Ep. 341: "The Head of Two-Thousand"
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Hi, Merlin.
Merlin: How's it going?
Merlin: Pretty good.
Merlin: Pretty good.
Merlin: Pretty good.
Merlin: Oh, bright and beautiful June 17th.
Merlin: And you're on your trip.
John: Oh, is it?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, June 17th, like it says on the calendar right now.
Merlin: I would have thought that we were further along than that.
Merlin: Join the club.
Merlin: Oh, my goodness.
Merlin: I'm basically a Ren's song.
Merlin: An ongoing Ren's song.
Merlin: You mean one that is only partially recorded?
Merlin: Hey, he's trying.
Merlin: Charles had, as we record this on June 3rd, Charles had a very good dad joke this morning.
John: I saw that, yeah.
John: Oh, you saw that?
John: Oh, yeah, about the doctor's office.
Merlin: Wow, that's cool.
Merlin: I think we get the same Twitter.
John: Yeah, we follow a couple of the same people, I think.
Merlin: Yeah, it's a process.
Merlin: I think a lot of it's probably drums and drum sounds.
John: Drum sounds.
John: It's very hard to get good drum sounds.
Merlin: Yeah, I mean, if you've got...
Merlin: I've told you about that podcast I like, Hit Parade.
Merlin: I've encouraged you to listen to that podcast, even though one episode is about Red Red Wine.
Merlin: You can skip that one.
Merlin: But they talked about the guy, Chris Malamfy, did a good deep dive on the interesting phenomenon of Genesis being a little bit of a black swan.
Merlin: In that, the emergence of the solo careers did not harm, well, eventually, didn't harm Genesis Prime, but in fact helped it.
Merlin: So he talks about, it's got a lot about your man, Phil Collins.
Merlin: Do you feel that that is unusual or he feels that's unusual?
Merlin: He cites other examples.
Oh.
Merlin: of this, but it is unusual.
Merlin: I mean, so like, here's all the asterisks so that I can remember is that when you're talking about somebody like a Phil Collins anagenesis, it's unusual for a person to have an ongoing, very successful solo career that just keeps going up, like alongside an ongoing actual band venture, where there, in fact, they both at one point, there was one point where, and then you bring Peter Gabriel in the mix.
Merlin: And you had a week where it was like Genesis and Peter Gabriel 1 and 2.
Merlin: And then they swapped positions the next week.
Merlin: This is not actually that interesting.
Merlin: But I like the full story of In the Air Tonight.
Merlin: And I like the debunking of the myths.
Merlin: And I like the fact that somebody in Phil Collins was having a rough time, you know, in his life.
Merlin: And they gave him the prototype of a drum machine.
Merlin: Pre-808.
Merlin: And that's why we were in the air tonight.
Merlin: Anyway.
Merlin: Mike and the Mechanics.
Merlin: I forgot he was in Mike and the Mechanics.
Merlin: I was outside waiting for my lift because, you know, this is how I am.
Merlin: I can remember where I was when I heard something.
Merlin: I was on Parnassus Avenue waiting for my lift, and I heard that, and I totally forgot the other guy.
John: It's Mike Rutherford.
John: Yeah, it's not Phil Collins.
John: What's his name?
Merlin: Ernie Banks?
Merlin: Ernie Banks.
Merlin: Tim Banks.
John: Birthday party, cheesecake.
Merlin: Leonard Bernstein I hate you but you know they had a lot of songs Mike and the Mechanics you forget you know that they had all I need is a miracle see I forgot I remembered Silent Running featuring the great Paul Carrick right who sang Tempted in Squeeze oh isn't he wonderful he's wonderful that guy's got pipes and then you got the other one the all I need is a miracle who sang that was that Paul Young I bet that was Paul Young
John: Paul Young was in Mike and the Mechanics?
Merlin: Supposedly, according to the podcast episode, they had a rotating lineup of singer types.
John: Paul Young was a...
John: I was a weird fan of his.
Merlin: I was too.
Merlin: It's only super embarrassing now, but the first time I heard Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division was his cover of it, and I really liked it.
John: Oh, that's nice.
Merlin: Wait, is it the same Paul Young, though?
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.
John: Really?
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: A song was sung by Paul Young, the internet science site.
Merlin: A song was sung by Paul Young on both the original recording and the 1996 re-recording.
Merlin: Hmm.
Merlin: A lot of people re-record now.
Merlin: That's what I've heard.
Merlin: Jeff Lynne.
Merlin: Jeff Lin, he's like beard deep in re-recordings.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Cheap Trick might have done some re-recordings?
Merlin: I'm not sure.
Merlin: I can understand that.
Merlin: Because then you get the money.
John: It's all about the money.
John: I did re-recordings.
Merlin: Tell me more.
Merlin: Of previously released official material?
John: No, that's the difference.
John: That's the thing.
Merlin: You had at least, I want to say, three Western State Hurricane songs on your first album, The Worst You Can Do Is Harm.
Merlin: Oh, it was more than that.
Merlin: Okay, I know Car Parts was a very different song in Hurricanes.
Merlin: Oh, this is interesting, because, you know, I had that long list of topics if we ever ran out of things to talk about.
Merlin: This actually dovetails with that.
Merlin: If you've got topics, bring topics.
Merlin: But, okay, so I'm going to say... You know I never bring topics, so...
Merlin: Well, I mean, you're the epicenter, as they say.
Merlin: You got car parts.
Merlin: You got Mimi.
Merlin: You got... What's the one I'm thinking of?
Merlin: What's that one?
John: Unsalted Butter.
Merlin: Unsalted Butter.
Merlin: Is that an original for Long Winners?
John: Nope, that was...
John: That was a Western States song.
Merlin: So different, John.
