On this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the comedian and podcaster joins the show to talk about his life growing up in Los Angeles, his love of music, and the weirdest place he's ever been: the Viper Room.
00:04:55.000I don't want to look around there anymore.
00:04:56.000Well, Bart Sabrell, he's this researcher that's been doing these documentaries on the moon landing, and he's been saying it's fake since, like, I met him sometime in the early 2000s, I believe.
00:05:08.000And he put out this documentary called The Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon, and he's got a great quote.
00:05:13.000And he says, there's not a single thing that's not easier.
00:05:17.000Faster and cheaper to reproduce today from 1969, except the moon landing.
00:05:46.000I mean, if you look at just the way they filmed it, like when you watched it on television, the people that watched it on television, it was the first time ever where there was a news thing where the news stations, the networks didn't have a direct feed.
00:06:02.000What they had was they filmed the moon landing, they showed it on a projection screen, and then the networks pointed their camera at the projection screen.
00:06:29.000He played the lawman in Killers of the Flower Moon that shows up there near the end and finally kind of takes them down.
00:06:39.000But he's been on a lot of other stuff, and it's this really great movie about...
00:06:43.000faking the moon landing and all that stuff for like, you know, American kind of, um, cultural and economic dominance over Russia and all that.
00:07:13.000I think I saw him at the airport in Burbank a few months ago, actually.
00:07:18.000It seems like a stupid thing to say, but I don't think it is.
00:07:21.000And then after COVID, realizing how much stuff they can lie about, how much stuff the government can hide, how much stuff that people will just accept as being true despite...
00:07:33.000How much experts will go along with things.
00:12:22.000It was a wild movie, and they realized that the whole landing is being faked, and then, I mean, I won't spoil it, but then they get taken out.
00:12:56.000It's Coke and Pepsi, you know, because I was thinking, like, you know, that's the one thing that they did that everybody liked, and then they've kept that, as long as they keep that flavor.
00:15:18.000It's about this lady who's getting older and someone approaches her with this new experimental drug that allows you to live as a young person for seven days and then you have to switch back to the old person for seven days.
00:15:31.000I don't want to spoil it for anybody, but...
00:15:35.000I was like, I gotta watch something stupid on YouTube for a couple hours before I go to bed because I'm weirded out by this movie.
00:15:42.000Yeah, that's the reason I haven't watched it yet.
00:16:49.000What I don't like is when somebody's got all these balls in the air, they're juggling in front of me, and they're like, Charlie, I'm not juggling.
00:17:50.000Oh, and any time he won, like if he won big, we used to play his bingo, he used to run this bingo hall in New Orleans.
00:17:57.000And me and my cousin, we could, both of us with those bingo daubers, we could play like, we could play nine card pages for him.
00:18:05.000We got that good that we could keep up with it.
00:18:07.000And because he was running the place, nobody in there ever said shit about me and my cousin being like, you know, eight and 11 or whatever.
00:18:15.000And if we hit though, It was always a good time.
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00:19:45.000That's what keeps them going in life, just that next bet.
00:21:19.000What I just thought about, Joe, when I was on the street in New York, you know, I played up there, and I'm sure you know, but I'd play on the street all day, and at first I was playing in the parks.
00:21:33.000I was trying to play on street corners in the villages and all that.
00:21:36.000And you're dealing with traffic and cops.
00:21:40.000And that's what drove me down into the subway platforms.
00:21:44.000And those were really competitive, too.
00:21:46.000So even there, I started playing at the stations that nobody wanted or, you know, weren't desirable or, you know, nobody's really competing for the spots or whatever.
00:21:56.000And I would do that all day, and then I would hit open mics all over the...
00:22:05.000And the comedy guys were always the coolest, all of them, because we weren't in competition.
00:22:13.000I know comedians can be really competitive on the circuit, and obviously same thing on the music side.
00:22:19.000But I ended up playing a lot of Oh, cool.
00:22:27.000Open guys up with two or three songs or play their breaks or whatever.
00:22:31.000And, you know, all the comedy folks like me, I think, because, you know, I wasn't one of them.
00:24:28.000Shout out to my friend John Reeves from the Boneyard in Alaska.
00:24:32.000I got a buddy of mine who has this spot in Alaska where they just pull all kinds of crazy mastodon, woolly mammoth, fucking cave bear, all kinds of skulls, all kinds of wild shit out of this one piece of property where a lot of animals died.
00:24:46.000And he's taken a lot of the woolly mammoth.
00:27:40.000This kind of magic woman who had a barn out behind her house, and they called it the shanty.
00:27:49.000And she would have people over on the weekends and just kind of any random night, travelers, misfits, whatever, back there in the barn, and everybody would be telling stories and trading songs and, you know, taking potions.
00:28:07.000Long story short, this guy I met one night, his parents had, like, worked, they worked for, like, Texas Instruments, and he had disowned them, you know, because his parents were, like, scientists, and he woke up one day as a young man and realized they were, like, his parents were manufacturing, like, weapons, you know, and I never saw this guy again, but that was his whole deal, why he left Texas.
00:30:02.000One, probably 22, something like that.
00:30:04.000And I had done a little bit of hitching before, like around the south, Texas and Louisiana, but I'd never really been way out there.
