On this week's episode, the crew talks about their recent gig at The Troubadour, a small intimate venue in Long Beach, CA, and the crazy memories they have of the venue and the people they met there. Also, the guys reminisce about some of their favorite memories at the venue, and discuss their favorite concerts they've ever been to. This episode is brought to you by Sturgill Simpson's new band, House of Pain. They are a punk rock band from Los Angeles, California, and they are one of the most underrated bands in the entire punk rock community. The band is made up of a bunch of dudes who have a lot of good vibes and are great at what they do. We hope you enjoy this episode, and we hope you have a great rest of the week! -The Crew Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. If you like what you hear, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and/or wherever else you get your music recommendations. We'll be looking out for the next episode. Thank you so much for all the support! -Jon Sorrentino and his band, The Band of God. Love & Light. Jon & the Crew. -Jon & The Crew. Mike and the Crew at the Troubadore. -Shawn and the crew at Sturgills Jon and the band. Justin and the guys at the show last week. Will & the crew. Ben and the boys at the night before. Can't wait to see you at the next show? Mike & the band at the club? -Justin and the show next week? . Can you make it in the next one? Thanks so much Jon & his band? ? Justin & the rest of your support? --Jon and the whole crew at the tour bus? We'll talk about the show. -- Thank you for the show! --The Troubador -- and all the love you guys for the support you guys are so much love you all so much & all the hard work you do so much support you're so much, so much respect you're amazing, love you back to us so much more! and we appreciate you, you're a lot more than you deserve it.
00:01:48.000There's no connection, because everybody that is close to you is sitting down, and then there's this giant picnic going on behind them up on the grass.
00:03:14.000He's super cool, but I remember one of the first times I ever met him, it's one of those weird ones where you're like, am I really hanging out with this guy?
00:03:20.000Is this really Everlast from House of Pain?
00:03:23.000You know, Jump Around was such a goddamn gigantic hit.
00:03:28.000It was like one of the greatest hits of all time.
00:03:30.000One of the greatest, I mean, I guess you would call that a hip-hop song, right?
00:03:34.000But it was a giant hit with my generation, so to be hanging out with him was super surreal.
00:03:40.000I'm sure he's had a very interesting journey.
00:08:37.000Whoever is in charge of their career has one veteran's interest, which is pushing that single, and then it does its thing.
00:08:44.000And if they can't come up with the identical thing again, they don't know what to do, and then they just stick them on a shelf and you never hear from them again.
00:09:04.000How many, I mean, really, really good songs, if you stop and think about history, were from a band where you heard, like, maybe two of their songs ever?
00:09:16.000In the pop, in that world, you know, if you're, like, radio songs and syndication, yeah, this is usually...
00:09:24.000How much is that changing for you guys because of the internet?
00:09:27.000I mean, when you first started your career, how much of an effect did the internet have on promoting things or getting the word out on things versus now?
00:12:45.000They're all different expressions or interests.
00:12:48.000but that's really exciting you know when when someone mixes their style up as much as you do and you guys put together these albums you know each one of them is they're uniquely you but they're all different it's a it's a you've got a real weird thing going on man like if you went back and listened to your first album and then listened to the they're all awesome but they're awesome in like all these different ways man It's so cool to see all this experimentation,
00:13:16.000like this anime thing you're doing with this.
00:13:51.000And then you also reach a point where now you realize the only way we're going to survive and make money as musicians is touring.
00:13:59.000So why wouldn't we make this as fun for ourselves as possible?
00:14:02.000You play these festivals and then you're rocking out three or four songs and then people are jumping at them.
00:14:07.000And I just kind of asked everybody, why can't we just go do that for two hours and make music that people can dance and have a great time to and still...
00:14:16.000Miles has probably been listening to me talk about Making a fucking dubstep rock and roll record for five years and we finally just did it.
00:14:32.000But it's great that you take those steps.
00:15:34.000Yeah, so we made this record June of 2017 and had to sit on it, couldn't play any of it.
00:15:40.000You know, you go out and you do the other thing.
00:15:42.000So now, almost two and a half years later from the time we recorded in the studio and I was writing those lyrics, we were making this music in the moment.
00:15:52.000We'll go out, we've been rehearsing for two weeks and it's already at a point like, shit, I wish we could have recorded it now.
00:15:58.000Because you have all these ideas that you just don't have in that moment.
00:16:01.000A year and a half later on a tour playing that material, it's a whole other animal, you know, because you just found all these little idiosyncratic nuances and things that you can flourish that you just don't think about when you're in a control room for 18 hours a day.
00:16:18.000Is that a common tactic, where you're always changing your songs?
00:16:22.000You're always fucking with them and continuing to?
00:17:22.000And there might be ten guys you could call today to do this thing, but two of them might be way more perfect for this specific thing than those other eight.
00:17:31.000They're all badasses, but you can flavor.
00:17:34.000I just found the right flavors that I want to stand up there with.
00:17:39.000I could make ten records with these guys, and they're all going to sound like ten different bands.
00:17:43.000Now, is this because you guys don't have, I mean, how much of influence do record companies have on new bands?
00:17:50.000Like when new bands are coming up and they're trying to put together their music, how much influence do record companies have on the creative process?
