Ep. 246: "Night Burrito"
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: How's it going?
John: Super good.
John: It's early.
John: Jeez.
John: Just barely had time to splash some water on my face and
John: Eat half of a cold sausage.
John: It's kind of Dickensian.
John: Please, sir, may I have some more cold sausage?
Merlin: Be careful what you ask for.
Merlin: With the Jew fagin.
John: Here's a question for you.
John: Yes.
John: This is probably actually a question for Don Schaffner.
John: Oh, I'm happy to speculate.
John: How long can you leave a pan of cold grease on the stove before the grease goes bad, before it gets rancid?
Merlin: Strictly speaking, I'm thinking there's two angles here.
Merlin: One angle is that you made some lamb or something.
Merlin: How many days is it before you really want to be careful that you don't put your spoon in there and accidentally lick it?
John: Well, I don't think it's going to go bad in the sense of it.
Merlin: It becomes hazardous.
Merlin: You wouldn't want to pour that into a coffee cup and then drink out of it.
John: I'm not sure that hazardous is the standard.
John: I think it's more taste.
John: Because butter sits out.
John: It never goes.
John: It's not going to get bad.
Merlin: Well, that was my part two.
Merlin: My part two was that I reuse grease.
Merlin: I'll reuse some grease.
Merlin: I've recently moved to lard.
John: Reuse the hell out of some grease.
Merlin: Yeah, exactly.
Merlin: I think that used to be like a tradition.
Merlin: We used to keep it... I remember in the later parts of my youth, we kept... We would pour bacon grease into a coffee can.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Mostly so we could throw it out.
Merlin: But I think... I suspect that had its origins in.
Merlin: We're going to pour this in here and then reuse it.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: For real?
John: So, yeah, they...
John: My mom always had, he didn't just throw perfectly good grease away.
John: My good pal Bob Wood up in Alaska.
Merlin: Is Bob the one with the mom?
Merlin: Bob had the mom.
Merlin: She lived in a bookcase listening to PR and drank Lapsan sushi tea.
Merlin: Yep, that's right.
Merlin: That's Bob's mom.
Merlin: God, you're good.
Merlin: I love Bob's mom.
John: You're so good.
John: Bob Wood.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: Oh, Bob Wood used to keep, you know, he had a big, he had like a 10-gauge or a 12-gauge cast iron pan that he left on the stove at all times, and it always had an inch of grease in it, or, you know, maybe not an inch, but like a, you know.
John: It covered the bottom, though.
John: No, no, no, thicker than that.
John: Yeah, okay.
John: You know, it was like a, it was, let's say, between a centimeter and a half an inch of bacon grease on
John: It was always sort of coagulated in this pan.
John: And when he would – because, you know, all these guys up in Alaska, they're all fishermen.
John: He would get some five pounds of halibut cheeks or something.
John: Some guy would come into town and he'd be like, hey, Bob, I'll trade you five pounds of halibut cheeks for two gold pans and a pickaxe.
Oh, God.
Merlin: I'm very interested in the community up there.
John: Bob would have all this fish all of a sudden.
John: And so he'd throw the halibut cheeks in the bacon grease.
John: and cook them, right?
John: He wouldn't just throw them in there and leave them there for the afternoon.
John: He'd heat it up.
Merlin: He's not marinating them.
John: No.
John: He's cooking them, and that's the best way to cook fish, of course, is flash fry it in some hot bacon grease.
John: And then he would turn the gas off, and then the grease would just stay there.
John: He would pluck the fish out.
John: It's not like he ever... The grease was just there.
John: And so...
John: I wasn't living with Bob.
John: I never said, like, how often do you turn this grease around?
John: But then I thought about it, and a lot of people in Alaska had a pan of grease on the stove.
John: So anyway, I've been adopting this lately.
John: But I need some guidelines because I don't want to be making some classic mistake.
John: I don't want it to be one of those situations like, you know, when I used to drink heavily,
John: I'd go out drinking every night and some friend of mine would always come with me.
John: And I just assumed that all my friends drank every night.
John: When in fact, they just really, they got super fucked up one night a week.
John: with me oh you were there weekend but i was i said right i was there weekend but i was doing it seven nights a week but i was you'd gone pro at this point i was pro and i but i was confused because there was always somebody with me and i figured everybody was doing it but no they all had jobs and i don't want it to be one of those situations where as soon as i leave they dump the grease out
John: And then I come back and there's a new pot of grease because they made bacon that morning.
John: I understand.
John: And I'm thinking, oh, shit, they're just leaving this grease around for weeks and months.
Merlin: And one of your, despite any other side effects of your profession, I believe you said you weren't much of a blackout guy.
Merlin: You would still remember lots of things about what happened.
John: Oh, me as a... Yeah, no, no, no.
John: I never blacked out.
Merlin: It's worth mentioning again, because that's quite a performance characteristic.
Merlin: That's very unusual.
John: I didn't black out, and I hardly ever vomited.
John: I just, on rare occasions, would vomit.
John: But even in those situations, I would usually sort of excuse myself from the table, go outside, vomit.
John: Like a rhinoceros would vomit.
Ha, ha, ha.
John: Like standing up, beer still in hand.
John: And then go back in and sit back down at the table and say, like, where were we?
John: It was a great advantage.
John: It was a great advantage if that had been a competitive sport.
John: You know what I mean?
John: Like there are people that can run.
John: I'm a great vomiter.
John: Four minute mile.
John: I'm a really gifted vomiter.
Merlin: Is that right?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I don't get to use it as much as I would like.
Merlin: I don't know what it is because it's funny.
Merlin: It's one of those things where, you know, when you're a kid, like obviously to me, hypodermic needles were the height of fear.
Merlin: Hypodermic needles and corporal punishment were the two things I most feared.
Merlin: I never got the second and I only very occasionally got the first, but it was like a guiding principle in my life is I don't want to be hurt.
Merlin: yeah but but you know a far third was probably i didn't want to vomit i little kids don't like to vomit no no at some point and it wasn't even a drinking thing i just at some point i just got really good at vomiting i uh i let go and i let god i just accepted it and i just said this is a thing we're going to do it i i've said this to you before i believe but i think one problem is that people don't like nausea but the nausea just makes them more anxious about vomiting when really you want to just get it over with that's what a pro does
John: Oh, I should have taken that advice a couple of weeks ago.
John: I had a I went out and got a burrito in Portland, Oregon at two o'clock in the morning and a night burrito.
John: And it was, you know, it was a perfectly respectable place in Portland that I'd been before.
John: But it's a you know, it's a shabby late night burrito.
John: But I got the one, you know, I did what I do.
John: Right.
John: I ordered a little bit off menu.
John: And even as I was eating it, I was like, this is the wrong choice.
John: Not because there was anything fishy about the burrito, but it was just like, this is the wrong choice.
John: You don't need to eat this burrito at two in the morning.
John: But, you know, we're partying.
John: I'm showing off.
John: Look what I can do.
Merlin: It's not like eating everybody's Subway sandwiches over a sewer.
Merlin: You going to finish that?
Merlin: No, Merlin, I am not going to finish that.
Merlin: We're standing over a sewer.
John: What?
John: I took the liberty of ordering one of each of the Subway sandwiches.
John: You know, they've got 14.
John: I ordered one of each.
Merlin: I got a flight of Subways.
Merlin: And I would say it was for the table, but there's no table because we're standing over a sewer.
Merlin: We're standing on a sewer lid.
Merlin: Who is it?
Merlin: That's you, me, Jonathan, Colton, Paul, and Storm, probably?
John: No, Drew.
John: Drew.
Merlin: Oh, Drew, Drew, his helper monkey.
John: Yeah, right.
John: I'm not sure Paul and Storm, you know, usually those guys...
John: Storm likes to stay out late.
John: Paul likes to get home.
John: Back to the hotel.
John: He's got things to take care of.
John: He doesn't let anybody else drive.
John: He wants to Skype home.
John: Anyway, so then the next day I had nausea.
John: Oh no, from your night burrito.
John: And all day long I fought the nausea.
John: I drove back from Portland to Seattle the entire way just like speeds of sweat just dripping down the sides of my face just like
John: I am going to, you know, because I have a very good constitution in the sense that I can eat poisonous food and survive.
John: It's like the Princess Bride.
John: You've been practicing your whole life.
Merlin: My whole life, right?
Merlin: What is it, idocaine?
Merlin: Like you've been taking little bits so that you can go up against, you know, Sicilian when death is on the line.
John: That's right.
John: I have inured myself to idocaine and also to E. coli and also to whatever else.
John: E. coli.
John: I can eat almost anything.
John: And I said, you know, this burrito is not going to get the better of me.
John: So all day I just feel awful sweat and just green around the gills.
John: And by the time I get to my house...
John: I'm really incapacitated by food poisoning and not acknowledging it.
John: And I get into the house and I'm just... I have this... I guess I thought of you.
John: What would Merlin do?
John: WWMD.
John: Well, Marcus Welby, MD.
John: And so I went into the bathroom and then, boy, did I let fly.
John: And, you know, I felt...
John: I felt better.
John: I felt no longer that feeling of nausea.
John: It can be a kind of relief because you're like, all right, it's finally happening.
John: It was, except that I think by incubating the food poisoning for an entire day, but you know, like by will, I could have thrown up at nine in the morning, you know.
John: By spending all day really, really, really integrating it into my whole corpus.
Merlin: Well, the thing is when you're sick, whether this goes for downstairs basement situations, too, or upstairs situations, is that you're there...
Merlin: You're going to be there for as long as this thing needs to do what it's going to do.
Merlin: There are really not any shortcuts that I'm aware of.
Merlin: Because even if you had vomited at 9 a.m., that's no guarantee.
Merlin: You wouldn't still be vomiting all day long.
Merlin: You're fighting that initial vomit.
Merlin: But it's going to work its way through your system one way or another.
Merlin: And you just have to decide.
Merlin: In your case, you decided to fight it and drive sweaty.
Merlin: But that's part of what makes it... You're really in its thrall.
Merlin: You don't get to post bail and get out of nausea.
John: Well, this is one of the things that I...
John: i'm i'm i'm not 100 certain if i didn't make it a thousand times worse because it's incubating it incubated and then i was sick for three days which is a lot longer than you should be normally sick on food poisoning right you should be able to kick it in a day but i continued to really struggle and i think it's because you know rather than rather than get this stuff out i let it get in there and just you know set up housekeeping and
John: Rent a trailer.
John: And, you know, those guys were hook up utilities and basic cable.
John: Yep.
John: Yep.
John: Yep.
John: They had their their their dish out.
John: Yeah.
John: So I should have just I should have just taken it, take, you know, taking the axe to it.
Merlin: Let me tell you, if there's anything, it's Don and Ben, right?
Merlin: From Drs.
Merlin: Don and Ben.
Merlin: If there's anything that I've learned that's made my life more complicated, it's that food safety is a turns-out business.
Merlin: There's all this stuff you think.
Merlin: You've been on their program.
