In this episode, I sit down with singer-songwriter/songwriter Joe Pesci to talk about his early days as a musician, growing up in the late 80s/early 90s in the San Francisco Bay Area, touring with bands like Liz Phair and Dave Chapele, and how he got his start as a songwriter and producer. We talk about how he went from living in a garage to becoming a full-time musician, and what it's like to play music in front of a live audience. We also talk about the early days of his band, Exile in Guyville, and his new album, Girlly Sound, which is out now! This episode is brought to you by Native Creative, a division of Native Creative Records. Native Creative is a record label that specializes in the production and distribution of original albums and singles by Native artists from the North Coast of North America and the South Coast of America. They are located in Los Angeles, CA and have been working with Native Creative for over 20 years. They produce and distribute all original Native Creative music, including Exile In Guyville and other projects such as Girlly Sounds. They are also working on a new box set celebrating the life and career of the late singer/songwriting legend, Johnny Rambler, "Girly Sound." . and they are looking to raise awareness about the music they produce. of the music industry. and share it with the community. We hope you enjoy this episode. as much as we enjoyed making it. Thank you so much love and support. - we appreciate you, we really deeply and appreciate the support we get from you. Thank you for listening. We really appreciate it. We can t wait to do this! - thank you, so much, so we can't wait to make it even better. We love you, more and more. xoxo - P.S. We'll see you in the next episode with more of you next week - we'll be back next week! xo - Tom Belladonna -- Tom Bell Tom Bellavoy Jake Sarah Matt Brian Adam Joe Mike Jack Tim David John Evan Paul Chris Ben James Chad Michael Daniel Andrew Matthew
00:01:26.000Yeah, it's kind of like a reissue of my first record, Exile in Guyville, with the original girly sound tapes that I made on a four track in, god, late 80s, early 90s.
00:01:42.000Was that when you were living at home?
00:01:44.000Yeah, that was when I was recalled back from San Francisco having not gotten a job and run out of money and grifted my way across the Bay Area.
00:02:03.000And I made these little cassettes that I forwarded to two friends, and one of them got super busy making copies of these cassettes and sent them to every fanzine in America with this, like, glowing recommendation.
00:02:18.000And all of a sudden, I was getting—I was living at home, still didn't have a job, and I would get these envelopes coming to me saying, like, please make me a cassette copy.
00:04:55.000There's some real scientists that believe it's entirely possible that the Sphinx and a lot of the construction in Egypt is far older than they think they are.
00:05:24.000Yes, they think it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 9,000 plus BC, because back then, the Nile Valley was a rainforest, and somehow or another became a desert.
00:05:54.000If you had something, what are you going to get together in a fucking Marriott somewhere and show some blurry picture of some fucking hubcap that someone chucked up into the air?
00:06:27.000If you were guarding missile silos and you say you saw something hover above it and deactivate, I'm probably going to check that out a little harder.
00:06:37.000And there were just so many people that stood up in that press conference and said that they absolutely had seen evidence, met extraterrestrials, seen the crafts, like in hangers, etc.
00:06:52.000And to me, they didn't look like they had that much imagination there.
00:06:57.000The kind of people that I didn't think could really...
00:06:59.000I mean, did you find that convincing at all?
00:09:32.000And it's caused by various weather conditions.
00:09:35.000And they think that it can even be caused sometimes by the right weather conditions and the shifting of tectonic plates that somehow or another the friction.
00:11:46.000And I did not let go of this stranger who just puked, like, until we were, you know, like, I just, it took about, you know, 10 minutes, and then I was like, but that was intense.
00:14:22.000Ladies and gentlemen, I mean, like, that's it.
00:14:24.000Please prepare for a very rough landing.
00:14:26.000And what happened, I know I'm, like, monologuing, but, like, what happened to my body at that moment was I went into, this only happened twice in my life, full tremors, like, full body.
00:17:41.000Explosions of trapped methane gas are thought to account for the mysterious craters in Siberia, including this one.
00:17:47.000Yeah, and so they think that it has to do something with the Bermuda Triangle as well.
00:17:50.000So when biological tissue creates methane, And when they have, like, massive amounts of die-off, whether it's fish or whether it's plants or things like that, they think that some of that stuff gets trapped in the bottom of the sea floor and then escapes,
00:18:06.000goes up to the surface, makes boats sink, and even can bring down planes.
00:20:34.000The only guy that I ever talked to when I was talking to those UFO people that I believed about UFOs was a guy who was at Skinwalker Ranch.
00:20:42.000That whole area out there has a shitload of UFO sightings.