Merlin: I can't imagine you having been in a band with that lady and Michael and then somebody else, I think.
Merlin: And I can't imagine having played those songs, gigged them so many times, recorded the demo, if memory serves, with a friend of the show, Phil Eck.
Merlin: i know too much about you john it's creepy and then to have to reimagine those in a way that uh was utterly fresh car parts is a very different song extremely different um the songs on that record that were not western state songs uh give me that's the ones you wrote that's the ones you wrote in harlem on a mattress no that's the second long winner's record okay
John: Give me a moment, which is the song that opens the Long Winters catalog.
John: If you were following the Long Winters along in real time, it would have been the first song you heard by them.
John: It was actually a Bunn Family Players song, and I don't think the Western State Hurricanes ever played it.
John: Okay, that makes sense.
John: It was a song that the Bunn Family Players didn't... I had a vision, you see, and I don't think that I communicated it.
John: And the Bunn Family Players didn't really...
John: like it.
John: And so it kind of went into a hat somewhere.
John: And as I was trying to come up with songs for a first album, I cannot get inside my head, the head of 2000, the year 2000, um, to just to figure out like how I was choosing songs to record at the time.
John: Cause you know, I'd written 40 songs by that point.
John: But I don't know how I was combing through them because I remember feeling like I didn't have enough songs for the first Long Winners record.
John: The only new songs on that album are Government Loans.
John: Okay.
John: Which...
John: When people ask me, and it happens all the time, I don't know if there's a comparable thing in your world where people say like, what was your favorite website that you ever built?
John: I'm not sure what the comparable thing would be to people asking, what's your favorite song?
Merlin: Anybody who's made enough stuff that you know some of their stuff, to me, that's an interesting question to ask.
Merlin: Especially because it's very difficult to answer in a lot of ways.
John: And I refuse to answer it, and it's very hard for me to...
Merlin: even imagine answering it because i can't i can't i couldn't think of my songs that way right like if even if you ask me what's your favorite song on this one album well you've blown the topic i had but i think we could still salvage it if you wanted a topic i was going to ask you at some point to reflect on some of your career with long winter songs and now i mean i think we're kind of there i think we've arrived and i'm super interested in this
Merlin: Because every time one writes a song, I mean, even a piker like me, having written a song, it has a life.
Merlin: I interrupted you and I apologize.
Merlin: This will be brief.
Merlin: It has a life in that something welled up enough that it needed to come out somewhere or chose to come out somewhere, right?
Merlin: Like, you know, sand and a pearl kind of thing.
Merlin: Like, really, most things, even if you're, like, scrounging, like you famously writing lyrics, like, while the band's recording the other tracks...
Merlin: You dredge up something to have something to say.
Merlin: So it had a life you may not even have really known about before it became a song.
Merlin: And then it had a life as a thing you had to record tracks for over and over and Ken Stringfellow's punching you in and out and all those things.
Merlin: It has a life as a recording.
Merlin: And then it has several lives after that because it has lives...
Merlin: like you as your band lineup would change and you would choose to perform the songs differently you had all different ways i've seen you play some of your songs live so then maybe you do a throwback and do it the original way and maybe sean's there and maybe you know maybe it's nabil maybe it's michael but you know what i mean like in all those cases and then you get this weird in oregano or latent time where they're not top of mind and then maybe you think of one of those things
Merlin: I don't know, and you've got that times 40-plus, right?
Merlin: It's interesting.
Merlin: The lives of a song are very interesting to me.
John: Well, there's a difference, I guess, between a song and a recording.
John: Like song versus record in the Grammys.
John: It says here, I haven't done this in a decade, but apparently according to all music.
John: Don't look, don't look, don't look.
John: I'm still mad about the two and a half stars.
Merlin: I'm still mad about this.
Merlin: I'm still so fucking mad about this.
John: The review says the striking thing about John Roderick is his vocal similarity to R.E.M.
John: 's Michael Stipe, which is pretty uncanny.
John: And then they're not only a slightly mellower R.E.M., but
John: Soul Asylum, Counting Crows.
John: That's a sort of... Yeah.
John: Well, which is interesting because at one point, for a long time, the review, the first review that went up on AllMusic was this girl who said it was a hookless something...
John: Something something and it became the because all music is the is a portal it was the It was the first thing
John: that came up if you Googled The Long Winters.
John: Hookless something of indie rock.
Merlin: And now somebody, and it's one reason I avoid review sites for a movie I want to see, is that now, whether I want to have it or not, a baseline has been established, even if it's a baseline that I would later hugely disagree with.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: So people Google your band, and the first thing they see is that you're a tuneless.
Merlin: And this site that at the time was relatively canonical for being where you find out how good a record is, you know, kind of hated on it.
John: It appears that they don't even have the cover art for it.
John: So, you know, that was always fun.
John: But the...
John: the difference between a song and a recording has, I don't know, it's plagued me my whole career because, uh, because, you know, recording is a snapshot of, of a, of a minute.
John: And I never had a very strong, uh, aesthetic.
John: I was never goth or punk or, or even indie really.
John: And so, uh,
John: So for me, if I had a song, I didn't go into the studio with a vision of how, how the recording was going to sound.
John: I had the song and was very open to hearing from the people that were standing around because especially early days, I didn't understand how a baseline would work or how a drum part would work.
John: People would sit around me and talk about drum parts and how this guy's drum parts were great and that, you know, and
John: made the song and these drums, and especially drum sounds.
John: I had no idea what they were talking about.
John: Drum sounds.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: It seems like something that Chris Walla in particular really cares about and you can so hear.
Merlin: The production on Give Me a Moment in particular seems very Chris Walla to me.
John: Well, Chris Walla... It's got an atmosphere to it.
John: Chris Walla really cared about it, but I don't look back and think like, oh, that was amazing.