00:30:13.000Anyway, I started hitchhiking around because I had to, but I remember it was in California the first time anybody besides my mama ever looked at me playing guitar as it having any kind of value.
00:30:30.000Like, any economic value or, like, it was a trade of, you know, recognition, you know?
00:30:39.000It was kind of the first time I was out there.
00:30:42.000So you'd been playing about four or five years back then?
00:31:00.000And I'll never forget, the first time anybody threw, like, just a pocket full of change in my case, I'm sure it's because they, you know, were worried about me and felt bad for me or whatever, you know?
00:31:13.000And it wasn't like that money hit the case and then, like, a light went off or anything, you know?
00:31:46.000You know, I've said it a lot, and it's funny, I'm a lot better known than I used to be, so it's like you say stuff about your family and they hear about it.
00:33:10.000Because I had broken my arm, and he realized if you carted that young boy out in front of those apartments when that lady answered the door, and it's these two brothers, and one of them's got a broken arm, she's going to go ahead and subscribe.
00:33:26.000Yeah, and in a nutshell, man, he, you know, through all that stuff, you know, he started out as a door-to-door salesman, you know, hustling newspaper subscriptions, right?
00:33:37.000Then he started like selling neckties and like men's clothing door to door in downtown Dallas office buildings, you know, and as a very young man.
00:33:52.000I did And he got in with some big old wolves, you know, and eventually it, it knocked everybody out and a lot of people died.
00:34:13.000A lot of people went to prison and, um, you know, we were in the paper and, uh, I couldn't So it ended up being like a Bob Marley type of thing.
00:34:30.000He said, if you're not living good, travel wide.
00:34:35.000And I literally just walked out of town because we had scarlet letters on our chest.
00:34:41.000That's when I really started learning how to stand behind that guitar and write songs and slowly but surely start.
00:34:49.000I learned how to play basically in front of people, and people just were giving me money kind of over time.
00:34:55.000That and, you know, food and shelter in exchange for my story at their back door.
00:35:00.000This episode is brought to you by Netflix.
00:36:56.000But before I ever left Texas, I moved in with his sister.
00:37:02.000And I remember, and she was just my friend.
00:37:05.000I was never in a relationship with her or anything.
00:37:08.000She was working at Silver City in West Dallas, the Gentleman's Club at 18, and making more money than anybody I'd ever seen.
00:37:17.000The girl was 18, you know, and just making crazy, crazy money, and she let me rent a room from her and kind of gave me a deal and all that, and I ended up writing a song kind of about it more recently called Easy Money that I did with Shooter on the Lonesome Drifter record.
00:37:36.000And that's kind of a thing, you know, if you're a poor kid from Texas, there's no such thing, you know, as easy money.
00:37:43.000But I can't remember why I was telling you that, but it was hard on, I just remember like seeing, you'd see like young women working in strip clubs, making big money.
00:38:00.000And the ones that I was around and have been around.
00:38:04.000Very, very hard for that line of work, my line of work, your line of work, not to become addicted.
00:41:55.000Either you have to be your own example, or you have to find an example of someone else who thought their way out of it.
00:42:01.000And for my brother, for all the trouble that he's been in, in a way, I think he also was trying to help me.
00:42:13.000You know, and so, you know, his hustle and his work ethic, in another sense, you know, was, that's been helpful to me too, you know, because I remember he used to hand out flyers and shit all over the place.
00:42:25.000And when I'd be like a teenager, he'd be like, he'd be like, listen to me now.
00:42:29.000If you leave an event at the other day that you're handing out flyers and you're flooding it with promotion, if you can even see that pavement underneath the, you know, pamphlets that you're handing out, you didn't promote it.
00:44:03.000Like if somebody has a, you know, if somebody, like some of these guys, you mentioned Oliver Anthony and some of these guys, they have a viral hit out of nowhere.
00:44:12.000They've never played a venue or anything in their life.
00:44:37.000What they were good about, though, in a lot of cases, was developing these artists on these rosters, even if they were taking advantage of these poor farm boys, taking advantage, you know, of, you know, poor black artists from the South or women or whatever.
00:44:52.000Nobody was getting a good deal, basically.
00:44:54.000But, you know, like guys like Willie Nelson.
00:45:04.000And you think about when Waylon breaks through, right, in the mid-70s, you know, as he's doing, you know, coming into his own in 1974, 1975.
00:45:18.000I mean, how many records in is he at that point?
00:46:00.000And what better way to develop than to just keep constantly producing new music and learn along the way?
00:46:05.000In being neglected or misunderstood by the business when I was first dealing with it, it was really a blessing because I ended up making so many records, you know?
00:47:23.000If I was on the road and I didn't get to pick my opening acts, like if I was working at a club and they had some local act in Florida or something like that and the guy was fucking terrible, I would literally have to not listen.
00:47:35.000I'd have to leave the room and just sort of time when I was going to go on stage so I could go on stage.
00:47:41.000With a fresh mindset, I couldn't think that this audience had been poisoned by this guy's shitty comedy.
00:48:03.000Yeah, and it's crazy that they could have that.
