Ep. 350: "Wizard Rock"
Merlin: Hello.
Merlin: Hi, John.
Merlin: Oh, hi, Merlin.
Merlin: Oh, hi.
John: How's it going?
John: Well, today's off to a whiz-bang start.
Merlin: Whiz-bang.
Merlin: Tell me more.
John: Well, I woke up and, you know, I went to the store yesterday working off of a shopping list that was made by a committee.
John: Oh, no, you're doing an errand.
John: Yeah, but coffee didn't get included on the list.
John: So I woke up this morning and... You got no coffee.
John: One of the other people that lives here took the last cup of coffee from yesterday and didn't make any more because there wasn't... There was just a little bit.
John: So I made a little bit of a half...
John: Half pot, but then the filter fell over halfway through.
Merlin: Oh, no.
John: Because it wasn't full or it was, I don't know why, just one of those things.
John: So now the coffee's all full of detritus.
John: Anyway, that's how, as you know, my day doesn't start much before we start recording.
John: So I didn't have any good experiences today yet to offset these experiences.
Merlin: Oh, I want to pump you up.
John: I want to pump you up.
Merlin: So I want today to be a good day.
Merlin: I lose a couple weeks.
Merlin: I lose at least a couple weeks to some kind of filter breach, and it always bums me out.
Merlin: It feels like this is something I should have mastered by now.
A couple week.
Merlin: Well, see, sometimes it's a breach of my own fault where I get a little careless and I overfill.
Merlin: I'm a slow pourer.
Merlin: I like to pour slow and I stir.
Merlin: Oh, so anyway, I do that.
Merlin: You know, I use one of those little one-off dinguses.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Dingus.
Merlin: We're not a pot family anymore.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But I'll get a little bit ambitious, and maybe I stir too hard, maybe I pour too much, maybe I care too much, but it'll go over the edge, and that's on me.
Merlin: Sometimes, though, you know, in a pinch, I've got an off-brand non-Melita filter.
Merlin: Maybe it's good for the environment.
Merlin: There's a brand called, what's it called?
Merlin: You Don't Really Care, If You Care, If You Care brand.
Merlin: That's what it's called?
Merlin: I think it's called If You Care.
Merlin: I want to get this right, because it is a very, it's a wonderful...
Merlin: passive-aggressive, yes, if you care.
John: If you care.
John: What is that?
John: If you care about what?
John: It's green.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: Yeah, if you care.
Merlin: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: And I get a breach sometimes because it's green, and that's how you know it's green, is it's not as good.
Merlin: But I'm so sorry.
Merlin: You know what they say?
Merlin: Three is two, two is one, and one is none is what they say.
Merlin: And if it's something that I care a lot about, I do follow that.
Merlin: I get coffee by the case.
Merlin: If it's three is one, then two is one.
Merlin: Okay, so coffee is to morning as the best part is to waking up.
John: Oh, yeah, right.
John: Well, wait a minute.
John: He never asked for a second cup for my coffee.
John: Pretty sneaky, sis.
John: See, my day's improved.
Merlin: Oh, I'm so glad you're here.
Merlin: Remind me just real quick in passing.
Merlin: I got a lot of stuff here.
Merlin: Go on.
Merlin: Remind me just real quick in passing.
Merlin: Don't feel the need to give a long response on this unless you want to.
John: Okay.
Merlin: Remind me where you stand on Rush.
Merlin: Oh, on Rush.
Merlin: I feel like you maybe don't like them.
Merlin: I think Eric likes them.
John: Well, so Eric really likes them.
John: And Darius, the former, and by former, I mean formerly alive, drummer of the Posies, Darius Manwala, who died suddenly at a very young age a few years ago.
Merlin: You think about that.
John: Yeah, because Darius was very close to us all, right?
John: He was our guy.
John: Darius was ridiculous about Rush.
John: He was like... Did he like the later stuff, too?
John: Everything.
John: Really?
John: If you got into Darius' truck on the wrong day, you might... He'd listen to Roll the Bones.
Merlin: Well, later than that.
John: Oh, man.
Merlin: You might listen to... I don't even know a joke to make after Roll the Bones.
John: But here's the thing about listening to Rush with Darius.
John: You would listen to it very loud, and then he would be shouting at you over it about how amazing it was.
John: He wanted you to hear every single hit.
John: Oh, I'm the same way.
John: I'm the same way.
John: But Eric Corson, who used to live with Darius and also feels this way about Rush, Eric is someone who can airdrum to Rush...
John: With such conviction that you really do feel the hits.
John: You see in his air drumming, you picture solid drums.
John: He's done it so many times.
Merlin: He hits it even when it's the little cymbal or the gong or the chimes.
Merlin: He gets it all.
John: He knows every little thing.
Merlin: That's amazing.
John: So there were times on tour in the long winters because, of course, Nabil also... Nabil is someone who... Wasn't it kind of like... Didn't you guys do like... Was it Spirit of Radio?
Merlin: Was it something from the early 80s?
Merlin: Would it be like a soundcheck song?
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: They would just launch into it.
John: And the thing is, I can't... You know, like Alex Lifeson... I've seen your fingers.
John: Of the three dudes, Alex Lifeson is the one...
John: that maybe has the fewest number of cultists.
John: There are lots of culty Rush people.
John: But I've never understood what he was doing exactly, and I've certainly never spent a lot of time sitting and learning to play it.
John: So they would start to play it, and it's very identifiable immediately as Rush.
John: I could do the lyrics a little bit, but after a while, that was their way of taking charge.
John: But my Rush experience is, I think, like a lot of people my age, I was, what, in... I was... The older dudes who had already had marijuana were listening to 2112 when I was in freshman year, which at that point had been around for a few years.
John: and and it was you know this was uh it was it was scary sounding you know it was scary rock it wasn't scary rock like uh this was this was before there was a lot of uh you know fake scary it wasn't devil music but it felt like it had some dark some black magic in it oh yeah really you know it was wizard rock wizard rock in a lot of ways that's right it was and you know back when we believed in wizards oh god yes
Merlin: My daughter has only very recently entered the stage where she thinks she can move things with her mind.
Merlin: And her mom and I both were like, honey, you have no idea how normal that is.
Merlin: Everybody goes through a phase where they think they can move things with their mind.
Merlin: I've heard all three McElroys talk about it.
Merlin: I know it's true for me.
Merlin: I thought I could do so—Conjuring an Orb, I'm not sure, but—
Merlin: I think every kid goes through that, and I think Rush is there for you.
Merlin: While you're sitting there, maybe you're burning incense, maybe you've got a black light, but you're definitely listening to Rush 2112 and Xanadu, a state league pleasure dome did Kublai Khan decree.
Merlin: You're sitting there, Xanadu, concentrating.
Merlin: Maybe you can't see it, but I've got two fingers against my temple, Professor X. Come on, just move, just move a little bit.
Merlin: I don't want to go get the water.
Merlin: Bring it to me.
John: I saw Uri Geller on Nova.
John: Oh, sure.
John: Right.
John: Yeah, I wanted to go to the temples of Syrinx.
John: I didn't know if I wanted to be a priest right away.
John: Do you remember when you first saw the movie Heavy Metal?
Merlin: Yeah, I kind of do.
Merlin: Was it on Night Flight?
Merlin: It felt kind of Night Flight.
Merlin: I wanted to like it more, but I liked some of the music from it.
Merlin: I'd heard some of the music from it.
John: So the first time I saw it, it had just come out, and it was a double feature with Tommy.
John: Wow.
John: In the rec hall of the University of Alaska,
John: And it was kind of the first time like some we were in what's seventh grade.
