The Optimistic Curmudgeon

New Neko Case album streaming on NPR.org

2009-02-25T15:20:00.002-05:00

For those who think of NPR as a source of daily news and the Prairie Home Companion, you might want to give NPR.org a second look. They’ve been a pretty good source for independent music, through artist interviews and music previews. Their latest subject is Neko Case.

Case’s new album, Middle Cyclone, isn’t out until March 3, but NPR.org is previewing it here. Cyclone is packed with guest musicians from M. Ward and Garth Hudson to members of Los Lobos and frequent Case collaborators The New Pornographers.

The album has an airy, 60s folk feel, and sounds like it was recorded in an empty symphony hall, which serves well to underscore Case’s dramatic, full-throated singing style. She could be singing these metaphor-filled love songs from a lonely perch on the edge of a country valley if it weren’t for the often lush orchestration behind her. And thanks to NPR.org, you can hear it for yourself before looking for it next week.

Art Rooney, the Pittsburgh Steelers, and Losers' Alibis

2009-01-21T15:07:00.005-05:00

This space hasn't changed much lately, mainly because I have been putting all of my efforts into a new blog over at www.FunnyGrownHere.com. Since I no longer have a regular column in the Boston Globe covering local comedy, I started that blog to pick up the slack in local coverage. If you're a comedy fan, please go take a look. I'm covering the local scene past and present, and you might be surprised at how many great acts came out of this city.

But I do plan to get back to the Curmudgeon when I can. I still have another Richard Lloyd interview to post, the second half of the one below. And plenty of other things I'd love to cover.

In the meantime, I wrote this Sunday night. Hope some can appreciate it.

The night the Steelers beat the Ravens to earn the right to face the Arizona Cardinals in the Super Bowl, I was skimming over Myron Cope’s The Game That Was. It made me think about why I'm a fan of footbal, and of the Steelers, specifically. Art Rooney is the center of the story, and Cope the one who told it so well for so long.

The book was his tribute to greats of the game from the past, with chapters on Cliff Battles, Clarke Hinkle, Rad Grange, Don Hutson, Sammy Baugh, Bullet Bill Duddley, Marion Motley and Bill Willis, Bobby Lane, George Halas, and a few others, with an introduction and then a long section in the player's own words. It was written in 1970, before Cope left behind his career as a respected print journalist to become the voice of the Steelers, before he invented the Terrible Towel, and before he became a beloved part of Pittsburgh's sports history.

There is, of course, a chapter on the Chief, Art Rooney, in which Cope calls him “professional football’s champion loser,” even though Rooney had been successful at everything else he did – a welterweight boxer with national and international amateur championships and a minor league outfielder with a .396 average and 58 stolen bases (a prospect in the Red Sox farm system with the Wheeling Stogies, no less) =- outside of football. In his own words, Rooney talks about growing up in “The Ward” in Pittsburgh, buying the Steelers in 1933 when Pennsylvania “blue laws” made Sunday football games illegal (who could even fathom that today?), signing eventual Supreme Court Justice Whizzer White out of Colorado University in 1938 for a king’s ransom of $15,800, and his genuine affinity for players in his system (including Elbie Nickel, Jimmy Finks, Bill Walsh, and Ernie Stautner).

Rooney also laments giving his coaches “a free hand.” “I’m positively sure that had I run my ball club, like George Marshall ran his ball club, we would have won championship after championship," he tells Cope. "I was able. I was competent. Knowing football, knowing football material, and knowing what was what, I’m sure that if I would have said, ‘We’re not gonna do that, and you can like it or get out' -- if I’d said that, I’m positively sure we would have won championships. But I can’t change now. I’m too old to change.”

It’s a damn good thing he didn’t. Rooney said that in 1970, when the book was published. He already had the coach and some of the players that would allow him to see four championships in his lifetime. Coach Chuck Noll would take a laughingstock with a losing history, find a champion quarterback and a stifling defense, and bring home the Lombardi Trophy (that storyline should be familiar to Patriots fans, which is what mainly upsets me to hear so much outright hatred for the Steelers in my adopted hometown).

