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[00:00:01] I'm a sciatic nerve pain. It's dreadful. I've seen something advertised on television that you put right on your leg just below your knee that puts pressure on the sciatic nerve and relieves the pain. So they say.
[00:00:26] The fact that it was advertised on television doesn't give me a lot of faith in the product. No, I trust that there might be some luck involved or something like that. Maybe it's only mild sciatica. There are two herniated discs. Sounds serious to me.
[00:00:43] I have L4 and 5 are collapsed and my right thigh has been asleep since 1997. I assume then those are the common because yeah, my problem is L4 and 5 as well. Yeah. That's what it is. If you jump off too many garages when you're a kid, you pay for it.
[00:01:04] Your way was a lot more fun. I was talking to the doctor. There's a Cornell office in Manhattan I went into and she asked me how I did it. I said, you know, I was at the gym lifting weights. She said we get that all the time.
[00:01:27] My way was a little less fun than your way as I didn't jump off enough garages. I should. I mean, weightlifting is something lifting working out with weights is not a bad thing to do. If you have proper somebody knows what they're doing when they're guiding you.
[00:01:43] Well, I wish you the best of luck with it. Good mending and quick way. You had the show in New York. I know you had the show in LA. We played in New York.
[00:01:54] This band now the quirky band that we played in New York in 2019, the first time. Then we had a nice evening sold out show blah, blah, blah. And then we had a came out here to LA and we played the same show at the Hammer Museum.
[00:02:10] And then COVID came. We had to cancel a show we had organized in Chicago. We were offered to think about dates in Europe and all the capitals, blah, blah, blah, blah countries. And so now we had to COVID kill the whole idea.
[00:02:26] And then lately, a fellow I know in New York who runs the Sculpture Center named Sourub Mojave got in touch with us again. And he had organized the first thing at Boston Rouge and said that they wanted to know if we were interested in playing again.
[00:02:45] And it seemed that COVID was lightening up. I've been vaccinated to the teeth. So I thought we might be able to have a go. So we booked a show. There was a 25th anniversary or 15th anniversary, some anniversary of theirs and they wanted
[00:03:02] us to participate and we were happy to be invited. But then they booked the show in August and in August there's nobody in New York. I'm told it's like Paris apparently in August. So we can't, we pushed the show to what you saw there in December.
[00:03:18] But in the meantime, we had a show. We had booked two other shows, one in San Francisco and one in Los Angeles. And we canceled the San Francisco show for business reasons. But we kept the show here in LA and we played there on the 31st.
[00:03:40] And I still managed to get COVID done. David Thomas of Peribu invited me to sit with him and his new cohort when they were in town playing a show. And I agreed to when I went there and played with him.
[00:03:57] Wayne Kramer played and Kirstie, I can't think of her second name at the moment, David. There's Claire, I can't think of her name at the minute either. But I believe she had COVID when they played in New York. And I got it.
[00:04:16] And luckily I had, like I said, I've been properly vaccinated a lot. And I also got always allowed to get Paxlovaid, which I warmly recommend if you ever get COVID. It helps.
[00:04:32] I also, except when we got COVID was, I don't know, I went and got this new variant. So I felt comfortable enough to go to New York. I got on an airplane. I wore a mask the whole way.
[00:04:44] And went and played the show, put my mask back on and got on the airplane again and came home. And it's like that, you know? So there's not much shaking. Although the Corky Band is a very fine, I've got some found players.
[00:05:01] And we're going to make a new album in January called Corky Returns. That's at least the tentative. And the Corky Band is infinitely more popular than the Rec Rail. The Rec Rail is a very evil organization. It seems to be regarded as.
[00:05:17] And the people not only are unusual, people come to those gigs. All right. Small numbers coming on the Rec Rail. We don't do business. But Corky Band seems to draw flies. It's okay. I had both Wayne and David on the show.
[00:05:32] And Alan Ravenstein on at 1.2 is a really interesting guy. He doesn't care. I don't think very much. Oh, really? No. I went in here and read with him. I invited him out here to play some shows with us one time some years ago.
[00:05:49] And then the end of the 90, I think it was. I can't even remember exactly where it was. But one of the shows was at the Gatti. In other words, a rock and roll club here in town.
[00:05:57] And we had a show at Third Show lined up in San Francisco. Well, he booked and didn't want to play the Third Show. So, by any means, he went home. And then I read somewhere where he complained. He said he didn't like the money. And I thought, oh.
[00:06:11] And that's an interesting comment. And you booked, sorry. Then there was a magazine put together by a guy in upstate in Washington. And then Alex Parrish put together a book about kangaroo. And he interviewed Ravenstein. Ravenstein couldn't remember anything that he had done in connection with the record.
[00:06:33] He didn't say there was no point in telling him to do anything because he just did what he did. And he didn't remember who else played on the record. He didn't remember anything that we ever did together.
[00:06:42] So I had to gather that he's don't want to know me. So I'll take this opportunity to say bye-bye, Alan. Maybe he just has a bad memory. What's your sense of why it's this solo album from so long ago? It had very little success at the time.
[00:07:04] Obviously, it's grown and drawn a lot of fan base. Jeff Travis describes it as a cult. There's a cult of quirky people, which I think is very interesting. I'm delighted that people actually are taking to the record.
[00:07:23] Albert Hillen told me that this is the record that I'll be remembered for. And I don't know, dude. I mean, people say it's very personal. And I say, solo records tend to be personal, don't they? But solo records are personal. The personal part of the re-crayola is politics.
[00:07:45] Politics, I take politics personally. And in re-crayola we dare say things about these kinds of matters and so on. There's not much politics in the community. There's more psychology today and human relations and stuff like that.
[00:08:02] I think that people are able to relate to the subject matter a bit better. Maybe the language is a little bit funnier. Because there's a lot of rather didactic forms used in re-crayola in contrast. For example, I mean, there's not didactic. It's maybe not the right word.
[00:08:21] I'm not trying to teach anybody anything. But we do discuss things that have content. Everything has got content, of course. I take that back as well. And I wish I could say that re-crayola is not holistic, but all content is holistic. So it's really difficult.
[00:08:38] These things are difficult to talk about. So I find it difficult even to describe that the effects consist of in any case. I mean, the re-crayola is an interesting project to me because after the original, after Barthelme and Cunningham and I broke off, it was five pieces.
[00:08:56] First it was Rick and I, then it was Rick and Steve and I and Bonnie Emerson and Danny Shack. And then Bonnie Emerson and Danny Shack were let go. And it was just Rick and Steve and I.
[00:09:06] And then looked up and then it was Rick and Steve and I and the familiar ugly. And then we let the familiar ugly go and it was just Rick and Steve and I. And then we recorded some music with Fahy in Berkeley in 1967.