00:48:06.000That strong an effect on the audience like that that quick I mean somebody can be up there fucking it up like crazy musically Yeah, and you kind of get a pass, you know, right, you know poetic license or whatever Well, you know people it's tolerable if the guy's into it, you know He could be into his own music and you're like I'm not into it, but he's into it at least he's like doing his song if you're not indie if you're Doing comedy and the audience is not into it, you're fucked.
00:49:32.000He wanted people to be isolated and quarantined and taken away from society if they weren't willing to take this fucking experimental shit.
00:49:39.000I haven't kept up with him in recent years.
00:51:31.000It's crazy, and they're just fucking shuffling people in and out, trying to prescribe them as many things, and they're financially incentivized to prescribe things.
00:51:40.000And then they have extreme overhead because they have liability insurance, they have student loan debt, and they have, you know, a high overhead to keep their practice running.
00:51:50.000Where's Bernie Sanders when you need him?
00:52:12.000All this electricity is moving through it all the time.
00:52:16.000You know, like a semiconductor or whatever.
00:52:19.000And there was like a section of it that was like misfiring and it would cause an arrhythmia with me.
00:52:25.000And when I was a kid in South Texas, we were told that was all I knew about.
00:52:29.000And we were told that it was an annoyance.
00:52:32.000Because I almost died a couple times when I was really, really young from it.
00:52:36.000And, you know, my mama noticed and saved my life a couple times by getting, driving in, you know, into the city there in the San Benito and them hooking me up to all the wires and saving me.
00:52:49.000Anyways, they told me as I got older that it would just, I could get, you know, an ablation for it where they apply heat basically and close this electrical.
00:53:00.000Channel that's stuck in a loop or whatever But it but it wasn't life-threatening And then I got out here, you know, I was on the street for years And then when I was coming off the street Through kind of blues jams and I had been you know,
00:53:16.000I was working on Gondra farms and it started selling, you know Weed in the mail and all that to kind of get off street buy myself some better clothes Get myself a good guitar and amp and all that started showing up at blues jams and then I could like you know because everything takes money you know like Problem with being a street player was even go play the open mics that have a two damn drink minimum And they'd see my crazy ass come in and knew knew that I was You know pretty wild and they didn't have any money and it didn't smell and I didn't smell good So
00:53:47.000they really didn't like me for the longest time or whatever.
00:53:50.000But through blues jams, I started leading bands and bars.
00:54:43.000Well, he took it home and he listened to it with his then girlfriend and now wife.
00:54:47.000And lo and behold, his agent, John Folk, called me up and started booking me.
00:54:51.000And then that's when I started playing the old Red Dirt, I like to call it the Hank Williams circuit, you know, the kind of old country chitlin circuit.
00:55:00.000John Folk had kind of inherited it from like Buddy Lee attractions from an earlier generation.
00:55:07.000It goes all the way back to Lucky Moeller and that old South Circuit that all the...
00:55:20.000And then they, you know, then Coke and Pepsi came in, you know, CAA and William Morris and Wazerman and bought it all off, you know, bought it all out.
00:56:10.000200 and whatever shows a year for a bunch of years in a row, playing all over the place.
00:56:15.000Seems like sometimes we play 21 nights in a row out there, you know, for shit kickers at Bonita Creek Hall and punk rock clubs in New Jersey and shit, you know?
00:56:24.000Playing at the fucking, you know, Saint?
00:56:26.000That little club, the Saint in Asbury Park?
00:57:11.000Marsha Millam put it on or whatever and then it turned into ACL radio and then Shady Grove closed down there on Barton Springs or wherever.
00:58:54.000The point, long round point that I'm making to you about medical industry that I learned the hard way, man, is like, no one's advocating for you.
00:59:41.000So here they are covering me, and probably because I don't have money and they're dealing with, you know, how it is, you know, American business practices or whatever.
00:59:50.000They're like, here's this mechanical valve.
00:59:53.000And I go and look it up, Joe, and it's like, you know, if you have a mechanical valve, you automatically are on blood thinner the rest of your life.
01:01:29.000Yeah, but what they did is they put a...
01:01:38.000The medical industry is, I think, really fucked up and really predatory, totally profit-driven, and people's health and preventative well-being and all that, we don't give a fuck about that in this country.
01:01:53.000There's no money to be made off of people taking care of themselves and eating right and being preventative.
01:02:02.000The part about it that is amazing, though, even in the kind of insanity of all the land of cheap traders, is the technological advancements.
01:02:13.000The technological advancements in the medical field, though not really, you know, available to the common person, they are incredible advancements.
01:02:36.000It was just more experimental and they didn't want to do it.
01:02:39.000They were only doing it on really high-risk older patients.
01:02:43.000But I think it's already kind of gone more mainstream from where when they cut me open to if I did it right now, I could probably get around cutting it.
01:02:55.000And then what do they have to do to it?
01:02:57.000Well, so with me, what was happening was is I had to get the ablation first before I could deal with aortic valve disease is what it's called.
01:03:08.000And what it basically is is that over your aorta, there's these three valves that sit over the top of your aorta that they look like a Mercedes symbol is what they look like.
01:03:43.000And, I mean, I just got lucky, man, because I was, like, in the back of that fucking bus, and there was this lady driving us back then that, like...
01:04:27.000And there was this video passing around the industry, this guy they called Jimbo.
01:04:31.000And it was this bus driver that was like, you know, just a speed freak.