Here’s a bit more from the book and Rooney – a great read for fans who can find the out-of-print book in a used bookstore somewhere:

“Have I ever had any idea of selling the club? No, never. My boys are grown now, and they like the business. Losing kept down our crowds, that’s true, but money has never been my god – never. I’ve had opportunities to move the franchise. I’ve had tremendous offers. Back in the early 1950s I could have moved to Baltimore, and then later, to Buffalo, Atlanta, New Orleans, Cincinnati. The propositions they made were fantastic. So it you didn’t have ties, if you didn’t care for your city and its people, if you were just looking for wealth, you could have picked up and gone. But that’s not you, not if you care for your city. And I believe Pittsburgh is a great city. I believe if we win, we’ll do as good as we would in probably any of those other towns.

“Well, when you lose you’re so dumb you don’t know enough to come out of the rain. All losers are dumb. All winners are sharp. When you win, you know all the answers. I don’t know all the answers, so maybe we are dumb. But we’ve tried. We hired Buddy Parker, a top coach. He came to us with a big reputation, not many coaches sharper, and he was a good man. But he was here eight years, and still we didn’t win. We hired Bill Austin, who came just as highly recommended as could be, by none other than Vince Lombardi, who we know would tell us the right thing. Okay, we didn’t win with Austin. Now we come up with a new man, Chick Noll, who came from Baltimore, a championship club, with a reputation that’s just as good as can possibly be.

“We pay. I think Buddy Parker, when he was here, may have been one of the highest-priced coached who ever worked in the league. The papers said eighty thousand a year. It was more. When we make trades, we don’t ask what does a player get. Until now – and I don’t know how long this will continue, because times are changing – but until now, we’ve never had a ballplayer here who’s played out his option. What I’m telling you is we’ve tried. But I want you to know, and I want the town to know, that I’m not alibiing. I’m not crying. I’ve just told you our side. Who’s interested in losers’ alibis?”

No one is interested in losers’ alibis, but Rooney was most definitely not a loser. And his patience paid off. And come to think of it, it’s still paying off, long after the chief passed the franchise along to his son Dan, long after he passed in 1988.

If you’re a fan of football, how could you read those words and not have respect for the history of the Steelers franchise and the Rooney family? Those are the things I think of when someone whines to me about how silly the Terrible Towel is, how Joey Porter always shot his mouth off, how they think the team is a bunch of “big mouths,” as I heard yet again on WEEI last week. Those people don’t know their history, and they don’t know the soul of this team.

Being a fan seems silly to a lot of people. But the idea of giving yourself over to something and making it work for you is a common principle. It’s punk rock. It’s Jesus. And it’s waving your Terrible Towel. Blasphemous? Sure. But only to the nonbelievers.

Happy Birthday, National Lampoon Radio Hour

2008-11-17T15:43:00.005-05:00

According to Dennis Perrin’s excellent Mr. Mike: The Life and Work of Michael O’Donoghue, today is the 35 year anniversary of the first broadcast of The National Lampoon Radio Hour. For comedy nerds and fans of satire, this is an important date. Radio Hour featured not only razor-sharp writing and performing from O’Donoghue, it also helped to introduce talents like John Belushi, Christopher Guest, and Chevy Chase, as well lesser-known but no less talented writer and performers like Sean Kelly and Anne Beatts, to a national audience.

Here’s a story on the Radio Hour from NPR, which includes some audio samples.

And pick up Perrin’s book if you’re a fan of O’Donoghue, The National Lampoon, or the original Saturday Night Live. Powell’s Books has one left!

Blue Mountain reunion coming to Boston

2008-11-13T11:27:00.004-05:00

The first time I saw Blue Mountain, they were opening up for Matthew Sweet at the Water Street Music Hall in Rochester, NY on the 100% Fun tour. I hadn't know there was going to be an opening act -- none was listed on the ticket or on the marquee -- so I showed up a little late. I only got to see them perform three or four songs, one of which was "Soul Sister" from the Dog Days album. I wound up playing that song on my radio show at University at Buffalo's WRUB, and then learning it and playing it at my own shows. In fact, I'll be playing the song Saturday, more than ten years later, at the Gulu Gulu Cafe.

But first, I'll be able to see Blue Mountain again, and catch a full set, at T.T. the Bear's in Cambridge. The band is back together and touring with two new albums -- Midnight in Mississippi and Omnibus, a collection of rerecorded favorites.