[00:09:19] And then the band, we got back to Texas, the band was over. And since then, the re-crayolas come together. They came together again in England when Andrew Lauder of Radar Records made a deal with the Ligland Rogers for the back catalog of international artists.
[00:09:39] Up to them, nothing had happened with it. I mean, we claimed that re-crayola played on Nye and Grossman Conspirator. Jesse Chamon and I were not the re-crayola until Andrew Lauder made a deal with us for soldier talk.
[00:09:52] And they said to me, Mayo, you can go and be a solo. You can go out on your own now, right? Or you can have the band. What would you rather have? I said, I'd rather have the band because I don't want it to be a solo artist.
[00:10:05] I know what I can do by myself. And it's not that much fun. It's entertaining enough but I like to share ideas with other people. That's one of the reasons I like playing music. And so anyway, the band was reformed in 78s in England.
[00:10:27] Yes, with Jesse and I. And we had recorded some music with Argyll language before that. And we just kind of retro-retradically, okay, we were re-crayola. But it's not. It's just, it was a convenience. That's all.
[00:10:40] And the band has always been sort of like me and some version of a familiar ugly. And I've had the good fortune to have fantastic players. John McIntyre on drums, George Hurley on drums, you know, like Epic Soundtracks on drums.
[00:10:59] I mean, I've had some good drummers and now I've got Yah Yah Alcance in the Korky band. I'm able to, somehow when I ask musicians to play, lots of them have said yes. And very good ones.
[00:11:11] But it's a throw to give the oracle has been a throw-together band since Jesse left. And Ravenstein was in it one time when we threw it back together again. Jesse and Ravenstein in that place in the gigs at the re-crayola.
[00:11:24] And then Ravenstein played some gigs with Ben Anasly and Chris Taylor and I as the re-crayola. We recorded some music like that. Black Snakes we recorded, three songs on a trip to the United States to America. There's some of that stuff.
[00:11:41] Then I dropped it, went and lived in Germany for a while. And then one day I got to meet David Grubbs and we got talking and eventually we wound up thinking about what was going on. He asked me was I doing anything?
[00:11:55] And strangely enough I had done some demos of songs. I'd written six songs. I was thinking about music again for some reason, just thinking about it. And I told him, yeah, I got this demo and he said, what are you gonna do?
[00:12:07] And I told him, well I probably do what I usually do. I'd go to some record company and ask them to back roll me to make a record and see if we can make some money together. And he said, well you're going to Warner Brothers, you'll get lost.
[00:12:19] You know how it was more or less. And he was right about that. Warner Brothers, they couldn't sell Soldiers' Dog. That didn't work for them. And so I paid attention. He said I know some people in Chicago, would you mind if I play this for them? Go ahead.
[00:12:36] Well he got back to Chicago and he played it for Koretsky and Osborne, Drag City. And then I went to Texas to visit my mother. And Koretsky, it was Christmas time and Koretsky and I spent two days on the telephone more or less talking to each other.
[00:12:50] And he had to convince me more that what kind of an independent company Drag City was. Because I'm familiar with the end and outs of independent record industry as you can well imagine. I worked outside of the street, worked the other side too. The mainstream stuff.
[00:13:09] But he convinced me. And sure enough they turned out to be a very good record company. And we've done lots of stuff together. We've been together over what we were going on for. We got to make our first things in 92-3.
[00:13:24] So we've been together in about 30 years more or less. And learned a lot about, we've watched the CD become obsolescent more. The vinyl make a sort of like a faint return. Found out that carriers don't determine who's willing to stream and what does streaming mean.
[00:13:48] People are like, I mean you do business with Spotify right? When Neil Young quit Spotify over the Alex Jones crap that comes out of that creeps mouth. And Spotify making millions off of it and so on. I remember when Neil quit, I quit too, Rick real quick.
[00:14:08] And I'm talking to you today because I've seen that things have changed somewhat. But then I saw Elon Musk as rehabilitated this creature from the dark side of hell. In terms of deciding to call the quirky record a solo record, was that a pragmatic decision?
[00:14:26] It's what people did in those days. You know, like when one guy who was in a band goes off and makes a record by himself and hires people in to play on the record and he doesn't know necessarily.
[00:14:38] I knew one guy. I knew two. I knew Frank Davis and I knew Rock Romano. Because I'd worked with Frank. Frank Davis was a mentor to me. He was one of the early people I stuck to. We met when he was a folk singer.
[00:14:51] He sang at the gesture and I would go to this club and hang out there with him and Guy Clark. And the two of those guys were very friendly to me and very encouraging and nurturing about my musical attitude.
[00:15:04] When I wanted to make a record after the record, I got in touch with them. With Rock Romano was working at Walt Andrews' studio working on records. Rock was extremely versatile. He could do everything. He can engineer, he can play, he can think like hell.
[00:15:22] And Frank Davis is a legendary Houston figure. He was an inventor. He made some Mylar speakers. He made a microphone that we used on Corky that you hear on 2U. If you put headphones on, listen to 2U sometime on a stone stereo with headphones on.
[00:15:45] And you'll hear the microphones. Because he made it kind of like had a canister of gas that drove a pipe that went up like that. And it had a pipe on the end of each end of the pipe. It was a microphone facing in like that.
[00:16:05] And then you open this valve and that thing is starting to go like that. And got the horn players, got the euphonium in front, the saxophone and trumpet in the back. And they stand in one line and you hear this music.
[00:16:25] It's a lot of interesting technique we use making that record. And then it went on the shelf. Nobody liked it. The guys that Walt Andrews was partners with, they said we can't sell that. That's crap. You know, as Joe Dugan said, my voice is an acquired taste.
[00:16:44] And it seems that people are acquired a taste for this. However corky it is in the record is a bit of a mess and in some respects.
[00:16:52] And at the same time, if you don't pay attention too much and just kind of like get into it, relax and enjoy the way it goes, it grooves. It's got some emotion in it. Some recreative tunes have emotion, but not many.
[00:17:06] In what respects would you say it's a mess? Oh, I can't sing in key for long, for very long. I mean, I can sing a bit, but then something that I was told as a child, you know,
[00:17:19] Mayo, you couldn't carry a tune in the bucket and that didn't stop me as you're here. I've made a lot of vocal records, but after the recreative, the book collapsed.
[00:17:28] I made that one more record. And that was when I heard the judgment on that we can't sell that. I stopped singing until we got to, until we got to soldiers talking. There was punk and that's, you know, I can scream just fine.