00:21:26.000And he's telling me about this glowing orb that came through the walls of his house and floated around inside of his living room and kitchen and then took off through the wall.
00:21:43.000I think they have it a lot in that area.
00:21:45.000And so I think whatever the atmospheric conditions in that area, it's a frequent occurrence.
00:21:49.000And because of that, a lot of these people see things, and then they start talking, and then people start looking for them, and then they start talking crazy.
00:21:55.000And then people start talking about, like, they were talking about a bulletproof wolf that appeared out of mist.
00:22:50.000What does that mean there's not enough energy for lightning?
00:22:52.000You can't marshal that much electricity in the atmosphere?
00:22:55.000I'm too stupid to repeat what he said and have it make any sense, but when he was describing it to me, the way he was explaining, and I think I read it as well.
00:23:03.000He was explaining, and what I read was that they don't really understand how that much energy is produced in the sky like that.
00:23:12.000And that if you calculated like what it would take to produce that that shouldn't be possible.
00:30:11.000You might be able to have a dream ahead of time that would be how you would synthesize that traumatic experience just as if it had happened before and you were dreaming after the fact before.
00:31:17.000And he suffered from asthma when he was young and really badly.
00:31:21.000So when there was a lot of particulate matter in the air or it was just bad air conditions, I would tend to be very worried about him and keep him home or inform the teachers or whatever it was.
00:31:34.000Just he'd get really bad asthma attacks.
00:31:37.000And so I have a predisposition to be on the alert.
00:32:20.000I didn't think about it at all until, you know, we were socked in, in this sort of brown muck as we are, and, like, the sun became the eye of Sauron.
00:32:28.000And, you know, everyone's, like, freaking out, and we're looking at all these images, and I was so distracted by all these images that I completely forgot my sense the night before.
00:32:37.000And what I think that was, until I remembered it, then I called up and I'm like, ah!
00:32:43.000I think it's more like I don't know something's coming, but I have maybe time, maybe the envelope of time is a little bit more mushy than we think.
00:32:54.000Maybe we perceive time as very orderly and very linear, but maybe it's really not, and it could be pushing back.
00:33:03.000Maybe I had the experience before I perceived the experience, or I don't know what that is, but that happens to me a lot.
00:34:07.000I think it's pattern recognition and data chunking.
00:34:12.000I've met so many people that when I see things that are off...
00:34:16.000Little things that are off, and you probe, like you're talking, little things are off more, and you're like, you're looking into the eyes, you see calculations, you're like, okay, something's going on here.
00:37:29.000And all these different mechanisms that you've kind of like psychological mechanisms that you've utilized to try to hide these thoughts from yourself or try to skip past them really quickly.
00:37:40.000Oh, I've got that under control and just get past it and move on to some new thing.
00:39:09.000Yeah, he's a wild man, bow hunter, and he goes up to the northern area of Australia.
00:39:15.000Australia, all the animals, essentially the large mammals, are all invasive species, so they have to hunt them because they don't have predators.
00:39:22.000So he goes up there and shoots water buffalo with a bow and arrow.
00:40:04.000There's certain animals, there's certain hunts they put on where they kind of have to control populations of these things, like grizzly bears and stuff like that when they start encroaching.
00:42:28.000If you believe people and animals, yeah.
00:42:30.000But I think, as everything, depending on your perspective, just like we were talking about when you get high, and suddenly your territory expands of what your awareness is, same difference.
00:43:07.000He's a documentarian from the UK. He's got a great special that he did where he went over to one of those wild game parks and stayed with these Weirdos on these rich American people that go over there shoot shit and he was over there for like weeks and finally just drove the guy crazy The guy was just like breaking it down to him.
00:43:27.000It was basically just saying in this crazy accent Africa is fucked.
00:43:31.000This is what you have to understand Africa is fucked this African guy is explaining it to him like this is the only way these things are gonna survive if you think that you're gonna remove these fences and Remove the profit right?
00:43:43.000These people are going to come in and slaughter these things, and they're not going to think at all about the future.
00:43:47.000They're not going to think at all about preserving the populations or them going extinct.
00:44:59.000Just leaves from some local plants that they use to make their houses.
00:45:03.000But he, you know, when he tells you what it's like over there in the extreme poverty, and most of these people were dying because of waterborne diseases.
00:45:48.000You can change the whole thing because all these people, they have distended bellies because they're filled with parasites and they have all these waterborne diseases and they're just dying.
00:45:55.000The girls don't go to school because they spend all day walking to the water source.
00:47:00.000You're changing my idea about my Nile trip that I want to take, my bucket list Nile trip.