I recently talked to band co-founder, singer, and guitarist Cary Hudson for Skope Magazine (you can read that article here), and may post the interview on the Curmudgeon at some point. (Also upcoming, more interview from Richard Lloyd and a piece on Alejandro Escovedo).

Blue Mountain tour dates:

Nov 14 CD RELEASE PARTY T.T. The Bears Cambridge, Massachusetts
Nov 15 CD RELEASE PARTY at the Lakeside Lounge New York, New York
Nov 15 Hank’s Saloon Brooklyn, New York
Nov 17 Shayni Rae’s Truckstop at National Underground New York, New York
Dec 3 Sticky Fingerz Little Rock, Arkansas
Dec 4 CD RELEASE PARTY at Knuckleheads Kansas City, Missouri
Dec 5 CD RELEASE PARTY AT Quixote’s Denver, Colorado
Dec 6 The Crystola Roadhouse Woodland Park, Colorado
Dec 13 DBA New Orleans, Louisiana

OC Interview: Richard Lloyd

2008-11-07T17:02:00.003-05:00

One of the best things about having a blog is being able to indulge yourself in a bit of back history and catch up with things you should have learned years ago. So when Richard Lloyd’s label publicist at Parasol Records contacted me to let me know he was doing interviews to promote a Boston date, I jumped in with both feet. Which, incidentally, is the only way you can really approach Lloyd’s history and music.

Lloyd, of course, co-founded the legendary punk band Television, a staple of the early CBGB’s rock scene. That’s where most people begin with Lloyd, but I start with his vibrant guitar work on Matthew Sweet’s albums. Because of this story, I found his solo work, as well, in the reissued Field of Fire and his latest, Radiant Monkey, with which he is now touring. That’s a lot of ground to cover, and fortunately, Lloyd covers a lot of ground naturally in conversation.

In our phone conversation, Lloyd shoots first, asking me about the neighborhood where the Boston gig is – Church, which is near Fenway Park. Apparently, he used to live in a nearby boarding house, where he said he used to “sit at the window drinking red wine, daydreaming.” We talked for an hour and a half, so this interview will be posted in two or three parts over the next week, as I have time to transcribe it piece by piece. This installment focuses mostly on Television. Still to come, thoughts on the philosophy of the Radiant Monkey, politics, the Television reunion, and Lloyd’s solo work.

This interview is mostly learning for me, because honestly I know you mostly from Matthew Sweet and I’m trying to learn more. I hope that’s not insulting to say.

Not at all. Well, I founded the band Television, along with, you know… Tom didn’t find me, Tom Verlaine, I found Tom. So anyway we formed Television, we needed a place to play, we turned CBGB’s from what its initials stand for – Country, Blues, and Bluegrass… Country, Bru.. Bluegrass – my mouth isn’t working right today. Country, Bluegrass, and Blues. CBGB’s. And we made it into a rock club.

You were playing split bills with the Ramones at that time?

We never actually played with the Ramones on the same bill. But there’s a poster, it’s quite famous, there’s one at Christie’s supposed to go for a thousand bucks, with us and the Ramones opening. But something happened and Johnny had to go down to Florida for his parents’ something or other, either somebody got sick or there was a holiday or something, so they canceled and we had the Talking Heads play instead. So we never actually played on the same bill with them. I saw them the first time they ever played in Manhattan which was at a place called the Performance Studio. There was about twenty people there. Somebody came to me at CB’s where I was just sitting around drinking and doing what I do, or doing what I did, and said, oh, there’s a great new band you ought to come see at the Performance Space so I want up and saw them and I mean, man, I thought, there’s another great band, you know? I knew they were going to be, like, a hot potato.

It’s got to be a pretty great thing that the Ramones cancel and, oh, we’ll just get the Talking Heads.

Those were the days, yeah. Then people made records and… It’s like a nest, you know? You have chicklings in the nest and then the record company comes along and takes all the nestlings out, they get turned into chickens, they drop eggs, which are called records, and they fly away. Then they can’t play CB’s, it’s too small, you know?

Did you realize when you were making and writing Marquee Moon how different it sounded and how much of an influence it would have?