[00:17:42] But that affected you personally though? No, I don't take it personally. You know, the thing is that I worked on my singing over the years. I've worked on it. I haven't taken voice lessons, but I've worked on it. And I can carry a tune to some extent.
[00:17:55] And I know how to use my voice by now. I know what I'm good at. And sometimes I get carried away and I go for silly effects, but that's just my, that's stupidity on my part.
[00:18:10] Rick Quarriol, Rick Quarriol, it's really, we went, we went from playing, you know, like other people's songs to writing our own stuff, and then eventually not playing songs at all. Coconut hotel is all abstract ideas, right?
[00:18:24] About sounds. And some of them are made musical instruments and some are more than that. We weren't. And we even played the Berkeley Folk Festival. We were playing feedback. And here's a mistake that we made. The last day, the last show was July the 4th.
[00:18:37] We were at the Greek Theater, height of the Vietnam War, 67, really thick in it. 5,000 people standing there. And we played our freak noise and blah, blah, blah. It's very funny. We should have played war sucks. If we played war sucks, imagine how different my career might have been.
[00:18:58] Because at first it helped nobody complain about the singing on Parable of Aarable Island. When I say it impacted you personally, I mean... I mean business-wise. Well, yeah. In terms of the lack of sales, it caused you to make this dramatic change to your approach. I stopped playing.
[00:19:20] I mean, I tried a couple more times. Barthelmy and I had a band together for a while. We made one record for Walter again for Texas Revolutionary. Pig ankle strut was on one side and the old Tom Clark on the other. We wrote those two tunes.
[00:19:35] Barthelmy wrote Pig Ankle Strut and we wrote the old Tom Clark together, wrote the lyric. And the lyric gave it to Frank Davis to sing. Because, again, we didn't want to rule it out.
[00:19:48] And the legend was, and I don't know if it's just apocryphal or intolerable or not, but apparently Warner Brothers fancied it and it sat on the A&R disc for a couple of meetings, couple of weeks of meetings, but then they passed finally.
[00:20:01] But Frank was a great singer. He tried out for the monkeys. He got that close to being in the monkeys. He could do anything. I love this man and rock Romano as well. Business has always been determining factor in what I've been able to do in music.
[00:20:23] And I just characterize myself as a commercial artist. I make commodities. I don't argue about the political stages or the identity relations about this stuff. I know what I'm doing and I know what it amounts to.
[00:20:40] This idea of contextualizing things as commodities, does that apply to the books? Does that apply to the paintings? Yeah, they're all commodity. I think that all object relations which are traded for money in the professional, in the culture industry is adorno rejoiced in calling it.
[00:21:01] I think that's all, that's commercial. Not all of it is made for the same reason. I grant that. One time when I was talking to Dietrich Diedrichsen in Alberta, I'd been to Japan and done an interview in the magazine. They sent me some other questions.
[00:21:18] They wanted to know could I tell them what art is, for example? Could I tell them what it is to be an artist? I read these questions and Dietrich said, to be able to answer those questions we'd have to be able to distinguish between the...
[00:21:32] We'd have to be able to make a distinction between the production of our friends who are neurotic and can't help doing what they do and other people who are thinking about it. And it's like that. Who knows why anybody does anything?
[00:21:46] I've been lately thinking to myself, I can't figure out how... I mean human beings seem to really like music. It's fantastic. But not everybody does. And not everybody likes the same words, right? And there's something about how you're enculturated and makes a difference.
[00:22:02] Me, I've been around a long time and I used to be an eliminate to this. I used to say to myself, I used to say when we were kids, how could anybody do a thing like that? Why would anybody want to make a thing sound like that?
[00:22:13] Duh-duh-duh-duh, right? Yeah, I don't say that anymore. People do things for their own reasons and I don't have to like it. It doesn't matter. The whole game is 100% asymmetrical, as far as I can tell. And all of the asymmetries are in favor of...
[00:22:27] The privileges belong to the listener. And interpretation is all transcendent. It transcends the facts. That's just the way it is. There's a lot of... I mean this town, I live in LA, right? And in this town, when I got here, I thought,
[00:22:44] oh wow, this is a really place, oh so much. I started looking around for action. And it slowly dawned on me, everybody. There are millions of smart people in this town. Very, very smart, very talented people chasing a buck and will do whatever it takes to bake one
[00:23:04] if they can get something going. And I don't blame them. I'm down with that. When I was in Germany, I lived in Germany. And there I made advertising music for C&A, a Catholic clothing firm from somewhere in Belgium, I think. And I made decent money there.
[00:23:25] More money than I'd ever made in the record industry. Really, near-bound. There is an element of, I guess, commercially based decision making in terms of some of the choices that you made along the way. There are, you know, I mean as cynical as I'm...
[00:23:42] I portray myself slightly cynically here. The fact of the matter is that I'm, you know, I mean what I do. And I'm not sitting around, you know, Leland Rogers, when we went to International Artists, they wanted us to record gentle on my mind. You remember that tune?
[00:24:00] I do. I do. Got my bed roll rolled up behind your couch. And we said no. We weren't going to do it. Another mistake, we should have done that. We would have been in the commercial record business.
[00:24:15] We'd have made, we'd have had a local hit with the X-Atom. We'd have had on the radio station. We'd gotten all the sympathy, all the people. No, we were smartasses. We thought we were going to make an avant-garde record.
[00:24:25] We were going to change the way people thought about pop music. We were crazy. Right? And I learned that, you know, like it doesn't work like that. We do what you can with what you've got and the people that you're going to get around you to work with.
[00:24:39] Luckily, I've had some great bands and I'm not, I don't think we, there's not a record that I, that we've made that I think, oh, I wish we hadn't done that. Not one. And I won't use the word sincerity about what we do
[00:24:54] because I think sincerity is, you know, hard to gauge without, you know, I don't want to give offence. Even for yourself? I don't know. To be frank with you, I'm one of those people who sees both sides of things. I go to a Japanese restaurant.
[00:25:13] They come with a little bowl of fruit up to the meal. It's got a fruit fork in it, these two little things like that. Like a pitchfork right now. Oh, in this last, and then I go like that.
[00:25:24] I don't want to jam back on my hand, you know. And I think about it. I don't do it, but I think about things like that all the time. I always think of it and, you know, I liked it. One of the reasons I mentioned Adorno,
[00:25:39] I admired about Adorno, I was really glad to find out that he negates the negation soon. He's a super dialectician and I'm with him on that. I don't think that then... I think you're describing what they call intrusive thoughts in therapy. What? Intrusive thoughts.