John: That's an 81.
John: Yeah.
John: So, yeah.
John: So it would have been it would have been seventh.
John: Well, yeah, it could have been spring of seventh or fall of eighth grade.
John: Some friends of mine like cooked up this thing like we're going to go to this this movie showing at the University of Alaska.
John: And they got the parents to sign off on it because it was at the college.
John: And it was really just a bunch of college kids sitting on the floor of the gym watching these movies on a pull-down screen.
John: And of course, it was 1981, right?
John: They were all hopped up on goofballs.
John: They had the wacky tabacky.
John: And we were in seventh grade sitting there kind of on some sleeping bags that we brought.
John: And heavy metal...
Merlin: the movie like really freaked me out tripped me out i've never seen anything like it of course there's some there's some adult themes surrounded by it was ahead of its time i mean there are some kids that will uh oh what was that mtv show liquid tv or something like that or eon flux like those i think that you can trace some of obviously some of this you can trace back to like the rough back she's in the crazy some of the stuff you like there are chrome kind of stuff
John: Yeah, Fritz the Cat.
Merlin: But you're used to, let's state the obvious, which is that a person of our age had grown up watching, in my case, you know, Overture, Curtains, Lights, This Is It, We'll Hit The Heights.
Merlin: You know, you watch a lot of Bugs Bunny, you watch some Disney, and it was unusual to see animation that was this fucked up.
John: with the show this is it it was not just the thing is the animation was kind of bad too like jerky jerky and it was like not it didn't have the smooth uh style that we were used to it was like and um and yeah lots of lots of crazy adult themes right with uh with uh with heavy metal music playing in a
John: And, boy, it made an impact, especially since the movie Tommy –
John: did not make any sense to me.
John: It's not a great movie.
John: It's not a great movie.
John: And by that point in time, I'd already seen one movie.
Merlin: It's like when Nelson Luntz goes to see Naked Lunch and walks out and says something like, I can think of at least two things wrong with that title.
Merlin: Like you see Tommy and you're used to listening to the record and you see it.
Merlin: It's like, it's really stiff in a lot of ways.
John: Yes.
Merlin: It's just the whole staging of it.
Merlin: It doesn't feel very luxe as a production.
Merlin: And there's a lot of Roger Daltrey wandering around going, huh?
Merlin: Tina Turner is very good in it.
John: Tina Turner is really excellent.
Merlin: Oh, doesn't that have Anne-Margaret?
John: It does.
John: And Margaret, of course, stealing the show.
John: Tommy's mom?
John: It has Elton John in it.
Merlin: Elton John should stop covering things.
Merlin: Just let Bernie run the show.
Merlin: No, let Bernie run the show.
Merlin: Ouch.
Merlin: Well, I mean, his Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds...
John: Okay, but that's a bad choice of song.
John: The Pinball Wizard?
John: That's a terrific song, but that's a guitar song.
John: It's not a piano song.
John: All right, all right.
John: But the thing about Elton John is he always had the good sense to have a guitar player there.
Merlin: Oh, that is really sensible.
John: You know what I mean?
Merlin: He's a showman.
Merlin: I've done a deep Elton dive in the last few weeks.
Merlin: I've become extremely obsessed with the song Tiny Dancer.
Merlin: which I have declared to be a Mona Lisa of its time, in the sense that it's so easy for somebody of my age and generation to have completely lost what an exquisite song that is.
John: It just becomes like the air that you read.
Merlin: And I'll tell you, that band Florence and the Machine do a cover of it?
Merlin: Ooh!
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: Oh, it'll curl your tears.
Merlin: It's just... Bernie Taupin was such a good lyricist.
Merlin: Everybody calls it an Elton John song.
Merlin: Elton John this, Elton John that.
Merlin: A lot of what you remember are those wackadoo lyrics.
Merlin: Those lyrics are weird.
John: Well, you know, some of those lyrics are a little bit... I'm not talking about Tiny Dancer.
John: I think Tiny Dancer lyrics are great.
Merlin: Yeah, but some of the stuff from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is pretty weird.
Merlin: He's got some weird lyrics.
Merlin: Some lyrics where you're like, hmm, that was a first draft.
Merlin: Yeah, no, no.
John: But you know, I think that way I've done a lot of things.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: But so Rush scared me.
John: Okay.
John: Oh, hey, you brought up.
John: You did it.
John: It's kind of what I do.
John: Hey, you.
John: Wow.
John: Wow.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: For having coffee with crumbs.
Merlin: You kind of nailed it.
Merlin: You brought it back around 13 minutes.
Merlin: God damn.
John: I got my hat with the scrambled eggs on it.
John: Like a Commodore hat?
John: Yeah, the Commodore.
John: That's the hat that I put on when I finally bring it back around.
John: Commodore Schmidlaff.
John: You know when you see Commodore Schmidlaff and he's trying to bring his boat into the berth and you're like, how's he doing that?
John: He gets it in there.
Merlin: He can't get rid of that bomb.
Merlin: Okay, so they scared you because it's Wizard Rock.
John: And also the kids that were listening to it, you know, they had chew cans in their back pocket.
John: They were a little bit harder core.
John: They tucked their T-shirts into their jeans.
John: They played, you know, they like, I don't know what, man.
John: You know, they just had that.
Merlin: Big, big, big watch band.
Merlin: There's also a lot of overflow between, I think because of the iconography alone in my junior high, there was a lot of overlap between the Rush people and the Judas Priest people.
Merlin: Well, and the Blue Easter cult thing.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, all those umlauts.
Merlin: They were in, what is it?
Merlin: Oh, Veteran of the Psychic Wars.
Merlin: That was in the Happy Metal soundtrack.
Merlin: Yep, yep, yep.
Merlin: They were fun.
Merlin: They were fun and funny.
Merlin: You know, they work with the Patti Smiths.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: Yep, yep, yep, yep.
Merlin: She wrote lyrics for some of their stuff.
Merlin: No kidding.
John: I had no idea about that.
Merlin: Blue Oyster Cult was, I think, a little bit misunderstood by the young kids.
Merlin: They didn't realize Blue Oyster Cult was having fun.
John: Well, see, no.
John: And in fact, one time I was over at Matt Olness' house.
John: This is that same year, maybe seventh grade.
John: And we were doing the things that young kids do.
John: We put his cat inside a beanbag chair.
John: We...
John: We were setting off fireworks in the house.
Merlin: I hated that.
Merlin: It was full of staticky styrofoam beads.
Merlin: Oh, no, when it came out, it must have been so sad.
John: It was really upset.
John: And then I think Matt was also the guy.
John: Matt was a little bit of a sadist.
John: Matt, I think, put tape on the cat's paws.
Merlin: Okay, okay, okay, okay.
John: All right.
John: But also fireworks in the house.
John: I mean, we were bad kids.
John: Fireworks in the house.
John: And we were also giving ourselves like shaving cream mohawks.
John: You know, we were in danger of going the wrong way in life.
John: Matt's a doctor now.
John: He worked for the National Health Service for many years as a doctor.
John: And until I believe at one point we were sitting and talking and I was like, so you're in the you're in the like surgeon general's office.
John: Like, do you have a rank?
John: Because he's a general or she's a general, right?
Merlin: I have a friend from college who was one of the, I mean, like not a dear, dear friend, but a dear friend who I hadn't talked to since college until I saw him testifying before Congress in a military uniform.
Merlin: And now he is a, he is a uniformed man of dignity in the armed forces.
Merlin: No, he's got, he's like, I think he's like a colonel.
Merlin: I don't know how the fuck that happened.