Of course we did. One of my proudest moments was when we auditioned for Atlantic Records and Ahmet Ertegun, who was the head, turned to Jerry Wexler, who really wanted to sign us and who was second in charge and he said, in his Turkish voice he said, “Jerry, I can’t sign this band! This is not Earth music.” And I was going to the bathroom so I overheard it. I thought it was just perfect. It was more important that he said that than sign us, as far as I was concerned that was like the highest compliment. I mean, after all, wasn’t Jimi Hendrix from outer space? If he claimed we weren’t Earth music, that was the highest compliment you could give somebody.

There’s also that tradition of having to leave you own country to come back, Jimi Hendrix going to England and the Beatles going to Germany.

We did well in England. Much better than America. America is so big. I mean, it really is. Unless you have a gigantic machine underneath you, or you tour endlessly for no money, you’re not going to make it in America. And things on radio, they’re not on there because they’re good. You know the great rule of radio programming?

The first ten seconds of a track, is that what you’re referring to? [Note: The rule that a track has to “grab” a listener in the first ten seconds to be considered for play.]

Oh, no. That’s not the real rule. The real rule is a closely guarded secret and I’m about to let you in on it. You play only things that you are certain will not cause your listeners to turn the dial. That’s the real rule. It’s not you play good music, it’s you don’t play anything that has the slightest chance of having somebody reach over and turn the dial. That’s the real rule. Because if they turn the dial to another station you’ve lost them and your advertisers know about it.

Do you feel that’s gotten any better with the Internet and all the ways you can distribute your music yourself?

No! Internet now you’re talking. Hold on one second please. [Walks away from the phone momentarily].

Hi. Thank you. What was the question?

I was saying do you think gotten any better with the Internet and all the ways you can release and distribute things on your own without having to go through some of the same sort of corporate machinery.

It’s good and bad. It’s good because you can do deals where if you sell ten thousand copies you make a fortune. And on a major if you sell ten thousand copies people are jumping out the fucking windows and suicide. You know. So that part’s good. But the bad part is, three-fourths of the nation’s youth are in a band. And they all think they’re good. And they’ve all got this MySpace, MyFace, My Ass, you know? And they’re out there, and it’s like a giant ponzi game.

Going back to Television, when you guys first got together, was there an argument over who was the lead guitar player [between Lloyd and Tom Verlaine]?

No. Basically, Terry Ork was going to form a band. He wanted to sponsor a band, because he worked for Andy Warhol, making silk screen prints and shit in the Factory, and he sort of felt like he wanted to find a band like the Velvet Underground only younger and start a new, like, Utopian scene. And he was going to put a band together around me. But he learned from Richard Hell, because Richard Hell worked at the place he worked at during the daytime, Cinemabilia, that there was this guy named Tom who always came and met Richard and they went to lunch and he was an electric guitarist, too, who didn’t have a band.

So Terry said, hey, he’s playing at this nightclub on audition night, do you want to go see him. I said, ah, I don’t know. He says, he does what you do. And I said, how dare you tell me what I do? What do I do? How do you know what I do? [Laughs] Terry says, well he plays the electric guitar without a band on your own and so does he. And I said, why would I want to see another fucking guy do what I do? I’m busy practicing. And the night came and honest to god, I wasn’t going to go, and I broke a string, didn’t have another, so I said, ah, what the hell, let’s go.

And it was this Off-Broadway nightclub where Liza Minnelli and Peter Allen and Peter Lemongello used to go. Bette Midler. That kind of thing. Gay Off-Broadway singers. And Tom came in and he played three songs, just him, and electric guitar, and an amplifier. And during the second song which I think, it happened to be “Marquee Moon,” I mean not “Marquee Moon,” we hadn’t written that yet, but “Venus DeMilo,” I leaned over to Terry and I said, “Terry, forget about putting a band together with me. Because I’m missing something. And this guy’s got something. But he’s missing something. And what he’s missing I’ve got and what I’m missing, he’s got.” You see, I was not in a position, due to my substance abuse and my own, let’s say immaturity, I was not capable of being a business leader. I was not capable of managing a band, that is, not managing, but leading a band, properly. And Tom could. So Tom was always the leader. And originally the leader was Tom and Richard.