John: I mean, I don't feel like the sounds...
John: The sounds we got were very indie, but they're not sounds that I chose because I didn't know enough to choose.
John: If you'd put two drum sounds right next to each other, and I remember it used to happen all the time.
John: I would just sit there dumbfounded.
John: Looks like nothing to me.
John: Right, exactly.
John: And it wasn't just the sounds, but I couldn't
John: it was hard for me to have an opinion about a bass part, for instance, because bass parts can do a lot of different things, and I didn't understand what any of those were.
John: Like, I knew listening to the Beatles that Paul McCartney's bass line was doing something, and I appreciated it.
John: But also, Geezer Butler's bass line is doing something in Black Sabbath tunes, which is playing the same part as Tony Iommi.
John: Mm-hmm.
John: And it's also amazing.
John: So if you're recording one of my songs, if you're recording Samaritan, which do you do?
John: Do you find a really great bass player and turn him loose on it?
John: Or do you have somebody just play the root notes?
John: Because I never had a solid band that just developed a sound.
Merlin: it wasn't it wasn't me and three friends and we started at 15 years old and our sound was the sound of the band and you couldn't separate it from my songwriting and most of the i mean like in so many bands the primary person writing the songs not always by a long shot but in most bands especially younger bands it's mostly a guitar player slash singer who writes the songs who is thinking about the chords and the changes in the bridge and that kind of stuff and it is you know it's
Merlin: I don't mean this to sound like a slam on bass players, like, in the way it is, but, like, it's unusual to find somebody who is competent when they're young and new at getting, really getting inside the song and becoming, like, a critical part of the emotional...
Merlin: valence of the song who's not also like a little bit of a showboat like you don't you know what i mean you meet those people who are like savants that like take over the the whole song but not everybody's uh i know you're not a huge fan but not everybody is mike watt and d boone where like you say they've been playing together forever and have lived inside each other's brains for so long you know what part to play
Merlin: And also, this is in the time before isolated tracks and before bass tabs were widely available.
Merlin: When I played bass, I played like Lou Barlow.
Merlin: I mean, I played like a guitar player who was like, oh, I see these strings are pretty much the same, just bigger.
Merlin: And then you would do like a Black Sabbath type thing or a Ramones type thing.
John: Well, there was a kid in my high school who was...
John: Who really decided sometime around the age of 15 or 16 that he was identifying as a bass player.
John: He came out as a bass player.
John: And it was, you know, it was extremely unusual because there were 20 kids that were lead guitar players.
John: And there were a bunch of kids in choir that sort of toyed around with the idea of being singers, although a lot of them were sort of like piano singers.
John: There wasn't really anybody who... I mean, considering how many metal guitar players there were, there was a surprising lack of metal singers.
John: And then there was just this one guy that...
John: that talked about bass lines and i'd never even heard the term of course and he and he was evangelizing about it like you gotta listen to the bass line because the assumption i think that we all had was that the bass player was the guy in the band who wasn't good enough to be the lead guitarist and got handed the bass um but so so the songs on the first long winner's record and the second long winner's record really every song i've ever recorded
John: most of those decisions were being made by not me.
John: And it's a character, I think, that kind of haunts me, follows me throughout my life, which is a feeling about a lot of stuff that I just want somebody else to do it and take ownership of it.
John: And
John: Either send me the receipts or tell me about it later.
John: And it haunts me because you would think I was pretty controlling about stuff.
John: But I actually just want to be...
John: I want to be on the receiving end of good fortune.
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Merlin: I don't think you're that way about implementation.
Merlin: I think if there is any way you're like that, it's about idea generation and desired outcome.
Merlin: But there are people out there who are really all about the implementation.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: I've got to say, I'm really glad you and Eric got connected because I think he really found something special in the arrangements and the choices that really brought out the melodies of your songs while still really holding it down.
John: I was really lucky to meet up with Eric and to sort of see...
John: When Eric auditioned for the band, everybody else in the band was like, not that guy.
John: He was like 12, right?
John: Yeah.
John: And I don't know.
John: I just connected with him right away.
John: But that was luck as much as anything.
John: He was the only person that auditioned for the job.
John: For instance, if I want a brick path laid in my yard...
John: And a person comes and says, I will do it.
John: I say, great.
John: Well, I'd like it to be a herringbone pattern.
John: And they go, fine.
John: Great.
John: And then I really, really go inside and pull the blinds.
John: I don't stand there on the porch and watch them.
John: I don't say, oh, hey, you know, I want it like this, not like that.
John: You know, I don't.
John: I don't.
John: What I do is I come out later and look.
John: And if they got it right...
John: I go, yeah, right.
John: That's what I meant.
John: And that's somewhat obvious.
John: So right on, you know, high five.
John: If they get it wrong, which happens a lot, I'm super devastated, confused.
John: I don't understand how somebody could have made those choices that seem so unobvious.
John: And you get this a lot.
John: In the world where you can get three people together and say, what's the way to do this?
John: And all three of them say exactly the same thing.
John: And then you hire a fourth guy to do it, and he does it completely backwards.
John: And all three of the other people will be like, it was obvious how to do.
John: But it's not always – and people make really weird choices, right?
John: So –
John: I always handed stuff like that off.
John: Making the first Long Winners record, I just handed it off because there were people in the room that wanted it.
John: Chris Walla and Sean Nelson wanted it.
John: to be in charge of that.
John: And I was grateful.
John: I was grateful to them.
John: Like, yes, I don't know what a baseline is.
John: I don't know what a drum sound is.
John: Like, I'm going to play my song and you guys take it.
John: And they made choices that were personal to them that would follow me the rest of my career because, because the long winters didn't turn into a band.