01:04:34.000And it was like this video of him where he was like on whatever he was on.
01:04:39.000Somebody had recorded him and they'd put a phone up or something because they knew it was nuts and he was having one of those fucking methamphetamine freakouts driving the bus down the road and it was getting all passed around the industry and I saw it because he was driving us at the time.
01:04:57.000I remember we woke up somewhere in New Mexico one morning because we were going on this road all of a sudden and I get up and I go to the front of the bus and we're like on some Fucking two-track, you know, Caliche fucking dirt road that was like behind a gate in a bus, that bus, right?
01:05:20.000And I get up there, and he's looking all crazy, and the door handle, the inside door handle, the bus had been pulled off and shit.
01:07:36.000But I remember something he said a long time ago that stuck with me where he was talking about American consumerism over the last hundred years.
01:07:48.000It really kind of illuminated my mind.
01:07:55.000He was saying, there are people working really, really, really hard to eliminate your sense of purpose for the explicit goal.
01:08:06.000Of making you a more efficient consumer, right?
01:08:12.000All human beings live for and desire a life of purpose.
01:08:32.000Wood making or your buddy with this ancient tooth that he's carving into this beautiful piece of art You know?
01:09:01.00090s radio just Blasting my brain as a kid.
01:09:11.000that like it's like so much programming is so hard for me to watch because you know that it's only a vehicle for the commercials right right so whenever i'm watching something and as soon as i think that it's not that good
01:09:41.000I feel like I killed a lot of the false version of me that I was becoming that I only realized when I walked away from Crystal City.
01:11:51.000And he would show up over in the States a couple times a year, and he was doing really well there in Denmark, and the state really sponsors the arts there in a big way, and it's a small country, high quality of life.
01:12:05.000He really had it made over there, and when he was coming over to the States to play music, it was almost more of a leisure thing for him.
01:12:15.000And he'd show up at the open mics and all this shit.
01:12:17.000And he, I think he really, And he eventually helped me get over to Europe.
01:12:28.000And I played the club circuit in Copenhagen for like six weeks or whatever.
01:12:33.000And I was really rough around the edges.
01:12:36.000And the American novelty in the folk, in blues clubs around Copenhagen wore off really quick.
01:12:43.000And I wound up back on the street, but this time in Europe.
01:12:46.000And as soon as I started playing on the street in Copenhagen, man, then being a real Texan in Europe in front of tourists on the street, man, that's when I started making money.
01:15:06.000Europe is way ahead of us on all of that because in a lot of ways America when you try to like analyze America against Europe and But we're more similar to Latin or South America in a lot of ways, with just how big the country is.
01:15:28.000You know, and, you know, the, you know.
01:15:37.000Because the country's so big, we got the states that are divided up, all that type of shit, those kind of technologies to hit the people and become mainstream, it's a slower process here, right?
01:15:48.000And one of the things about the pandemic that is obvious to me now is a lot of people realized that they could speed that up.
01:16:00.000I think they'd been trying to eliminate the risks.
01:16:54.000You know, and that's part of it, and if they don't have to pay people, they can maximize their profits, and then it becomes a very impersonal experience.
01:18:24.000Yeah, you know, and I've been saying that in the music business, like in country music, you know, like Mark Twain said, history doesn't repeat, it rhymes.
01:19:38.000Stapleton made his career as a songwriter early on, you know, and that's what catapulted.
01:19:44.000Really, for everything, you know, that he's got going on now, there's a really great foundation there of a guy that's spent his whole life writing songs.
01:19:54.000So Willie actually had success pretty early when he got to Nashville with, you know, songs like Nightlife and Crazy and all that kind of stuff.
01:20:04.000Baron Young and Patsy Cline and these kinds of really big artists were cutting his songs pretty early on, right?
01:20:10.000But he was so weird to the establishment at the time.
01:20:15.000So, you know, kind of had this like philosophical thing to his writing that was going over the heads of the hillbilly deal.
01:20:44.000Waylon was like, man, I'd be number one all the time and I was fucking dead broke.
01:20:48.000You know, it's like, man, they got you out there seven nights a week and you're coming back and Lucky Moeller's telling them that you owe him fucking 10 grand.
01:21:03.000He leaves RCA because Jerry Wexler is coming down and A&R and Texans out of this progressive Central Texas scene of that era that was so unique.
01:21:14.000And it happened then and just totally unique.
01:21:17.000The whole scene, everything here, the movement, the hippies and the cowboys, where everybody could hear in the capital of Texas, It was weird, but they were in the same rooms.
01:21:31.000We're still doing that here, you know, which is what I'm really proud of, you know, and glad that this town never turned into Nashville or LA or any of those towns.
01:21:41.000The best thing that ever happened to us is that the business didn't grow up like that.
01:21:44.000I really do believe that because it's allowed our unique culture to continue to grow, even if it's, like I said, and sometimes it's good to be neglected by that machine.
01:23:51.000which at least they're being honest about, you know?
01:23:52.000But then what they would do that was so weird is, like, they'd give you – Like a tenth of that, you know, kind of on the independent, alt-country, Americana circuit.
01:24:17.000But what frustrated me about it, Joe, was that they're only giving you a tenth of money, but they're behaving like major labels with these two-year record cycles.