We talked Richard into playing bass. He said, “No, no, not again. Playing with Tom is like going to the dentist, I’d kill myself first.” But I talked him into it. I said, “Richard, you got to be the bass player. Man, you got a look. You look like a cross between, god, I don’t know what, Elvis and like Robert Mitchum.” And he said, “Well, all right.” And I said, “You don’t have to play well. Let’s just rehearse. And you’ll get better.” And then Tom said, “Well, I know a drummer.” So Billy [Ficca] came down from Boston and we started rehearsing. And it was outrageous. It was so much fun. It was like we had run off and joined the circus. We used to fall on the floor, knock the mics over and then sing while lying on the floor, writhing like little worms. Gales of laughter. It was unbelievable. The public never saw that, because as soon as we did a public performance, people stiffen up a little. They couldn’t help it. We sounded more like the Sex Pistols than the Sex Pistols in the beginning.

And we had these great songs because Tom wrote great lyrics that had triple entendres to them. Like “Hard On Love.” I mean, come on. “You’re so hard on love” is the real words, but, you know, but let’s face it, that’s a double if not a triple entendre. Friction. The word. It was like heaven. The music was great, and the two guitarists, we used to fight it out. We would take turns playing the solos in songs and whoever played better in that key would get the solo. And it slipped back and forth and back and forth. And the goal was to have an equal amount but Tom being the leader, he ended up with, it was like 60/40, the lion’s share. But I was never a rhythm guitar player to Tom’s lead guitar player. Because what happened was, while he’s singing, he can’t play lead! So I played all the melody parts and lead parts while he’s singing and then during the solo I’d switch to rhythm or not. So it was this big jigsaw puzzle. You couldn’t tell who was who. And it was very much like the very early Stones, where you can’t tell whether it’s Brian or Keith. Brian, of course, fell apart. But the jigsaw puzzle of the very early Stones I’m talking, you can’t tell who’s playing what. And Television was like that, plus we were like the Beatles – four guys with three front men. I was in the middle, Tom was on the one side, Richard was on the other side. Those two sang about forty percent of the songs each and I sang twenty percent in a set. So it was based on kind of the Beatles.

Richard Lloyd Tour Dates

2008-11-06T15:20:00.001-05:00

I had the opportunity to interview legendary Television guitarist and solo artist Richard Lloyd for the Curmudgeon yesterday. While I am transcribing the interview, here are his tour dates, including a stop in my home base of Boston Saturday. Check back for an extended Q&A.

Nov. 6 / Don Hills / NYC
Fri. Nov. 7 / Café Nine / New Haven CT
Sat. Nov. 8 / CHURCH / Boston
Sun. Nov. 10 / Now That's Class / Cleveland OH
Tues. Nov. 11 / The Summit / Columbus OH
Wed. Nov. 12 / Radio Radio / Indianapolis IN
Thurs. Nov. 13 / Canal Street Tavern / Dayton OH
Fri. Nov. 14 / Club Octane / Morgantown WV
Sat. Nov. 15 / Brillobox / Pittsburgh PA

Only Dopes Need Leaders

2008-11-04T00:24:00.001-05:00

At the end of the Clinton administration, Lewis Black said something on one of his specials that stuck with me. He said, “If the last eight years proves anything, it’s that we function pretty well without a leader.”

Several years later, political satirist Barry Crimmins would put a finer point on that sentiment. I interviewed him toward the beginning of the primary season, when the sheer breadth of lunacy was hard to imagine. “This thing is always called a search for leaders – ‘America wants a new leader,’” he said. “I don’t want any leader, I don’t need a leader. Dopes need leaders. I need a public servant.”

That’s a novel idea, that a leader is in some way beholden to the people he leads. After eight years of signing statements and “you’re either with us or you’re against us,” it’s an extremely useful idea. When a public servant is doing their job, they are engaged with a populace that is actively talking back.

The pretense of election day is that we are choosing a leader. There has been a lot of talk of three a.m. phone calls and foreign policy experience, who has been tested in a crisis, who will be tested in a crisis (thanks, Joe). It makes us feel comfortable, absolves from paying attention. If we elect someone we can trust, we can all go back to sleep.

Leadership is a big industry in America. It’s a value we don’t question. We read books on business leadership, in the Boy Scouts they teach us to be leaders. The people we admire are captains of industry or fashion leaders. It’s a romantic ideal, that among us there are people who can take us bravely into places we have not been before.