John: It was a, it was, I mean, long winters turned into a band obviously, but like,
John: Eric Corson being the one thing that was consistent or constant.
John: And he doesn't even play on the first record.
Merlin: Was it mostly Chris Walla playing bass?
John: No, Chris never played any bass on it.
John: It was Joe Bass.
John: Oh, right.
John: Is that the Posies guy?
John: No.
John: He played in the Posies, yeah.
John: And in Sky Cries Marion and a hundred other bands.
John: Joe Skyward.
John: Joe has a lot of names or had.
John: Joe died a couple of years ago.
John: Um, but you know, Joe was widely regarded as one of the most creative and interesting bass players in Seattle.
John: And I think his bass parts on that record are phenomenal.
John: I'm super lucky that he agreed to play on the record and you know, he was always kind of a hero of mine, even though he's a, or was a freaky nut.
John: Um, and Brian from Fountains of Wayne played drums.
John: I mean, it was a nice, it was a nice group.
John: It's just, you know, choices were made in the recordings.
John: And choices about tempo, choices about whether we were going for, I mean, as basic a choice as like, is this going to be rock or is this going to be pop or is this going to be slow or fast?
Merlin: That's the version that goes onto the recording that lots of people hear and imprint on and love.
Merlin: And if you choose to cover, or if you cover, if you choose to play that song live and the bass part doesn't go like this in the time you play it, it's not going to sound like the song people love.
John: Well, and I really discovered that toward the end of the Longwinners recording career when I covered my own song, Ultimatum, which I had done a lush electro sad pop version of on the Ultimatum EP and then completely rejiggered as a hard rocker on our last album.
John: And got angry letters.
John: How dare you?
John: You know?
John: And I was like, wow, I just, my song, you know, you can do them a lot of different ways.
John: And people were upset because they really liked the first version.
John: I agree with them.
John: First version I'm proud of, very proud of.
John: But the reason this is all in my mind is I've told you, I think, about the lost Western state record.
Merlin: tell me again what I know is you had this band that became where you guys worked real hard and gigged a lot and it became kind of a phenomenon and sort of a band's band in Seattle and there were some flirtations with a popular or well regarded local label you had a demo that I've heard but tell me about that record
Merlin: Well, first of all, was that mostly correct?
John: Yeah, well, that's true.
John: I mean, the Bunn family players were falling apart.
John: This was my band in the 90s that I put together with my best friend from high school.
John: And he and I had very different musical tastes.
John: We came up together listening to 70s AORs.
John: And I think the arrival in the mid late eighties of the red hot chili peppers and, um, Jane's addiction really changed the direction of alternative rock because we up in Anchorage, I mean, I was, I went to punk rock shows.
John: I was exposed to a lot of punk rock, but I didn't,
John: And I liked the rock aspect of it.
John: But I didn't click with the subculture.
John: And it was pre-hardcore.
John: So there wasn't that sort of righteousness to the politics that came with hardcore.
John: The politics were either nihilist or were like hyper sort of...
John: revolutionary, but, but like, you know, in a, almost a young one's way where it was just like dumb, you know, like I felt like the politics of punk rock were dumb in the mid eighties.
John: It was, um, and, and I'm talking about it as, as filtered through Anchorage, Alaska.
John: And so I didn't, I wasn't there for hardcore when it came in.
John: I, and, and the politics got, got sharp and,
John: I was already kind of meh about it.
John: And then Jane's Addiction and the Chili Peppers introduced that funk to big rock, to stadium rock.
John: They're like, you know, they put that weird Frusciante guitar on it.
John: And I thought that was cheeseball.
John: I loved Jane's Addiction.
John: But...
John: the chicka chicka bang aspect of it was not the thing that made it great.
John: It was a, it was an element of it that was, that was interesting.
John: It was kind of like the reggae sound of the early eighties that like the police are great.
John: The reggae aspect of it is crucial to the sound of the police, but it's not the, it's not the cool part, right?
John: You don't go like, I can't wait for the, the two reggae songs on the first pretenders album.
John: It's like, yeah, they're there.
John: People were trying to process that into music, but that's not what's great about it.
John: And that was true for Jane's for me, but my high school best friend, Kevin, really dug that.
John: You know, that was a kind of, that was the head bob.
John: And you see the reverberations of the chili peppers and that in, there's a whole strain of
John: of alternative rock that went that direction.
Merlin: I mean, there's, I'm thinking like all the way down the line, again, to mention the Minutemen would be one, but like people who were doing a sort of unironic, unironic edition of funk and in some cases a little bit of hip hop, like before it got silly and new metal, but there was this, there was this strain
Merlin: of you know i think jane's addiction is an interesting one to mention because they were so they seemed so odd that album seems so weird it was crazy i mean and i i think a lot of it comes down to the most obvious thing which was his singing yeah his singing was so odd but yeah no i i agree with you i mean like part of what you're you're talking about the politics of punk rock and and it's and it's uh
Merlin: And it's nieces and nephews, but a lot of that was like a pretty unironic post-clash earnestness that led to a lot of things where like, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: I mean, there was not room for that much fun.
Merlin: I mean, I guess you could maybe think of Fishbone.
Merlin: Like Fishbone seemed like such a breath of fresh air to me.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: When I first heard, I want to say, probably Party at Ground Zero.
Merlin: And I was like, what is this with the horns?
Merlin: I never saw them live, but everyone I know who saw them live was like, they walked away going like, that's the most amazing live band I've ever seen.
John: Yeah, well, and Living Color was doing a version of that.
John: Yes.
John: But they're drawing from Ska.
John: I'm reading this incredible book right now, which is just this British writer who wrote a biography of Mudhoney.
John: And, you know, what have I not heard about the grunge scene, right?
John: I just feel like I know as much about it as you could know.
John: But here's this book just about the formation.