00:20:36.000I'd run in a rail yard just overseeing the switching crews that when the trains would pull in from the east and west side of the yard, we would break those trains apart and look at other manifests and drive cars off other rails and build them into those trains and then crew them again and get them on the line.
00:21:21.000You got to struggle in difficult jobs until you're about 35 and barely get to where you want to be, where you're really kind of freaking out about your future, and then pour yourself your heart and soul and then find success after that.
00:21:39.000But if you get into music early on in your life and make a career early on in your life, you miss everything that you did by being an older...
00:21:48.000You're a 35-year-old man that makes a jump.
00:22:57.000If you're reading a horoscope or someone's trying to give you some sort of indication of what's going to happen serendipitously or by fate, either way, it's just someone making the shit up.
00:23:31.000Some people can get a little loopy with it, and they won't fly on an airplane.
00:23:37.000They'll have their numerologist look at the flight numbers or the number on the plane and how these things all correlate, whether this is a wise decision or not.
00:23:50.000She was deep into astrology, actually.
00:23:52.000And she had some famous astrologer who would do the readings for them, and she would dictate whether or not Ronald Reagan should go and do shit.
00:24:28.000Quigley was born in Kansas City, Missouri.
00:24:31.000She was called on by First Lady Nancy Reagan in 1981 after John Hinckley's attempted assassination of the President and stayed on as the White House astrologer in secret until being ousted in 1988 by ousted former Chief of Staff Donald Reagan.
00:24:46.000She said, I was responsible for timing all press conferences, most speeches, the State of the Union addresses, the takeoffs, and the landings of Air Force One.
00:24:56.000What the fuck is what she claimed, though?
00:24:58.000She claimed a bigger role in her 1990 book.
00:26:20.000I don't think that anyone on this planet, I don't think there's an equal ability to perceive anything.
00:26:31.000I think some people are way more perceptive, some people are smarter, they see patterns better, they see trouble coming, they see problems, they see things better than other people do.
00:26:39.000And I think there's feelings that you get sometimes.
00:26:57.000One time we were all texting about Jean-Claude Van Damme and five minutes later my Netflix recommendations are full of Jean-Claude Van Damme.
00:27:04.000I've never watched a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie on Netflix in my life.
00:27:23.000Maybe it's like they have a cleaner and they say to this guy, listen, I don't give a fuck how you find out what these people are talking about, but you can find out, right?
00:27:35.000And this guy just, like, this thing is just listening to every goddamn word you say and providing suggestions for things you could buy on Amazon.
00:29:15.000I forget what they were talking about.
00:29:17.000But they got to this thing where it was deception with primates that they'll pretend like that there's an eagle coming so that everybody dives down and they'll steal the fruit.
00:31:12.000And then they made a hellacious movement to get me to the medevac.
00:31:15.000Long story short, I'm eating dinner in the hospital.
00:31:18.000One of the first meals, jamming out to these dudes.
00:31:21.000And I was like, Mom, I want to meet Sturgill Simpson.
00:31:23.000And then she tried to get a hold of him, SOCOM eventually did, and he came, hung out for like two hours.
00:31:31.000I made my friend now, General Beaudet, wait like 15 minutes so that we could finish talking about what we were talking about, which when you're an enlisted dude, you don't make generals wait.
00:31:42.000But I was on a lot of ketamine, so it was sweet.
00:31:47.000Then Sturgill had it on his own accord to donate to the foundation.
00:31:51.000So this little tour going on that coincides with the actual album release is donating to the Special Forces Foundation.
00:31:59.000So that helps Gold Star Families, which are the families that remained of the friends that got killed on this trip.
00:32:07.000So there were four Green Berets and two EOD techs.
00:32:18.000I don't have any legs below my knees, for those that can't see my legs on the video anyway.
00:32:24.000And I don't have my testicles either, so that's a different set of challenges.
00:32:28.000But I don't care about getting taken care of, other than the normal army processes, but I want them to get taken care of from the foundation.
00:32:36.000I'm grateful to have these guys as friends now.
00:33:34.000Yeah, you were, you know, you could tell you were seriously moved by this.
00:33:38.000And, you know, for someone like you who truly understands the consequences of war, like the physical consequences in a way that none of us will understand, you know, it's very, not just...
00:33:51.000It's brave of you to talk about this, but it's also so valuable.
00:33:55.000So valuable for everybody that hasn't served to understand what it really is.
00:34:02.000Well, I always say I really like combat, because I was in a lot of it, relatively speaking.
00:34:07.000A bunch of guys have been in way more combat, a bunch of people have treated more casualties.
00:34:11.000I'm a medic, but I was in a fair amount, almost got killed on the first trip a good handful of times, so I just don't like the war aspect when you see your friends get killed.
00:34:24.000And, uh, you're stuck in a hospital bed on top of all this stuff that's, you know, I didn't shit for a week.
00:34:44.000Like, especially on ketamine, when you're going through all that and you're just like, I was telling like the people that took the trash out in the room, like, hey, I'm grateful for you, brother.
00:35:02.000Does it just put you in another dimension?
00:35:04.000So ketamine is an MDA antagonist in the brain, so essentially it's a dissociative.