[00:25:57] It's part of obsessive compulsive disorder actually. That's the compulsive part. I can believe that I have some compulsive disorders and that, you know, that I came along at a certain time and I was able to cope with them, deal with my shortcomings, those kinds of things,
[00:26:12] dealing with structures and so on like that. I had, you know, I got one of those IQs that I can turn things over in my mind and I have a good memory. I'm sure it's faulty on a lot of things
[00:26:23] and details, but I see images from my past and youth and I have an idetic memory. I think they call it. It's official. And although I'm not like Bob Nettlkoff who has, I asked him, he's an expert on, you know, the Kennedy assassination and first edition books
[00:26:39] and suddenly we're talking one time and he's going on and I said, Robert, are you reading from something? He said, no, they all... I said, would you photograph them? He said, no, I just remember everything. You know, there are people like that. And thank you for mentioning
[00:26:58] a compulsive disorder because it's certainly the case that it has been afflicted by these kinds of years. I asked my wife as a molecular biologist and I asked her about fossil DNA. You know, thinking to myself,
[00:27:17] I'm the product of an awful lot of people who came before me, right? You know, I do the 23 and me and I get, you know, noticed you have X, you know, by now I have must have a thousand or two thousand third cousins and fourth cousins, you know.
[00:27:31] We have, you know, great-great grandparents in common and we'll never meet. And, you know, the DNA that I really wish that I could get are real. Ironclad Association, what is the one my wife ridicules before which is like a tiny little drop above outer Mongolia.
[00:27:47] You know, it's like... There's some number that effectively like everyone on Earth is related to Genghis Khan in some way or another? That's the thing, you know. I always say that, you know, I belong to the Mongrel Lord
[00:28:03] and, you know, when it comes to this kind of stuff but I can't complain. I've also been extremely fortunate in my life. Really lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky. You know, here I am at the... I'll be 80 in February and I can't complain.
[00:28:32] I mean, you know, it's my father used to ask, are you bragging or complaining when you would say something? Right? It's one of those things. Yeah, both. Brown numbers are tough for a lot of people when it comes to aging. As you approach that number,
[00:28:49] you know, are you thinking about the things you can do with the time you have left? I mean, touring, for example, is something that people can't do forever. I don't know. You know, there's one thing I say to myself every day, maybe you've got to get organized.
[00:29:04] You know, I have half of my archive, it makes sense. The other half is a lot of stuff I just have in process because I do get busy. You know, those books, for example, it took me a long time to write the first one.
[00:29:21] The second one, it took me a long time to think of what I could do with the second one. Once I got going, it didn't take as much as long because it was like wrapping up. I had introduced all these characters,
[00:29:32] okay, on the B side, I'm going to account for what happened to them and what they were thinking, and I'm going to take them to court because my father's a lawyer. I should have been a lawyer. You know, if you're thinking about missed opportunities,
[00:29:48] he was on Federal Trade Commission, Nixon appointed him. And I was hoping he was going to get to be Vice President, but he used to go play golf. And he said, I wish we would change our name. I said, why? What's the matter?
[00:30:04] And he said, I go there in my golfing, my own home, my circle of squares, as he used to call them. They asked me, how's your Marxist rock band mayo? Stuff like that, right? I'm still going down the storm in Texas. Is that the red aspect of it?
[00:30:22] Yeah. No, actually, in the first instance, in Penningham as a Catholic, Barthelmy was raised Catholic. So was I. I don't know what Barthelmy is. I'm not anything anymore. In fact, I'm quite, I'm a little uncounted about that school of thought. Those schools of thought.
[00:30:42] In Penningham, I think, still practicing Catholic. And the red crayola was about RC, red, royal and Catholic, Roman Catholic, that kind of job. Barthelmy made the name up, and I just went, oh yeah, that sounds cool because red and also a crayola, it makes perfect sense to me.
[00:30:58] What did they give a kid when they wanted the kid to stop smearing things with their fingers and hands and give him a crayola? Right? They started drawing. We were always, we had lots of ideas. I have, my father lived to 88. His mom lived in 97. Her sister went 100.
[00:31:22] I got my genetic material a lot from that side of the family. Because my mother's side of the family is a little bit more debilitated. But my mom lived to 74, but she died of Alzheimer's disease, right?
[00:31:38] But I have done my DNA profile with the medical side of it and I don't have a liability for all Alzheimer's, blessedly. I do forget things. Don't get me wrong. I don't remember everything I was supposed to do. Some of that's willful.
[00:31:59] But I think I can go on for a while. We're going to make this new record in January with Corky Returns. We've got 15, 16 tunes. I went back and found, I've got tons of material on tape. And I've run into some guys out here
[00:32:14] who can dub it on, make digital files out of it. So I'm thinking, I'm going to leave a bunch of stuff with Drag City and I intend to haunt this planet even when I'm not here anymore. You know why not? Circa 2018 or 2019,
[00:32:32] what is it specifically that brought you back to Corky? Sol Rob Mohibbi, the guy I told you about who runs the sculptor center. When I started working in visual art, what happened was I got invited to be in the Whitney Biennial in 2012 by Jay Sanders and Elizabeth Sussman.
[00:32:59] And I thought, wow, this is interesting. So then after that, Carol Green, a gallery in New York and she invited me, she offered me a show thinking, I suppose we could do some business because people would come by. I guess Bob Dylan must sell a picture or two.
[00:33:20] It's a safe guess, I would say. I would imagine there are some people who want some object of it, something that's on the artifact. And I've been drawing, my mother taught art and English when I was a kid, she was an high school teacher.
[00:33:36] So I've been drawing my whole life and I continue to draw. But I took up painting for the first time. Well, I really enjoyed it. Painting, first I worked with acrylic and Carol Green gave me a show of drawings first. She couldn't do much business with it though,
[00:33:51] really couldn't get it going. She asked me one day, she mentioned the name of some artist whom I thought I might know, we don't speak to each other very much anymore. She said, what if he wants one of your pictures when I sell them?
[00:34:03] And I said, please sell pictures to all of my enemies and that kind of thing, right? So I'm still in that game as well, still painting, doing some painting. I've had some shows with bookholts gallery in Germany and Berlin, a couple of shows, one about drawings
[00:34:23] and one of paintings. And I continue to do this kind of stuff so I'll go on doing that as well. And the one thing that's missing that I would like to be able to be able to say grace over would be the political,
[00:34:41] some political activity, some political to be involved. Because I was involved in other than New York in the 70s and got to go to some places that you wouldn't have otherwise got to go and meet some people I wouldn't otherwise had the chance to meet
[00:34:59] because of the politics. That's a political question. I have my opinions about politics. I don't have any solutions to our great problems but I mean, like this is the limit of this thing I was telling you about a minute ago, right? I really do believe living like live.