John: I'm only the first third of the way through it about the formation of Mudhoney.
John: And I know all the characters.
John: I know some of them personally.
John: I know the environment.
John: This book is talking about streets in this town that I know and was walking down not long after the events depicted.
John: And yet this book is really illuminating.
John: And it's illuminating of a kind of what I think of as a pretty specific Northwest reaction to punk, which was
John: and this was true in Anchorage too, there was an absurdist take on it.
John: Um, the take where, where the earnestness of that post clash punk was, was given the send up treatment by people who were, who were also punk, but too punk to be punk or whatever, or not punk enough to be too punk to be punk there.
John: People were, were taking the piss and,
John: At the same time that other people were dead earnest about it.
John: And that was my instinct.
John: Right.
John: And if you if you read about this, you know, like this little group of dudes, Mark Arm, Steve Turner and their weird connection to Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard.
John: at a point when they're all in high school or right out of high school and they're just going to shows with each other.
John: And Jeff Ament has come from Montana and he is self-admittedly kind of like a humorless dude from Montana who just wants to play hard rock and is sort of punk adjacent.
John: And Stone Gossard, I mean, they're all rich kids, right?
John: I mean, both Steve Turner and Mark Arm are from
John: Bellevue, they're, they're middle-class suburban kids.
John: They're going to these punk shows and they're developing this thing of like, we're going to make a band that's so bad that it's, you know, that it makes all that it pisses off all the punk rock kids.
John: And that was like, that was where I was coming from too.
John: Like, Oh, is, are we, are we trying to sound terrible?
John: Like I can, I can be even more terrible sounding than that.
John: Um,
John: And that was the hard, fast rules days, right, where bands were just playing as fast as bands could play.
John: I didn't emotionally respond to that music at all.
John: That just felt like sports.
John: I just felt like dudes just with all the blood vessels in their neck bulging out.
Merlin: It's like watching a kid do cup stacking where you're like, well, that's really accomplished.
Merlin: But the main metric, as I understand it, is just how much more quickly you can stack and unstack the cups.
John: yeah yeah right i think i mean like i think i got the gist if this gets three times faster i'm not sure i'll like it three times more right it didn't you know i'm always looking and that was why the that was why the sex pistols record was just it just hit me like a fucking wall in a way that nothing by the clash ever did right like the and and and i would make that stand on city streets in the 80s and just get and and there's still a
John: I think 80% of the people would roll their eyes at me.
John: But the Sex Pistols record is better than anything that Glash ever did.
John: In my humble opinion, because it's fucking great.
John: And there's no, you know, the politics in the Sex Pistols record are just, fuck you.
John: What have you got?
John: Fuck you.
John: Fuck that.
Merlin: I mean, the two sentiments that I could think of that come straight to mind is anti-monarchy and anti-abortion.
Merlin: They have an anti-abortion song.
John: Yeah, well... Kind of.
Merlin: I mean, it's not what you think it is.
Merlin: I mean, yeah.
Merlin: I mean, they had a fuck you for everybody.
Merlin: And certainly a lot of it was a bit, but it was a good bit.
Merlin: And their sound was unique.
John: Yeah, pretty good rock, you know?
John: But so when I formed a band in Seattle trying to...
John: fit myself in somewhere in the mid nineties to, uh, to a world that was already very well developed, right?
John: I was not going to come in in, I was not going to come in with a band in 1994 and be good at grunge.
John: Certainly I wasn't punk or punk adjacent.
John: I wasn't going to be good at punk.
John: I didn't understand the codes and I, and I didn't believe in them and I wasn't going to be good at, uh,
John: glam rock or rock, really.
John: I mean, any kind of rock with swagger, I couldn't do it with a straight face.
John: You know, to get up there, briefly I was in a band.
Merlin: Not even a straight face.
Merlin: If you're going to do it right, you've got to make guitar face.
Yeah.
John: Well, but I was in a band where I was just the lead singer very briefly, and it was a Black Les Pauls band.
John: The other dudes in the band all had really long hair.
John: I know exactly what you mean.
John: And it was just, you know, like low-slung Black Les Pauls, and the music was all like... And they were like, they knew that I could sing, and this was when I was still on drugs, so I met these dudes like...
John: freebasing crank or whatever at some party late one night and we talked for 48 hours about the band we were going to start and all of a sudden i was in this band and it was just it was completely like a drug-based band genesis but getting in front of that music and what they wanted me to do was like oh
John: Or the grunge version of that, which is like, and I did it in practice.
John: We never played a show.
John: But for six months, you know, we would get together and it would be an excuse to get high and get messed up.
John: But they had all the gear.
John: One of the, you know, they shared a practice space with a guy that ended up in Built to Spill, like
John: Oh, this group of people ended up being in a successful band.
John: That was everybody kind of like dried out a little bit from, from the hardest, harder drugs and got just to be like beer soaked.
John: And they had a band called Goody Blick and the country kind that was like a fucking country band.
John: But at this point in time, they were really trying to hit the zeitgeist 93.
John: And I was up front, you know, with this mic on a mic stand, which I'd never done before looking for something to do with my hands and
Merlin: You didn't have any guitar at all?
John: No, because I was not... You didn't get like a Davy Jones percussion setup?
John: Because at the time, I didn't own a guitar.
John: I didn't have a fucking house, you know?
John: So I didn't own anything.
John: And nobody was going to loan me a guitar.
John: And also, I was not trusted with a guitar.
John: Because I looked like...
John: I looked like somebody that didn't know how to play guitar.
John: And when I, when I said I did, you know, that I would pick up an acoustic and I'd strum along and they would just go, yeah, uh-huh.
John: Great.
John: Because I actually was terrible at the guitar.
John: Like their practice base got broken into one time and all their shit was stolen.