But inevitably, our leaders disappoint us. And the only feeling better than picking a leader is condemning an unworthy former leader caught at the height of their inadequacy. The more someone claims they want to lead us, the more they have to compromise to get to their goal.

You can compare John McCain ’08 to John McCain 2000 and find all the little pockets of compromise, the things that he found would have made a difference in that previous run if he had been more willing to budge. What could have been, if he were more willing to cave to the religious right in 2000, instead of calling them “agents of intolerance?” He likes to talk about how “the surge is working” in Iraq, but in 2004, he was wholeheartedly stumping for the Bush crew, the architects of the shortsighted policies he now claims he railed bravely against. Ask him if he’s had a chuckle with the former Bush advisors who rescued his candidacy from the dead over the “McCain has a black baby” strategy from the 2000 Bush campaign they worked on.

Obama has had these problems, as well, albeit to a lesser degree. He has included offshore drilling in his plans, something both he and McCain had said wouldn’t help. He buckled on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to appear more moderate. His list is a bit shorter, but still worthy of note.

None of these actions seem terribly leader-like. And maybe that’s because leadership is an arbitrary ideal. It’s a big shiny symbol we can all gather around and warm ourselves from the more terrifying prospects – some manufactured, some real, mixed until we can’t tell the difference – of the world around us.

I spoke with former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter on the subject, and told him Crimmins statement, “Dopes need leaders. I need a public servant.”

“I don’t disagree,” said Ritter. “Again, when we say ‘we need leaders,’ basically we’re saying, ‘we need messiahs, we need Stalins, Lenins, Maos.’ We don’t need that. We need people who are committed to a system of beliefs and values. That’s why I’m a Constitutionalist, I believe in the Constitution. And we need people to believe in that. Now, within that, you need leaders. But we don’t need people to come in and say, ‘Follow me, I am the solution.’ We need people to say, ‘Hey, let me remind you, we’ve got this thing called the Constitution and we need to start adhering to this. We need to make sure that that which it espouses is being followed through. We need people to commit and invest.’”

Ritter has some experience in an environment where leadership is an important issue. He has served in the U.S. Army and as an intelligence officer in the Marines, in which capacity he was an advisor in the first Gulf War. For the past decade, Ritter has been an outspoken activist concerning U.S. and U.N. policy in Iraq, even producing a sort of instructional manual in last year’s Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement.” The book advocates informed citizen involvement and an adherence to the Constitution, which makes for a non-standard definition for leadership.

“A leader, I can come in and become a leader and get lemmings to march off a cliff. Is that leadership? The other thing about leadership is, the screamer, the yeller, get in the face, the intimidator – that’s not leadership, that’s an intimidator. A leader is somebody who gets a group of like-minded people together and works with that team, as part of the team. A leader is a member of a team. I mention in the book, you can’t be a good leader unless you’re a good follower, first. You have to understand the importance of give and take. A leader isn’t making decisions, a leader is simply facilitating the will of the collective. And that’s what we need – we need a collective that agrees upon what it stands for, and then we need facilitators. If you want to call them leaders then so be it.”

Fear, of course, negates the equation of which Ritter speaks. And fear can take just about any form these days. Fear of the gas pump. Fear of terrorism. Fear of radical ideas. Fear of losing your house, your stocks, your job, or whatever meager savings people have been able to put away. Leadership implies direction, which requires rational thought on the part of both the leader and the followers.

That’s where dissent comes in. Any healthy system provides for dissent, and no true leader is threatened by it. If you believe in anything only because you’re afraid of the alternative, you are no longer participating in a democratic process. And there is no leadership.

Author Steve Almond has been a sharp critic of the Bush administration and of what he calls the “cult of personality” of right wing pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Sean Hannity. He believes the faux patriotic rhetoric plays to an insecure population for whom confidence is more important than content.

“They need Big Poppa,” he says. “They need a big person who’s going to at least play the part of ‘invulnerable leader.’ That’s not moral leadership, it’s emotional leadership. But it’s a kind of twisted, bad parenting emotional leadership. And it says, ‘The world is simple, you just punch the other guy before he punches you.’ Kind of this brawling mentality.”