[00:35:17] I think that's where I'm now. I don't need to meet anymore because I don't realize this. And when human beings deny being animals I really want to jump on them and bite them on the throat. Like, you know, ah, no, I'm teasing. I'm not really dangerous.
[00:35:36] I want an animal, you know what I mean? Come on or lick them or something. You know what I mean? Come on. It's pathetic. I mean, you realize how complex these problems are and still that's the one thing I wouldn't mind
[00:35:51] being able to do something about a little bit. But there are limitations. You know, I mean, Chomsky makes sense to me as an anarchist and I characterize myself these days but my political limits more or less could be described as anarcho-syndicalist.
[00:36:09] I mean, you know, I would syndicate if there's something to go for but otherwise, I mean this is what... I mean, do I misunderstand something? You know, where I didn't live in America for 16 years and when I got back to these right wing libertarians
[00:36:24] like this Kentucky senator, the high doctor, what's his name? Paul. His father was a Texas lawman, law, what do you call it, representative? Ron Paul. Ron Paul. A strange dude. I mean, his appearance in the Borob movie is really... Even beyond that, even beyond that,
[00:36:48] I know that Alex Jones was a huge fan of his. Who is? Alex Jones. Is he really? Yeah. He used to have him on the show. Loved him because he was the one openly libertarian, you know, national politician at the time. He's the one libertarian.
[00:37:07] I thought to myself, maybe some of these right wing libertarians are not completely insane, but his son is a bastard. Anarcho-capitalism is another thing entirely because to me there's a very... I very much relate to what you say about being involved in politics
[00:37:25] and recently it dawned on me, this is very obvious in hindsight, but the easiest way to affect some change that I found, I started volunteering at a food pantry in my neighborhood. And you know, because I'm somebody... I consider myself to be a compassionate person.
[00:37:48] I would say, you know, I do like a lot of what Chomsky espouses, but at the end of the day, I tend to be a little more socialist in my thinking because it's the... I think the starting point is effectively just making sure
[00:38:06] that people have food to eat and a place to live and then everything else we could figure out. I'm with you. You know, this country has got the level of poverty, 41%. It's a crime. It's criminal, it really is. And you know, what I didn't understand before
[00:38:29] was voting matters and why. And I learned that since I got back to the States. When I was living in Edinburgh, my wife had a lab there for a while. We were living in Scotland. One day we had lunch with some people she knew
[00:38:45] and from Austria, she's from Austria, these people. And they had their little boys with them, three little boys and the eldest of the little boys said to me, what did you vote for? He was like 12, 13 years old. And I said, I don't vote.
[00:38:59] He said, oh, you should vote. Well, when I got back to America, that's rang in my ears and rang in my ears, rang in my ears. And I voted for Obama. And that was easy. When I voted for Clinton, that was not easy.
[00:39:19] You know, but I voted for her. And her party right? It was on the way to have a show opening in Berlin. The day the trump was made. What the day that the Electoral College handed him the keys. Where he was made queen for a day.
[00:39:46] That's infuriated me. So I'm more and more I really think of, I think, you know, public work, social work, I think that that's great. Among the politicians that I see when I see
[00:39:54] And some of the things Ms. Warren says, I mean, she has a reasonable critique of the lack of some of those. But the progressive wing of the Democrat Party seems to be up to their eyeballs in identity relation problems. And that seems to be what's going on.
[00:40:17] And politically, I don't have anything to contribute to the identity question. As an 80 year old white man, you don't have anything to add to the conversation? I can apologize for doing too well. But that's what it gets. It's a disgrace.
[00:40:39] I mean, you know, I'm growing up in Texas. And when I say what's going on in Texas with this abortion thing, I mean, it's there. Ted Cruz has been a boogeyman in Texas for a long time.
[00:40:54] My father was a conservative white, but he was also born a Christian. My father, we parted company among other places politically as well. But he was an astute observer of the situation and he knew what was going on.
[00:41:12] And one time he was annoyed that the Texas A&M was going on, that the governor was going on. This was Perry was a governor. And he was going to nominate some guy to be the head of the president of the Texas A&M
[00:41:24] universe within the governor's gift to make, to name the president of the Texas A&M University. And my father was furious about this candidate. And he said, I'm going to call his office and tell him I'm voting for Cruz.
[00:41:40] So Cruz is kind of like a boogeyman that conservative Republicans, conservative Democrats, Texas Democrats all would think, oh, I'm going to get you with this guy. Right? And I'm hoping that Colin Alred destroys him in the next election.
[00:41:57] You had said earlier that maybe one of your regrets in hindsight was not playing effectively, you know, a protest song live in that instance. And you also alluded to some of the politics that have permeated throughout the Red Cradle, a cannon.
[00:42:16] Is do you find yourself wanting to be more political on record? I find I have found what I think by the measures in which it is possible for me to say something sensible without trying, appearing to volunteer for a job I am not qualified to do.
[00:42:33] And I'm a strong believer in the principle of the one that people rise to the level of their incompetence. I'm fighting this temptations to be like to be dean of the art school at such and such a university.
[00:42:51] For example, I had some people talk to me about that some years ago. Artists I know who worked in this school. Yeah, you taught for a while. I don't call it the teaching. I would go up the hill in the daytime going like this. God, come down.
[00:43:08] I survived. It was like that kind of a thing. But what I did was I would discuss it was easy. It was an art school, an art college in Pasadena. And it was easy because they had our students and would be artists in graduate school.
[00:43:24] They are the same problems that I had been dealing with for years already. And I understand something about production and having read Marx. I understand that you any discussion there, you might well want to discuss distribution as well. And, you know, that kind of stuff.
[00:43:37] And so that's the kind of thing I provided a kind of service, a reference service. Plus over the years, I've read a lot of philosophy books and a lot of philosophers and so on. So I could discuss and I could discuss philosophy where it was necessary.
[00:43:52] Plus I know some artists and some writers and so I was able to carry on a conversation with a lot of these young people who are processing lots of the same kind of material that we're talking about today
[00:44:02] and we qualify to be on your show in the future, right? Because they will all have the same kind of problems we're discussing. And these are these are real issues for people who are what they call used to call cultural workers, right?
[00:44:17] I don't break a sweat making culture. On the music side, especially just as an aside, I'll cut this out. But I would recommend Damien Krakowski of Galaxy 500 has a newsletter and he talks a lot about, you know, unionizing in music and Spotify royalties and things like that.
[00:44:38] I think you would enjoy it. I can send it to you. Yeah, they covered Victory Gordon. Galaxy 500 covered Victory Gordon. God bless. Now talk to that dude. Nice people. You know, Jeff Tweedy's a nice man and he does political things.