00:47:04.000I want to get one of those big houseboat things with, like, have you ever seen them?
00:47:08.000They're like double-deckers, and then they have the top thing, and it's just like a bunch of sort of, like, game zones.
00:47:15.000Like, it's just like, you know, cool lounge chairs with, like, covering.
00:47:19.000It's all very open air, and it just feels like you'd be having cocktails up there at sunset, walking around, talking to all your family and friends.
00:47:26.000You do it like one of those European explorers.
00:51:45.000This guy's on top of an elephant, and he's walking this elephant through this grass, and this tiger runs through the grass and leaps up into the air and fucks him up while he's on this elephant.
00:51:56.000I shouldn't laugh, but it's kind of funny.
01:00:49.000Do you think that stuff adds up in your brain?
01:00:52.000How much of our stress and unhappiness and all that kind of stuff that culturally everybody feels is because you expose yourself to things you just shouldn't know about?
01:01:03.000It's a matter of does it have an effect as far as raising awareness of consequences of devious actions or does it have an effect in that you're always worried about it and so it sort of manifests itself more often because it's constantly in your head.
01:01:24.000And find a group of people that you can hang out with that you trust that are cool to protect you from all those fuckers coming over the fence.
01:02:06.000There are times when I will sit and dream about those lines.
01:02:10.000And I'll just sit there thinking, I'll see this sort of greenish murk, and then I'll hear the silence and that clicking sound that you hear under, you know, with all the fishes eating stuff.
01:02:43.000I asked my son what he thinks we're gonna look back on in the future and think was like the craziest thing we lived with, and he said, wires.
01:02:49.000And I thought it was kind of brilliant.
01:02:51.000That's what a kid would say, right, that lives in this world today, that is brilliant, wireless charging, wireless internet.
01:02:56.000If I didn't have wires, I could just play live and move anywhere around on the stage.
01:06:04.000Have I? Do you know that they can listen to what you say in a room by monitoring the window and the vibrations of normal human conversation has enough of an effect on the window that they can translate that into speech.
01:07:03.000I actually thought about that the other day because I screwed up my knees and I've been doing this thing where I put my elbows into my legs as I'm sitting watching TV or something and kind of give myself a massage.
01:07:12.000But if you were listening through the audio of my phone or anything, you'd just think I was constantly masturbating.
01:07:18.000It's kind of like rubbing motion on my legs all the time.
01:07:44.000I think we're only a couple decades away from that.
01:07:46.000I think right now, it's like service providers have the possibility to tap it into you.
01:07:53.000Maybe all these different government groups knows how to tap into your phones and tap into your TV and tap into the camera that's on your laptop.
01:08:02.000But I think it's going to come a matter of time where the intrusion in privacy is going to be the bottleneck to future technology.
01:08:07.000And we're going to get to some virtual reality environment where it is so titanically bizarre and so incredibly realistic.
01:08:18.000That whatever the fuck happens in the regular world is going to lose its significance.
01:08:21.000It's going to slowly lose significance to the point where we're going to accept that one of the ways to overcome some of these technological hurdles is to completely dissolve all boundaries between all people and information.
01:08:34.000Meaning you're going to be able to look at anybody doing anything anytime and they're going to be able to look at you.
01:08:38.000And that's going to be the new reality of human beings.
01:08:40.000And this will be after we've accepted virtual reality.
01:08:44.000So once we accept virtual reality, regular life is going to be so mundane because you're going to be able to create artificial environments like Avatar World, like you're flying through 2001 at Space Odyssey.
01:09:08.000Whether it's going to happen, it's a matter of when is it going to happen.
01:09:10.000I think when that does happen, the big bottleneck is going to be privacy.
01:09:14.000And I think people are going to, just like they're doing now, with constantly putting up things on social media, constantly showing pictures of their kids, and constantly giving updates on everywhere you go, and tagging all these things with geotags.
01:09:26.000I think that in the future, we are going to just accept that no one has any privacy.
01:09:32.000And kids today are more likely to accept it than we were, and our kids are going to be more likely to accept it.
01:09:38.000Then they're kids, and it's gonna keep going on and on and on, and three, four generations, it's gonna be life.
01:10:16.000It's going to go into the next thing, and you're going to deal with people looking at you naked all the time, LOL, because you don't care, because you're in the Avatar dimension, riding a fucking dragon over a volcano.
01:10:25.000You're going to be living in a world that's so much more fantastic than the real world.
01:10:29.000As someone looking at your asshole in the real world, you're like, go ahead, look, who cares?
01:10:35.000You're basically saying that we're putting ourselves in those little pods in the matrix.