00:35:13.000So the way that it feels, because we learned this in class as a medic and everything, but the way that it feels is kind of...
00:35:21.000It takes your perspective and it's like...
00:35:24.000It always felt like a whirlwind if I was getting a push of it.
00:35:27.000But it's like you're starting to get your vision masked and you're still there but you're dipping into subconscious because you're still conscious.
00:35:36.000Because unconscious would mean that you pass out and you cannot have a gag reflex depending on how unconscious you are.
00:35:47.000I would close my eyes and immediately trip the most insane balls that you could imagine and open them and I'd be back in the room and I'd be like, what the fuck?
00:35:56.000And then a friend of mine, when I left my first rotation, he was an Air Force CCT that got blown up in the same village I had a few casualties in.
00:36:07.000He stepped in ID, he's in above the knee, some missing fingers, but when he was on ketamine, when he was awake and looking around, he'd see the walls on fire.
00:36:15.000And then there'd be like women, like white pale skin in the corners, peeling the skin off their back.
00:37:17.000And I've gone through a huge development last year through depression and then this year after this blast of being grateful and doing introspection and communicating and having empathy for other people and being a compassionate human.
00:37:33.000Which General Mattis has told us, a group of us, on the way back from my first trip.
00:37:38.000It's like, don't let this experience of war make you a more hateful human being because people haven't experienced it.
00:37:43.000Let it allow yourself to go through post-traumatic growth and become a better human being and treat other people like you want to be treated.
00:37:52.000And I would add on to that, which came from Tim Ferriss, treat yourself the way you treat other people, too.
00:37:59.000That's not a side of Mattis that you ever hear in the press, huh?
00:40:08.000Altered States is based a lot on John Lilly, because he invented the sensory deprivation tank.
00:40:12.000Does he give the dolphin's ass in the movie?
00:40:14.000No, because it just was loosely based on him, because in the movie, the guy experiments with a bunch of different types of sensory deprivation tanks, and everybody knew that this guy, he was a legitimate doctor, a brilliant guy, but he was also a ketamine freak.
00:40:28.000And one thing he would do is take intramuscular ketamine and then get into the sensory deprivation tank.
00:43:22.000And how long did it take to get you off of the methadone?
00:43:28.000I mean, once you're off of it, the doctors were saying that it stays in your adipose tissue, which is your fat, for like two or three weeks.
00:43:34.000Because I'd have random nights when I was off of it and just get lit up with nerve pain and like getting hit with a hammer on my toes.
00:43:43.000So probably four to, probably like six weeks of weaning that and then I weaned another drug.
00:43:51.000I mean, for you it had to feel, I mean, because you were there at Walter Reed the whole time, you had to feel frustrated, but for somebody like Mike, the first time I came to see you, it was only what?
00:44:06.000So he was still in a lot of, I mean, more pain than I could even comprehend somebody being in, you know, from nerve pain, for how many surgeries on each leg?
00:44:18.000It's close to 30 surgeries total, which is a lot, but there's a lot more.
00:44:22.000He still had staples in your back, too.
00:44:24.000Were they taking, I mean, you described this, man, just like, how can anybody...
00:44:31.000You know, and then he was still, as he said, the first time we met, he was highest giraffe balls on Academy.
00:44:36.000But, like, I was profoundly impressed by even then, like, how clear-headed and articulate, and I was obviously, like, this guy's obviously brilliant.
00:45:03.000But then when I went back, the second time I went to see him was there for a couple days, and it was like just in a matter of short time, it was leaps and bounds.
00:45:12.000He's in the gym on one leg, like fucking busting out 20 pull-ups and everything, you know.
00:45:17.000There's got to be something, anything you can do to help in whatever way.
00:45:24.000And these guys, since I've known him, I've never once ever heard him ask for anything.
00:45:28.000His only concerns were for the families of the guys that didn't make it.
00:45:36.000It's just like really around an album release if I'm going to have a bunch of attention on me I thought it would be a good opportunity to put attention on what other people can do to help these guys and their families because you know the sacrifices especially sitting in these rooms and looking at these dudes man I can't even you can't you know what do you call that?
00:46:01.000Yeah well I want to help so after the show Let's figure out what we can do to jump in.
00:47:14.000So it's not like, you know, right or left.
00:47:16.000It's just like this is the reality of it and people are making these sacrifices for you and when they come home, what do we do for them, you know?
00:47:24.000It's a hard thought for people to accept that war is inevitable.
00:49:30.000So, like, if you're going to move the chess piece to war, then we need to understand the implications of what that means and try to do everything in political power and state strategy to avoid overt war, because it's nasty.
00:49:46.000You mean Russia or something like that?
00:49:49.000Yeah, near-peer war would be the worst thing.
00:49:51.000That's World War III. Mutually assured destruction is the strangest thing on Earth.
00:49:55.000That we all have enough weapons pointing at each other to literally nuke every fucking man, woman, and child off the face of the Earth many times over.
00:50:03.000And that's what keeps us from using them.
00:51:14.000I mean, most people, most of the time, are not thinking about killing somebody.
00:51:20.000But we know that it is just an inevitable part of being human that groups of people are going to get together and fuck up other groups of people.