[00:44:55] He has, you know, he runs a festival which has got social aspect in Massachusetts someplace. And, you know, I can't do that. That's beyond me. I've, you know, some political aspect comes into it. And the red quail is not finished.
[00:45:16] If offered work, I might well take it and I can put together a red quail like with a couple of phone calls and be on an airplane in an hour and, you know, that kind of thing. If there's if there's something in it, somebody lately mentioned
[00:45:31] to me a polytree or possibility in Mexico City. I thought, that sounds fun. I got a buddy who works for Reuters down there. It'd be fun to see him and the drummer from the corky band also lives in Mexico City.
[00:45:43] So, hmm, I think I can put something down there. You know, it's like that would be fun. And that's an interesting, I love Mexico, but it's a scary place. Wow. That's life and death real fast down there. Texas too, though. You will get dead for nothing in Texas.
[00:46:02] Part of the reason why I brought up Damon's newsletter is Spotify is getting worse when it comes to the royalty situation. I don't know how up on you that you are, but they effectively are cutting out. They won't say anything. Think they're there.
[00:46:17] They're they're now going to say, you know, I will play your records, but we won't give you anything because they don't make any way. No, I understand. And, you know, General Rourke has been very wise. He will not let anybody stream his music.
[00:46:31] And he has a perfectly good reason, streaming his crap. And until you improve on the delivery system and make the sound where I hear my music over that thing. No. And he has as a good and I don't think it's not an excuse.
[00:46:46] It's also double, you know, double threat because he's also telling them, you know, you're taking money for for on false premises. That's not the music. Right? It doesn't sound like that. And that's true. Quincy Jones is able to make a record that sounds good on anything,
[00:47:09] but he's one of the few people on earth that was famously it was either Quincy Jones or Brian Wilson. I've heard it attributed to both, but they would go to sit in a car with the worst possible stereo to listen to it on that.
[00:47:25] Yeah, we all did that as well. But the difference between us and those two guys was we couldn't tell the difference. We kind of liked the way it sounded busted, right? You know, it's like, hmm, I like that. Where are you? I'm in Queens. Queen.
[00:47:48] I'm from California originally, but I'm in the area. I'm from the Bay Area. That's pretty up there. It is. I mean, I like it down here. LA and Houston are my main. Houston is sort of like a flattened out LA and life by appointment.
[00:48:06] You've got to drive everywhere, et cetera, et cetera, traffic jammed. And restaurants are closed at 10 because it's a company town, right? And they want you up early. It's like London. And only certain classes get to do anything after a certain hour is there.
[00:48:20] And everybody else has got to be working in the morning. I think England was interesting to live in that and working with art in the language was that's where my. Politicization began to take some real shape.
[00:48:32] My first political and first political thing that happened to me was when I was working at Texas as a DJ on the local. Pacifica Station, and I had a radio show four nights a week. And I played La Jazz one night.
[00:48:48] This Latino dude called me up and he got to we got talking about jazz. And we get over time, we developed a conversation. He was really interested in Freddie Hubbard when I was a milder. As God, we chat about trumpet.
[00:49:01] And play and while playing records and then one night he said to me, you know, that station you're up there, he said, y'all say that it's a listening responsive station. That's right. And so and it's an open microphone, we say.
[00:49:13] And I say, yeah, that's what that's what they say here. And that's what's playing. And he said, not. I said, what do you mean? You see, what's not an open microphone? What I hear on this a bunch of, you know, like, you know,
[00:49:25] kids are going to high school with white kids who are, you know, like experts on this, that and the other thing have interesting hobbies. But I don't hear anything but it speaks to anything that I do in my life.
[00:49:35] You know, like you and I, we talk about jazz, but, you know, like, what's that? Jazz, right? Cool. But else this is you've got a political agenda there. So eventually this guy is politicizing me.
[00:49:46] We're going on and telling me what kind of a job I'm involved in doing. And I get to thinking about it. I think, gee, this guy is right about this. So I go to the headquarters and I tell him, listen,
[00:49:58] I've had been taken to task by one of our listeners who sponsors this radio station that we don't have an open microphone here. And I think we should do something about it. So well, the guy said, yeah, manager of station.
[00:50:12] And then they called New York and then New York sent a guy down who was who was involved in Vietnam war, anti Vietnam War protests. And so an organizer, effectively, working for the end work for them involved in the NBA and the whole Pacific of thing.
[00:50:33] Which is an interesting organization, obviously, a strange one built on the money by the guy who invented Xerox, right? And anyway, they sent this guy and this guy came down from New York and he said, no, you should just resign and then we'll deal with this thing.
[00:50:50] Right? Because I was protesting. He said, you resign. So I said, OK, I resigned. He said, come here, Keith. And I was locked out and they didn't do anything about it. They never said a word about it.
[00:51:04] So that's when I started thinking, hmm, so it's like death, huh? And more treachery, hmm, everywhere. Hmm. And then I got going in and I started thinking and started reading, thinking about starting by Karl Marx, who I knew that he had done some things.
[00:51:25] And so I read the manifesto and I started reading some other kind of stuff. One time I was in the hospital, my mother was ill and she was having a procedure in my brain toward my great-uncles. Because the Christian, he was sitting downstairs
[00:51:38] and we was having a coffee and he said to me, have you have you ever read the Communist Manifesto? I have. He said, that's a great book. He said, but there's no way to make it happen. Not here, not with what we got.
[00:51:55] Right? And it's not with what we got. I thought, hmm, yeah, right. They're going to have to be some kind of like. We're going to have to not be afraid of revolution. So I'm for that stuff seriously when I got to New York,
[00:52:11] when I got to New Orleans, they got more and more serious because Marx and I mean, it's such a strange, I mean, it's ironic as paradoxical. It's a complete mess. It's a joke. It's a contradiction. You know, Maoism, Marxism saved the paperback book industry
[00:52:28] in the 70s in the United States during that time. Then one also the art world, the Vietnam War, when it came to an end, a lot of artists who had been involved in protesting about that got focused on some local domestic issues about what museums were
[00:52:47] discriminating against blacks and Latinos and Asians and women and so on. So the organization came together to meet that requirement that we're going to artists meeting for cultural change. I got involved with that and I was involved with art and language
[00:53:04] and the language was all drifting in this left direction. A lot of talk about art for social purpose was there, right? And there we parted company. I don't think that you can make custom make art. Well, social purpose. You can you can make propaganda.
[00:53:21] I don't think it's wrong, but I don't think it should be called art. I think it could be treated for what it is. Although there's an art to it, of course. But anyway, I got involved in that.