01:24:30.000That just kills an artist that hasn't broken through.
01:25:58.000you know what I mean and then by the time we get to the 80s you know it's like this level of like pop culture and like American pop culture as a global export Kind of in the 80s and 90s.
01:26:30.000It's kind of like in country music today.
01:26:33.000One of the reasons everybody's sprinting into it.
01:26:36.000It's because it's like one of the only places left where there's like loyalty, long-term loyalty in the fan base compared to like, you know, what happened with pop music in the last 20 years with pop and hip-hop and all that.
01:27:35.000Something I wanted to bring up with the Willie and Waylon thing, and I've been meaning to tell Coulter this, so I'll just tell him on your show.
01:27:41.000So we were both on the 30 Tigers roster for years.
01:27:45.000I met Coulter out at Willie's Ranch goddamn 10 years ago, right?
01:29:15.000And RCA, they had hollered at me through one of their A&R guys or whatever.
01:29:20.000Their big guys were never really interested in me out there, right?
01:29:23.000So they weren't one of the ones that was really hot on me.
01:29:27.000But David Macias at 30 Tigers, very similar to...
01:29:38.000And when he left, all of a sudden, those guys, because he took everything with him, were about to lose me, and they fucking handed the keys over to me.
01:30:49.000I've been right through Saskatoon, even that big town there, you know, and I guess he's not too far down south from there, but, like, it's a – Yeah.
01:31:07.000And he grew up on, you know, Waylon and all that stuff, you know, and all the cowboy and all the, you know, he knows that cowboy music probably better than anybody.
01:32:24.000Well, they want to be it, but they don't know how to get there, and they don't know how to do it, and they've never lived it, and they've been paying attention to all the polls and the focus groups, and they've been listening to the executives, and they've been taking the advances and driving the Mercedes.
01:32:38.000They're doing all the shit that leads you down the wrong path.
01:32:42.000And then one day you realize, like, fuck.
01:32:47.000It's interesting, because it's like, you know, there's always going to be these examples of something that pops through that's real, that people gravitate towards, and then there's always going to be these people trying to capitalize on it and make money off of it and trying to figure out how to recreate it in an inauthentic way.
01:34:28.000I'd listen to A Whole Lotta Love and If Six Was Nine.
01:34:31.000I'd listen to that all the time on the way down Laurel Canyon.
01:34:37.000Can you imagine how crazy that must have sounded coming through the radio or coming through people's sound systems in America in the late 60s?
01:41:24.000Man, you know, listening to Gary do that, and you talking about how much you love Stevie Ray Vaughan, it just, you know, it reminds me.
01:41:30.000It's like, you know, this, to me, it's like, you know.
01:41:38.000Because if you're in Texas, all that shit over there on the other side of Mississippi, it goes away for us.
01:41:46.000There's a brashness, there's a boldness in any sound, whether it's coming out of honky-tonk or coming out of a blues joint.
01:41:57.000In Texas, it's a totally different sound.
01:42:00.000You know, it's like Billy Gibbons talked about this a lot, you know, like when those guys were trying to break through on the national scene, the idea of Texas is just a total stigma, right?
01:42:10.000It's all hillbillies, it's all provincial, you know, and all this shit, you know, and so it's like you go to Nashville or whatever and it's all Appalachia.
01:44:34.000Mark Maron said that he hung out with Kennison and they did so much coke that he had voices in his head for a fucking year afterwards.
01:44:40.000a year like literally like schizophrenic you know like hearing voices in his head for a year before they stopped talking to him yeah they were doing cocaine yeah and they were doing at the viper room everywhere yeah he was doing it everywhere yeah but kenison became almost like a caricature of himself it became sort of captured by this The perception by this character that they had created.
01:45:30.000And New York, which is like the club comics.
01:45:32.000That was like the Dave Vittels and these guys that would like – And then there was this new scene, this new scene out of Houston, this new scene out of the Laugh Stop in River Oaks.
01:45:48.000And I remember the first time I ever worked there, man, you could feel it in the building.
01:45:53.000You could feel that they had been there.
01:47:02.000And so many people tried to emulate it that at the green room, the punchline in Atlanta, there was a, like people wrote a bunch of shit on the walls in the green room, but one of the big ones that said, quit trying to be Hicks.
01:47:19.000Dude, you'd come, so after Stevie Ray Vaughan passed, right?
01:47:23.000I remember, you know, we were up in Dallas-Fort Worth, and you'd come down here, we'd come down here in high school and shit, and go up and down 6th Street.
01:48:46.000And then Hicks went on stage and immediately started bombing.
01:48:51.000Immediately he opened up with saying that he's tired of performing and tired of going up and...
01:49:07.000But the comics were dying, and there was like 300 people in the room.
01:49:11.000By the time he was done performing, there was 50. There was 50, and there was maybe me and my friend Greg Fitzsimmons were in the back of the room just dying, laughing, and maybe 10 comics.
01:49:21.000We had all come to see Hicks because we had heard about him.
01:50:32.000But it was back when there was all this like pop mall comedy or pop mall music and he fucking hated it You know and it was and he was just Yeah, rallying against corporatism.
01:50:46.000It's going to make a comeback, that little sub-genre.
01:51:21.000It was so shut down, and I knew – And I came to Texas, and Ron White was already here.