00:53:03.000The guy didn't come in because of that, and I went downstairs and kind of swept the ground floor, and then he was gone.
00:53:08.000I didn't want to freak my wife out, so I waited until the morning to tell her, and then we called the police.
00:53:12.000Of course, one of the neighbors got on a ring cam in the back alley, the guy leaving and going down the street, so I had a very clear view of him.
00:53:22.000For whatever reason, my wife and the kids, they had to go on down to where we actually live.
00:53:27.000I was working that week in Nashville, probably mixing a record or something, so I had to stay behind.
00:53:35.000As a result of me being home alone that day, I was cleaning and working on a firearm I had recently purchased and assembled.
00:53:46.000Went to bed that night, locked everything up, and because they weren't home, I put the gun on the floor on a padded case next to the bed.
00:54:06.000And I guess out of paranoia, For whatever reason, I grabbed that gun and just went to the top of the stairs to look.
00:54:14.000I still think it's the maid, and when I hit the top of the stairs and looked down the staircase, same guy, same clothes, just standing in my living room, rolling the cord up on my headphones.
00:57:37.000Because I was the only one that actually met him.
00:57:39.000And I go to the court case and, you know, that was a very interesting and telling experience for me because I'd never really been to anything like that.
00:57:47.000And he was one of maybe eight or nine other people on the docket that day, all...
00:57:52.000I signed the same public defender who literally shows up 15 minutes before they start the day to familiarize himself with every single case.
00:58:00.000And you just saw this factory, like these young, underprivileged black males just getting pumped into the system.
00:58:06.000The DA came over and she was just like, thanks for being here, yada yada.
00:58:10.000And, you know, unluckily for him, he broke into like 13 other houses and they had him on tape and a lot of things.
00:58:16.000So we had 13 or 14 aggravated burglary charges, which is pretty fucking heavy.
00:58:21.000You know, every one of those is like a class B. So he was looking at 12 to 15. I think he sang like a bird, pleaded down, got six, and then if he does a successful rehabilitation program in prison, he could be out in two.
00:59:28.000But there's so many people in this country that are set up to fail.
00:59:34.000Their circumstances, their life, their environment, what they're surrounded by all day long, they're set up to fail.
00:59:43.000And I've always said that if we really cared, we have this plan that we always sort of impart, we put X amount of money toward this and Y amount of money towards that, but if we wanted to make this country, we wanted to really make it stronger,
01:03:12.000So when you say freelancer, what does that involve?
01:03:15.000Like what he was saying, if someone needs...
01:03:17.000Yeah, I've been in the area for like 25 years, so I play with a lot of bands, a lot of friends, there's a big group of people.
01:03:23.000Detroit's a great city for musicians, so you can stay busy, you know, if you know the right people and you're not a dick, so...
01:03:30.000Dude, I mean, I have zero musical talent, or never pursued any of it, so I love music.
01:03:36.000It's one of my favorite things to hear, stories about people, because...
01:03:41.000I just love the idea of you going out and, you know, hey, we need a badass bass player, and they send you over to this place, and that's like a fucking gun for hire.
01:03:50.000To me, as a kid growing up in Newton, Massachusetts, I used to always listen to music.
01:04:45.000There's, like, something to the way he's got, like, this...
01:04:48.000He did a cover of Midnight Rider with Suzanne and Honey Honey at this, like, little hole-in-the-wall place in downtown LA. It was, like, maybe 100 people in the room.
01:05:00.000Tiny-ass little crowd at, like, midnight on a Tuesday night.
01:05:53.000We played a festival once he was at, and I just saw him walking across the grass backstage, and I was like, that's a cool motherfucker right there.
01:09:10.000Looking back now, I mean, that whole fight scene with him and the guys, I used to fuck guys like you in prison, like, what was going on there?
01:09:17.000Yeah, I think that's just bad writing.
01:10:06.000We've actually seen a guy take a bottle to the head, so I can attest for a fact that you can still fight after taking a giant, full, unopened bottle of Grey Goose to the head.
01:10:18.000But only in a Mexican discotheque in McAllen, Texas.
01:10:22.000He had a big white cowboy hat on, and he looked like a bodybuilder, and he had two ladies at the table, and he was flossing hard, and I think he turned around and spit a little game at somebody else's woman.
01:10:32.000Oh yeah, let me back up that fucking story.
01:10:56.000And we were down in far Texas with P-H-A-R-R, which is right on the border.
01:11:02.000And We went down and did the gig, and it was fucking amazing because it was in this giant auditorium, and they had these long tables like you would have in a school cafeteria, but there were rows of them as far back as I could see.
01:11:17.000It looked like it might as well have been 1955, man, and we were playing the Hayride or some shit because it was white cowboy hats.
01:12:13.000But they said it like 50 fucking times, you know?
01:12:16.000And finally, we're just kind of sitting in the corner, not speaking and minding our own business so that we don't die.
01:12:22.000And Miles and I were sitting at a table on some chairs and all of a sudden it's just liquid and broken glass just raining down on us from behind.
01:12:31.000And I kind of turned around to see this guy...