[00:53:36] But the long short of it was I kept getting deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper into the whole sort of thing involved in this thing to the point that when we finally did wind up going to the Whitney
[00:53:46] and protesting with this organization chose to call a boycott. Wasn't a boycott, but never mind, you know, people get terminated wrong. But that's what we were the best of intentions. But it wouldn't break up.
[00:54:00] Well, anyway, we're walking up and down in front of the thing during the opening and people are coming up and catalanxing going in and berating us, you know, cluttering the sidewalk. Well, up came some people from the organization called the Congress of African People, which was an organization
[00:54:16] run by Amiri Baraka and his wife. And Amiri had been Leroy Jones earlier, right? And anyway, so I got involved with him and they started something called the Anti-Imperialist Cultural Union. And I had to get my. Hold it closer. The Blues people by Leroy Jones. I actually was.
[00:54:43] I'm sorry, I can't find it here, but yeah, I picked up another one of this. I love his. I love the music writing that he did as an aside. The guy could sling. He's a he's poetry. I mean,
[00:54:56] they made a they made a record, which I had a copy of it and I don't know what happened to it. I kicked myself. It's one of the two records that I've lost that I really kicked myself for. I've lost lots of records, but these two,
[00:55:08] one of them was legendary Stardust Cowboy paralyzed and who's making knocking at my door. And the other one was the Congress of African People's a band they had they were called. Can't remember the industrial industrial workers or something like that. And it was Marxism, Leninism, Mao Zedong thought.
[00:55:29] And you know, like you've been dancing and why you've been dancing? You should have been studying Maoism, Maoism, Mao Zedong, the funky thing. Great, funny, funny, funny piece of business. And we went and that's when we were making corrected slogans as well.
[00:55:46] And this so back to him, why did Corky come out? Mojave. Carol Green wrote me one time and said, meet Mojave. Mojave, I met Mojave. And he said, I want you to do correct slogans. And he was working at the Red Catters and assistant curator at the time.
[00:56:00] Red Cats, a theater run by, or I don't know who owns it, but attached to Cal Arts. Right. And he was working there. So we and I said, OK, we would do it. And so we played there and the thing sold out.
[00:56:19] That was like, wow, it was correct to slogan. So then sometime later than in 2019, he came to me and he said, how about Corky at La Poisson Rouge? And I said, Corky band, who's going to play? And he happened to have had a band when he was in
[00:56:37] in the East from Tehran and he had a band there called the 127 band. And they used to get in trouble with the Revolutionary Guard for distilling their own vodka and playing punk rock, I guess, or something like that. And.
[00:56:51] They all migrated, three of them migrated to the states and they live here now. The drummer is in Mexico City, but so Rob is in New York and his his mate, Sal Moc, lives a little bit up from New York City. And.
[00:57:04] So they formed the core of this band and with them came two other players, Lena Tolgrun and Doug Tuttle, who is a guitar player who wanted to play bass. And he's not the first guitar player who said, if you ever play that record, I want to play bass.
[00:57:23] So anyway, these people are all great, great players. And the other player who was in the band is Tom Watson, who has played with me in Rayc Quarrow for years, right? And with whom I worked on a couple of records of his, which was always fun.
[00:57:37] And it worked out. But Tom, lately, Tom's health had some health issues and he wasn't able to join us in New York. So we have another guitar player now, a guy named Conard Gallagher. And again, we played this most recent show there again,
[00:57:56] because Mojave called me after four years and said, I've heard from the plus on Rouge. They have an anniversary show. Would you like to play? And so this guy gets keeps pulling me back in. And I love him and I trust him.
[00:58:09] So I will always, you know, try to take up the invitation where possible. He's a very smart dude. He curated. He's a curator on the Carnegie International with most recent one that was opened in September. I just remember he was one of those people.
[00:58:27] There have been a handful of people where I was slightly intimidated before I talked to him. And then once we started talking, it went great. He can, if he will, he won't always. I either lucked out or I just am able to get good stuff out of him.
[00:58:46] But yeah, it was good. It's good conversation. I've spilled my gut to you, old chap. You know, I mean, thanks for bothering to ask me. You know, my ears perked up when you mentioned that you're working on another another quirky record.
[00:59:00] And 50 years so years after the original came out, what what shape does a follow up take? What I did was I went back and found some guitar tracks from that I had recorded in 81, which is only 11 years out. Right. And those guitar tracks will form the basis.
[00:59:27] Basic track will embellish those tracks and I'll write some lyrics. And the lyrics will be the question, you know, like how do I deal with it? You know, I have thought about this a lot of times, you know, because like I said, when I wrote Art Mystery,
[00:59:43] I read certain issues like questions about what makes something an icon. And that kind of stuff and some some serious art questions were incorporated in that in that text and tried to build some fun for them to occur and so on like that.
[01:00:00] And then felt it was all hanging. So I felt like I had to explain it a little bit about what happened to the people. And so I wrote the second book. So I keep thinking to myself,
[01:00:08] maybe I need to explain some of the things that happened in Corky. Pick up the story, so to speak. So that's one possibility. I may pick up, you know, like Dear Betty Baby. I finally got off that boat, you know, and like I was in,
[01:00:21] you know, some strange town and then I can talk about colonialism a little bit, perhaps, you know, for example. And, you know, which would. I mean, it was an interesting topic at one time and continues to be interestingly enough. But although the whole question is transmuted,
[01:00:41] you know, now it's patronage of Chinese or busy helping Africa realize itself and, you know, the Belgians no longer persecute the Congolese. There are obviously still a lot of repercussions from, you know, what happened hundreds of years ago.
[01:00:56] You know, I mean, when I lived when I worked at Rough Trade, I had the pleasure of meeting Stuart, Stuart Hall and, you know, and I worked with a guy in Germany who was related to Edward Said. And, you know, and back when I was involved
[01:01:11] with Mary Brock, his crew and that stuff, you know, my reading picked up quite a lot. I mean, I read a lot. Franz Fanon, you know, read African thinkers. And when I lived in England, I also got to know, you know, the ANC, Joe Slovo and his wife.
[01:01:33] Joe Slovo was the minister of he was a white guy. They were a white couple and he was the minister of defense for the ANC. And his wife was killed by boss. Is that yeah, boss is the was the Africa Secret Service, right? They blew her up.
[01:01:51] They succeeded in her in assassinating her. I met their daughter anyway in London. And just I've had the luck to know those kind of people. I know I got to know Robert Wyatt, who was one of the few card carry in
[01:02:04] Connie's in the music business, you know, Roger Waters being another. And, you know, and and Robert is very political and his place one time. One way to do is talk about Rough Trade and some other people talking about putting together a journal. And what was his name?
[01:02:26] Duncan writing about Ireland all the time. It was all the trouble going on. So all of this exposure to politics and so on, like that the politics in this country, I don't know quite what to do, what I can contribute. But I will embrace some political topics.