Merlin: This is, what's it called?
Merlin: Food Safety Talk.
Merlin: We've both been on there.
Merlin: I really enjoyed it.
Merlin: The thing that I feel like I'm learning from them is that it's sort of one of those everything you know about food is wrong type situations.
Merlin: The primary one being, and we discussed this at length when I was on their show, and I think you might have discussed this, but there's that whole idea of this matrix of what makes food.
Merlin: food safe in terms of how hot you cook it, how long you cook it.
Merlin: And there's this amazing graphic that Ben showed me of, because I'm a sous vide guy, right?
Merlin: That's the thing where you vacuum up food and then you cook it in a warm bath at a very specific temperature.
Merlin: You vacuum it up?
Merlin: I eventually popped for the vacuum thing, and it was really worth it.
Merlin: You could do it in a Ziploc bag, too.
Merlin: But the basic idea, when we first hear this, this sounds mental, but you get this thing that looks like a lightsaber, you stick it in water, and you say, I want to get this water to exactly 132 degrees.
Merlin: Now, I've aged, dried, and pre-packaged really nice ribeyes with thyme and the whole nine.
Merlin: I've got it in a little plastic bag.
Merlin: I pulled that out.
Merlin: Are you ready for this?
Merlin: Brace yourself.
Merlin: I pulled this out of the freezer.
Merlin: You take that out of the freezer.
Merlin: You did not hear me wrong.
Merlin: 132 degree water.
Merlin: Must not be hot.
Merlin: It's not very hot.
Merlin: I mean, most will tell you, like, usually for like a, this is fascinating steak talk, but a lot of times when you think of a medium rare, and there's so many ways to get a medium rare wrong, that's about somewhere in the low 140s.
Merlin: Is that right?
Merlin: Yeah, I think it's usually no higher than like a 142.
Merlin: And what do they tell you?
Merlin: You're cooking chicken?
Merlin: You're cooking pork chops?
Merlin: It's got to be 160.
Merlin: Because if it's not 160, you're going to die with pork worms.
Merlin: Isn't that what they tell you?
Merlin: All the times I've had pork worms.
Merlin: Pork worms?
Merlin: This is where you get into the turns out, though, because guess what I do?
Merlin: I throw frozen meat in plastic into a warm bath, 132 degrees.
Merlin: Are you talking about boil in a bag?
Merlin: It's like boil in a bag, but it's not boil.
Merlin: It's bag, no boil.
Merlin: And it's a delicious ribeye.
Merlin: And then you know what I do?
Merlin: I tell my dingus, I say, remind me to take out steaks in two hours.
John: so you think i would have left the time off of there first of all but but let's assume let's assume that you like the taste of time oh you don't like see people have strong feelings cilantro rosemary time people have strong feelings i feel like time is the stuff that that you smell when you're walking through joshua tree like when you're walking through the desert somewhere and you're kicking up brush yeah it's got a brushy smell
John: I don't want that put on my steak.
Merlin: Okay, I'll leave it off yours.
Merlin: All right, thanks.
Merlin: So there's so much about this that is bananas.
Merlin: So first of all, the fact that you would have meat that was 132 degrees sounds crazy.
Merlin: And the fact that you would cook a steak for two hours sounds mental.
John: Well, that you would be using the lightsaber at all in this process.
Merlin: The lightsaber, it's plugged in in the water.
Merlin: You're putting electric in the water.
Merlin: And then you put frozen meat in.
Merlin: But long story short, probably too late.
Merlin: The thing is, 132, if you do it long enough, kills.
Merlin: And please do your own due diligence.
Merlin: Don't die from what you hear on a podcast.
Merlin: But the idea is that you don't need to cook pork to 160.
Merlin: I cook pork to 142.
Merlin: come on and and the thing is you do it long enough it kills the pathogens and the thing is mainly the longer you leave it in the more it becomes it's sort of like when you um smoke or slow cook pork over a long time it gets kind of you get that kind of pulled pork sort of thing so if you put your ribeye in there you could put it in there for 24 hours you could put a rib roast in there but if you put a steak in for 24 hours it would still be medium rare it would just be kind of mealy
Merlin: And the physics of that, which I don't begin to understand, but it has been explained to me and I still don't understand it.
Merlin: All I know is that me of two years ago, the idea of taking frozen steak and throwing it into a bathtub at 132 degrees for two hours is the craziest idea.
Merlin: In a bag.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But it does work.
Merlin: But this is where you get into the turns outs.
Merlin: And this is where we get into your grease specifically.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I'll bet you there's a turns out to how long to keep the grease.
Merlin: If I had my druthers, it would be like McDonald's.
Merlin: I would just have grease sitting around like Bob all the time, you know, good to go.
Merlin: Hmm.
John: Let me get back to this steak in a bag thing.
John: It does not sound like it would have a very appetizing outside.
Merlin: It does not.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: So this is where you go to the next level.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: So as you know, we basically live in a hovel built in the 20s, but we do have a range.
John: I wouldn't describe it as a hovel, but yeah, I like our house.
Merlin: So what you do is you take it out, you dry it thoroughly.
Merlin: At this point, you don't really have to let it set up.
John: You're talking about pat it dry with some towels?
Merlin: I'll do some paper towels on either side.
Merlin: And then you get the oil of your choice, the lubricant of your choice.
Merlin: Let's call it bacon grease in a pan.
Merlin: For me, it's lard.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: I've gone down on lard.
Merlin: Where do you buy lard?
Merlin: Local grocery store.
Merlin: I think it's made by the armor company.
Merlin: Oh, all right.
Merlin: You see this lard.
Merlin: Okay, this is going to be show notes.
Merlin: You see this lard, and you're going to go, oh, yeah, that lard.
Merlin: I'm not talking about no vegetable stuff.
Merlin: I ain't talking about no Crisco.
Merlin: I'm talking about Manteca.
Merlin: I'm talking about armor lard.
Merlin: And it's Armour, right?
Merlin: Yes, Armour.
Merlin: It's from the French.
Merlin: Yeah, from the French.
Merlin: Oh, and they have a website, Discover the Lard of Difference.
Merlin: Is that a pun?
Merlin: Discover the lard of difference.
Merlin: Oh, sorry.
Merlin: Discover the lard difference.
Merlin: Oh, the lard difference.
Merlin: Back to basics.
Merlin: Being a trusted family tradition to your kid.
Merlin: This is the lard of difference.
John: Pull it from the stone and ye shall be king of England.
Merlin: You're going to have to save versus the lard of difference.
Merlin: But, wow, I'm really fascinated by this.
Merlin: I sent you a link.
John: I'm on the armor site.
Merlin: Manteca.
Merlin: Manteca en Español.
Merlin: And let me just real quick, real quick side road.
Merlin: I don't want to derail our conversation.
Merlin: It's so on track.
Merlin: But this started for me when I got a blue apron.
Merlin: And the blue apron was to make some kind of like a delicious Mexican dish with carnitas.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: And it comes with the tiny little, you know, like if you get like if you make cinnamon rolls at home and you get the jizz in a little package.
Merlin: Like they give you a little jizz size package of lard to cook the carnitas with.
Merlin: And I was like, lard, that's not very healthy.
Merlin: But I did it and it was fantastic.
Merlin: It browned up really well in the pan.
Merlin: And that's why I use it for the steak.
Merlin: So you pat your steaks.
John: Well, I'm going right here to on the armor site.
John: Yes.
John: One of the top navigation bars is why lard?
John: Why lard?
John: Question mark.
John: You get down, you get in there, discover the lard difference.
John: It's better for you.
John: It has better taste and better results.
John: Lard is better.
John: It seems so obvious now.
John: Pure natural goodness.
John: That's why your grandmother's grandmother trusted lard.
John: Whoa.
John: They're dropping some science on us.
John: Bringing out the big guns of grandma's lard.
John: Not because your grandmother's grandmother didn't have anything but lard.
John: It's because she knew it was pure natural.
John: She knows about the lard difference.
John: Yeah, the lard difference.
Merlin: So you patted it dry.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Now, you don't want this to get too hot, but I will go to a medium setting, which is still pretty hot, especially if you're cooking with Manteca.
Merlin: And so you got your steaks.
Merlin: They heated up your oil of choice, your lubricant of choice, and you gently put it in there.
Merlin: Now, here's what I do.
Merlin: Here's a life hack.
Merlin: I have an old cast iron pan that got kind of janky, but I keep it around as a pressing pan.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: I put a steak with the manteca, the lard, into the new Lodge cast iron pan.
Merlin: I use the old Lodge cast iron pan.
Merlin: I put it on top like a brick, like you'd make a chicken under a brick.
Merlin: I press it down.
John: You've never had chicken under a brick?
John: This show is going off the rails.
Merlin: No, no.
Merlin: I happen to know from feedback that people love when we talk about food and recipes.
Merlin: Is that something your grandmother's grandmother taught you?
Merlin: Chicken under a brick?
Merlin: The chicken difference.
Merlin: And then within less than two minutes, you get a great sear that does not overly mediumify the layer next to the delicious medium rareness.
Merlin: Oh, that's the other thing with this cooking in the sous vide is it is uniform.
Merlin: Every single cubic millimeter of that steak is exactly the same doneness.
Merlin: But then you sear it at the end.
Merlin: You want a little bit of extra kosher salt or what have you?
Merlin: You can use butter.
Merlin: You can use whatever you want.
Merlin: Steak and butter, pretty good.
Merlin: And you've got yourself.
Merlin: Now, at this point, I will drop that into some aluminum foil.
Merlin: I'll fold it up and I'll let it set up a little bit.
Merlin: I'll finish the sides because, as you know, I like all my food to be hot and finished at exactly the same moment.
Merlin: Hot and finished.
Merlin: That's the Merlin man difference.
Merlin: Fest and bulbous.
Merlin: So then that's all done.
Merlin: That's right, the mascara snake.
Merlin: Okay, we might be a little off the rails.
Merlin: And I still got to talk to you about the Beatles, and I still have to talk to you about parking.
Merlin: So we have a lot to talk about today.
Merlin: This could be a very long end.
John: The thing is, there's a lot of new Beatles news, which we can't always say.
John: No, it's such a huge week for the Beatles.
Merlin: Yeah, the Beatles.
Merlin: Okay, say something.
Merlin: Me?
Merlin: Okay, good.
Merlin: You fuzzed out a minute, but you're back.
Merlin: Yeah, you fuzzed out, too.
Merlin: Oh, no.
Merlin: That was really exciting.
Merlin: We got hacked.
John: Do you think we got hacked?
John: Do you think it's the Russian hackers?
John: It's ransomware.
John: Are they taking our social security numbers?
John: Manafort!
John: I'm going to use domain tools to get to the bottom of this.
John: Uh-oh, I'm in.
John: I cracked the encryption.
Hippie.
Merlin: There's green letters on my screen.
Merlin: We're in.
Merlin: So that's how you make a steak.
Merlin: And so here's the thing, though.