John: This is years ago, and I was like, are you some kind of surgeon major?
Merlin: I guess you've got to have a, I mean, if you've got a surgeon general, it implies you've got some surgeon sergeant.
Merlin: Do you have a surgeon sergeant?
John: Well, no, I don't think you can be a surgeon and a sergeant.
John: Okay.
John: You know, that just goes without saying.
Merlin: You can be an officer and a gentleman.
John: You can.
Merlin: But you have to be officer class.
Merlin: You couldn't have a surgeon warrant officer.
Merlin: No.
Merlin: That's just too close.
Merlin: You've got to become at least a second Louis surgeon.
John: Even then.
John: I think if you graduate from medical school, I think you start as a captain.
Merlin: The doctors are captains.
Merlin: Look at Hawkeye.
John: Yeah.
John: You don't want a surgeon sergeant.
John: Okay.
John: Frank was a major.
John: He's probably a surgeon major.
John: Legras used to say that.
Merlin: No surgeon sergeants.
Merlin: He's always pointing out the implausibility of MASH.
John: But yeah, Matt, even then, and this was a long time ago, I think Matt looked at me because he would take tape of cat's paws.
John: Like this is the type of thing that he would look at you.
John: He'd give you that look where you're like, fucking don't tape my paws, please.
John: You get canceled for that today.
John: And he would say, he said something like, yeah, I have the rank of a brigadier general or something like that.
John: And I was just like, okey dokey.
John: Anyway, we were sitting in his room listening to 45s.
John: And he had a Blue Oyster Cult 45.
John: And we listened to it.
John: And then he said, he's an intense guy.
John: He said, you know, this music is, you know, Blue Oyster Cult is their Satan worshiper.
John: Yep.
John: And I was like, well, I don't know.
Merlin: They don't let you have that umlaut unless you're a saint worshiper.
John: I said, I don't know anything about that.
John: And he said, well, look, and he showed me the upside down... The cross thing with the hook.
John: Well, it's like an upside down question mark with a cross on it and with a dot.
John: Yes.
John: And he was like, you know, that's the symbol of...
John: And I was like, oh, well, I don't know.
Merlin: I love the days before the internet so much.
Merlin: That's just dry Tinder for children.
Merlin: You're going to tell everybody you know about that.
John: And I didn't know.
John: I mean, you know, I was a precocious child, but I didn't have an older brother, and I didn't know anything about...
John: rock, or certainly not like wizard rock, or definitely not about Satan.
John: And so I was like, oh, it's about Satan, huh?
John: And he was like, yeah.
John: And he showed me the guy with the three balls on the Blister Cult record, and the guy with the, you know, like all the kind of puppet masters.
Merlin: You get the guy with the butt walking into the star.
John: Right.
Merlin: All that stuff.
John: And I was like, geez, you know,
John: Scary.
John: Yeah.
John: And then, and then Matt, you know, then we're in seventh grade, right?
John: And I think we actually had shaving cream, shaving cream Mohawks as we were doing this.
John: Wow.
John: He said, he said, I renounce Satan.
John: And he took the 45 off the turntable and broke it, like shattered it against the edge of his bed into a hundred pieces.
John: And like, without, without losing eye contact with me.
John: And that's intense.
John: It was super intense, especially since the one thing I did know was that a 45 cost money.
John: And that that was probably at least a dollar 50.
John: He had just broken a dollar 50 right in front of me, which, which seemed like lighting a cigar with a hundred dollar bill.
John: And I was like, Whoa, you know, like Matt renounces Satan.
John: And I was also a little worried about that because what does that mean?
John: Like who, who does he follow now?
John: All this stuff was all new to me.
John: And so for a long time, I couldn't listen to Burning For You, or whatever the song is called, without getting scared about... No time to play B-sides.
John: Yeah, I know.
John: He had broken the B-side and the A-side.
John: He broke the B-side and the A-side.
Merlin: But he did it like Michael Corleone.
Merlin: That's so cool.
John: He did.
John: Just like... Wow.
John: So I was scared of Rush until...
John: My friend Kevin Horning, who reappears on the show periodically, said – because Kevin was somebody that helped me.
John: He shepherded me through hard rock in the early days because he wasn't judgy, right?
John: A lot of guys, if you said like, oh, I've never heard about that –
John: they would just like kill you with scoffs and so it was like you're looking I mean so many you see even at my kids age now where people are just scanning for vulnerabilities you know but but Kevin would Kevin would come in and say listen Coda is not a proper Zeppelin record but it does have some cool tracks so it's
John: So it's okay.
John: But what you need to start with is presence.
John: And I'd be like, okay.
John: What?
John: You're not ready for In Through the Outdoor yet.
John: I'm like, all right, sure, sure, sure.
John: Presence.
Merlin: That cover was so weird.
Merlin: Do you remember the cover?
Merlin: That's got to be Hypnosis that did that.
Merlin: It's such a 70s rock album cover.
Merlin: They didn't even talk to the band.
Merlin: They were like, we have this odd photograph.
Merlin: Can we use it?
Merlin: Well, again, wizards, right?
John: Yes.
John: No, no, no.
Merlin: See, I totally know what you – I know exactly what you mean.
Merlin: And like the thing is this continued for a while.
Merlin: This is going to sound silly, but into the 80s with the like, oh, Motley Crue, they've got to move out, right?
Merlin: It was cartoony then.
John: No, that's what I'm saying.
Merlin: That's exactly what I'm saying.
Merlin: By then, you couldn't pull that off.
Merlin: But let's remember we got – what do we got going here?
Merlin: We got Satanism.
Merlin: We got D&D.
Merlin: And we got nuclear war.
Merlin: We had a lot going on at our time.
John: And also sky-fi, right?
John: Because we had just been to the moon.
John: And now we had a rocket ship that looked like a jet airplane.
John: And we were still just in the tail end of that, like anything is possible.
Merlin: Anything can happen.
John: Maybe we're going to go to the space all the time.
John: And in space, maybe we're going to find some dragons or a girl with a glowing green slime orb.
John: Oh, man.
Merlin: Or maybe that green lady from Star Trek.
John: Yeah, right.
John: It's all still out there.
John: It wasn't until the late 80s that we realized, oh, we're not.
John: There's nothing.
Merlin: No, that's just a branding choice.
Merlin: Yeah, we're just doing science.
Merlin: I'm underwriting what you said, which was when I went to the mall, there's two of everything, right?
Merlin: You got a Walden Books and you got a Bedalton.
Merlin: You got a record bar and a Camelot.
Merlin: They're on the two ends of the mall.
Merlin: right and at least at our malls in florida and i would go through and i would look at every album in the rock section every time i went and i would acquaint myself well it was a single story it was florida you know there was water table issues so but no i would go and i would pretty much at least once a month go through every album in the rock section flip flip flip
Merlin: Flip, flip.
Merlin: I would see, of course, here's all the Kiss cutouts.
Merlin: They still can't get rid of those.
Merlin: But I would just sit there and I would pour over especially some of those albums.
Merlin: It was like finding a Playboy Jr.
Merlin: to be able to go in there and look at these albums that were not for me.
Merlin: Even the Kiss albums, which was, I mean, most Kiss fans were 12.
Merlin: But still, you look at the cover of, like, Rock and Roll Over or Destroyer.
Merlin: What's happening on the cover of Destroyer?
Merlin: That's not safe.
John: No, it's not.
Merlin: You know what I'm saying?
John: No, they're flames and stuff, or dragons or demons.
John: I don't remember.
Merlin: So he's prepping you for prevelts through Koda.
John: My sister actually worked at... Yeah.