[01:02:44] You know, there's I don't know if you've heard the album that we made, it's got I'm So Blase on it. It's it's it's called Hazel and the song goes on. So Blase, yes, I'm Blase. Nothing really touches me. I'm so blase everything passes over me.
[01:03:00] Go ahead on and cry, baby. I say to myself, cry, baby, cry. You know, I'm consoling myself for having nothing to cry about. But I read lately I got an introduction to it, which was cooked up when we played and something Yaya reminded me of it.
[01:03:15] And it goes like life or life. Mine has been sublimely sweet. Dealing in quiet days and cliche up on Easy Street. But my life's not perfect by any means. There's our fly there are flies in my appointment. I have come to realize that my happiness depends
[01:03:38] no small measure on others' disappointment. Oh, blase. So stand by for some crap irony. You bad jokes. A spiritually, at least this, I guess, would qualify as another solo record or at least sort of in the in the lineage of the first solo record.
[01:04:04] And you mentioned how that solo record was much more personal than the red preola stuff, which tended to be more political. Does does that mean that there's a sense in which this is also going to be a very personal record for you? It will be.
[01:04:18] The minute when I say personal, I mean something really simple. You know, when it comes to pronoun and dexicalities, I means me in corki. I don't mean me in red creola. It means, you know, like some first person speaker, some subject, right?
[01:04:36] And you doesn't mean it means whoever hears it, right? That's that that that. Referent is there, the you part of it. But there will be personal. Yeah. And when I mean, you know, Rosalind Krauss was famous in the 60s for having said the personal is political.
[01:04:56] She was ready to argue about, you know, right? I and I have an inverted slogan. I just said the political is personal. I take it personally. And so I'm going to do some try to do some things about it.
[01:05:08] And I don't really know quite what it would be. I'm careful with it because, you know, I get calls to to in, you know, to participate in political things and to do and doorstep.
[01:05:21] And I one time Joel Wax, who was on the city council out here, he was running for mayor. And we were the red quail was asked to to to play a little party kind of event, a fundraiser party in an art gallery in Beverly Hills.
[01:05:37] And I said, the red quail do not play for political parties. We were invited one time by the, you know, the Basque separatists also to play. But we don't I don't we don't I don't endorse political parties.
[01:05:49] I wouldn't play rock against racism because I don't want to, you know, I don't think that I have any business standing up as a white man and telling people don't be racist, you know, in that in that direct speech. That's something else and maybe in private.
[01:06:03] Don't underestimate the importance of being an ally, though. No, I don't. I want to be as much as possible. But I'm I don't I'm careful. What I say, because I don't want to take them with my reputation.
[01:06:17] Like I told you, my father's golf cronies, they knew that I'd read Karl Marx. You know, people who lived in England and subscribe to two newspapers when we live there, the Daily Telegraph, which is the Tory newspaper and the Morning Star, which was the Communist Party newspaper
[01:06:33] and the Daily Telegraph was a better newspaper by a country mile. They actually understood something about, you know, the theories that Morning Glory was taking for granted, it seemed. And the music critic was better in the theater and just so I have
[01:06:51] an open mind about, you know, political ideas when people like the Republican Party characterize themselves as conservatives and really makes me furious. From my understanding of a conservative is somebody's backs up the institutions, which is the opposite of libertarianism. Really? I mean,
[01:07:12] my I wouldn't characterize what I do as a libertarian, but it is probably related to a bit to anarchy. You know, I expect the government to pick up the trash and keep, you know, keep us keep us safe and that kind of stuff.
[01:07:25] And I also expect them eventually to clean the air up. Right? That's something I could well get interested in. We're going to convert this house and put since we raise an FG, we're going to put solar panels up, you know,
[01:07:43] so they get out of all of those nasty affiliations as much as possible, withdraw from capitalist material relations into more social relations. Like you said, socially, my wife, she's from Vienna. They have a strong social history there. They also got some crazy right wingers in power.
[01:08:05] Austria has an interesting record with racing politicians. Let's just say that, you know, I mean, Adolf Hitler and Bernat and and and Kraski when I was a kid, Kraski was a socialist and he was the president
[01:08:18] of Austria. I mean, when we first played there in 1981, we went out and played there. And I thought that was the farthest East I've ever been. And it was really obvious you could see that the Soviet Union never really left a mark on the place.
[01:08:34] And we're walking around and we walked into the big square and they were shooting a movie I didn't realize it, but I looked up on the balcony where Hitler had made his famous unschievous speech. And my God, there was a freaking swastika on a red banner hanging there.
[01:08:48] And I swear my heart jumped because I mean, like all good white American boys, I was indoctrinated to hate the Germans. I found that out one of my father and I went to see Private Ryan together on the scene on the beach, Normandy. My guts started to churn.
[01:09:09] I grabbed the arms of the chair. I started, you know, it was like the end of 1984. I realized I loved big brother. It was the lesser of two evils, I guess at the end of the day. He is, you know,
[01:09:25] it's there is there, you know, I I I'm subjective about a lot of things, but Nazi Germany is no one of them. No, me either. That was all bad. All bad. Nothing good about it. And these sympathizers who hang with Trump, Trump, Rump, Queen for a day.
[01:09:51] I mean, I've been thinking about doing it. But at the same time, you know, I'm thinking about making some political posters like where you get a picture of Trump and then dressing up to look like a queen, but then you're making fun of, you know, of cross dressers.
[01:10:03] And, you know, that's no can do that. I've heard people describe him as a queen in in that sense, in terms of like, you know, and the things that, you know, the gossip and everything else that he concerns himself with.
[01:10:16] And what I will say is I think that again, this is we're getting into probably not your place to do it. But the there's a sense in which I feel like that that comparison is fair because of how poorly he's treated the trans community, for instance.
[01:10:36] I think you can explain these things. Somebody saying can be explained. You could you can say, I understand your feeling of offended on those and so forth, but prepare me out. Here's how I meant that and try to, you know, count forward in some sense.
[01:10:47] I've had to do that with a record cover of Amor in language where we had that supermodel I couldn't think of. Dammit. Anyway, she posed for us and then she had a transparent brazier on in one of the photographs.
[01:11:02] She played dead while they played we got on tour. We played in Switzerland. And so Swiss feminists came in and approached us and said to me that record cover is sexist. And I said, yes, I know that I'm sorry
[01:11:15] to have offended you anyway, but you know, like I do and she was dead. I said, but please now, wait a minute, all of the model all those poses were struck by her. We didn't tell her to what to do with any of that stuff.
[01:11:27] She did all the made up all of those things on her own.