John: This was like six months after I left the band or the band broke up or whatever.
John: And they seriously thought it might be, I was like very high up on the list of suspects.
John: And when I found out later that these guys believed that I would break into a practice space and steal 10 guitars and amps or whatever, I was... That would take a lot of organization for you at the time.
Merlin: For sure.
Merlin: I mean, you would need a regular like Ocean's Eleven to pull something like that off.
John: How would somebody have loaned me a car when they wouldn't loan me a guitar?
Merlin: How would you get the stolen things...
Merlin: How would you get the black glass balls anywhere?
Merlin: Just running down the street with the strap locks?
John: You got them around your neck?
John: Just waiting for the bus?
John: But the whole idea that they knew me so little that they would suspect, even in my darkest, darkest day, that I would steal something?
John: You know, that I would break into a place that was owned by a friend or anybody and steal a thing in order to keep my drug habit alive or whatever.
John: I would rather fucking die than burgle.
John: And I'm saying this as someone who's who's convicted of burglary in Boulder County, Colorado, on a trumped up charge because I had a for a different day.
John: I had a electric razor in my pocket that, you know, I found in a bathroom somewhere.
John: Um, but like it, it, it pointed to how little they knew me or how much they were projecting their own values onto somebody else.
John: Right?
John: Like if you, if you could believe that about myself, it is because you, sir, are a burglar in your own heart.
John: Hmm.
John: But, but, but finding that I couldn't play grunge with a straight face, um,
John: I couldn't play punk rock with a straight face.
John: Anytime somebody would be like, let's play that song twice as fast.
John: I would start making a funny face because I, because I felt like it was now I was parodying punk or I was parrot parodying.
Merlin: grunge none of that stuff was natural and the only thing and a good i mean like it sounds real stupid but like yeah i hear everything you're saying but it's also that like sometimes when one feels that the songwriting is not there in a song whether it's yours or someone else's you feel like speeding it up 20 will make it better and sometimes sometimes it does sometimes it does but like it's not it's not actually going to make the song better it might make the record better
John: Well, and and I think that often happens because the people in the band are coming out of a subculture that they already belong to and feel like they identify with.
John: And that was the thing I didn't have in high school or college.
John: I did not.
John: I was extremely polyamorous in terms of and still am.
John: I can go to a show of any kind with anybody.
John: I'm friends with people of every stripe.
John: And if I'm at a punk rock show, I am there as an appreciator, but never a member.
John: And if I was at a grunge show or a hip-hop show or classical music or whatever, I can go.
John: I appreciate it.
John: I'm there with you.
John: I'm consuming your media, but I'm not...
John: they're either as a member or repping a different thing.
John: And it's not a chameleon.
John: I'm not trying to pretend I'm anything.
John: I just am not.
John: So when I heard punk rock, it was like, yeah, I mean, like I say, I took my sister to all those shows and I sat in the back of the room and I listened to all those bands and I slam danced and I saw all and I, and the fucking agent orange and whatever else you got.
John: Right.
John: Um,
John: but i i saw do2 and whatever and the point was that when it came time to record my music that i was writing on the acoustic guitar i had no idea at all what i wanted it to sound like and i felt like i don't know is it should it sound like
John: I mean, all I could think of was, it's kind of just guy with an acoustic guitar, right?
John: I mean, I wanted strings on it sometimes.
Merlin: Did you find yourself, as a corollary, did you find yourself actively...
John: Living in a shotgun shack.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I mean, somebody like me, the stuff that I would write, I kind of wanted it to sound like a band, usually REM or Husker Do.
Merlin: But did you find yourself, it sounds like not, but did you find yourself deliberately not wanting it to sound like this or that?
John: No, no, no, no.
Merlin: It didn't occur to you?
John: No.
John: And the thing was, I did.
Merlin: You never went like, oh, this E minor is a little bit Neil Young.
Merlin: I should do something else.
John: No, because I didn't, because I never learned to play a song by another songwriter.
John: Yeah.
John: I never covered a song for the first 12 years of playing the guitar.
John: I learned to play the guitar by somebody writing out the chords on a piece of paper and looking at the piece of paper and making the chord and strumming.
John: And then as soon as I could put three of them together, I started singing like as when I had CDG,
John: I immediately was just like, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la.
John: Like, it never even occurred to me.
John: I think somebody bought me a Beatles chord book.
John: Easy Beatles.
John: But the thing was, even Easy Beatles, the chords were so hard.
Merlin: And to make it sound like... No, no, it was like, for me, like, I could do a GSC, but for some reason, stuff like D7 would be like, ugh, it hurts my pointer finger.
John: So confusing.
John: And, you know, in a lot of those Beatles songs, it's like, okay, I got the verse...
John: G, D, C, and then it's like, okay, well now we're going to the chorus and it starts with a B minor 7.
Merlin: It's got like a T augmented 35 and you're like, is that a chord?
Merlin: I don't think that's a thing.
Merlin: Paul McCartney shit and that's the music I wanted to learn how to play.
Merlin: And if you played it wrong with those songs, you could tell like, oh, that was a little bit, you rounded that off a little too much.
John: And looking at the Mudhoney Steve Turner story, like their guitars were always amplified.
John: The first instrument they ever picked up was a guitar that was plugged into an amp that had a distortion box on it.
John: So you just learn to play a different – you're making music right away.
John: You can make music on one string with an electric distorted guitar.
John: With like a $20 acoustic guitar that your mom's boyfriend bought at a swap meet –
John: Um, which is hard to play anyway.
John: That's not, I didn't start there, but, but what I wanted was a, was a band, you know, like I wanted the friends.
John: I wanted the, I wanted the feeling of the, I wanted the feeling of hard days night.
John: Mm hmm.