John: Robert Joe's, which was the extremely cool record store in Anchorage.
John: And she got a job there because when she was 12 years old, she was there at the store.
John: She would have our mom drop her off at the record store.
John: Like she didn't even want to go to the mall.
John: It was a freestanding brick and mortar enterprise.
John: She didn't want to go to her friend's house.
John: She didn't want to go to Chuck E. Cheese.
John: She would say, drop me at the record store and come pick me up in three hours or something, you know, like she'd spend the afternoon there.
John: And so the staff of the record store who were all 21 had this 12 year old girl that was just there all day looking at records.
John: And eventually they said, do you want a job?
John: And she was like, yes.
John: And so they gave her a job stocking.
John: And then pretty soon she was, you know, she was running the cash register and she was too young to, I mean, she had to have my mom sign off on it.
John: And even then she was too young to have a job, I think.
John: But like 12, 13, 14, 15, my sister, by the time she was 15, she was running the store.
John: That's amazing.
John: That is very high status.
John: It was super high status.
John: But the problem was I didn't recognize it.
John: I would go in and stand there and be like, you know, because mom would say, go pick up your sister because Susan couldn't drive.
John: And I'd go stand in the record store drumming my fingers like, come on, let's go.
John: And like every cool kid in the city is in there.
John: And I'm just like, oh, you nerds with your your denim jackets and your funky shirts.
John: I mean, get me out of here.
John: Right.
John: But, you know, of course, I wasn't a jock either.
John: I wasn't in anything.
John: I was just like I was just exasperated by everything.
John: But Kevin was the one who said.
John: Start with the first Rush album.
Merlin: Rush.
Merlin: The John Rutsey one.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: That's the one with Working Man, right?
John: That's the one with Working Man.
John: And the thing about the first Rush album is there are no Wizards at all.
John: It's just straight ahead Canadian rock and roll.
John: It just sounds like Triumph.
John: It doesn't even sound like Zeppelin.
John: There aren't even any Hobbits in it.
John: It just sounds like
John: It's like rock, and it's a great record.
Merlin: Well, they were, I mean, I have not spent a lot of time with that album, to be honest, but I know from many, many, many documentaries of Rush that I have watched that they were heavily in the thrall of Led Zeppelin.
John: Yes, but they were, but they didn't yet have, I mean, this is perhaps why...
John: They got another drummer later on who had some lyrics.
John: They didn't have a ton of... They didn't know exactly what they were going to be all about.
John: Yeah, they didn't have a theme.
John: Neil Peart had some ideas he needed to get off his chest.
John: He surely did.
Merlin: How could such a smart man write such dumb lyrics?
Merlin: You ever see him in an interview?
Merlin: He's so smart.
John: He's extremely smart.
Merlin: He's really smart.
John: And he's lived.
John: I mean he's had some tough life.
Merlin: Oh my god.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: But he's a little bit like the Brad Bird version of Ayn Rand in some ways.
Merlin: It's like it's just – it has not aged.
Merlin: It really has not aged well.
Merlin: No, but he lost his wife and his daughter on separate occasions, right?
John: He did, yeah.
John: Oh, God.
John: But so here's a little bit of a track listing.
John: First of all, the first Rush album only has eight songs on it.
John: And that's because there are fully two songs that are over seven minutes long.
John: But here are the titles.
John: Finding My Way.
John: Now, that's not about a hobbit finding its way to Mordor.
John: It's about a young guy finding his way in the world.
John: Need Some Love, which is about needing some love.
John: Take a Friend, which is about taking a friend.
John: Friend is not a hobbit.
John: You're not in the Shire.
John: Then there's a long song called Here Again.
John: which is seven minutes, 30 seconds long, and that is just about being a long song.
John: Okay.
John: Then you flip it over side two.
John: Track five.
John: There's a track five that is called What You're Doing.
John: Okay.
John: And that's a song that's wondering what you're doing.
Merlin: And, you know, I couldn't tell you, I don't know as much about this album as you clearly do, but I can already hear the song called What You're Doing in my head, and it's basically just a slightly up-tempo shuffle.
Yeah.
Merlin: isn't it it's gonna be kind of like it's before now this is also before he went super high he was high but he hadn't gone to the crazy highness of later on right yeah right i mean he the thing is he got silly high uh in the in the uh you know before and after 2112 is when he got into the like the like oh my god like you know you're making cats cry
John: But you know, Brad Delph was over there getting so high.
John: That guy could sing.
John: He was sung really high.
John: He was terrific.
John: This is the singer of the band Boston.
John: That's right, Boston.
John: What you doing?
John: What you doing?
John: Definitely an up-tempo shuffle.
John: And then the next song is called In the Mood.
Merlin: Which is also a later Led Zeppelin song on one of their later albums.
John: It's about being in the mood.
John: Being in the mood, okay.
John: Before and after.
John: Okay.
John: What's before and after about?
John: Well, it's about the span of time.
John: Oh, so there's a given event.
John: Well, or just like, you know... Or a time.
John: There's a time.
John: You have to be consciousness of time moving forward from one to another pole.
John: Okay, that one's 533.
John: And then the last song, seven-minute and seven-second song.
John: And I think it was probably that...
John: Seven minutes and seven seconds where they were like, wait a minute, that's kind of nice.
John: That's a nice symmetry.
John: We should do a record sometime where it's like 21 minutes and 12 seconds.
John: And it would be like also really cool.
Merlin: I didn't know you knew so much about Rush.
Merlin: And that's the song of your track 8, 707, Working Man.
Merlin: That's why they call him.
Merlin: They call him the working man.
Merlin: I know this, but just so our listeners know, what is the song Working Man about?
John: The song Working Man is about the struggle of working and being a working man, just a regular... You're saying it's about a man who works or has worked.
John: Yeah, right.
John: And it's not enough to work.
John: It's...
John: There's more to it than that.
John: You know what I mean?
John: The working man gets up at 7.
John: And he goes to work at 9.
John: Pours himself a cup of ambition.
John: That's exactly right.
John: He tumbles down the stairs.
Merlin: Stumbled down the stairs.
Merlin: Tumbled to the kitchen.
Merlin: Woke up.
Merlin: Get out of bed.
John: I'm a working man in my head.
John: Although he has two hours between when he gets up and when he goes to work.
Merlin: He reads the papers.
John: Well, but the thing is, he says, I've got no time for living because he's working all the time.
Merlin: Oh, taking what they're giving because I'm working for a living.
Merlin: Got it.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: All right.
Merlin: I got it.
Merlin: Marvin, Marvin Barry.
Merlin: Marvin.
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Merlin: it's about a man who works it seems to the working man that he could live his life a lot better than you think he does and that's the that's the crux okay all right all right so we so now we have made it through uh the i don't know how many albums they have we've gone through the 1974 self-titled album by the canadian band rush rush right okay
John: Um, so the thing is he, he likes to, he's Canadian.
John: Yeah.
John: So he gets home at five.
John: He, he gets himself a nice cold beer, but he's always, he's always wondering why there's nothing going down here because it's just, I mean, this is, this is Bob and Doug McKenzie music.
John: Oh, right.
John: So it's a beauty, it's a beauty way to go.
John: It is beauty.
Yeah.
John: There's no point in steering now.
John: The problem with the working man is at no point in the working man's story or struggle or dramatic arc does there appear a wizard or a hobbit of any kind.
John: Also, there's no philosophy here other than that he has a beer and is bored.
Merlin: Based on your analysis, and thank you for that analysis, I did not know that about these songs.
Merlin: You've taught me a lot already about what's happening on a deeper level with these songs.
Merlin: But I feel like we're still ending it with Working Man.