01:51:34.000So Ron White, who's a very good friend of mine, and Gary, I knew Gary from L.A. He used to hang out at the Comedy Store, too, and that's why I became friends with him.
01:51:43.000And he moved here, I think, 2017 or 2018, and I talked to him on the phone.
01:51:48.000I'm like, why'd you go back to Austin?
01:51:49.000He's like, man, I can't fuck with those people in L.A. It's just like, I'm tired of it, man.
01:58:52.000And I was just working so hard, I never really thought about anything else.
01:58:56.000But something about the California shutdown that's funny.
01:59:01.000Not funny, but the pandemic hit, and I was unknown.
01:59:07.000But I had just finished that record, Welcome to Hard Times, and it didn't have anything to do with – I'd had the two surgeries.
01:59:16.000I'd gone through a relationship that crashed and burned in a tailspin.
01:59:23.000I'd gotten rid of a management relationship that was going nowhere.
01:59:30.000And I wrote Welcome to Hard Times just kind of out of my own personal kind of dark feelings about where I was going through and just the whole like rigged...
02:00:01.000I wrote the record in November, cut it in December, got the Masters back, and a week or two later, I remember me and Taylor Grace, my now wife, Dayton, and we were at a diner in Cloudcroft, New Mexico.
02:00:18.000And my manager at the time called me and said that South by Southwest was canceled.
02:00:22.000And that, for us here at that time, that's when we knew the shit was real.
02:00:28.000Nothing could stop that machine that was South by Southwest at the time.
02:00:31.000And strangely for me, I'm not, I knew a lot of people that have known a lot of people that have, But for me, my career trajectory totally changed early on in the pandemic because no one was putting out records.
02:00:54.000No one had any interest in putting out records.
02:00:58.000And for that reason, David Macias, because I was riding his ass, actually thanks to John Folk at the time, was like, don't let him shelve your record.
02:01:38.000I remember a publicist told me once, you should spend at least double the money marketing your record that it costs you to make it and at least match it.
02:02:50.000And, you know, sometimes you write a song that, get lucky, I was writing about personal experience.
02:03:00.000And it spoke, for me, it wasn't a big record, but it changed my trajectory because Welcome to Hard Times, the song, really spoke to what was happening in America.
02:03:21.000It's like, and then I did all those records and Welcome to Hard Times and Music City USA coming like kind of right for the...
02:03:31.000And then the man from Waco that I made down in Lockhart with Bruce Robinson, which was like the first time really that I'd made a studio record with my guys, you know, with more money.
02:03:43.000And Bruce Robinson, a songwriting friend that was not stopping me from being me, you know?
02:03:49.000And then that one was my first one to hit the Billboard 200.
02:03:57.000Really took off another big step from there.
02:04:00.000And then I got hooked back up with Shooter.
02:04:02.000See, I used to open up for Shooter because Shooter was getting booked by John Folk too, right?
02:04:06.000And the two guys that took a liking to me early on, like pretty much nobody else did, was Evan Felker and the Turnpike Troubadours and Shooter Jennings.
02:04:14.000You know, a shooter would take me out and, like, I mean, he's fucking Waylon's son.
02:04:25.000And he would give me little things to live by.
02:04:26.000Like, when he saw how hard I was working out there, he's like, it says you can't park behind the Nashville Palace, but between me and you, you fucking camp there and nobody's going to say shit.
02:04:35.000And I lived in that fucking parking lot.
02:04:37.000That's the kind of shit you get by on, you know what I mean?
02:04:57.000And all the pressure of the business is mounting on me.
02:05:01.000And I'm just trying to get away from my manager and the machine and my phone and all that shit.
02:05:06.000And I decide to leave the phone at the house.
02:05:09.000And I had heard from a journalist about this secret shrine in a liquor store.
02:05:16.000Dedicated to Waylon Jennings in his hometown of Littlefield, Texas, there on 84. I'd known about it, but in the movie, I'm playing like I've never heard of it, and I'm going on this pilgrimage to find out if this little museum really exists, which it does.
02:05:31.000It's run by his youngest brother, James D., Waylon's youngest brother.
02:05:35.000And so to get the movie going, I needed to get on the phone with Shooter, you know, to get hooked up with James D and them, and we got the idea to get his mama, Jesse Coulter, involved, and all that.
02:05:45.000And I wanted to use some of Waylon's music for the film, and I was scared to death to ask for it.
02:05:51.000But Shooter had always been good to me, and so we ended up having the conversation.
02:05:56.000We caught up on a lot of stuff, because, see, I'd been hearing that he was producing, right?
02:06:01.000But I couldn't make heads or tails of it, where he was going with it.
02:06:04.000And truthfully, I was, like, avoiding producers altogether.
02:06:07.000Because a lot of these guys, it's like, you know, they're such big names, it overshadows the artist.
02:07:02.000And I had almost made a record at Sunset Sound there in old downtown Hollywood, the old Sunset Sound studio.
02:07:11.000I'd wanted to go in there because Mark Neal had told me about it, and I was tired of making records in Georgia and didn't want to go over to the wrong side of Mississippi.
02:07:20.000I wanted to make a record in California.
02:07:23.000And I told Shooter in passing on the phone that it had fallen through and, you know, did he know such a sound?