Merlin: I think we should probably reach out to friends of the show, Drs.
Merlin: Don and Ben, and ask them for their opinion.
Merlin: And now, do we want to pose this in a specific way?
Merlin: Is it a question of how long is it safe for me to leave bacon grease in the pan, and how long is it safe for me to reuse it?
Merlin: Is that kind of the question?
John: Well, but I think my suspicion is that the word we're looking for is not safe, right?
John: because i think the doctor like is it proper yeah or yeah is it ethically uh sound it's going to be one of those things that they you know that my experience of talking to those guys about food safety was pretty much first of all every time i said is it safe to eat this one of them would say yes and the other would go no and it and it kept flip-flopping between the two of them and the lesson the ultimate lesson was
John: In every situation, you have to make a judgment call.
Merlin: Because it's not one vector.
Merlin: That's the thing.
John: This is part of the turns out.
John: There's not one vector to this.
John: Right.
John: Is it safe for me to eat right now?
John: Do I choose to take the risk of eating this?
John: Because what they said was everything you put in your mouth, there's some risk.
John: I hear that.
John: You know, somebody could have pooped on your popsicle.
Merlin: You know, if you say, okay, is it safe?
Merlin: This thing has been frozen for a month.
Merlin: Is it safe to eat?
Merlin: The easy answer is yes.
Merlin: But the huge asterisk is, well, what happened to it before it was frozen?
John: Right?
John: Right.
Merlin: What if somebody put that chicken under a brick?
Merlin: If somebody put the chicken under a brick, it might be half a cock in there.
Merlin: You don't know.
Merlin: You don't want to be putting that in your mouth just because somebody said, see, this is the problem with the Internet.
John: So, I don't know.
John: A lot of times when I have a piece of food that I have left out too long, and I think, hmm, this food is now into this range of like, has this been sitting out too long?
John: I'll put it in the freezer.
Merlin: And I figure, if I leave it in the freezer for a month...
Merlin: That's like taking your severed finger and putting it in a box of Band-Aids.
Merlin: Put it in the freezer for a month.
John: The freezer will do something.
John: I don't know what.
John: But the primary thing the freezer will do is cause me to forget that I ever left this out on the counter for too long.
John: And it will make the choice for me because when I find it in there later, I'm going to be like, oh!
John: I didn't know this was in here.
John: Right.
John: And then I'll make it, and it'll be trouble-free.
John: Oh, you do go ahead and make it, though.
John: Because I forget.
John: I forget that I put it in there because it had been sitting out on the counter.
Merlin: Oh, I don't.
Merlin: I know all along what I'm doing.
Merlin: It's sort of the way my wife basically, when she saves any tiny bit of food, so you basically get garbage plus a plastic bag.
Merlin: And you know nobody's going to eat that last chicken leg or wing or whatever, like the one burnt wing.
Merlin: Like, why are we keeping this?
Merlin: I don't want to waste food.
Merlin: Well, now you're wasting food and a bag.
Ha, ha, ha.
John: In that case, it's like... Oh, I just had a glimpse inside your marriage.
John: It's so beautiful.
Merlin: Oh, I like so much about my marriage.
John: Now you're wasting food and a bag.
Merlin: I love that.
Merlin: I really am a joy to have around.
Merlin: Stella Dora breakfast treats!
Merlin: I wouldn't be down there gnawing on this thing like the Paperboy's cock.
Merlin: What are you doing?
Merlin: We're doing somebody else's bit.
Merlin: But this is still a thing I do easily five to 60 times a day.
Merlin: I walk by the cat and she's just sitting there in the hallway staring.
Merlin: She's sitting on her cushion by the heater because she's an old frail lady.
Merlin: And I look at her and I go, what are you doing?
Merlin: And my family says, stop doing that.
Merlin: You're scaring her.
Merlin: And the cat looks at me like, what?
Merlin: Right, right.
Merlin: Stellador breakfast treats.
Merlin: Yeah, no, the cat knows.
Merlin: The cat knows.
Merlin: Stellador breakfast treats.
Merlin: I love that album so much.
Merlin: There's so much on that.
Merlin: We're talking about Feeling Kind of Patton.
Merlin: Patton Oswalt's, I think, first comedy record.
Merlin: A long, long time ago.
Merlin: There's much on there that is not for sensitive ears, but boy, is that funny.
John: Yeah.
John: There's a website.
John: Let me recommend it to you guys.
John: Yeah.
John: It's called folkstreams.net.
John: Folk, F-O-L-K, folkstreams.net.
John: And it's a place where all of the documentary films about American roots cultures are archived.
John: Oh my gosh.
John: It's like a free... I feel like I've been to this site.
John: A national preserve of all these documentaries made in the 70s.
John: I think I watched a movie here recently.
John: Yeah, it's just like, whatever happened to the paddle wheel steamer?
Merlin: Yes, this is where I got a copy of Talking Feet, Solo Southern Dance, Buck, Flatfoot, and Tap.
Merlin: Because you know why?
Merlin: This is an important substrata of a very important movie.
Merlin: What's it called?
Merlin: Dancing Rebel?
Merlin: Remember the guy with the costly sunglasses?
Merlin: You ever seen that movie?
Merlin: Oh, gosh.
Merlin: This is a terrific... I'm sorry.
Merlin: I'm taking you off.
Merlin: Folk Streams.
Merlin: Yeah, Talking Feet.
Merlin: I wish we had show notes.
Merlin: I would put it in.
Merlin: Go Google Talking Feet, Solo Southern Dance, Buck, Flatfoot, and Tap.
Merlin: And it's an amazing documentary.
Merlin: I think it came out in the mid-'80s, but it was made in the early-'80s.
Merlin: And it's just documenting these very, very old men who do that southern tap...
John: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: It's like clocking.
Merlin: It's not a group.
Merlin: It's a solo performance.
Merlin: But these guys are amazing, and they just live out in the sticks, and they're incredible.
John: I'm sorry.
John: Folkstreams.net.
John: Folkstreams.net.
John: So if you want to, like, I'm just scrolling down here.
John: It's like Ed Presnell, the dulcimer maker.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: The art of ironworking.
John: Yeah, Finnish Americans, a 1982 portrait of Finnish American culture in Upper Michigan.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: Florida shrimping traditions.
Merlin: Oh, man, so many nights.
John: Here's some gandy dancers, more gandy dancers.
John: Gandhi dancers are singing as they build railroad tracks.
Merlin: 1978 documentary, Mermaids, Frog Legs, and Filets.
Merlin: It's basically about hip-hop on the streets in 1978.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Wow.
John: Anyway, so I'm on here a lot, and I was watching a movie about the decaying.
John: So this movie was made in about 1981 or 1982.
John: And it's a guy that's like, there used to be a lot of Irish in the Bronx, but the Irish are getting pushed out.
John: So I'm going to go around all the Irish bars and I'm going to talk to all the Irish guys.
John: What are you doing?
John: And so I'm watching this movie and he's just, you know, the guy, like, he wrote his narrative out before, you know, he does voiceover narration.
John: And he's a real Irish poet.
John: So his...
John: His narration is very colorful language.
John: But he goes to these bars and there's, as you can imagine, cops and firemen and then a bunch of people from the old country who have been living in the Bronx since the 40s.
John: And I'm like, this part of the Bronx is not a part of New York that I know.
John: And so I started looking up, I started looking into this part of the Bronx.
John: And, you know, like, you've been all around it, but just sort of didn't realize, like, oh, I guess this was the center of... I mean, if you go to this part of the Bronx, there's 400 Catholic churches all, you know, within 10 blocks.
John: Anyway, the Stelladoro factory...
John: It was right there.
John: That's where they made them.
John: No kidding.
John: And then just recently they were purchased by Armand or by Armand Hammer or somebody.
John: By Big Breakfast Cookie.
John: Yeah, that's right.
John: And then they moved their manufacturing to the Alamo or something.
John: It's kind of the reverse.
John: It's like, New York City, except reverse.
John: You watch so much of the same TV that I do.
John: Texas?
John: New York City?
Merlin: Get a rope.
Merlin: It's my turn to operate.
Merlin: I'm the sole survivor.
John: Anyway, let me recommend that you spend hours and hours on this because it never gets here.
John: There's Morgan Sexton, the Bull Creek banjo player.
John: Of course.
John: Oh, wow.
John: Mouth music.
John: I highly recommend this.
John: Boot camp count off chants, jump rope rhymes, and carny barks are featured in this fast-moving sampler of proto music.
John: Wow, that made me kind of tingly.
John: Right?
John: Boot camp count off chants, jump rope rhymes, and carny barks.
John: Boot camp count off chants.
John: Boot camp.
John: That's like camp, right, left.
John: Had a good job, but I left, right, left.
Merlin: They call it a cadence.
Merlin: We used to do those when I was in military school.
Merlin: C-130 on taxiway.
Merlin: Airborne.
Merlin: We're just going to jump today.
Merlin: Sound off.
Merlin: One, two.
Merlin: Sound off.
Merlin: Three, four.
Merlin: One, two, three, four.
Merlin: One, two.
Merlin: Three, four.
Merlin: Three, four.
Merlin: We should start our paramilitary unit.
Merlin: Let me hear one of your count-offs.
Merlin: I don't know, but I've been told.
Merlin: Let's see, I'm trying to remember.
Merlin: I'm confusing it with Full Metal Jacket, but this was 1979 I was hearing these.
Merlin: We had lots of bawdy cadences and bawdy camp songs, a lot of songs about vaginas.
Merlin: There was a lot of references to vaginas, even though none of us had ever seen vaginas.
Merlin: You're talking bawdy, like B-A-W.
Merlin: Bawdy.
Merlin: Bawdy, not bawdy.
Merlin: Body.
Merlin: Body.
Merlin: Where were we?
Merlin: Night Burrito, Grease, Dawn, and Bend.
John: We've gotten all the way to... Are we up to Beatles in parking yet?
John: I think so.
John: I think we got real close to the... We're here at Mouth Music.
John: Here's Ot Blair the Sledmaker.
Merlin: I can leave this.
Merlin: See, the problem is I prepared a little bit for this because I had an experience yesterday with parking.
Merlin: It's not nearly as interesting as talking about the Beatles.
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: But I just, I feel like I had to tell you this.
Merlin: You don't usually take notes, so let's hear it.
Merlin: It's quick.
Merlin: It's just, I don't want to take us off Beatles.
Merlin: But I just want to say, like, okay, so yesterday, as we record this, it was today's Memorial Day.
Merlin: Thank you for your service.
Merlin: Yesterday was the day before Memorial Day.
Merlin: We went down to Santa Cruz, go to the beach, boardwalk.
Merlin: We're going to, you know, go on some rides, get ripped off by some games.
Merlin: Just absolutely.
Merlin: have a little little very short fun family day and of course it's the day before memorial day so the place is mobbed and this place was never meant it's basically like a small coastal residential neighborhood where someone built a boardwalk that now is like a small theme park and it is not it is not like arriving at disney world like it's full of teenage vampires too right yes skateboarding vampires many of them teens it's real sketchy it's got that kind of like beach sketchy feeling
Merlin: Anyway, long story short, it's packed.