01:12:35.000Sort of stumble, and the dude's still standing there holding the bottleneck, and it was like he had these big, unopened bottles of Grey Goose, like big-ass Grey Goose bottles on ice, and the dude just came up to his table behind him, like, fucking necked one and took it to the dome, and the guy kind of stutter-stepped.
01:12:51.000He turned around, he took his cowboy hat off, and he went at him and beat the fuck out of both of them.
01:12:56.000And I told him, I was like, I think this is where we leave.
01:16:12.000That's some good shit right there, man, if I gotta say so myself.
01:16:15.000That was a lot of adrenaline, man, because we'd all, literally, everybody, we had all the horns with us, but everybody in the band, you know, as a kid, you dream about that shit right there from the time you even think about playing music, you know what I mean?
01:16:28.000Going out rocking SNL. Before the second song, we were backstage, and I just told everybody, like, you know, this is most likely the only time we may ever get to fucking do this, so don't leave anything out there, you know?
01:16:40.000Somebody wrote a great article about it saying that a musical artist named Sturgill Simpson just snuck in a song about the illegal heroin trade on SNL. Yeah, that happened.
01:17:17.000Yeah, the military was guarding the poppy fields because in order to get information from the people that lived there, you had to get them on your side.
01:17:26.000So the way to get them on their side was to protect their heroin production.
01:17:30.000So you got the United States military walking through these poppy fields with Geraldo Rivera interviewing them.
01:18:22.000We won't play the volume because otherwise we'll get kicked off of YouTube.
01:18:27.000But when we're watching this, Geraldo Rivera is interviewing these soldiers who are talking about how they have to guard these poppy fields.
01:18:35.000So they guard these poppy fields so that they can get information on the Taliban and that these guys who are the farmers will be on their side.
01:22:55.000I definitely had heard about the bear eating the coke.
01:22:57.000The Barry Seals one is a terrible one because the reason why they found out about it is because these two kids found the coke drop.
01:23:04.000They found the coke and they wound up murdering these two kids when they went to retrieve the coke and they put their bodies on the railroad tracks.
01:23:10.000And they told the parents that the kids got high and fell asleep on the railroad tracks.
01:23:16.000But the parents did an independent autopsy and they found stab wounds.
01:23:23.000I've seen that when, like, transients or bums come in on, you know.
01:23:29.000It's always, part of our, we would have to find, like, young kids and shit playing hop car and, you know, doing the gutter rat lifestyle and the $1,000 fucking North Face parkas and shit.
01:23:47.000It was over at the North Yard, this guy.
01:23:48.000He thought they were done with the movement.
01:23:50.000You know, you took 5,700 foot steel with fucking 45,000 horsepower on the front of it.
01:23:56.000Like when it starts moving, it's very sudden and hard.
01:23:59.000So if you just go to stand up all that thing, all of a sudden when it starts rolling and then you lose your footing and you fall down on the tracks between the cars.
01:24:08.000But when you get run over by a train, it's not bloody and messy.
01:24:11.000Especially if it's been on the main line, it's rolling really hard and hot.
01:24:16.000You put a limb on a track or a body or a corpse, all that weight and friction and heat, when it goes over, it just cuts it like butter and cauterizes everything, like pinches you off like sausage.
01:24:32.000Unless you hit a fucking cow or something standing in the middle of the track and you're going 70 miles an hour and then it's just asshole and guts hanging off the front of the train.
01:26:21.000So it's all just gravity and downforce, keeping that thing going.
01:26:25.000So you could put like a brick, technically.
01:26:28.000You could take anything, a piece of fucking metal or a car jack and just lay it on that thing.
01:26:33.000And when that train hits it at 70 miles an hour, it's coming off the rail.
01:26:37.000Everything behind it is still going 70 miles an hour, stacking up behind it.
01:26:43.000Every time you pull up to a crossing in the city and you see a train go by 10 miles an hour and there's like 20 tankers on there full of raw chlorine, you could really fuck some shit up if you knew what you were doing.
01:27:29.000I would live at the yard for three or four days until we got everything repaired and back together and rolling.
01:27:34.000But two or three times where you'd be sitting out there in the middle of switching leads, this happened where I'd be in a pickup truck at night or during the daytime with one of the guys I work with.
01:27:44.000You know, maybe it's a guy, you're tired, you're trying to get done early, and you got a bunch of empty cars on the back, and the dude puts the throttle down before the air goes through the system all the way to the rear of the train.
01:27:54.000So, you know, you got this dead weight, and he thinks, oh, fuck it, I got three locomotives, I can push you, it'll be okay.
01:28:25.000Pushing rolling metal hits metal that does not want to roll.
01:28:29.000It just buckles up in a teepee almost instantaneously, goes off, and you won't even feel it if you're 30 cars up that you're pushing shit into the dirt.
01:28:39.000And it's all just piled on top of itself.
01:28:42.000In only like two seconds, I watched this train go from being on the track to literally digging out a 10-foot trough of earth and just displacing it.
01:28:52.000And I think, like, every day, me or one of my guys is standing right there.
01:30:58.000You see, you go to this calm, weird place when we were out in the bubble on a long tour where everybody's just sort of not talking at the airport or whatever it is, and you're just in your little happy zone.