Merlin: For people like me, I wanted that to be my football.
Merlin: Yeah, right.
Merlin: I mean, not literally, but in the sense of... I never found myself very envious about most group activities, but I did admire and crave the...
Merlin: the bon ami, I guess, of like having a group of people who are all working on the same thing, which which bumped straight up against my own problems with authority and getting along with people because I was a dick.
Merlin: But like, there was a part of me that really wanted I wanted to be in a band because it was it was cool.
Merlin: And I wanted friends.
Merlin: It'd be nice if you had cool friends.
Merlin: And you're like, Oh, yeah, you can you can you can really you can play Misty Mountain Hop like that's cool.
John: Well, I think I thought also that a band was a thing that people would coalesce around.
John: So I didn't have to be in a band that was part of a scene.
John: If you had a band, a scene would form around you.
John: This is a thing that I didn't think about directly, but I wasn't trying to impress anybody.
John: Uh, anybody that I admired, I was trying to impress people who were looking for a thing that nobody else was making.
Merlin: You also talked about this in that interview in my backyard that became the backdoor pilot for this show, um, where we talked about like people who, uh, learn guitar to quote unquote get girls.
Merlin: Mm hmm.
Merlin: And talking about those are usually douchebags, and the truth is you don't really, quote unquote, get girls when you play guitar.
Merlin: And you talked about the tennis racket thing.
Merlin: You want that feeling.
Merlin: You want whatever, I don't know, Pete Townsend, whatever your hero is feeling, you want to feel that by making something with your own hands.
Merlin: That's such a huge part of it is that you know the visceral feeling of listening to Dirty Deeds.
Merlin: And what would it be like if I made something where I... You have to imagine the uncut product of having written something like Dirty Deeds with whatever the four chords.
Merlin: But you want that.
Merlin: You put it in my veins, man.
Merlin: I want that Angus Young feeling.
Merlin: Well, and I...
John: Like, I don't think that Billy Gibbons is probably the greatest hang or like an amazing dude.
John: Like you don't read about Billy Gibbons doing things.
John: You know, there's no story of like, remember when Billy Gibbons jumped his motorcycle over the snake river, like Billy Gibbons just plays guitar and ZZ top.
John: But the thing that he conjured was,
John: Appealed to me so much.
John: And I had no desire to be like a guy, like a grease monkey in Texas.
Merlin: The problem is, though, people remember them for their weird videos and their beards and like the whole bit.
Merlin: of Eliminator and their whole like branding around Eliminator, but without even having to invoke like their older, like bluesier stuff, like it was just really fucking good music.
Merlin: And like how many people realize how hard they were rocking out to synth driven Texas boogie rock?
John: I mean, I will fight for that record.
Merlin: Those were driven by synthesizers, and you wouldn't know it.
Merlin: What you remember is Billy Gibbons is a fucking baller who plays the guitar with a peso.
Merlin: Like, that's so badass.
Merlin: And like, yes, I mean, like, what they made was so them.
John: And that was, I mean, and it was the early stuff.
John: I don't know how I got turned on to it, but Eliminator, too.
John: Like, I sat and played the tennis racket to that stuff, and I was not thinking, I want to start a Texas blues rock band.
John: I was not thinking I need to inhabit this universe.
John: It just felt good to play the tennis racket to.
John: So my friend Kevin was more literal about it, right?
John: He liked ZZ Top and Jane's Addiction, but he kind of wanted to put those sounds together and make a...
John: make an amalgam of them so yeah it's almost like he had more of like a recipe card for what he was wanting to do well because he wasn't writing lyrics and he wasn't sitting in like trying to put verse chorus verse together he was playing guitar a very common you know like leisure time activity for American teenage boys at the time and Kevin was a good guitar player and I was so grateful for
John: to have him interested in, in my songs, both because he, Kevin was older than I was.
John: He was always cooler than I was.
John: And at this transition moment, this inflection point right at the end of high school, there was Kevin who had always been cooler than me was like, I was starting to develop a kind of cool.
John: That was not like,
John: Not like the other kinds of cool, right?
John: There was an independence to me that other kids had always found kind of threatening and distasteful.
John: The fact that I didn't obey the kid rules.
John: But by the time you were 18, that thing...
John: I mean, the kids that found it threatening and distasteful moved on.
John: They went somewhere else.
John: They went to the University of Arizona or they did whatever they were going to do.
John: But you started to see or I started to see, oh, there are other kids from other places that are also doing things that are threatening and distasteful.
John: And also I can kind of, you know, I'm a chimera.
John: I can move between things.
John: So I started to I started to have a cool experience.
John: But Kevin, I still really admired really.
John: Um, he just had confidence and capabilities.
John: I didn't.
John: And so we started playing music together and it was in a way, maybe the, maybe the, the, and I, and I don't mean this as a bad thing at all directed toward Kevin, but it was a, it was, I can't decide whether it was the best thing or the worst thing that ever happened to me.
John: Because I hitched my wagon to the... Not to his star, but to the idea of him as a collaborator.
John: We were going to write songs together.
John: And his songs were riffs.
John: You know, they were riff-based.
John: And as I got older and started to get into styles of music that were other things... I mean, living in Seattle and hearing... Honestly, Built to Spill.
John: And we've talked about it before, but Built to Spill...
John: affected so many of us with their just sort of weird, uh,
John: Just sounds.
Merlin: They were doing... It was kind of... When you say riff-based, that sounds like short shrift, but such wily, shimmery, little snake-like, low-key riffs that weren't always just super distorted.
Merlin: And when they were distorted, it was more fuzz.
John: It was fuzz, and it was there for emotion.
John: It was very emotional music.
Merlin: Think about...
John: Psychedelic music.
Merlin: Think about something like the way In the Morning starts out, which is from my favorite Built to Spill record.