Merlin: The parking takes us 45 minutes just to get from somewhere to finding parking.
Merlin: There's parking lots, tiny parking lots.
Merlin: We finally find a parking space.
Merlin: The sun is blaring down.
Merlin: I don't know why I'm telling you this, except I think you'd appreciate it.
Merlin: We arrive there.
Merlin: We park.
Merlin: Oh, God, we got a space.
Merlin: There's a meter.
Merlin: All right, let's go run our card through the meter.
Merlin: Try to put your card into the meter.
Merlin: It's up to a 12-hour parking meter.
Merlin: Pretty great.
Merlin: You try to put your card in.
Merlin: Card doesn't fit.
Merlin: This does not take credit cards.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: It'll take quarters.
Merlin: Well, are we going to put in four or five hours worth of quarters?
Merlin: No, nobody has that anymore.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: So we discover they say, if you want to pay for this.
Merlin: So I look around.
Merlin: Every single one of the meters says expired and 00 on it.
Merlin: I'm like, honey, maybe they're just not doing them today.
Merlin: And she's like, do you want to pay for a ticket?
Merlin: And I said, no, I do not want to pay for a ticket.
Merlin: But I also do not want to interact with an app.
Merlin: Because guess what?
Merlin: To pay for the parking, you need to get an app.
Merlin: Oh, see, that's how they hack you.
Merlin: This is how they get in the hack you.
Merlin: So I don't know why I'm telling you this.
Merlin: So I see there's a service called Park Mobile.
Merlin: And I want Park Mobile.
Merlin: I don't want it to die once in a fire.
Merlin: I want it to survive and go through painful recovery to go die in another fire.
Merlin: You've used Park Mobile before?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Usually you pay for parking like an adult.
Merlin: You put in a few quarters if you're going to the comic store.
John: Or you use your credit card like an adult.
John: You went into this just completely like you're just a virgin to this.
Merlin: Totally virgin to this.
Merlin: You know how I am, right?
Merlin: Yeah, I do.
Merlin: So anyway, there's a service called Park Mobile.
Merlin: And then their thing is it's parking made simple.
Merlin: So here's what you do.
Merlin: You're either going to get the app.
Merlin: Or you can call and set up an account.
Merlin: And my family, I see the look in their eyes because they see I'm going to a certain place.
Merlin: And I'm like, you're telling me that in order to park the car, I've got to get an app?
Merlin: Or make a phone call.
Merlin: Or you make a phone call.
Merlin: They're making it simple.
Merlin: I'm starting to get the app.
Merlin: So you go to their website.
Merlin: Their website points you to the app store.
Merlin: You go to the app store.
Merlin: You download the app.
Merlin: You wait.
Merlin: Because remember, you're not on a wireless connection.
Merlin: You need an app to pay for parking.
Merlin: So you wait.
Merlin: You wait.
Merlin: You wait.
Merlin: It downloads.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: How do I pay for this?
Merlin: Uh-uh.
Merlin: Not so fast, Johnny.
Merlin: Guess what?
Merlin: Now you got to create an account.
John: You got to create an account.
Merlin: So I say, Madeline, would you please use your iPhone and please call to set up an account while I'm doing this?
Merlin: Because I'm going to hulk out in a minute.
Merlin: So now you know me.
Merlin: Now, I don't just go type a bunch of letters.
Merlin: I go to my password app where I have to go create a new login with a secure password.
Merlin: I got to go copy that.
Merlin: Now I go in, I create a new account.
Merlin: Pretty soon your garage door opener is going up and down.
Merlin: That's how they get you.
Merlin: They hack.
Merlin: They hack in.
Merlin: Yeah, they do.
Merlin: So now I go enter my new account information.
Merlin: I put in my email address.
Merlin: I paste in my new, ready to go?
Merlin: Can I pay for this now?
Merlin: Oh, hang on a minute.
Merlin: Hang on.
Merlin: Now you need to configure your account.
Merlin: Because they need to know your license plate number.
Merlin: Oh, sure, sure, sure.
Merlin: You're still part of configuring the account.
Merlin: Sure, you've got to configure the account, because now they've got to know the license plate number.
Merlin: You've got to give it a name, like a memorable name for the car, for all your cars that you have.
Merlin: You want to give it a memorable name?
Merlin: Call it Pookie.
Merlin: Mine was Fuck Me Gently.
Merlin: And then, just like the Elvis song.
Merlin: And so you name it, and guess what now?
Merlin: Fuck me gently.
Merlin: Fuck me true.
Fuck me true.
Merlin: Never let me go.
Merlin: It's based on our elite.
Merlin: So now, OK, this is like seriously 10 to 15 minutes.
Merlin: OK, fine, whatever.
Merlin: You know, I have to pee so bad.
Merlin: We didn't stop.
Merlin: We've been driving for two hours.
Merlin: I've been slamming seltzer the whole time.
Merlin: You didn't tell me this part.
Merlin: Oh, God.
Merlin: And I'm getting cross.
Merlin: I'm getting cross.
Merlin: I'm in the sun.
Merlin: I'm already burning off some of my 100 SPF sunscreen that I've been counting on to take care of me all day.
John: You're stomping up or down.
Merlin: My daughter is just watching the roller coaster with, like, tears in her eyes.
Merlin: Like, why are we still here configuring an app?
Merlin: Okay, can I do this now?
Merlin: Not yet.
Merlin: You want to turn on notifications so we can give you notifications about your parking.
Merlin: Okay?
Merlin: And now guess what?
Merlin: Guess what?
Merlin: Oh, we need your payment information.
Merlin: Because why the hell would we put a credit card dingus into the parking meter?
Merlin: You need to enter it in the app with the account you just put in.
Merlin: That's fine.
Merlin: Dude, boys, flash.
Merlin: So guess what, though?
Merlin: You can take a photo of your credit card.
Merlin: Feeling great about this.
Merlin: Fine.
Merlin: I enabled the camera.
Merlin: I set it on this steaming hot top of our automobile.
Merlin: I attempt to take a photo five times.
Merlin: It doesn't get it any time.
Merlin: Oh, that's fine.
Merlin: Let's just start over.
Merlin: Now I go into my password app.
Merlin: I get my credit card information.
Merlin: Now I got to go copy, onesie, twosie, go copy and paste all of that in.
Merlin: Am I done?
Merlin: Nope.
Merlin: Now you got to enter what parking zone you're in.
Merlin: Tell us the parking zone, please.
Merlin: Oh, you can shoot the QR code now that you've enabled the camera on your fucking phone to be able to pay for the parking so you can go and run on a goddamn roller coaster on a Sunday.
Merlin: And I entered the parking zone and then it goes, now completing your parking.
Merlin: You have up to this time in the countdown.
Merlin: Do you want us to send your reminders?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: We had a pretty good time.
Merlin: We had some fried food.
Merlin: I went on a roller coaster.
Merlin: They went on a sky ride.
Merlin: It was all good.
Merlin: And then we got back.
Merlin: You closed the session.
Merlin: I got four emails from all of this.
Merlin: I got four emails.
Merlin: I'm getting notifications.
John: Welcome.
Merlin: Thanks.
Merlin: This is so that I could have my car be somewhere for a while.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Do you have a thought on this?
Merlin: You know me.
John: You're saying the machine had some facility to take a card, just not a credit card?
John: Yes.
John: What was the card it could take?
Merlin: I didn't think to take a picture of the meter.
Merlin: I think it was probably the classic prepaid card.
Merlin: And in a sensible move, for once, you would not want that to be a size that would accommodate a standard credit card, because that would be very confusing to people.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Right?
John: But this was a thing that if you were a Santa Cruz resident, you would get a little card that was your parking card.
Merlin: We have that.
Merlin: I mean, we have that for public transit.
Merlin: You can get them for parking.
Merlin: You buy like a throwaway $20 card to pay for parking.
Merlin: Let's move on to the Beatles.
Merlin: Do you feel me on this?
John: I am so filled with sympathetic rage.
Yeah.
Merlin: You've got to get an app.
Merlin: You've got to go somewhere.
Merlin: What if you don't have a smartphone?
Merlin: What if you don't have a credit card?
John: You know what you would have done?
John: You would have walked over to the nearest bodega store.
John: Can I have $60 and quarters?
John: No, you would have said, what's the deal with parking around here?
John: And they would have said, oh, we sell the parking cards.
John: $20.
John: See, you're smart.
John: And you would have gone, hmm.
John: I'll know for next time.
John: I think, right?
John: But maybe not.
John: Maybe the guy at the counter would have said, like, you got to get a nap.
Merlin: I feel like this is when I look around and I see every one of these that says zero zero and expired on it.
Merlin: But that's an argument you're having with your wife, not with not with the meter.
Merlin: Do you want to get a ticket?
Merlin: I said, yeah, honey, I want to get a ticket.
Merlin: That's why I'm sitting here configuring an app in the sun.
Merlin: I feel like I'm in a fucking Camus novel.
John: The problem is that even Santa Cruz now is too close to San Francisco to ever be a real town again.
Merlin: They bring in the apps.
John: And so...
John: I just played this festival, right?
John: The Long Winters got back together.
John: We played this Upstream Music Festival.
John: It's being put on by Paul Allen's company, Vulcan.
John: It's all a lovely organization, and I know a lot of the people there.
John: I actually am on the board, which apparently was not a conflict of interest when they asked me to play because they never gave any information to the board or asked us any questions at all.
John: But when we got our packets, because when you're playing a big festival like this, right, you get packets.
John: Sure.
John: You're going to get a packet.
John: I'll give you a packet.
John: And Sean Nelson got his packet first, and Sean has become somebody, I guess, who does his due diligence nowadays.
Merlin: Isn't he an editor?
John: He is, right.
John: So he has to make sure that things are proper.
John: He does.
John: Oh, and he also lives in Pioneer Square.
John: So on behalf of the band, he said, I'm going to go down and figure out what the deal is.
John: Which is great.
Merlin: If you're playing a big festival and you have somebody doing advance... Listen, in any situation, if you want to make yourself suddenly very useful, be the person who decides to go and figure out what the deal is.
Merlin: Yeah, go find out what the deal is.
Merlin: There's always a deal to be figured out.
Merlin: You're recon, right?
Merlin: You're ranger.
Merlin: You could spend four hours guessing or 20 minutes finding out what the dealio is.
John: Find out what the deal is.
John: So Sean comes back.
John: This is all happening via text.
John: And he said, here's the thing.
John: You have to go to the football field, to the box office there, get your packet.
John: And then you have to, you have a wristband, but you have to activate the wristband.
John: What?
John: Is it a smart wristband?
John: And to activate the wristband, you have to get the app.
John: Oh, my God.
John: And once you get the app, then you activate the wristband.
John: But there is a full typewritten page with a second page of addenda.