01:31:12.000And I'm at this fucking terminal in D.C., and they announced this cancellation, and this place just erupts.
01:31:18.000And it's like 30 people literally over there screaming at the Amtrak employees.
01:31:24.000I saw a pregnant lady get pushed down.
01:31:27.000In front of me when they finally opened the doors and people were trying to get up on the train and straight up just knocked this pregnant lady down.
01:32:19.000I've only been to Tokyo once, but I was like, if you told me, if I didn't know about Tokyo at all, and someone said, hey, I'm going to take you to another planet where human beings live, and they're so much like you, but their city is very orderly,
01:32:35.000and they have beautiful neon signs and great architecture, and there's millions of them on this one island, but they're super considerate.
01:33:05.000It's kind of the place, too, that you can go drinking at night and go in bars and there's people passed out drunk right there on the floor.
01:34:43.000So what connection did they have to the anime thing?
01:34:47.000Who was making all that animation for you?
01:34:52.000Well, I had the idea for the record first, then we played Fuji Rock in 2017. I have a very good friend, a Japanese friend, who grew up in Kentucky on an exchange program with my wife, and he later moved back to Tokyo for college,
01:35:09.000became a radio DJ. His name is Shunsuke Ochiai, and he did the radio thing for a while, and then he got into voice narration for Marvel over there.
01:35:20.000I went over for a couple weeks before we played Fuji Rock to hang out with him and my buddies and get some time on the ground.
01:35:27.000The record was recorded the month before.
01:35:30.000I was like, man, it'd be really cool to do some animated videos for this album.
01:35:33.000If it's like one or two And we were sitting around his place watching a lot of old animation and anime films and the textures and the color and everything, just stuff you don't really see anymore.
01:35:45.000And I was just thinking about some of my favorite cartoons from that, especially the older stuff, the 70s and 80s that came from that world.
01:35:55.000So we decided to start taking meetings with producers just to get an idea of what would this cost?
01:36:36.000Basically, they have to stay within someone else's lane with their vision.
01:36:42.000He asked me what kind of animation I was interested in, so I named off some of the references of the things that I loved and was looking to get in terms of aesthetic and texture.
01:36:52.000He just went straight to the guys that made those things, because they were drinking buddies with all of them.
01:36:58.000Junpei Mizusaki especially was the one director who I think Shun translated all the lyrics for them because I wanted them to know, one, what the record was about so they could gauge interest.
01:37:09.000And he just sort of said at dinner one night, he's like, you're talking about the same things that I deal with as an artist.
01:37:15.000He's like, you know, I feel like this could be me talking.
01:37:18.000We deal with the same things in terms of dealing with business and commerce versus art.
01:37:24.000So he just sort of reacted passionately to the music, and he just said, I want to do the whole record.
01:37:28.000He's like, this is kind of a dream project for me.
01:37:34.000And then I was like, well, how are you going to do the whole record in a year?
01:37:38.000Because we've already been sitting on this thing for a year and a half now.
01:37:43.000And they assembled four other directors who were running teams or project teams at the same time simultaneously and breaking the songs up into chapters.
01:37:52.000So even though there's somewhat of a linear narrative told out of chronological order, and then two little side vignettes, which are sort of same universe, different world, just to give a different perspective on some of those songs, because some directors were doing one song,
01:38:08.000other teams had two, and he was overseeing the entire team, but had them all working simultaneously on it so we could finish on time.
01:38:15.000So I went over six times in the last year, and I realized about the second trip that those...
01:38:22.000Visits were very beneficial because those guys don't do half-ass.
01:40:01.000I mean, I wrote the initial story, the main byline screenplay, and then told Junpei.
01:40:07.000We were trying to do an homage of specifically Ojembo and then a couple other famous samurai films like Takeshi Kitano's Zatoichi and a lot of Kurosawa things like Very reoccurring storylines.
01:40:21.000And we were watching Kurosawa films in the studio making the record on silent in the control room just to kind of keep our mood right.
01:40:28.000Like to keep everything kind of dark and ominous and no second guessing.
01:40:33.000But yeah, it's kind of like a futuristic dystopian Yojimbo, which is also a fistful of dollars where you got...
01:40:41.000One town of people being oppressed by a couple rival factions or gang leaders and sort of using them for their own billing.
01:40:52.000So in the future now, Junpei and I talked about it.
01:40:57.000Sex, drugs, and weapons, and war are really the main drivers of the economy.
01:41:02.000So let's just say that those are the only economy.
01:41:06.000Those are the only things that have value anymore at that point.
01:41:29.000I told him there was a very old famous samurai film called Zatoichi and at the end of it, this blind swordsman conquers this evil force and the townspeople celebrate and there's this very famous scene in the end of it with this traditional dance and they're doing this dance and I said, can we sneak this in as a dance sequence slash homage?
01:41:47.000Anybody that has to be a film buff geek like me would get it.
01:41:50.000Anybody else just be like, this is fucking cool.
01:41:52.000So they decided to take the gimps and the sex-trafficked slaves, so to speak, and then just make a big chorus line.
01:42:01.000But then they had a woman, a traditional Japanese dancer, come in and they put her on motion capture and green screen and she did the actual dance from the film and they animated everyone to that.