Merlin: We're still doing a little bit of that John Fogarty roll up your sleeves type situation.
Merlin: Yup, exactamundo.
Merlin: And they love, also in Canada, they love plaid.
Merlin: So this is a little bit of a plaid shirt song.
John: It's extremely plaid shirt.
John: It's not plaid shirt like an Ignatius.
John: Not a Pendleton.
John: Nope.
John: It's not a hat with ear flaps that you're wearing in Louisiana for some reason.
John: This is like something else, right?
John: Oh, and this is the other thing.
John: When I go to Canadia and talk to the Canadianians, they say, typically, that up there...
John: Rush is just a, like a Hesher shit kicker band.
John: And they are constantly confused about why Americans treat Rush like they're some kind of philosophical, like intellectual band.
Merlin: Yes, I think we've elevated them in a way perhaps in their homeland they don't.
John: No, up in Canada, most of the people I know say, you know, I was kind of a, I was a nerdy kid.
John: You know, I know a lot of nerds.
John: And even in Canada, there are people that are, I mean, we would think, well, Canada, it's a nation of nerds.
John: But no, there are cools up there.
John: I mean, they would get eaten alive down here.
John: Oh, 100%.
John: But they're the denim crowd up there.
Merlin: You should see their emo kids.
Merlin: They're adorable.
Merlin: Well, I know, right?
Merlin: You want to put them on a keychain.
Merlin: They're so cute.
John: And so my EME friends from there say people that listen to Rush just are bullies and they beat you up.
John: Mean kids?
John: Mean kids.
John: Or tough kids.
John: Tough kids.
Merlin: The kind of person that set off fireworks in their house.
John: Yeah, they're like muscle car drivers, that type of thing.
John: So I was surprised to find that because we do treat Rush like they're very smart down here.
John: Um, it just seems like, uh, seems like smart, smart rock, smart, smart rock.
John: But I got into that first rush album because themes were uncomplicated.
John: And I have to say, it's not only is it good rock music.
John: which it is, but also Alex Lifeson at that point in his career was playing guitar that I could understand perfectly well.
Merlin: Of all of the people, there are many... This is an opinion from me, Merlin Mann, your co-host.
Merlin: This is an opinion.
Merlin: I think of practically all the people...
Merlin: who owe a clear debt to Jimmy Page in their style and approach.
Merlin: You put in your Ace Freelys, you put in your Alex's Lifeson, all of those.
Merlin: I think he is one of the most accomplished at making it into his own thing.
John: Well, so that's the thing.
Merlin: Ace Freely is just playing Jimmy Page likes, mostly.
John: But Alex, you know, as he evolved, he got more and more into a thing where I was like,
John: like I'm with you.
John: I'm following along.
John: Believe me, it is not at all that I find it unlistenable because I do not.
John: I find it very listenable.
John: It can be very busy.
John: But I find it, yeah, a little... Fussy.
John: A little fussy.
John: A little fussy.
John: Let's call it that.
John: Or a little hard to get inside.
John: And the thing about, you know, the thing about Kurt Hammett's playing is that I can get... It's terrible.
John: I can get no purchase there.
John: No!
John: I cannot get a toehold in what Kurt Hammett is doing.
Merlin: It's like if you gave...
Merlin: A guitar to a random number generator.
Merlin: He doesn't even know what mode he's in.
Merlin: Jesus Christ.
John: When I listen to Metallica.
John: Fade to black?
John: Really?
John: That's your solo?
John: I am holding on to the mountain.
Merlin: Are your cans working?
John: Can you hear the rest of the band?
John: I'm holding on to the mountain of James Hetfield, right?
John: I've got my feet firmly planted.
John: I have my hands on the rock there climbing up the James Hetfield mountain.
John: And Kurt Hammett is like a wasp trying to... He's got a wasp in your shorts.
John: And so I have one hand off the mountain just trying to swat at it, like, get off.
John: But I'm hanging on the side of a mountain here.
John: I can't afford this...
John: this this feels like the wasp is just like and then of course you know then there's lars who is who's just like throwing that's just rocks coming down that are all that i also have to dodge and it's just like god give me something anything to work with here that isn't yeah and that's why jason newstead was such an important person to me but let's leave him behind for a moment okay okay that uh that rush record established me firmly
John: both feet planted in rush and also... Despite the lack of wizard content.
John: Also, wait for it.
John: Yeah.
John: Then that is not the record that most of the Hesher wizard bullies were familiar with.
John: So all of a sudden, I had some purchase in a place where I was firmly planted in a rush that not everyone knew.
Yes.
John: And this was this was heyday of Rush, right?
John: This is the this is moving pictures there.
John: So so as Rush became more and more as everyone was a wizard.
John: Mm hmm.
John: I was able to be I was able to stand at least somewhere at the party and say, yeah, I'm kind of into their earlier stuff.
Merlin: Oh, that's a good that that is a great line at that time.
John: That's a huge line.
John: Nice.
John: And then and people were familiar with Working Man because it was, you know, it was in that that it was in the seven minute song pantheon.
John: But I could go I could go deep on what you're doing.
John: right i could go i could get all the way in all the way back to um to some of that foundational like blues jam so i i did quite a bit of i did quite a bit of uh playing the tennis racket to to that early rush and now
John: Now, over the years, I have absorbed so much Rush that I can only say that I am 100% pro-Rush.
Merlin: How interesting.
Merlin: That did not go the way I expected.
Merlin: If we've talked about this band before, I don't remember it.
John: I'm sure we have.
John: We must have.
Merlin: Oh, it's going to be so embarrassing.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Well, can I tell you why I asked?
Merlin: Yeah, go, go, go, go.
Merlin: This is what I did last night.
Merlin: I have.
Merlin: So in the era that you're talking about, which is my favorite era of Rush, like I'm a basic bitch.
Merlin: I like, every Sunday morning, I listen to Duke by Genesis, and I like that period of Rush when they were really good for three albums.
Merlin: No, no, I don't dislike the other things at all, right?
Merlin: I'm familiar with a fair amount, not a big fan of Caress of Steel, but...
Merlin: But but I am solidly in the camp when I got Rush and Rush made sense to me.
Merlin: It was the period of permanent waves, moving pictures and their live album called Exit Stage Left, which, you know, if you didn't have their old records, you could hear them playing stuff like The Trees.
Merlin: And, you know, and they did a lot of really good stuff.
Merlin: Those albums are great.
Merlin: They're really good.
Merlin: The point being, I knew of and maybe I knew of the Exit Stage Left concert video.
Merlin: Videos, excerpts from that, I believe, were played on MTV.
Merlin: So, like, when you saw the video for Limelight, I'm pretty sure that's the performance from the Exit Stage Left movie.
Merlin: I'm not sure.
Merlin: Point being, it has been out of print for a super long time.
Merlin: And finally, and I've been looking for it in all my usual, you know, trucks.
Merlin: I've been looking for it in places.
Merlin: I've been looking for it.
Merlin: Well, you know what?
Merlin: Turns out, turns out there's a pretty good copy of it on YouTube that I was able to obtain for my local viewing.
Merlin: And I watched the Exit Stage Left concert video last night.
John: Oh, isn't that interesting.
Merlin: And I had the time of my life.
Merlin: I was so happy watching this.
Merlin: They're so good, John.
Merlin: And the songs are so good.
Merlin: And Geddy Lee's doing like four different things all the time.
Merlin: Wow.
Merlin: and it's great and it's not all just focused it's not all just jerking off to uh to to neil now understandably great drummer the camera shots were not set up in such a way that they could get every single you know you watch those videos of him now and there's like 14 different cameras to show his timbales or whatever he's got he's yeah he has a uh he has a uh a splash
John: He has a splash gong.