John: of instructions about how to activate the wristband oh my god and like all this stuff like if you if you do this wrong then you're you can't get into the festival for the rest of the day null and void john null and void that's right and just on and on and he's sean is reading all these like rules and regulations about the wristband and and but he said since we're
John: playing we have two wristbands but the instructions are saying do not activate two wristbands if you activate two wristbands it's null and void you can only activate one but it doesn't say which one and it's just like this uh it's just this thing that's you know sean is getting very frustrated and very like what is this is madness and it's the same thing like he can't download the app because he's standing in the middle of a parking lot and so uh eric and nabeel
John: Both, like, sitting in their respective homes, like, went through all this process, downloaded the app, got prepared for the event, for the day.
John: And I did what you might expect.
Merlin: Can you guess what I did?
Merlin: Did nothing about it until it was too late to do anything about it?
John: Yes!
John: Okay.
John: I took the... I know that strategy.
John: I took the envelope with both of my wristbands and all the instructions and several VIP drink tickets and whatever else, and I put it in the front pocket of my jacket.
John: And I walked around the festival, and I went...
John: everywhere that i wanted to and when i would walk up to a place and they would say do you have a wristband i would say yeah it's here and i would pat my jacket as i walked past them no one stopped me and when uh when it was time to to park in order to do the
John: to do our show, I was like, where's the artist parking?
John: And they said, oh, there isn't any.
Merlin: They had time to get wristbands with apps, but they didn't have time to figure out a place for load-in.
John: They designed an app, but they didn't think about load-in.
John: So I just parked my truck right in front of the venue, not on the sidewalk, but it was like a plaza.
John: And I took one of the VIP drink tickets and I put it under the windshield wiper.
Yeah.
John: It could work.
John: There's so many ways it might end up working.
John: I'm not going to use it as a drink ticket, right?
John: And it says VIP on it, so I put it under the windshield wiper.
John: That's clever.
John: And I sat there and watched, and all day long, cops on their beat swinging their nightsticks would walk by.
John: They'd stop.
John: What's all this thing?
John: They'd look at the VIP drink ticket, and they'd be like, hmm, and off they'd stroll, you know.
John: And I...
John: And then it was time for the show, the big show, the night show.
John: And we're standing out front.
John: We're talking.
John: People are coming up to the show.
John: There's a line of people trying to get in.
John: And Nabil walks over and he says, I just talked to the woman at the front door.
John: And she says, they don't have the guest list.
John: And I was like, what?
John: This is not good.
John: You know, we're going on in 45 minutes.
John: And I walked over and said, I just heard that you don't have the guest list.
John: What do we have to do?
John: And she said,
John: Oh, it's not that I don't have the guest list.
John: It's that we have no provision for us having a guest list.
John: Nobody said a word about guest list and we're not supposed to have that here.
John: I said, well, how does that work?
John: She said, well, the guests, your guests are supposed to go down to the football field.
John: And get the wristband and get the app and activate the app.
John: Are you kidding me?
John: And I said, oh, that's not going to work at all.
John: And she said, well, that's the deal.
John: So I called my guy, the person that had been repping us to the festival.
John: And I was like, or our festival rep, rather.
John: And I said, hey, what's the story?
John: And he said, well, it's a festival.
John: It's not...
John: Every club doesn't have a guest list.
John: It's like a fest.
John: And I said, yeah, but you're describing it as a fest, like Bonnaroo or something where there's one door, one gate, and you stop at the gate and you get everything you need before you go through the gate.
John: But this is, you're having this event in a town.
John: This is your first year.
John: This isn't how things are done.
John: We're, you know, like people aren't, they're going to show up for the show and
John: They're not going to go to the football stadium.
John: And he's like, well, I don't know what to tell you.
John: I didn't design it.
John: This is the thing.
John: You've got to have your app.
Merlin: And it's just implicit in all of this, though, is that everybody has a smartphone from a major vendor that will allow them to, number two, then wirelessly go to a site online.
John: get an app yeah i mean it's i guess it's probably a fairly safe bet but oh my god what a crummy system that you have you know then you put in all this information about yourself and then then you have to you have to enable the microphone just in case it needs to uh hear you scream or you need to you know it's going to send you notifications now for the rest of the year and so forth give yourself a memorable nickname fuck me gently so i'm on the phone with this guy and i said
John: Listen, because, you know, I've been practicing for a long time.
John: Like, you know, you've said to me many times that I should be nicer.
John: Have I?
John: Well, you know, read between the lines.
John: Sure.
John: And I've heard this from a lot of people.
John: You should be nicer.
John: And, you know, for every time that I put a VIP drink ticket under the windshield wiper of my truck and I get away with murder all day, there's another time when I'm, like, angry to somebody and that makes them sad.
John: And that's not what happens.
John: one.
John: So I remain not just calm, but very friendly.
John: And I say to this person, let me describe what's going to happen.
John: What's going to happen is about 15 minutes from now, my 82 and a half year old mother is going to walk up to the door of this venue and she's going to say, hello, I'm on the guest list.
John: They're going to say, we've never heard of this guest list thing.
John: You need to go eight blocks to the football stadium, download, get your wristband, download an app,
John: And the guy on the other end of the line is, he's already with me, right?
John: He's with me now.
John: And I said, see, that is just not going to work.
John: at all right my 83 year old mother 82 and a half i'm sorry it's not it's not i'm not going to ask her to make this trek particularly not because she showed up here 10 minutes before we went on right and he's like right right right i see i see i understand and i said so there's got to be some kind of situation where you can send someone here
John: to handle this someone here to the venue to handle this situation because i can't handle it and you can't handle it the people at the door can't handle it but it needs to get handled and he said let me let me uh let me let me call you right back and i said okay so i'm standing there and about four minutes later here comes a guy up the street and he's exactly the guy you want to see
John: Because this is a festival being put on by Paul Allen and Vulcan, right?
John: So all the security at all these events are the same people that work the football games.
John: Because they've never put on a music festival before, so they don't understand that that's a different kind of thing, right?
John: There are production people who do it for a living.
John: Production is an actual job.
John: Event production is a high-level job.
Merlin: It's like event planning.
Merlin: It's, you know, anything where you think like, oh, I can be an event planner.
Merlin: It's like because I schedule meetings and people come to them.
Merlin: It's like, no, you are really shooting a bullet with a bullet.
Merlin: There's so many things.
Merlin: Even if everything you plan goes flawlessly, you haven't accounted for even the beginning of your job when everything doesn't go as planned.
John: You see this in tech all the time.
John: People are just like, oh, I can do this.
John: Anyway, the guy shows up.
John: He's dressed head to toe in black.
John: which is what you want, black jeans, black sleeveless t-shirt.
John: He has a radio.
John: with a microphone on his shoulder.
John: Good signs, all good signs.
John: Yep, he has a maglite and a Leatherman.
John: Oh yeah, this is your guy.
John: The sides of his head are shaved, but on the top he's got black hair pulled back into a ponytail.
Merlin: He's got a maglite, he's probably got some tape, he's got the Leatherman, he's got it all going on.
John: He walks up, puts his hand out, he says...
John: hi, John, we've worked together before.
John: And I said, it's great to see you.
John: And he said, what do you need?
John: I said, here's the situation.
John: He said, don't worry about it.
John: Show me your guest list.
John: And I pulled it up on my phone and he sat while I'm holding my phone and he wrote all the, he didn't want me to email it to him.
John: He just sat and like tapped in all the names into his own phone really fast and
John: And I was like, I can just email this to you.
John: And he was like, nope, I got it.
John: And I'm doing this while people are talking to me, right?
John: Like he's not demanding any attention either.
John: He's just like, I understand I got this covered.
John: And then immediately everything was fine.
John: And I grabbed him by the elbow and I was like, why are you not doing this already?
John: And he said...
John: When they announced this festival six months ago, he leans in all quiet.
John: When they announced this festival six months ago, I sent them an email and I said, hey, I'll handle security and production for you.
John: I have a production company.
John: I'll do this work for you.
John: And I didn't hear back from them for five and a half months.
John: And two weeks ago, they wrote me and said, will you please help us?
John: A little bit of a Fyre Fest type situation.
John: Yeah.
John: And he was like, so I'm working for him.
John: I could have done all this.
John: I could have made all this.
John: a long time ago it could have been fine but anyway now it's fine I've got your stuff fret not and so I heard so I left and went up on the stage and I heard later that as my people showed up at the door they were like hi I'm on the guest list and the people at the door were like welcome
John: So nobody got the app.
John: Nobody, nobody got the wristbands.
John: They didn't even know that they had to.
John: That's the beautiful thing about this story, Merlin.
John: They never even learned that there was a thing that they were getting around.
John: This guy should get some kind of an award.
John: You know what?
John: He does get, he gets the reward of being a professional that kicks ass at his job.
John: Yeah.
John: I mean, then I hope that they paid the shit out of him because I mean, I, I heaped praise upon him.
John: I was like, thank you.
John: But the thing is, as soon as I saw him coming down the street, I was like, someone from my tribe.
John: I recognize what I see this person and know.
John: It's like D&D.
Merlin: You've met this ranger before.
Merlin: Oh, yes.
Merlin: You know this kind of ranger that's walking up to you.
John: Because he's walking up with also the stride of someone who is not...
John: like this is not a guy who is going to follow orders and one day be convicted of a war crime you know sometimes just the way a fella carries himself you just know whether or not he'll he'll be charged with a war crime yeah this is not a second lieutenant with his helmet on backwards calling down
John: artillery on his own position yeah this is somebody who's like at a certain point when he gets an order that's that's a foobar he's gonna belie that order he's gonna apply that order that's right he's gonna say stand down sir yeah he's gonna say remove your key sir i would prefer not to
John: I do not prefer it.
John: So, anyway, all by way of saying, as we say in this podcast game, the fucking app.
John: I don't want any more apps.
John: I want fewer apps.
John: Oh, oh, oh, oh.
John: Oh, I didn't tell you.
John: I know you want to get to the Beatles, but there's one more thing.
John: We have a loyal listener to our program who lives in Portland, and she runs a...
John: She runs an operation called Strange Vacations, which is a motorcycle clothing and lifestyle company for women.
John: Strange Vacations.
John: Strange Vacations.
John: It's in PDX.
John: It's in PDX, that's right.
John: And she's got a great collection of... It's not just that they do leather jackets, but they do events.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: Look at this stuff.
John: Yeah.
John: They do... It's like an organization to bring motorcycle... Women who ride motorcycles of all stripes.
Merlin: That's so cool.
John: And it's a Squarespace site.
John: Look at that.
Merlin: Just like us.
John: So she sent me a thing the other day.
John: And you may have heard of it.
John: You may not have.
John: Oh, my God.
John: But it's www.thelightphone.com.
John: Are you familiar with The Light Phone?
John: No.
John: I'm looking now.
John: The Light Phone.
John: The Light Phone.
John: You said, I saw this.
John: I thought of you.
John: I thought you might like it.