01:43:24.000I wouldn't want to make this sonic signature.
01:43:27.000I would probably use traditional Japanese musicians and then contemporary production methods and actually have dialogue and sound effects and make a story.
01:43:36.000Are you going to get into the cartoon business?
01:44:10.000I mean, she rides off with the two robots, and there's like an AI monster on Lyft dealt with.
01:44:16.000Or you could go back in time to the origins of the two Slick and Slims feud with her dad while they show up to the dojo and kill everybody.
01:44:37.000When you have an album release, when will you decide to try it?
01:44:42.000Because you've been pretty consistent every, what, how many years?
01:44:45.000Well, High Top and Metamodern came out like nine months apart from each other.
01:44:50.000Sailor's Guide was 2016. Now here we are 2019. But we recorded that record 2017. No, man, it's like there is a tread water or drown mentality now.
01:45:04.000Everybody thinks you have to be in front of people all the fucking time.
01:45:07.000Or you've got to be blowing air into your brain balloon on Twitter and showing everybody how funny and enlightened you are to be a musician.
01:45:14.000I think sometimes the best thing you do is just go the fuck away and process and recharge and look for holes that aren't being filled and exercise other interests.
01:45:25.000Like I said, these guys, I don't want to play music with anybody else.
01:45:29.000The only reason I would need another band is if I made a bluegrass record.
01:45:33.000You know, so you just get the hang down and the people you want to be around and love and have a good time with.
01:45:39.000Like I said, we could make ten records, it's all going to sound like ten different bands.
01:45:42.000Because all these guys have extremely broad and diverse influences and ability.
01:45:58.000So it's not really saying we're going to make this kind of record.
01:46:00.000We just went in and made fucking noise.
01:46:02.000And this is what happened with those tools.
01:46:06.000It's interesting to see your conscious decision to sort of just check out and recharge.
01:46:11.000Well yeah, you got a certain point you just realize you're not in charge.
01:46:15.000And I'm a very controlling personality.
01:46:17.000I like to feel like I'm in control at least of myself.
01:46:20.000With music I've learned like you can put ideas out there but they decide what they want to be.
01:46:25.000You know I knew I didn't want to put a wanky fucking noodley guitar solo on every single song.
01:46:30.000Two or three of those on a record you're pretty good to go.
01:46:33.000Especially now when the guitar is kind of dead.
01:46:36.000But Bob's an amazing keyboard player, and we had this badass old Moog Model D synthesizer that does the Dr. Dre shit.
01:46:43.000And we did it on one song, and we just kept going and cracking it out and putting higher and a lower octave and then running it through amps and blowing it out and getting it really dirty like a big cracked out laser beam.
01:46:55.000And I was just like, that's the fucking sound, man.
01:46:56.000We've got to put that on everything and cohesively tie the album together.
01:47:04.000Making this fucking sweet ass like synth thing over some Black Sabbath and I never heard that record growing up, you know, so we made that record.
01:47:15.000So when you're touring with this music now and you're fucking with it and you're switching things up, like when will you decide that it's time to write some new shit?
01:47:24.000Will you just tour and then stop touring?
01:47:31.000I used to sit down with a guitar and like, I'm going to write this song.
01:47:34.000You get like a part and words and you find meter and phrase.
01:47:38.000I've discovered I'm really just a poet.
01:47:40.000It's easier to write the words out and craft the meter and phrase to those words musically in the studio.
01:47:46.000I would say both, all the other three records, I would probably wrote half of them while you go in to make the record.
01:47:53.000You think you have the songs, and you realize that those songs are not supposed to be a part of this record, and I would go home at night and write songs that fit that record.
01:48:01.000Where I would come in with parts, like Sailor's Got, I had a lot of parts of music that get pieced together in the studio, and these guys probably all thought I was fucking insane.
01:48:09.000It scared Ferg to death, because he's like, I want to hear the songs.
01:48:13.000I was like, I got some notes, you know?
01:48:15.000But really, the music happens, you lock yourself in that room with the right people for a matter of days, and you just keep going until it's done.
01:48:54.000We did some loops and we would record riffs in a certain key and then record that same riff in every other key so I could take it and chop it to a loop and make it super precise like a hip-hop album.
01:49:06.000And then some stuff was just live as fuck, you know.
01:54:08.000We can find those things and put them all together.
01:54:11.000A big part of it too, to be completely honest, was every other record I've made, even the ones that some of these guys have played on, it was much more like I came in You're the songwriter and session musicians.
01:54:23.000And then you go out and you're the commodity.
01:55:45.000We were walking up to Mumbry and going to the only place that was still open to get some food at like 3 in the morning.
01:55:50.000So all these meat market bars are letting out.
01:55:52.000And we both look like a couple degenerate scumbags probably.
01:55:57.000We walk by and there's this group of like four or five obviously Vandy fucking football players, like just huge dudes, young men, and pretty inebriated.
01:56:08.000And we're walking by and I hear one of them say, oh look, it's the Strokes.
01:56:15.000And I blew it off, whatever, I'm a grown-ass man, and I just kept walking and I got about 10 feet.
01:56:20.000I don't know why, I could just tell Bobby wasn't with me anymore.