John: He has a sizzle cymbal gong camera.
John: He's got it all.
Merlin: It's very heavily focused on the two men out front who do rock poses.
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: And they play.
Merlin: And they do some of their long stuff.
Merlin: But they do some of the hits.
Merlin: And...
Merlin: it was really fucking good.
Merlin: I'm not sure what my point is, except I stayed up a little late last night.
Merlin: I have a copy.
Merlin: If you would like a copy and you can find it on the YouTube, but I was so happy to watch this.
Merlin: I hadn't watched it in years.
Merlin: And John, here's the thing.
Merlin: I'm 52.
Merlin: There's so much stuff in my life where I revisit something from 30 plus years ago.
Merlin: And I go, Hmm.
Merlin: Yeah, that's okay.
Merlin: Mrs. Doubtfire hasn't aged super well.
Merlin: Ghostbusters, don't even get me started.
Merlin: Duke is still good by Genesis.
Merlin: But sometimes I return to something that I haven't spent a lot of time on in 20 or 30 years.
Merlin: I saw Rush live around 8 or 10 years ago, and it was really good.
Merlin: But it was so nice to return to that and go, this is exactly how I remember, and it's exactly as good as I remember.
Merlin: I cannot believe this many years later, I still thoroughly enjoyed this performance.
Merlin: That's all I want to say about that.
John: The thing that's so impressive is that there are only three of them, and through the magic...
John: of Geddy Lee being able to play the bass with both his hands and his feet at the same time, and also somehow be able to play the bass with his feet and his hands and the keyboards at the same time.
John: Important keyboard parts.
John: Which is an astonishing feat that Eric Corson actually adopted during the later years of The Long Winters.
John: Jonathan used to do that.
John: Jonathan used to be working every limb.
John: You play the guitar and the keyboard.
John: But Eric and I started doing some shows right before Long Winter stopped doing shows where it was just the two of us.
John: And he was playing the bass with his feet and keyboards and guitars with his hands while I was playing the guitar.
John: Or sometimes the piano.
John: And on one song, the drums.
John: We also had drums.
John: So Eric would play the drums while I played the guitar or the piano.
John: It was really fun.
John: And we made a lot of music for just two dudes.
John: Partly because Eric was making the music of three dudes and sometimes more.
John: But Getty is playing...
John: So much that three people sound like a multi-tracked album except live.
John: And, you know, and at this point, Alex is playing some some guitar stuff that is this is when he this is when he begins to play.
John: music that is a little outside of where I'm finding it 100% lyrical.
Merlin: I'm thinking of Limelight in particular, which has been in my head all morning.
Merlin: He gets supermodal.
John: Well, that's the universal dream.
Merlin: He gets supermodal, and there's these amazing pull-offs, but he also has a way, it would seem heretical at the time to everyone involved, I imagine, to compare the two great power trios of the time.
Merlin: And to say, as I will toss out right here, that I think his role is very similar in some ways to Andy Summers in The Police.
Merlin: In that, he not only has a very distinctive tone,
Merlin: in a very distinctive style, but he has a way of not, he's not resorting to chords and chunkity chunks.
Merlin: He's doing a lot of interesting stuff, arpeggios, pull-offs.
Merlin: He's not getting in the way of the song, wanking around.
Merlin: He's, everybody's driving the song.
Merlin: There's nobody who's not driving the song forward, but he does that in an unconventionally deft way.
Merlin: A lot of the time, I feel.
John: Absolutely.
John: At one point, I was in a grouchy mood.
John: Not a grouchy mood.
John: I don't get any grouchy moods, but in a mood.
Merlin: John, everybody has good days and bad days.
John: I was having a day.
John: I don't know what kind of day it was, but I was going through bands.
John: This is on Twitter.
John: of course and this is actually on Twitter and maybe this is the rare occasion where I'm going to say maybe this wasn't during the heyday of Twitter maybe this was a little bit later when Twitter was already kind of not it had already started to become a pain in the ass yeah
John: And I here's, you know, everybody like John Moe is real famous for like every morning he tries to come up with a meme.
John: And sometimes back back in the old days, sometimes he would get a meme that caught fire.
John: And now everybody does it like like try and caption this video, except wrong answers only or whatever, you know, just trying to get something going in the world.
John: But I started to say, like, who's the weakest link?
John: Every band has a weakest link.
John: Who's the weakest link?
John: We know Kurt Hammett is the weakest link in Metallica, even though Lars is widely regarded as the weakest link.
John: They could add an Airedale to the band and he'd still be the weakest link.
John: But every band has a weakest link.
John: Like, even the Beatles has a weakest link.
Merlin: i just said the beatles have but the beatles have well that that that week has sling changed over time well it did but you're not gonna like this but you can talk about it yeah 1968 it was john it was i made that exact case he was really fucking high people dumped on me so hard oh come on oh ringo can't please shut up fuck you ringo kept the band together
John: even flansberg came at me he was like oh john lennon in 68 you mean one of the most legendary performers of all time and i was like yeah and the weakest link in the beatles in 1968 i'm afraid hundred percent but so i'm going through and i said that alex lifeson was the weakest link in rush now stipulating there's got to be one that's the point that's the point of the exercise you may not like the answer but there must be one every classic album has a terrible track and
Merlin: End of story.
John: Every classic album has one terrible track.
John: There's one where the band decided they were going to try reggae, right?
John: I mean, for 15 years, there was one song where the band was going to do a reggae song, and it was always the worst song on the record.
John: Except for I Shot the Sheriff, which is... See, that's a very good song.
John: Yeah, that's a great—the thing is, the song is so great that it can even withstand being played by Eric Clapton.
Merlin: And he's a Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
Merlin: He has a little fucking reggae bit.
John: Right.
John: It's a terrible, terrible version of what is a great song.
John: Yeah.
John: Should never cover Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
John: No.
John: Going forward.
John: No.
John: But I got a ton of Rush flack, and this is why I think—
John: You know, I get the reputation of not liking Rush because I have I am capable of criticizing Rush or offering a critical opinion of Rush.
John: And there are a lot of Rush purists that will not allow for even I mean, Darius Darius could not hear.
John: He could tell it was Rush.
John: Just by the sound of the needle in the groove, like the band didn't even need to be playing.
John: It was just like he's like, it's rush.
John: And he would know he knew the tune, you know.
John: So he's not going to listen to me tell him that Alex Lifeson is the weakest link.
John: Right.
John: Because he he's it's one of those things where you're like, there's got to be one.
John: That's the game.
John: We're playing a game.
John: And he's like, no, it's impossible.
John: It would be impossible to say.
John: But I'm not – oh, and also because of my contentiousness or whatever, people assume I think that anti-rush is a kind of –
John: I don't know.
John: I don't understand how anybody could be pro music and anti rush.
Merlin: Well, I mean, it's music there.
Merlin: And I don't know.
Merlin: I mean, there, I think there's all kinds of ways that that's, and I'm not, I'm not trying to sound sensitive about this because people should like what they like, but it is one of those.
Merlin: I don't even know how many bands I do this with, but you know, it would be like what, like fish or dream theater or tool who apparently has a new album or,
Merlin: or even rage against the machine like there are bands where it's really easy to just go i think and it's it's an easy if you ask me because you know i don't i don't love all those bands not a fan at all but like you know people like that but i think rush is one of those bands where it's easy to go yes well uh one time many years ago uh
John: I wrote a review of Tool at Bonnaroo for CMJ Magazine.
John: We thought you'd be safe.