John: The Light Phone.
John: Oh, my God.
John: It is a phone the size of a credit card.
John: Also a Squarespace site.
John: And it only has...
John: It has 10 preset people and then just numbers on it.
John: It's just a phone, and it's real little.
John: Yeah, you can't text on it.
John: You can't do anything on it.
John: And the thing is, it's tethered to your... Not tethered.
John: It's somehow connected to your normal phone, so it's your same phone number.
John: But for times when you don't want a smartphone, when you literally just want to be reachable by phone.
John: Right.
John: So you leave your smartphone at home, you put this in your pocket...
John: You can call the 10 people you most regularly call, and they can reach you.
John: People that have your number can reach you.
John: But otherwise, you are free from having to look at your thing.
John: I could use that.
John: I could still use that right now.
John: And I think they said it's like $5 a month.
John: I mean, they're doing everything they can to make it like...
Merlin: just like namaste you know what i mean namaste i was kind of hoping she was going to make us a leather jacket i'm kind of bummed well you know i said to her at one point if you want to make me a leather jacket i would accept it where's where's where's the rock swag and she was like oh next time we get a big order in and then i never you know she sends me this kind of shit but never says like oh yeah somebody takes somebody takes the time to reach out and offer us something useful and they're like that's all very interesting where's my free shit
Merlin: That's great.
John: But what about the leather jacket?
John: What about the thousand dollar leather jacket that you never said that you would make us?
Merlin: Anyway, the light bulb.
John: Thank you for your service.
John: So I was I was looking around the other day.
John: Somebody suggested that there was a new Beatles documentary.
John: And so I went around looking for it.
John: It was made by Ron Howard.
John: Heartbreaking.
John: And I couldn't find it except on Hulu.
John: It's made made by and for Hulu.
John: And I went to Hulu and they were like, you got to download the app and then you have to put in your you have to pick a pick a name, pick like a cute nickname for yourself.
John: Get 30 days free.
John: But then, you know, then we're just going to suck $15 out of your life for the rest of your life.
John: And I was like, there's got to be a better way.
John: And so I went on the Internet and I was like, I want to watch this for free.
John: How do I watch this for free?
John: And I never do this and I hate to do it because it's always awful.
John: It's at odds with how you approach this industry.
John: But I found a place where I think it had Japanese subtitles or something.
John: This sounds legit.
John: I started watching this movie and I was just like.
John: Oh, it was, you know, you think there's no new Beatles news under the sun.
Merlin: There's no new footage.
Merlin: There's no new stories.
Merlin: You've heard it all.
Merlin: You know, every cliche backwards and forwards, chapter and verse.
John: It's so wonderful when you discover that there's more Beatles stuff.
John: And great Beatles stuff like all this live footage, the cleaned up audio.
Merlin: You can hear how great they are live.
Merlin: And when they did that sound great to themselves, they couldn't Ringo could not hear anything.
John: Couldn't hear it.
John: Couldn't hear a thing.
John: But they but there they are.
John: And then about halfway through watching this thing.
John: It stops.
Merlin: Oh, no.
John: And I go try to refresh it, and it's gone.
John: Like, I am watching some pirate shit as it's being taken down.
Merlin: It's like the light of another sun, and by the time it gets here, that sun's actually dead.
John: That sun was gone, right?
John: I was just watching the last dying... It might have been dead when you started watching it.
John: That's right, the dying embers of... I mean, I heard millions of souls cry out, and all were extinguished at once.
Merlin: Seven-sided lighthouse made of dreams.
That's right.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: So that's no moon.
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
Merlin: Wasn't it sad, though?
Merlin: I mean, you just feel the melancholy.
Merlin: There's so much Beatles news this week.
Merlin: I'm currently reading a book called Beatles 66, and it's an entire book-length book all about...
Merlin: starting really in December 65.
Merlin: It's the length of a book?
Merlin: Yeah, it's a whole book about what happens with the Beatles in 1966.
John: That's a great year for the Beatles.
Merlin: Which is easily the most interesting, really the most interesting Beatles year.
Merlin: And just in short, that means it's basically Rubber Soul comes out beginning December 65.
Merlin: They do a small tour in the UK.
Merlin: They take three months off.
Merlin: Which, if you know the Beatles and go look at some of the infographics on the Beatles, that happened, I think, once, period, full stop.
Merlin: Is this where they went down to the islands?
Merlin: They were in Greece or something?
Merlin: This is pre-Maharishi, I believe, but I haven't gotten to that part of the book yet.
Merlin: But the thing to know is that a lot of their interests as individuals developed during this period.
Merlin: They didn't have the same haircut anymore, etc., etc.
Merlin: I mean, there's a lot to those three months.
Merlin: They come back, they record Revolver, they release Revolver.
Merlin: They do a little at this point now.
Merlin: So now they're done touring.
Merlin: They're done touring at this point.
Merlin: And then they start recording Sgt.
Merlin: Pepper at the end of the year.
Merlin: Along with lots of life stuff.
Merlin: I mean, Paul and John's relationships break up.
Merlin: John meets Yoko.
Merlin: Ringo meets Charlie Chaplin.
Merlin: There's all these things that happen.
Merlin: There's questions about what the next movie can and should be.
Merlin: I mean, these are things where today this all seems normal because you're used to how pop culture and culture works.
Merlin: Back then, the idea of the most popular and successful band in the world...
Merlin: is going to stop touring.
Merlin: Like, that's what rock music is, rock and roll.
Merlin: Rock and roll is touring, putting out records, touring, putting out records.
Merlin: Who do you think you are?
Merlin: What are you, you know, Leonard Bernstein?
Merlin: You're going to sit around and write songs about love?
Merlin: Like, get out there, you know, Mach Shao.
John: Yeah, that's right.
Merlin: But then the idea that, like, they wouldn't just jump into an ill-advised third movie when they didn't like the script.
Merlin: There's all these things that they did where people are like, well, this is it.
Merlin: Put a fork in them.
Merlin: Finally, finally, the Beatles are going to be exposed for the frauds that they are.
John: Their whole career.
Merlin: The whole thing was a fluke.
Merlin: You go and read reviews of Rubber Soul in NME and Melody Maker, and it has kind of a nice song, and in my life it's like, oh, it has a nice piano melody, but none of... But it's finally over.
Merlin: Yeah, this is it.
Merlin: I mean, really, these guys, the songs, Nowhere Man is so repetitious, Fool on the Hill, like, ugh.
Merlin: They tried, you know, it's a swing and a miss.
Merlin: Next band, please.
Merlin: Sorry.
Merlin: So anyway, 1966.
Merlin: But in this case...
Merlin: It wasn't heartbreaking, though.
Merlin: You know that for years they were playing sometimes three shows a day.
Merlin: They like in Liverpool, they would play a lunchtime show at the Cavern Club and then two evening shows at different venues.
Merlin: They were for a time playing up to three, at least three gigs a day.
Merlin: I think they honestly legitimately did love it.
Merlin: And then they become successful.
Merlin: And now it's the worst.
Merlin: It's like it's like they're trying to swim around in jello.
Merlin: Ugh.
Merlin: It's so not rock and roll.
Merlin: I mean, it is rock and roll to the audience.
Merlin: Like, oh, my God.
Merlin: And we've been watching so much Beatles.
Merlin: I told you last night we watched A Hard Day's Night at my daughter's request.
John: That's such a great movie.
Merlin: That iconic, you just look at a silhouette of those four guys.
Merlin: And I explain, you know, Paul's over on the left because, you know, he's left-handed.
Merlin: And that makes this stage set up, like, so iconic.
Merlin: It is the iconic.
Merlin: But you show a silhouette of the four Beatles with Ringo up on the drum riser.
Merlin: There's no question in your mind who those four people originally were.
Mm-hmm.
Merlin: Live is not fun.
Merlin: Live is not fun.
Merlin: Live is pulling teeth.
Merlin: They feel like they're treading water.
Merlin: They're musically, they feel like they're moving backward musically.
John: I'm confused.
John: What role did Charlie Chaplin play in the breakup of the Beatles?
Merlin: Not the breakup of the Beatles.
Merlin: This is 66.
Merlin: This is just from the first chapter of this book, explaining why this was such a momentous year.
Merlin: And it's just in the service of saying that, really, the short version is that from, depending on when you start counting, let's say 62 through 65, it was just a non-stop series of escalating craziness.
Merlin: As you saw in that documentary, they were increasingly...
Merlin: I mean, you already know, like, oh, the Beatles couldn't walk around because, you know, young people would chase them.
Merlin: Like, everybody knows that.
Merlin: You've seen A Hard Day's Night, and that was part of the bit.
Merlin: But the truth was, their life was unmanageable.
Merlin: People were threatening, the Ku Klux Klan, political groups, people were threatening their lives at this point.
Merlin: They could not go anywhere.
Merlin: They really, really were stuck.
Merlin: Four guys, they're mostly indistinguishable to strangers, four identical-looking guys who played terrible music.
Merlin: and then all of the people who wanted to possess them.
Merlin: That's what it was.
Merlin: And the only people in their lives were a handful of, like, girlfriends and music professionals.
Merlin: And so it was the first time since the Beatles got anywhere near popular that they had any air at all to go and develop new interests, you know, go get into, you know, Stockhausen or go out and get into, like, whatever it is, go out and discover these things that would become hugely important in the giant middle phase of the Beatles.
Oh.
Merlin: I'm sorry, I'm talking a lot because it's such a big Beatles week.
John: What struck me about that documentary, I mean, there were 50 things that struck me about hard, but one of the interesting things that had never been shown to me in exactly that way was how much the phenomenon of the Beatles was registering as world historical to the people of the time.
John: Like, the
John: the journalists
John: were saying, this is an unprecedented crowd of people.
John: This has never happened before.
John: No one has ever, no one expected this.
John: No one knows what to do about this.
John: That guy that followed them on tour, who, you know, his boss said, you want to go out with the Beatles?
John: He was like, no.
John: Why would I want to do that?
John: That seems like a dumb thing.
John: Why are you sending me a seasoned reporter on this dumb junket?
John: And then two weeks in, he's like, I'm basically, I'm living
John: the most extraordinary event in the 20th century.
John: And this is what, 20 years after the end of World War II, most adults are, you know, World War II is going to be their formative tentpole moment for the 20th century.
John: But this is like something above and beyond what anybody could have ever seen or known what to do.
John: And hearing those voices and realizing that
John: From inside it, I mean, they were – you always see the picture and you know that, like, yeah, there's never been a Beatles before, right?
John: Like, Beatlemania, sure.
John: But we're all post-Beatles.
John: And to hear those people talking, having been pre-Beatles and now being, like, trying to make sense of it, it was so thrilling.
Yeah.
John: but also just terrifying because it had never happened before.
John: And so who wants to keep...