01:56:23.000And I turn around and look back to see this motherfucker standing in the middle of the circle of all of them, like literally eight inches from this guy's face with his hands on his hip, wearing his leather jacket.
01:57:22.000It was pretty fascinating to watch them all immediately knew that they were dealing with something that they'd never experienced and they wanted fucking none of it.
01:57:29.000I was like, I think this is my new best friend.
01:57:31.000I'm going to be friends with this guy the rest of my life.
01:57:32.000This hot dog destroying man is not to be fucked with.
01:57:35.000This David Lee Roth organ playing motherfucker is alright with me.
02:00:46.000But all the other shit catches up, and it caught up to me pretty hard around the second kid.
02:00:53.000And I just realized, like, there's a smarter way to do this that will still provide for my family and all these guys, which is, like, less is more.
02:01:03.000And now I'll never tour like that again, because there's no need, one.
02:01:42.000Yeah, those guys, the great things about comedy is you only have to go out for a weekend.
02:01:47.000Sometimes I'll travel somewhere for one night and come home, and most of the shit I do is around L.A. It's like the practice stuff, just to stay sharp.
02:01:56.000But I have friends that do the long touring, and they start to go crazy.
02:04:33.000But to me, it sounded like they were performing the songs faster, which I always attributed to them being hyped up because they're in front of an audience.
02:14:21.000My friend Tate just got a severe concussion from doing some stunt work in a movie.
02:14:25.000He's having a hard time looking at lights.
02:14:30.000I fell on my back in some rehearsals for a movie last year.
02:14:35.000We had to go to New Orleans for like a week and rehearse this scene because it was going to be one like 12 minute shot.
02:14:42.000And Daniel Kaluuya and I had to like body slam each other on the pavement about 20 times one day and I guess I landed on the pad on the curb wrong.
02:14:50.000I got home that night and it felt like my kidneys were on fire and then I had to piss like every three minutes for the next week.
02:14:56.000I had some blood tracing and so of course the next week is when we went to actually film the fucking thing in Cleveland in the middle of the polar vortex.
02:15:02.000We're out there in the shoot and the whole time I'm just like I feel like I got a bladder infection from just from falling down one time wrong.
02:16:46.000Definitely when it comes to anything that's going to be throwing you around or battering you into something, the more muscle, the more strength you can put into your body, the more you can protect yourself, but obviously only so much.
02:17:01.000But when you think about wrestlers or anybody who does anything when they're getting slammed to the ground a lot, they're mostly doing it, if they're doing it as a competitive wrestler, doing it on mats that are cushioned.
02:17:14.000If you're doing it on the street, and they've got you doing some sort of stunt maneuvers, what kind of pads do they have underneath you?
02:17:43.000I definitely had to like judo flip his ass off onto a pad and we did all that but then like the stunt guys came out and did that shit for real onto frozen fucking concrete in negative 20 degrees and I was like oh yeah y'all can have at that you know but they for real like dude straight up suplexed this motherfucker on the pavement and they had knee pads and elbow pads on everything but you know it had to look real Those are the guys you wonder
02:18:48.000But the CGI, it's so obvious that it's not real people.
02:18:51.000So the guy who invented the software that James Cameron used to make Avatar did the video for the number four song on this film, Michael Arias.
02:31:05.000They should make a movie about this guy and let Bryan Cranston play.
02:31:07.000Sentenced to 15 years to life, died in prison in 2010. The funny thing is, you read in here that there's another guy that's his competition.
02:31:18.000That's the second worst doctor, or debatable.
02:31:52.000Born into a strict Mormon family, Brown was a gifted child.
02:31:58.000That's the open parts of a novel that goes terribly wrong.
02:32:02.000He had a miniaturization technique for clitorises.
02:32:06.000He took the patient's penis and turned it into a clitoris, apparently guaranteeing his client's full sexual pleasure.
02:32:14.000He presented his work at the 1973 Medical Conference, where his technique earned him the respect of some of the world's most famous surgeons.
02:32:22.000Without surgical qualifications, Brown had to perform his operations in the most unlikely and inappropriate locations.
02:32:29.000One early patient remembers going to his office assuming he would do a checkup but awoke from the anesthetic to discover that he had operated in the office.
02:32:38.000He turned his garage into an operating theater.
02:32:42.000And the more operations he did, the further his standards slipped.
02:34:25.000James Franco actually made a whole movie.
02:34:28.000The movie's so insane, James Franco made a movie about the making of the movie, about how insane it was.
02:34:35.000A guy was like this dude who's like an actor and things weren't going so well, so he put together enough money to make his own movie, but it was terrible.
02:34:42.000And in every scene, he was like making out with girls.
02:36:05.000So I'm going to have to do this offline.
02:36:07.000You're going to have to just, like I said, go home, kids are asleep, spoke blunt, watch our anime film, and then right after that, watch Chuck and Buck.
02:36:16.000Yeah, I'm going to definitely watch your anime film first.
02:36:20.000Chuck and Buck would be a good chaser.
02:36:21.000I don't know if Chuck and Buck is next.
02:36:22.000I think I've got to go with Head next.
02:36:24.000You might actually want to end on Sound and Fury to end on something positive and cool and good.