Merlin: in the morning and you're like where the fuck did that come from like we're like 20 seconds into this song and I'm already in like this different universe this like and then when and you know then I get the feeling that I guess I guess got to stop and like it gets the fuzzy ending it's like
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: It's like a little journey.
Merlin: I'm sorry, this is very impressionistic, but I feel like I know exactly what you mean.
Merlin: As you know, my first hit of them was Three Years Ago Today, which was a similar idea.
Merlin: You think about how weird it sounded that they were playing these songs so unironically on undistorted electric guitars.
Merlin: It really, it really was its own sound and it wasn't like trying to be jokey and twee.
Merlin: It was just, it was all in the service of like this feeling that he could build with his, with his songwriting and performances.
John: The riffs and stuff, it, I mean, it,
John: It sounds like a basketball and five tennis balls going down a dirty clothes shoot.
John: You should work for all music.
John: You know, there's not a... There's not a... Like, calling it a riff is really doing it a disservice.
John: They're noodley in the best way.
John: But in an incredible way.
John: And when that came on the scene, I mean, Kevin listened to it politely.
John: But he didn't – it didn't grab him.
John: And what grabbed him at that point in time was like the music of Filter or whatever, which I loved, right?
John: I mean, Hey Man, Nice Shot is a killer, killer tune.
John: It's amazing that there was ever a time in the world when that could have been like racing up the charts.
John: But you contrast it with –
John: with ultimate alternative waivers and you're just in a, in a separate universe.
John: But so the bun family players were just this crazy, this crazy group.
John: Kevin was playing funk metal.
John: I was trying to start writing a really intriguing songs with a lot of different parts that, that had, that had all these surprises and like anti pop moments and
John: And we went through a succession of bass players and drummers that were sometimes really cool dudes who were bad at their instruments, sometimes cool dudes who were great at their instruments.
John: But it ended up being a vehicle for my songwriting as interpreted by...
John: My best friend who wanted to play really hard rock funk metal over the top of it or or adjacent to it, you know, because I would write songs with his riffs sometimes.
Merlin: But he's he's in some ways what you're describing.
Merlin: And this is not I don't mean this in a bad way, but like.
Merlin: What you're describing is that he is, whether or not he realizes it, whether it's by design or not, he is operating inside of genre rock.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: If I do a song that goes...
Merlin: you're going to know it's a ska song.
Merlin: And like, the thing is, once you do that, now it's a ska song.
Merlin: And if you start doing, like setting, now you're in funk rock genre land, which was so huge.
Merlin: The band that I essentially got thrown out of in college turned into that.
Merlin: They were so into, God,
Merlin: there were all of those bands in, like, I want to say, 80, 88, 89, that were just all about, like, the, and it was, like, post Chili Peppers.
Merlin: Not post Chili Peppers, but post Good Chili Peppers.
Merlin: And, but where they, it was just all about that pop and bass and those big tracks and then, like, the laconic vocals or the, like, overpassionate vocals.
Merlin: But I guess I'm saying, like,
Merlin: It's difficult to just have a little bit of something from a genre without it sounding like you're doing a genre thing.
Merlin: If you start playing country licks, it sounds like country rock.
Merlin: If you're not careful about it, you introduce pedal steel, it's going to sound like a country song.
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And I. That's going to pull you.
Merlin: But did you find that pulling you or pushing you away from genre rock as you would feel those inflections happening?
John: I never I never I never understood.
John: I couldn't I couldn't embrace genre rock.
John: I couldn't because I couldn't.
John: It's just like every media thing I've ever I've ever tried to make.
John: I can't.
John: imagine why you would imitate someone who had done something already because they did it already.
John: Like, why would you want to sound like a band that innovated a sound?
John: Wouldn't you want to innovate your own sound?
John: And it was the, it's the thing about, uh, it's the thing that drives you to parody other things.
John: Like what, what the way that Mark Arm and Steve Turner and, uh,
John: Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament invented a couple of different versions of grunge was just how they how seriously they took blending punk and metal and Stone Gossard blended them
Merlin: with a lot of seriousness and you know and put a bunch of that funk chicka chicka in with it i mean it's it's cool to to look back and say they're referencing led zeppelin which somebody like i feel like um uh black hole sun sound garden sound garden very heavily referencing led zeppelin but tons of those bands are actually referencing something that in retrospect is not as historically cool which is stuff like fog hat there's a lot of like you know what i mean like british british blues rock
John: They all cite Aerosmith over and over as the one thing that they could all kind of agree on because they felt like Aerosmith was good.
John: And nobody's apologizing for it.
John: A lot of the people in this book are apologizing for ever liking Ted Nugent.
John: And, of course, you don't have to apologize for liking Iggy Pop.
Merlin: because iggy pop ended up being in the canon eventually you know so you don't yeah but i mean like he was yeah i mean like alongside maybe i'm gonna say the ramones like just critically savaged and not particularly not even as popular as the ramones the stooges were like a really dumb band that just happened to be way ahead of their time in some ways and mark arm was talking about trying to find those records and you couldn't even find them
John: And the only reason he wanted to find them was that they had that energy and whatever that fuck you spirit that, that connected with him in his cul-de-sac watching other kids skateboard or whatever.
John: But, you know, Kevin and I grew apart and, and we played this show with a band called algae.
John: It had a lead singer who was a girl that played the played guitar in a cool way.
John: She and I got together and started monkeying around with songs and
Merlin: and i mean i'm i'm kind of just wrapping this up because you know um i'm gonna say something in band here i was gonna text you but i'm gonna say this in band um why don't we keep going and we'll make this a two-part episode because this is really good and i'm interested to see where you're going oh okay is that cool okay yeah that's great two part at this point at this point we end part one