Merlin: tonight tonight being the night that that everybody dies right i mean it felt even even taking into account whatever johnny ray's and frank sinatra's of the past it felt it felt unprecedented it felt weird so once it started it seemed really exceptional once it escalated it seemed even more uncanny once it went to like 10 times that people are like well this has to end like
Merlin: So it really becomes in a relatively short, you're talking about like a year and a half or less.
Merlin: You go from like they had a small single with like Love Me Do like a year ago.
Merlin: I think Love Me Do had like 18 months between when it first came out and like when they really caught on.
Merlin: They were a popular band, but there were tons of popular big beat bands, they called them or Mersey beat bands.
Merlin: But then the entire time you're a grownup, it's like, it's not so different from the condition I have today where I'm just going like, okay, it's another day.
Merlin: How long can this go on?
Merlin: Can this, this, there's no way this can go on in another week, let alone another month.
Merlin: Talking about something different here.
Merlin: But like back then, if you're one of the burgers and Meisters, like you would just be going like, there's no way this can continue.
Merlin: This has got to be exposed as a fraud and blow up in a shower of sparks.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah.
John: Right.
John: Or something awful is going to happen.
John: You know, like, like,
John: People are going to die.
John: There's just no... We didn't prepare... It was only because it was an era of greater civility that people didn't die.
John: Because, you know, there were 25 cops and all of a sudden there are 25,000 people there.
John: And they just didn't have the...
John: If the crowd had been unruly or less ruly, you know, they could have just stormed the doors or whatever.
John: And you see all those scenes where there's like 10 Bobbies holding hands with their hats getting knocked off.
John: And they're like...
John: you know, no, stay back.
John: But, but that's effective, right?
John: The 10 Bobby's holding their hands and the girls are like, well, we can't cross the police line.
John: Right.
John: Um, now, you know, that would have been, I mean, everyone would, everyone would have, would have been, uh,
John: I mean, it's astonishing to think no one was crushed to death.
Merlin: And nobody was thinking about an improvised explosive device.
John: Right.
John: None of those Ku Klux Klan guys actually did ride in and burn the place to the ground.
John: And these four ding-a-lings are riding the crest of this wave.
John: And it's so lovely to see that they did have each other in those years.
John: And they did have that sort of... I didn't know about the...
John: about the fact that they decided internally that they were absolutely democratic, and if one Beatle didn't want to do something, then they wouldn't do it.
John: And I just thought that was a miracle.
John: I couldn't fathom that they actually made all the decisions that they made from 63 or 61 to whenever.
John: The decision to stop touring was just like George saying...
John: I can't do this anymore.
John: And they were all like, right, right, done.
John: And that's so lovely.
John: And considering how fast that all fell apart, and by two years later, they couldn't stand to be in the room with each other.
Merlin: But yeah, imagine...
Merlin: It's all new to them.
Merlin: They haven't been through this either.
Merlin: Ooh, who bad, you know?
Merlin: Right, they're young.
Merlin: They're in their early 20s.
Merlin: They are very young.
Merlin: Their life is changing very, very quickly.
Merlin: And, yeah, I mean, that's the thing is when you look at this stuff and you look at the pictures and the movies and everything, we feel, you know, we're so inured toward those images.
Merlin: But they were living that.
Merlin: This was all new to them, and they didn't know where it was going to go either.
Merlin: Basically, it was understood...
Merlin: A question they would get in almost every interview was, okay, so clearly this is going to end soon.
Merlin: What are you going to do?
Merlin: John and Paul would say, well, we'll probably be songwriters.
Merlin: And it was generally, I'm just quoting this book at this point, The Beatles 66, is that, oh, well, you know, for Ringo and George, whatever money they end up with, they should probably invest in business.
Merlin: Because obviously this will be over with any day now.
John: And there are a couple of scenes in the movie where Paul's like, well, you know, I think it'll last another six months.
John: And he's, in a rare instance, you know, being sincere.
John: They're not being snarky.
John: They're like, yeah, you know, it can't last, right?
John: Like, this is madness.
John: Oh, poor Beatles.
Merlin: Poor Beatles.
Merlin: What else happened this week so much?
Merlin: So I was... So the Beatles 66 thing, highly recommended.
Merlin: I had heard... I just want to stipulate.
Merlin: I really like the band, the Beatles.
Merlin: Sgt.
Merlin: Pepper...
Merlin: On a Good Day is my fourth favorite Beatles album, probably.
Merlin: The top ones change, but Rubber Soul, Revolver, White Album... Rubber Soul, Revolver, White Album... Are always going to be, to me, jockeying for top position.
Merlin: And then you get down into With the Beatles or Abbey Road.
Merlin: But, you know, Sgt.
Merlin: Pepper's...
Merlin: hasn't aged well to me.
Merlin: Rubber Soul is 51 years old and still sounds like they're inventing a new kind of music.
Merlin: And obviously Revolver, I think is, I don't know, Fight Me, it's their best album.
Merlin: revolver is well i mean i'm all i want to say is that it's conventional wisdom i feel like this i don't know if it started with this but i i feel like the 25th anniversary um whenever that was of uh or no 20 years because it was 20 years ago today so i guess that would be 90 or 87 rather
Merlin: there was this whole like oh you know sergeant pepper there would be no this and that without sergeant pepper and they were definitely you know the beach boys and the beatles were playing off each other at the apex and there would not be psychedelia there would not be multi-track like i it is i just want to stipulate it's a good album and it's got some great songs it's a gestalt album no no i accept and understand the importance of sergeant pepper there are so many other albums i would put on
John: first so i just wanted to just wanted to prepare you for my adulation here by saying that's my position on sergeant pepper would you like to share your position on sergeant pepper uh so i also am a my feeling has always been that sergeant pepper is a little bit of a mixed bag of of fruit and there's a lot of stuff on there that
John: I don't go back to over and over.
John: Obviously there are some great songs and obviously it's the Beatles and every song is great.
Merlin: Do you come home from working at the bar and put on for the benefit of Mr. Kite?
John: Typically no.
John: And it foreshadowed a lot of the stuff on the White Album that is kind of like a little bit responding to what I imagine is
John: What they think is the culture in downtown London.
John: Those guys are still young guys and so, I think, sensitive to being called... At the point at which the Beatles became an epithet that the cool art kids...
John: would use to describe something that was cheesy or for teens.
John: I think the Beatles themselves were really sensitive to that.
John: And really a lot of the exploratory nature of their later work was...
John: Both driven by their own sort of desire to not be static, but also, you know, we can't know what it's like for them to go out to some club in London and have hipsters sneer at them.
Merlin: It was a really different culture and time.
Merlin: The music magazines were very important back then.
Merlin: And like anybody who's ever been in a band in England, you get frustrated with the press because they got their own thing going on.
Merlin: But unlike today, where you might more easily be criticized for being unsophisticated, back then it would just be article after article about how their days are up because they've forgotten how to make a catchy song.
Merlin: And so when they were trying all this, like putting a sitar on stuff, which they described as an Arabian guitar in the press, like they...
Merlin: The Beatles were two or three steps ahead of the entire mainstream in that way.
Merlin: And the music was described... Again, I'm quoting this book.
Merlin: I don't have it in front of me, but I remember very clearly.
Merlin: Their music became described as dark, starting around Rubber Soul.
Merlin: Although I think you really could...
Merlin: Um, Beatles for sale is very, Beatles for sale is very dark.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: You can hear it in hell.
Merlin: Oh God.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: And, but, but they, but they, but dark considered dark in an industry where promoting good feelings is the stock in trade.
Merlin: So it was considered like these guys have really lost the thread on what they're doing here.
John: Well, so there's that, but there's also all those, I mean, you think about like the,
John: John Mayall and the Blues Breakers or that whole movement of... Oh, even the Stones.
John: Like, they're so much cooler than the Beatles.
John: Yeah, just happening in the 60s in England where it was like, you know, oh, we're not making this, like, pop music.
John: We're playing the blues.
John: We're serious white British dudes playing the blues.
John: And whatever else, you know, they were under all that social pressure.
John: People doing avant-garde music.
John: dance performances and whatnot and the beatles are are trying to be on the vanguard of everything because of who they are you know they want to be they don't want to i mean that was the that was what was so profound about that about uh dylan at royal albert hall and the effect that that had on john just that they went to see dylan and you could hear a pin drop of
John: John was like, why don't people listen to us like that?
John: That feeling that he could get up there by himself and be so serious, so respected, so unimpeachable.
John: Again, Dylan is another phenomenon where you go, well, there's never going to be another one of those.
John: Imagine what it would be like to be somebody that really was unimpeachable for
John: Unimpeachable to all the people that you desperately, as an artist, want to be unimpeachable to.
John: That's the crazy thing.
John: I mean, there were plenty of critics of Dylan, but none of the critics of Dylan were the people that Dylan cared about.
Merlin: It would be almost like, in a time when there were comic strips in the paper, it would almost be like there was a comic strip that got really popular, and then it got popular with your smart friends, and pretty soon it was generally agreed to not only be the most important comic strip of all time, but one of the great works of literature.
Merlin: everybody would be going how could how could a comic strip in the paper be one of the greatest pieces of literature that's antithetical these are pop groups yeah these are pop that's the other thing the beatles did not call themselves a rock band they called themselves a pop group they they were a product in a lot of ways for the beginning of their career who would look at them or doing like this guy what folk music is going to become this really important thing folk music come on this is 1961 guys wake up
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: It's not 1935 and yet.
John: Yeah, sorry, Ma Kettle.
John: It's not going to be on the charts.
John: And there it is.
John: As an artist, as somebody working in this vernacular...
John: You know, you always want to be the you desperately want to be the band that not only that everybody loves, but even more importantly, that everybody respects.
John: And and you see you see artists throughout time that kind of come out with a thing.
John: People love it.
John: They respect it.
John: And then there's two ways you can go, right?
John: You can be respected and then your popularity falls off.
John: Or you can be popular and your respectability falls off.
Merlin: But those few people... It's so rare to obtain and sustain both.
Merlin: It's very unusual.
John: Stay up on that ridge and also stay up on that ridge and seem...
John: And make it seem like it's effortless.
John: You know, Dylan did everything he could to dislodge himself, and all it did was put him back up there.
John: And you think about the Eagles, who were one of the most successful bands in history and desperately craved...
John: critical acknowledgement which they which you know the critics just denied them and you think about i mean even bands of our of our age the the strokes that first strokes record like everybody loved it but they weren't able to maintain it they couldn't stay up there somehow they um and i think it was you know it was a big a big factor in harvey danger's kind of uh
John: Harvey Danger was motivated by a desire to be respected by the music critics much more than they were by desire to be internationally famous.
John: And, you know, those pressures really took their toll on those guys.
John: And Death Cab for Cutie, you know, my pals who have done this career where they...
John: worked very hard to get on this particular ridge that they're on, which is that their critical appraisal and their fan and the passion of their fans has remained constant throughout their career, always growing at a steady pace.
John: They've never made a record that the critics said they've lost it.