01:18:09.000The most extreme one, I was in the jungle.
01:18:13.000And there was some people that were native to this place.
01:18:18.000They were dressed in western clothes that are like t-shirts and shorts, but they were barefoot, which is often the case though, unfortunately.
01:18:26.000A lot of people that live in these indigenous villages, they wear like Under Armour shirts and shit that someone gets them.
01:18:35.000Missionaries maybe sometimes bring them.
01:18:37.000But they were speaking in a language that I understood, but it wasn't English.
01:18:42.000And I don't speak anything other than English.
01:18:43.000And when they were talking, I was listening to them, I was amongst them, and I was listening to them, and they were speaking in this very different language.
01:18:51.000And then I realized, like, holy shit, I can understand their language, but I realized that in English, and then poof, I popped out of the spell.
01:19:00.000Like, my freaking out about it brought me, it was all like, no, no, no, don't go away!
01:19:50.000I've done a bunch of different things in the tank, but mostly it's edible pot.
01:19:54.000Pot edibles has a distinctly hallucinatory effect at high doses, especially when you close your eyes and you're laying back and just letting visuals take place.
01:20:08.000Also, I think it's entirely possible that we have genetic memory.
01:20:12.000And I think it's entirely possible that Like, there's certain things that people pass down to their children.
01:20:20.000Like, there's certain traits that my kids have that I watch in them, and I go, okay, why are you so into this?
01:20:26.000Are you so into this because you just happen to be into this?
01:20:30.000Are you into this because I'm into this, and somehow or another got into my genes and passed on to your little tiny body, and now you're developing with this, like, hunger for certain types of activities.
01:20:40.000So it's, like, literally in their cellular level of...
01:20:43.000Well, we don't know what's transferred.
01:20:46.000We don't know how much of, like, people have certain instincts, right?
01:20:50.000People are afraid of spiders, afraid of snakes.
01:20:55.000Probably somewhere along the line, some memory got transferred into your DNA. Well, the question is, like, how much gets in there?
01:21:02.000Until I told my nine-year-old daughter...
01:21:06.000I thought probably very little I was probably just like physical traits and that's it But her mind is so much like my mind like in especially her obsession with things I've never seen a little kid so obsessed with things like this is me in a nine-year-old girl's body like this is fucking crazy and Talking to people that have musical talent or people that have artistic talent and their children seem to have an aptitude for this,
01:21:32.000like an unusual aptitude, almost as if they're trying to re-remember it rather than learn it.
01:22:01.000Underneath all that, it's entirely possible there remains some very, very distant memories, which is why people survived as long as they did, because you could transfer some knowledge onto the kids.
01:22:17.000You don't have to worry about getting eaten by leopards.
01:22:19.000It's a totally different environment we live in.
01:22:21.000So less of it gets in there, but I think there's probably still somewhere in the operating system.
01:22:26.000If you went into DOS and started sneaking around, you'd find some weird code from different languages that you spoke 10,000 years ago, or who knows?
01:23:27.000I think it was just imagination more than anything, honestly.
01:23:30.000If I had to be really honest, I think it was imagination.
01:23:33.000I think I just have a very vivid imagination, particularly when I was lit on some pot brownie.
01:23:39.000I've read a study where if something really traumatic happens to the parent, and I don't know if this is animals or whatever, even if the baby animal is born after this thing is over, this traumatic event, they'll have a fear of that thing.
01:23:59.000I think the pot's gone through me, and now I'm just sort of I think I know what you're talking about.
01:24:04.000There was a study that they did with mice, and what they did with mice is they sprayed a citrus aroma inside the cage, and then they electrocuted the feet of the mice.
01:24:13.000Their children, when they smelled, this is children that had not been electrocuted, when they smelled that citrus aroma, they had a heightened panic state.
01:24:55.000It's a piece of evidence that points to genetic memory.
01:24:58.000But it's one of those things, it's like, if you don't understand, go back to DOS or C +, or something like that, some computer code, I don't understand it.
01:25:05.000If I read it, it's just gibberish to me.
01:25:07.000Or like those quantum physics guys that write all that stuff, that's just gibberish.
01:25:10.000So we might be just getting that gibberish going, what is, what's going on here?
01:25:16.000One day maybe we'll be able to read that gibberish, but right now we know there's something getting passed down from these mice.
01:25:21.000So if the parent gets shocked because they smell that thing and then the kids who have nothing to do with it, they get shocked or they smell it and they think they're going to get shocked, something's being transferred to them.
01:30:27.000And it just travels in the distance into a tinier, tinier, tinier, tinier spec until it's just a little point until you can't see it anymore.