John: I did.
Merlin: They'll never find this.
Merlin: First, they'll have to learn to read.
Merlin: Well... No, but I mean, I don't even know how to make fun of Tool.
Merlin: It's that one guy, and it's really, really complicated, like deliberately overcomplicated, like heavy prog rock.
Yeah.
John: What I said about it was, you know, they put on a very interesting show where Maynard Ferguson plays the entire show in silhouette, at least when I saw them.
John: They're backlit.
John: And so it's very dramatic.
John: You just see him.
John: You just see like the the clip art version of him.
John: But they play like pretty intense vivisection videos of animals being, I don't know what, experimented on.
John: You know, it's the Nine Inch Nails thing, except it was like, whoa.
John: And so watching it, I was not a member of it.
John: And so I sort of just reported on it and maybe with a lot of snark spin.
John: But did I get...
John: Did I get, let's see, what would you call it?
John: Did somebody blow up your spot?
John: Not somebody.
John: He got canceled.
John: 600 Furious Tool fans.
John: Fans of Tool.
John: Who wanted to explain to me that Maynard was a prophet and one of the smartest men who ever walked the planet.
Merlin: I don't know how you could miss that.
Merlin: How you could be so good about understanding the first Rush album and understand that, what's his name, Maynard G. Krebs?
Merlin: That he is a prophet.
John: Well, this is, this is, did you learn your lesson from that, John?
John: Um, I did.
John: Did they put you in your place?
John: The lesson that I learned was do not cross tool fans.
John: And also I don't have enough investment in not liking tool that I'm going to put myself at that much risk.
John: So even seeing the word, so what I did was I stopped saying the word tool or having any take on tool and
John: Because I realized that Tool fans just are not into that.
John: I mean, Rush fans, at least you can tease them for being Canadian.
John: But Tool fans, they're not, you know, they're out there.
John: They're building machines in their garage that are going to put my eyeballs in a frying pan.
Merlin: What manner are they listening to while they're doing it?
Merlin: Tool!
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: Oh, no, this is terrible.
Merlin: We're going to have to bleep all of this.
Merlin: Let's drop in the word implement.
John: I got out of there.
John: And also, you know, when Tool put out that record that had a tool on the cover that looked like a pee-pee,
John: Oh, I when that was all happening, I was sort of so I was in a band briefly in 1991 with a guy who had long hair, except he shaved the sides.
John: Oh, yeah, that was a look.
John: Yeah, and he shaved the sides.
Merlin: Like he's in some kind of slamming British industrial band, that kind of look.
John: Right, right, right.
John: So he shaved the sides up pretty high, and so when he had his hair down, he just kind of looked like a greasy-haired guy that you could see his ears, long-haired guy, you could see his ears.
John: But when he pulled it up, then he had that, you know, yeah, he looked like he listened to Skinny Puppy while he was making love.
John: Yeah.
John: Which, let me tell you, is not how I do it.
Merlin: Remember Fetus?
Merlin: Fetus on the wheel?
John: You've got Fetus on your breath.
Merlin: Them and Ministry and all those bands, they were so serious.
Merlin: They seemed so serious.
Merlin: Serious perhaps in the way that Satanists and the Wizard Rockers seemed.
Merlin: They seemed very serious and very worked up about something.
Merlin: They were very worked up.
John: If you want to hear serious, I lived with a guy.
John: He's dead now, but he was... Yeah, I know what happened.
Merlin: I keep trying to elevate the show, and you keep bringing me down with all these bodies.
Merlin: When you live as long as we have...
Merlin: Yeah, that's true.
John: There's a few along the way.
Merlin: There's going to be a body count, yeah.
John: But we were roommates.
John: This was at a time.
John: He made a room.
John: We were living in a house that had like nine bedrooms, but there were 14 people living there.
John: And he made a room in the living room out of milk crates that he had stolen from the back of the supermarket.
John: Yeah.
John: And it was a full on room.
John: Like you would walk in the front door and there was a. He made a milk crate room.
John: It's like it's like Minecraft.
John: Like he made a milk crate room.
John: There would have been a large living room there.
John: But instead you walked in.
John: There was still like a nice hallway except one of the walls was made out of milk crates all the way to the ceiling.
John: And you could see through because they're milk crates, but you couldn't really see all the way.
Merlin: Like translucent tiles in a bathroom.
John: Exactly.
John: Like you knew he was in there or he wasn't.
John: You knew stuff was going on or it wasn't.
John: But you couldn't really like, you couldn't pick out anything because they were the milk crates that were.
Merlin: It becomes like a razzle-dazzle living room.
John: Right.
John: It was a little razzle-dazzle.
John: And then you would turn the corner around the corner of his milk crate room.
John: And then it opened up into the dining room, which became the living room.
John: And then there was a door in his milk crate room.
John: He was a genius.
John: But he had a prong tattoo for the band Prong.
John: And it took up his entire back.
John: Oh, no.
John: It was a prong tattoo that went from his waistband to the nape of his neck.
John: That's a big tattoo.
John: It was a really big, especially for the time.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
John: Which was, you know, like, and prong was one of those things where it was like, are they joking or are they serious?
Merlin: Yeah, I mean, you take like a Leibach.
Merlin: It became a funny thing to buy me for birthdays and Christmas.
Merlin: My roommates would always buy me a Leibach album.
Merlin: And one could never tell how serious Leibach was.
Merlin: And people would say, well, Leibach, you know, they're not actually fascist.
Merlin: They're having fun with the idea of fascism.
Merlin: They're actually an anti-fascist band.
John: Right, right, right, right.
Merlin: But I'm not sure everybody who bought Life is Life, which is a cover of a very silly pop song.
Merlin: I mean, they covered Let It Be all the way through.
Merlin: And people were still like, I don't know, these guys are pretty – this is bad news.
John: You don't mess with these guys.
John: Look at those mustaches.
Merlin: But you're right.
Merlin: But you're right.
Merlin: Consolidated.
Merlin: I mean, how many bands are there like this where people took them extremely seriously?
Merlin: I don't think – do I know Prong?
Merlin: I feel like I remember the name Prong.
John: I don't think you get a prong tattoo all over your back if you think prong is joking.
Merlin: There's no such thing as an ironic tattoo, if you really think about it.
Merlin: Interesting.
Merlin: Well, you know, that girl... Because she can take off an ironic shirt.
John: The girl, Stephanie, who booked the first Long Winter show on our first tour there in Milwaukee, she had a juggalo tattoo.
John: She had a couple of juggalo tattoos that, at the time...
John: uh in 2001 she claimed were ironic juggalo tattoos i was like stephanie they're just full-on juggalo tattoos there's it's like whatever it is and you know it's like are you a juggalette and she would say no are you kidding no i just think they're i just think they're fun and i just think they're great and good for her
John: that's it i was like whoa okay all right but you know like like killing joke right i mean killing joke oh yeah but that they're having fun great they're having fun right but you don't and if you got a killing joke tattoo you would know it was fun but i don't but prong you know there were plenty plenty of serious pretty people that thought that series and plenty of people that thought tool was serious anyway i was in this band
John: And we were making music that involved a lot of consumption of illicit substances.
John: And then he and I and a drum machine and another dude.
Merlin: Wait, the drum machine gets higher billing than the other dude?
John: Yeah, because the other dudes showed up about 70% of the time.
Merlin: The drum machine got an echo in the Bunny Man situation.
Merlin: The drum machine was more reliable.
John: The drum machine was always there.
John: And it was really the only thing that kept us together.
John: Now, we were living in a house at that point.
John: I wasn't actually living there.