John: They've never really lost their fans, but they've also never hit the
John: hit the big time considering how long their career has gone like by this point in i mean the death cab's been a band for 20 years um yeah i've been listening to him for 18 years that means when i started listening to death cab for cutie uh a baby born on that day would now be getting ready for college yeah right i know exactly right or or i mean if if uh if it was
John: If you've overlaid REM's career onto Death Cab for Cutie's career, we're into the 2000s in the REM canon, right?
John: Wow.
John: So Death Cab could have at any point along that way had a record that was their automatic for the people, and they never have.
John: But by the same token, they've never...
John: They've never had a record where it was like, well, you've had a couple of million sellers and then the next one sold 100,000 copies.
John: Well, they don't have a Dylan self-portrait.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Or a Metal Machine Music.
Merlin: They never went Christian.
Merlin: I would love to hear Ben Gifford's version of Metal Machine Music.
John: You never know.
John: You never know what comes next.
John: I could see Chris Walla doing that, maybe.
John: But for me, the desire to be critically loved...
John: It's so powerful.
John: Even if you sit with your friends, and this is what all artists do.
John: They sit and they go, wow, they don't know anything.
John: You know, the critics are all blah.
John: You know, shit talking critics is number one thing you do on a Saturday afternoon with your musician friends.
John: But you also just want, like, for some reason, I don't know what happened.
John: I went and looked at Pitchfork's top albums of 2002.
Hmm.
John: or 2000 yeah i think yeah i don't know why why would you look at that that's so strange why would that even occur to you to look at i know it was weird it was weird i just happened to be going by i wonder what they thought about that year it was a crazy year i was just looking i was just looking at folk streams i think mind your own business just checking out 2002 just looking back then looking to see what and you know the number one album uh pitchfork's number one album of 2002 was interpol's turn on the bright lights
John: Love will tear us apart.
John: And there were a lot of bands in the top 20 that I don't think anybody's heard of since.
John: And they'll know us by the Trail of Dead.
John: Arctic Snow Patrol Monkeys?
John: It's way up there.
John: I'm not even sure the Arctic Snow Patrol Monkeys were there then.
Merlin: You get maybe a Franz Ferdinand?
Merlin: Maybe you get a Dogs Die in Hot Cars?
Merlin: What do you get?
John: I think maybe even those came a year later.
Okay.
John: You know, you get some shins, you get some new pornographers.
Merlin: Oh yeah, that would be like a Blown Speakers era, maybe.
Merlin: New Pornographers.
Merlin: Pitchfork, 2002 albums.
Merlin: Or as they called them then, LPs.
John: LPs, 2002 LPs.
Merlin: Okay, here we go.
Merlin: Songs Ahaya.
John: Songs Ahaya.
John: That was a great record, actually.
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Liars.
Merlin: Sonic Youth.
Merlin: Oh, the No Twist.
Merlin: I always forget the name of that band.
Merlin: I like the No Twist.
Merlin: Kill the Moonlight.
Merlin: Very good, especially when you listen to it backwards.
Merlin: That is a good record.
Merlin: Girls Can Tell is better.
Merlin: Trail of Dead.
Merlin: Bleeps and Bloops.
Merlin: Yankee Hotel.
John: Oh, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
John: That was the one I really shook my fist at.
John: Yeah, really?
John: At the time.
John: You like the more tuneful ones?
John: Well, no, I felt like The Long Winter's The Worst You Can Do Is Harm.
Merlin: Oh, that's right.
Merlin: You had that album come out around that time, The Worst You Can Do Is Harm.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Just coincidentally.
John: Coincidentally.
John: And, you know, I felt like if you put The Worst You Can Do Is Harm and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot side by side.
John: Yeah.
John: You know, I'm probably not the one to ask, but I really feel like the Long Winters record holds its own in that competition.
John: But one of them was all anybody could talk about, and the other one was not really talked about that.
Merlin: That's true.
Merlin: Covered by All Music Guide.
John: Yeah, All Music Guy did a nice... All Music Guy was harder on the first one, right?
John: They were... Yeah, they didn't under... They just sort of like, meh, on it.
John: And they were wrong, you know, but a review like that goes out and it just hangs there for years.
John: Like Travis Morrison.
John: Yeah, that's right.
Merlin: Have you... I realize I'm springing this on you late, and I'm thinking we should make this homework for the next episode.
Merlin: Have you had an opportunity to listen to the remix of Sgt.
Merlin: Pepper yet?
Merlin: No.
Merlin: I would like to, if you don't have it, I would like to gift you with that.
Merlin: Is it a stereo remix or a mono?
Merlin: Well...
Merlin: Is that part of the story?
Merlin: George Martin, in his later years, was having a lot of trouble with his hearing.
Merlin: And he brought in his son, who has done lots of production stuff, to be, as he says, his ears.
Merlin: And they work together on love.
Merlin: Long story short... Oh, shoot, what's his name?
Merlin: Not Clive.
Merlin: What's George Martin's son's name?
Merlin: I'm totally spacing on it.
Merlin: Martin.
Merlin: Martin Hannett.
Merlin: Martin.
Merlin: Emmerich Aspinall McMasterson Tiger Woods.
Merlin: McMasterson Tiger Woods.
Merlin: You know what they did?
Merlin: They went into Janet Martin.
Merlin: Janet Martin Marway Mall.
Merlin: Shauna Malway Tweep.
Merlin: Martin.
Merlin: Martin.
Merlin: Martin.
Merlin: On the Thames.
Merlin: Thames upon Martin Bucket.
Merlin: Uh, they went in and they got, they got, I guess they got the source tracks that became, this is the pre bounce down.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: Tracks.
John: How did they get those?
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: Cause I can't believe no one ever thought to do this before.
Merlin: Now they got all the original stuff.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: What?
Merlin: Come on.
Merlin: They got all that stuff.
Merlin: You tried to kid.
Merlin: Come on.
Merlin: Yeah, and then they remixed it with the idea of saying, here's the problem.
Merlin: You take something like A Day in the Life.
Merlin: The drum sounds at the beginning of A Day in the Life.
Merlin: Like, the mono version, everybody knows, blah, blah, blah, go research Beatles nerds' preferences on stereo versus mono.
Merlin: The true story is that for most of the Beatles' career, they were heavily involved with George Martin in the production of the mono, but increasingly they would go, like, meh, you could just go do something for the stereo.
Merlin: So they could be actually kind of different versions with different parts.
Merlin: You'd hear different things.
Merlin: And a lot of times the stereo was really just Ringo's over here on the right.
Merlin: Ringo and Paula were over here.
Merlin: Nobody else is over here.
Merlin: It's pretty simple.
Merlin: And there's for a long time been understanding that like, boy, you know, essentially what they did was they said, we want to make a 3D stereo sounding mix that's got the propulsion and fullness of the mono version.
Merlin: And you're going to hear low end like you have never heard before.
Merlin: I don't want to spoil it for you.
Merlin: I would like, if you would, please, to consider, and we'll put this in the budget for the show.
Merlin: So here's what you get.
Merlin: You're going to get this.
Merlin: You're going to get the new remixed Sergeant Pepper.
Merlin: But that's not all.
Merlin: But that's not all.
Merlin: If you buy two and pay a separate fee, it also includes whatever take they used of the bass track unadorned.
Merlin: So, you know, you're going to hear what it sounded like.
Merlin: And, you know, nerds have been able to get these in the various trucks and back corners for a while.
Merlin: I've spent a lot of time on YouTube listening to this stuff, if I can, what I can find.
Merlin: I mean, I went pretty deep into the, like, oh, the MSFL Ebbets kind of revolver and all these different versions.
Merlin: And I had all the stereo and all the mono.
Merlin: I'm just saying, like, once you sat down, on Saturday, I listened to Sgt.
Merlin: Pepper
Merlin: Probably for the first time in my life, I listened to Sgt.
Merlin: Pepper three times in one day.
Merlin: And then I listened to the bass tracks.
Merlin: And it's a new album.
Merlin: And I'm going to leave it at that.
Merlin: Would you consider doing this for homework?
Merlin: Yeah, I will do this.
Merlin: I'll do this.
Merlin: And then we'll come back next week.
Merlin: And amongst our other topics, we will talk about the 1967 album, Sgt.
Merlin: Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Merlin: All right.
John: Can't wait to dig into this, because as you know, I like the Beatles.
John: Yeah, me too.
John: I think I'm ready to reappraise this.
Merlin: It sounds like the White Album, in a good way.
Merlin: Do they have these stem tracks just floating around for the other albums?
Merlin: good question the thing is it's sort of like john syracuse's position on the new start star wars uh you know the um updated editions it's like empire strikes back is actually not very marred whereas the first star wars movie is just massacred i'm guessing that's what it's like i bet you know revolver sounds pretty great yeah but if they exist i will kickstart the shit out of that get in there and do this for every one of these albums
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: What is his name?
Merlin: I feel terrible now.
John: But you want George Martin to be at the helm.
John: The day that George Martin isn't helming the thing, then it just becomes like... Giles Martin.
Merlin: And he says specifically, though, yes, he's going to keep in mind what his father would do.
Merlin: But even more importantly, he's going to ask the two living Beatles and going to try to infer what the other Beatles would want.
Merlin: He's trying to do it in the spirit of what they would want to do with this.
Merlin: Ask the living Beatles.
Merlin: Ask the living Beatles.
Merlin: I just wish that Paul was more trustworthy.
Merlin: You have not super directly addressed this.
Merlin: You have some credibility issues with Paul McCartney.
Merlin: Sir, Mr. Lord Paul McCartney.
Merlin: You parse hard on a McCartney quote.
John: I'm hoping that Paul...
John: Just hoping that Paul does the right thing here.
Merlin: Paul, at this point, has probably overwritten a lot of the original tape in his mind.
Merlin: That's what I'm worried about.
Merlin: He might have done too many punches, and there's just stuff that... He remembers a version of it that he started telling slightly differently in 1972, and he's still kind of operating off of that broken bit of tape.
John: Yeah, I'm just afraid that it's, you know...
John: I mean, what was his thing where he was like, I don't see why it's not called McCartney-Lennon.
John: Oh, Lucy Liu for the Bob's Your Uncle.
Merlin: And actually, the credits, that has been corrected.
Merlin: What, it's now McCartney-Lennon?
Merlin: Some.
Merlin: Some.
Merlin: Basically, a credit has been apportioned based on contribution.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: And I'm trying to remember.
Merlin: I don't have the hard copy.
Merlin: I've got the streaming version on Apple Music.
Merlin: But yeah, yeah, supposedly.
Merlin: It's actually good for Giles Martin.
Merlin: Good for Giles.
Merlin: Good for Giles.
Merlin: You know, it's good for Giles.
Merlin: Everybody's got to earn a living.
Merlin: That's what they say.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Giles Martin's 47.
Merlin: There's a 47-year-old guy producing Beatles albums now.
Merlin: It's depressing.
Merlin: That's younger than you, right?
Merlin: Just barely.
Merlin: Just barely.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Slightly younger than me.
John: The love you take is equal to the love.