01:31:16.000They think that, well, every galaxy has a supermassive black hole that's one half of one percent of the mass of the entire galaxy.
01:31:26.000So the larger the galaxy, the larger the supermassive black hole.
01:31:29.000The prevailing theory is that, or one of the prevailing theories, I should say, inside every black hole may be another universe.
01:31:39.000It's entirely possible that there's another universe of hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with supermassive black holes in the center of them.
01:31:45.000And you go through that one, you go into...
01:33:09.000The Fermi Paradox is like questioning why, because there's so many different planets that could potentially support life.
01:33:16.000Like if there's a hundred billion galaxies, or hundreds of billions, and each one has hundreds of billions of stars, how many of those have habitable planets?
01:33:25.000And if so, why haven't they contacted us?
01:33:29.000And like the math is overwhelming that either we're the first or they kill all the comers or we're like...
01:33:48.000Turn in word is the idea that we all go virtual and that we become some sort of a symbiotic thing connected to this hive mind, this real electronic reality.
01:35:39.000That doesn't dovetail nicely with my idea that they're going to discover something that lets me live 500 years because I've decided that's the exact perfect lifespan for me.
01:36:09.000We were talking about if you found out that you were going to live this life over again every time, like infinitely, would you be able to handle it?
01:36:33.000But if someone came up to you right now and said...
01:36:36.000Liz, I'm gonna give you the reality of existence.
01:36:39.000The reality of existence is you will do this life an infinite number of times until you get it right and you're never gonna get it right.
01:36:45.000So you're just gonna keep living this life over and over again, hopefully fucking up less and less each time, but most likely you're gonna still fuck up and you're just gonna keep doing the same thing.
01:37:37.000I haven't seen that one, but yes, you're feeling me.
01:37:40.000Okay, so if there's something that you evolve into, I can live my life over many times and strive to be better at it, but if there's no point to it all and I just have to keep living over and over and going to high school again and again and again, no.
01:37:58.000I think even our trials and tribulations and the things that go sideways, they reveal sideways as an option to us and gets us back on track.
01:38:08.000I have an expression that my mother loves, onward and sideways.
01:38:20.000And I like the idea of, I'm very into, as we sort of evolve...
01:38:26.000Speaking of UFO conferences, I was driven in the back of Rick Rubin's Bentley when I first moved to LA. My friend Nora was friends with him, and he drove us to a UFO conference.
01:38:37.000And I just remember sitting in the back of this huge Bentley, and he wouldn't talk to me at all.
01:39:07.000You know, there's a business in it, though.
01:39:10.000The real issue with all the UFO stuff is that there's a business.
01:39:13.000Is that you get to a point where people realize you could make a lot of profit if you just start talking about UFOs or talking about extraterrestrial invaders that are inevitably coming and when.
01:39:26.000And then everything gets murky, you know?
01:39:36.000It's just, it's not always pure, you know?
01:39:40.000Like, there's some people that look at it and that are, like, real researchers, like, there's a bunch of them that try to figure out what the fuck's going on, and they make a lot of sense, you know?
01:39:49.000And they're trying to figure it out, but they don't point to anything in particular and say, this, this little fetus, this is an alien baby, and we're gonna use genes to prove it.
01:39:56.000Like, you know, they found that little baby with the big head, just a baby, just a deformed baby.
01:50:28.000Well, what's crazy is horses originated in North America many, many eons ago, but then died off in North America, but prospered overseas in different places, like possibly went across the land mash and all these different places where horses evolved and became zebras and all these other different animals.
01:50:49.000And then the Europeans brought the horse back to North America.
01:50:53.000But the horse originated in North America, but then died off.
01:50:57.000So these wild horses, they're just domestic horses that got free.
01:51:04.000If you see a really well taken care of horse, they don't seem to mind it.
01:51:09.000Like if there's a place up here that has a stable and people ride their horses, people come by and pet the horses, the horses seem so chill.
01:53:36.000If you have hiking boots on with 17 eye holes and you get that bitch tied down and laced in and you shove them into those stirrups, if that fucking horse starts bucking and you get knocked loose, you're going to get dragged and kicked to death.
01:53:52.000You're going to be hanging on by your foot.
01:53:54.000It's going to be stomping on your head as you're running around.
01:53:57.000You're going to bounce you off rocks and shit.
01:53:58.000But if you're in one of them cowboy boots, your feet just come right out.
01:54:02.000I am now only going to wear cowboy boots.
01:54:04.000If you're riding a horse, you should only wear cowboy boots.