02:07:29.000And he was like, man, Charlie's crazy.
02:07:30.000I'm signing the lease on Studio 3, the print studio, tomorrow.
02:10:27.000But it's that whole thing where it's like, okay, I can play the blues, I can play country music, I can play folk music, learn how to play all that shit on the street, matter of fact, right?
02:10:38.000It's surprising to me that people would question my authenticity and point to me playing in subway cars.
02:10:46.000as this aha moment that I'm not who I said I was.
02:10:51.000Why don't you go try to play in those New York City train cars?
02:10:54.000Well, that's people that are just talking.
02:10:55.000Brother, I'd rather get on a fucking bull.
02:12:37.000Fate is a thing that's like, that's destiny.
02:12:40.000You know, like Waylon, like Shooter and like the Waylon Jennings thing for me, you know, is like, you know, I was out there, you know, we were, I did my, I debuted at the Houston Rodeo back in the spring.
02:13:29.000And it's the biggest rodeo on earth, you know, which is why you got everybody from, like I said, you know, Nowadays, you got Post Malone and Beyonce both playing it.
02:13:48.000Anyway, I played there, and we were putting a live record out on it, and me and Shooter were mixing it there at Sunset Sound.
02:13:55.000And then I stayed the extra night because he had the party at the Viper Room for the announcement of these three unreleased Waylon Jennings records.
02:14:07.000This is truly, legitimately unreleased music by arguably the king, certainly the king of all the outlaws.
02:14:17.000But in my opinion, when it comes to Nashville country music, whatever you want to call it, man, a buddy of mine, John Spong, a journalist here in town, a Texan, we were at the Sagebrush doing an interview a couple years back.
02:14:34.000And he was saying that, like, if Willie Nelson to country music is like Che Guevara, right?
02:14:42.000Waylon Jennings was the long-haired prince of darkness, right?
02:14:46.000And, like, he's the guy that, like, he's from West Texas, right?
02:14:51.000The guy learned, he learned how to play bass on stage.
02:14:56.000He learned how to play bass on fucking stage, backing up Buddy Holly, right?
02:15:18.000But these guys, whether it's Robert Johnson or B.B. King in the Delta or whatever, or Buddy Holly out in West Texas, you're influenced by the radio and all that.
02:15:28.000But there's something to be said for how hard that earth is out there in West Texas.
02:15:34.000People talk a lot of shit about Lubbock, right?
02:15:36.000It smells like shit because it's cows everywhere.
02:16:53.000And I know I'm going back on that a lot, but my path that led to making records with Shooter was that when I started figuring out the map is when I cracked the code.
02:17:06.000And realize what Waylon was doing musically.
02:17:09.000I finally fell in love with him musically.
02:17:12.000And it was on this specific record from 1968 called Hanging On.
02:17:17.000And every swinging dick in this business that I ever knew coming up in Texas, if it had anything to do with Texas songwriters or country, every one of them wanted to be Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Towns Van Zandt, and Billy Joe Shaver.
02:17:57.000So a lot of guys I knew when I started playing all the shows with Willie, Willie called me up and got me on with his agent and shit and put me on like 50 shows.
02:18:05.000And a lot of guys I knew were like looking at me like, man, why do you get to play with Willie?
02:18:32.000But, like, how I think I've landed with Shooter and his family and playing all those shows with Willie and getting married on his ranch and all that stuff is because, not because I worship Willie Nelson, but because I think Willie looked at me and was like, I like what you're doing.
02:22:47.000And then he comes to New York with that and takes that spoken word improvisational thing.
02:22:55.000And like all the best rappers I saw in that town, they were all like spoken word poets because, you know, they just were smart and quick, you know, and like we then we got together and like.
02:23:08.000And again, I went from making where I would make $30.
02:23:12.000All of a sudden, we would make $300 and split it 50-50.
02:23:16.000And we turned that into a whole really fine, pretty well-oiled machine where there started being five or six of us and we were bringing guys up and down from New Orleans and shit.
02:23:26.000So that's where you see the trumpet players, different spoken word rappers.
02:23:33.000Owned by Hasids that were, like, renting out space that was supposed to be for rehearsal, but really everybody was living there and selling drugs and shit.
02:26:31.000Like, who you come in contact with on those subway cars, you know what I mean?
02:26:34.000It's like, I saw Jake Gyllenhaal on the train one day, and then some other day on the, you know, six train, it'd be like the NBA commissioner gave us a $100 bill.
02:26:43.000You know, it's like, to me, that's like, that's all it is, you know?
02:26:49.000It's like, whatever the circuit is, it's like, putting yourself out there.
02:26:54.000And when you go out in public, man, when you go out in public, and you put yourself out there, And you really do that, that's a transformation.
02:28:38.000And they're putting us in front of these, like, computer screens and showing us, like, gym class heroes and the gorillas and Odd Future and Janelle Monae and, like, doing these focus group training.
02:28:54.000You know, and where they're going to plug you in to the thing.
02:28:58.000And it was like, what was so difficult about it for me, I'm not, they didn't do anything wrong.
02:29:03.000You know, we were young, desperate men playing in public transit.
02:29:07.000You know, be careful what you ask for, you know.
02:29:10.000I was mad for a long time, but I've been eating off that plate forever because it...