John: But this house that we had...
John: Actually, the roommate in that situation was a guy by the name of Gordon.
John: Gordon was in the band Sky Cries Mary.
John: Okay.
John: And Gordon was, you know, Sky Cries Mary was sort of goffy.
John: They were what you would call a Velvet and Paisley band.
John: Okay.
John: And they had, you know, they had long.
John: Were they heavy?
John: Yeah.
John: Oh, yeah.
Merlin: But not like a Red Cross, not like a silly kind of... No, no, no.
John: They were jammy.
John: Okay.
John: Sky Crazy Mary.
Merlin: They were, you know, they had... American Psychedelic Rock Group in Seattle.
Merlin: Psychedelic, that's what happened.
John: Roderick Wolgamont.
John: So that was the lead singer, Roderick.
John: What a great name.
John: In Seattle for a long time, if people said Roderick...
John: See, now in Seattle, if people say Roderick, they mean me.
John: Yeah, sure.
John: But in the early 90s, they meant Roderick from Sky Cries Mary.
John: And then there was a period in the late 90s where it wasn't clear which Roderick they were talking about, him or me.
John: Oh, man.
John: Because Sky Cries Mary was kind of in the waning throats.
Merlin: I've heard the name of that band.
John: yeah yeah and so you know roderick but he still had a lot of you know he still had a lot of time uh uh like um he had a lot of time on the ground here and i was sort of the new guy coming up and so somebody would say like oh i was talking to roderick and i was like which one um anyway sky cries mary so gordon was in sky cries mary and i wasn't a founding member but you know he was um
John: He was rocking and rolling.
John: Gordon went to New York, so he lived there, and he was the guy that kept coming out of his bedroom all bleary-eyed.
John: Wait a minute.
Merlin: John and Ken have been in this band?
John: Yeah.
John: Everybody's been in Sky Cries Mary.
John: Okay.
John: Okay.
John: Wow.
John: Joe, Joe base who went on to be the wonderful bass player of the posies.
John: He also is dead now.
John: Okay.
John: But Joe base played on the first long winter's record.
John: He's the bass player on the first long winter's record.
John: Joe base was longtime bass player of sky cries, Mary.
John: Okay.
John: Uh, but also like he played on frosting in the beater.
John: I mean, he played on all those posies records, uh, and his, you know, he, he was, uh, he was instrumental in the Seattle scene and, and, uh,
John: And when he passed, it was tragic.
John: When Darius passed, it really was like an explosion in our little world.
John: Joe was dying for a long time, so we had time to process it.
John: Anyway, Gordon used to come out of his room and say, Hey, can you guys like...
John: Maybe like, I don't know, man, practice later or something.
John: Because we're in the living room with the drum machine going.
John: And we were going.
Merlin: That'll go right through a milk carton.
John: You did Electro Wookiee Rock?
John: Oh, yeah, for sure.
John: Can you do that sound again?
John: We were called King Nilla.
John: Because one time we were we were on substances.
John: We were sitting around and somebody reached.
John: We were we were passing around a box of Nilla wafers and somebody pulled out a Nilla wafer that was like twice the size of a normal Nilla wafer.
John: And we were like, oh, dude, it's the king of all Nillas.
John: That's us.
John: We're King Nilla.
John: So King Nilla was practicing.
John: Gordon would come out and say, oh, dudes, can you just like, I don't know, man.
John: It's your whatever you're doing.
John: It's like really repetitive right now.
John: Also, I sometimes was the singer of King Nilla.
John: Yeah.
John: That was during my wizard phase.
John: Gordon Raphael was his name.
John: Yep, yep, yep, yep.
Merlin: A lot of past members, according to the Internet Science page.
Merlin: Gordon produced the first strokes record.
John: Huh?
John: Yeah.
John: Let that sink into your brain for just a second.
John: Gordon gave the Strokes their sound.
John: Yeah, right.
Merlin: Do you remember how popular they were for a while?
John: Oh, do I?
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: Right before 9-11, because, I remember, because they had to take that New York City Cops song off the record.
John: New York City Cards.
John: Yeah.
John: That whole sound, the whole concept of the lead singer singing through like a Colin Malloy megaphone.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Money machine, counterfeit money machine.
John: That's Gordon Raphael.
John: That's Gordon Raphael.
John: Yeah, who was like, who was not the biggest fan of King Nilla, but was in Sky Crate.
Merlin: Wait, wait, wait.
Merlin: Is Gordon the one behind the milk crates?
John: No, no, no, no.
John: That's the dude.
John: That's your co-bander.
John: No, he and I were never in a band.
John: He was just the guy that lived behind the milk crates.
John: Oh, I see.
Merlin: Sorry, there's a lot of pieces on the board.
Merlin: I just don't want to miss anything.
Merlin: All these guys are dead now.
Merlin: Oh, Jesus.
Merlin: Come on, John.
Merlin: I know you haven't had enough good non-crumb coffee, but you've got to stop bringing me down, man.
Merlin: It's Labor Day, for God's sake.
John: The thing is, what people don't understand is that before I started doing this show, I had lived an entire life already.
John: That's true.
John: He lived at least a life.
John: At least one and a half lives, maybe two.
John: And some of the many people, I ran into a girl at a coffee shop the other day and we just sat around talking about the people that we knew in common that were dead.
John: Oh my God.
John: I know, right?
Merlin: We're still young people.
Merlin: Put aside the alienation, get on with the fascination, the real relation, the underlying theme.
John: The underlying theme?
John: The real relation, the underlying theme.
John: I've never been good at that, at taking a word and turning it into a three-syllable word.
John: Taking a normal word and turning it into multiple syllables.
John: Elliot Smith was great at that.
John: He would take a word and just put as many syllables in it as he wanted.
John: And we loved them all.
John: We did.
Merlin: Never want to cover Elliot Smith.
John: You know what I'm saying?
John: Well, you know, you're not supposed to.
John: I ran across.
Merlin: Where did you say that?
Merlin: You said that somewhere.
Merlin: Was that on Twitter recently?
John: Yeah, it was on Twitter recently.
Merlin: What'd you do in your car?
Merlin: Pictures of me?
Merlin: What'd you do?
John: Pictures of me.
John: That's such a good song.
John: And you're not supposed to do it.
Uh-huh.
John: You're not supposed to do it, but I... Risky, risky.
John: But we did it, and it was cathartic for us.
John: I mean, the thing about Elliot Smith is you're trying to find catharsis.
Merlin: Well, that's the thing is he's... What did we say?
Merlin: Did we say this about him?
Merlin: He's rocking at half speed?
Merlin: Like, he... Like, when you get to that last... The last verse of Pictures of Me, and that's a... I mean, outside Heatmiser...
Merlin: I can pull this out of my ass.
Merlin: But outside Heatmiser, that is as rocking out mostly as he gets.
Merlin: He's so sick and tired of all these pictures of me.
Merlin: But you can feel that he's ready to blow kind of feeling.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
John: That's such a good song.
John: Oh, my God.
John: Well, but the problem is he's willing to blow, but when he blows, it's just going to be his own head off.
Merlin: Oh, my God.
Merlin: I would have gone with Bottle Up and Explode.
Merlin: But Jesus, John.
Merlin: Are you ever going to put aside the alienation?
Merlin: No, I can't.
Merlin: You can't get on with the fascination until you put aside the alienation.
John: What I'm trying to do is have alienation and fascination simultaneously.
John: Because I do want to get on with the fascination, but I can't put aside the alienation.
John: Decisions to be made.
Merlin: All right, before we have any more deaths on the record.
Merlin: Oh, Jiminy Cricket.