02:30:33.000You know, and so it's like, I know a lot of these guys in the business, they're like, oh man, you know, I don't pay attention to the business shit and all that type of stuff.
02:31:59.000But I kept growing and doing my comedy at the comedy store.
02:32:03.000And that was the most important thing that I just kept doing comedy.
02:32:06.000And then the money was just like fuck you money.
02:32:09.000So it's like because I had the fuck you money, I could kind of be myself.
02:32:13.000And, you know, there was a lot of temptation.
02:32:15.000Like, I remember the producers of Fear Factor were like, what are you doing?
02:32:18.000Like, because some of my comedy was just out there.
02:32:20.000Like, you know, this gets you in trouble.
02:32:22.000This is not network television comedy.
02:32:25.000I was like, well, then I won't do network television anymore.
02:32:28.000Like, once I had a certain amount in the bank, I was like, all right, this is more money than I ever thought I'd ever have in my whole fucking life.
02:32:34.000And I never thought I'd ever be wealthy.
02:32:36.000And then all of a sudden I have money.
02:32:38.000So if you have fuck you money and you don't say fuck you, what's the point?
02:32:43.000What's no one's gonna say fuck you then if you're gonna be a prisoner right to that money like you the like Everybody says just afraid to be you afraid to be yourself Like that's the only time you can really do it is when you have you know It's like the universe gives you this gift and what is the gift is a gift of freedom and you have to choose to either accept it and take it and and run with it or Be captured by it and then want more and more and more forever Forever.
02:33:13.000You know, we were talking about my friend Brian has this friend who's worth three billion dollars and he feels poor because his friend is worth 80. You know how crazy that is?
02:34:20.000I think that's what makes people say it's the shadiest business.
02:34:25.000I don't think it's the shadiest business, but a guy told me that in New York, actually when I got caught up in the Sony thing with the train robbers deal y 'all were showing on the screen, A lot of people were trying to sign us.
02:34:39.000Actually, the guys at A&R'd Wu-Tang, like DJ Scott Free and Matty C, they were trying to get us into a deal.
02:34:46.000Citizen Cope had a deal on the table and all that shit.
02:34:51.000And it was like, he was the one that told me that.
02:34:56.000He was like, man, fuck what you heard.
02:34:59.000Now, I had come from a background of dealing with some pretty crazy shit in Texas, you know, with everything.
02:35:06.000But even in that business, like people that are, if you're trying to play the stock market or whatever, Wall Street, it's a corrupt business and it is really fucked up, but it's highly regulated.
02:35:18.000I mean, compared to the music business.
02:37:06.000And I've always liked this one because I felt like it was a little bit of both.
02:37:10.000And I didn't know anything about it at first.
02:37:13.000But the reason I never take it off anymore is when I started reading about what it meant to the Egyptians was that it meant safe passage as you journey through this world and get ready to go on to the next one.
02:39:13.000I mean, there's this group of scientists that believe that there's structures under the pyramids that go two kilometers deep into the earth.
02:39:37.000These people knew things, and we don't understand how they knew it or what they knew.
02:39:41.000And we don't know if the people that lived in ancient Egypt that we considered ancient Egypt, like, you know, 2000 BC, we don't know if they found those structures or if those people built those structures.
02:39:54.000Weirdness with Egypt, because the construction is so beyond anything else that exists anywhere on Earth, and especially when you're dealing with 4,500 plus years ago.
02:40:06.0004,500 years ago is the conventional estimations.
02:40:09.000But there's a lot of these heretic archaeologists that think, no, this is a lot older than that.
02:40:16.000I mean, there's a king's list that goes back 30,000 plus years.
02:40:35.000The most profound evidence is just the vastness of the Egyptian Empire and just the vastness of the construction, the way they were able to bring these stones from 500 miles away through the mountains that are 80 tons.
02:42:03.000You know, when I was like a kid, you know, a lot of people have had this thought, but it's like, you know, I'm always like looking up here in the stars and it's like, if they're saying that the stars are basically infinite.
02:42:14.000Then it's infinite possibility for other planets with life on it, which basically is a certainty, right?
02:42:24.000And the more we explore in the known universe, the more we understand that it's much more likely that this is not an anomaly, that there's many, many planets out there.
02:44:08.000Well, we're about to find out because if this shit keeps popping off with Israel and Iran and they start going nuclear, That we're so close to emerging as a Type 1 civilization.
02:44:26.000We're so close to getting out of this barbaric, you know, territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons.
02:44:34.000We're so close to passing this stage that we're in right now, as long as we don't fuck it up.
02:44:41.000And who knows how many times people might have fucked it up in the past.
02:44:44.000I mean, that might be what we're looking at when we're looking at ancient Egypt.
02:45:24.000Type 1 civilization known as a planetary civilization defined by our Kardashev scale as the one that's harnessed and controls all available energy on its planet.
02:45:35.000This includes utilizing all forms of energy from sources like solar, wind, geothermal, and potentially even harnessing nuclear fusion.
02:45:43.000A Type 1 civilization is also characterized by a global technologically advanced society with a high degree of interconnectedness and the ability to manage planetary scale resources and weather.
02:45:58.000And AI, in best case scenario, helps us achieve that.