The election season is especially maddening for Almond, particularly watching the media coverage. “It’s too bad that the political system caters to the big macho, posturing, who’s going to have the best sound bite, who’s going to really knock who out in the debates, and you’re like, shut the fuck up you crazy, psychotic media idiots,” he says. “It’s not about that. It’s really about trying to solve the common problems of the state and its citizens, especially its disenfranchised citizens. It’s very sad to see that degraded day after day.”

What might also help is if people knew that there aren’t just two candidates running for president. Bob Barr is on the ticket for the Libertarians, Ralph Nader is running as an independent, Chuck Baldwin with the Constitution Party, Cynthia McKinney with the Green Party, Brian Moore from the Socialist Party, and numerous others. The fact that you didn’t see any of them in the nationally televised debates means that some significant voices and ideas were left out of the spotlight, partly because the main two choices didn’t want to share.

Of those two – Obama and McCain – one will get the job they want today. Both of them want to be your leader. Hopefully, neither of them will be, at least the way the term has been defined lately. Hopefully, one of them will be a public servant, and you know what direction you want to go.

“I don’t need a leader to tell me I need health care,” says Barry Crimmins. “I’ve got a pain in my side that tells me that.”

OC-Ed: American Hats?

2008-09-03T10:47:00.004-04:00

I have not posted here in a while, as I have been busy writing music, but I couldn't quite let this pass. This is one of the most distrubing, Orwellian images I've seen in quite some time, coming from a story in today's New York Times. The image of the president, looming in a dark cave with hats that appear to be headless looking up at him. Are these the "American Hats" we're all supposed to be wearing now because the Republicans have decided to finally react to a potential crisis?

The past, present, and future of David J

2008-07-24T17:56:00.004-04:00

This piece was original written for another source that ceased publication a couple of months ago. But I found David J to be a talented, thoughtful guy, and his new work is definitely worth picking up.

David J undoubtedly has a millions things he’d rather be doing than dealing with deliveries and doing press interviews. But that’s what he was doing one February morning in Los Angeles, trying to get ready for the debut of Silver for Gold, his musical based on the life of Warhol muse Edie Sedgwick, and talking Bauhaus, Love & Rockets, and producing.

He’d like to be painting, making out a set list for a DJ gig, or even seeing his son’s band, the Correct Sadists. But he hasn’t had time to see them yet. He’s barely had time to breathe.

“You don’t know the half of it, mate,” he says, speaking by phone.

Despite a new Bauhaus record and new Love & Rockets tour dates, it is Silver for Gold that has been occupying most of J’s time. He has dabbled in drama before, but this is his first full-fledged production, writing and recording music and rehearsing for his March debut in Los Angeles. “I’ve never worked so hard on anything, ever,” J says. “There’s so many strands to pull together, but it’s coming together. It’s just a helluva a lot of work but it’s very rewarding. I feel like everything I’ve done in the past has been leading up to doing this.”

It has been a four-year, slow-burning obsession for J, who has been captivated by Andy Warhol, and by extension, Sedgwick, since he saw them in a magazine photo when he was ten years old. In 2004, J met David Weisman, who wrote the Sedgwick film Ciao Manhattan. Weisman was working on a script about Sedgwick’s life, which inspired J to write a song about her. Weisman encouraged J to write a full musical production.

J put in his time researching the project, interviewing Sedgwick’s friends and listening to hours of tape recorded conversations from the Warhol Museum archives. What he found was something deeper than the story of a rock and roll starlet who overdosed in 1971.

“Just hearing her voice when she was sparkling, effervescent, in 1965, very intelligent, compassionate, interesting, such a different persona than the only one I’d been exposed to before, which was Edie towards the end in Ciao Manhattan,” says J. “I was really struck by the difference. It was only a matter of three years or so, four years. That really informed the writing from then on, hearing that voice.”

There has always been a theatrical streak in the music J wrote for Bauhaus and Love & Rockets, something he acknowledges helped him in writing Silver for Gold. His telling of Sedgwick’s life isn’t quite a rock opera, and it’s not doggedly biographical. J imagines Sedgwick as Persephone entering hell, complete with rock band as Greek chorus.

“It operates on a lot of different levels,” says J. “It’s also just using her as a device to retell a classic myth, hero’s journey, and put in other mythic elements to tie them all together. But it’s not like a straightforward biographic portrait.”

While J attempts to mount the production in different cities, he is likely to face a few ghosts of his own. Released in March, Go Away White marks the end of Bauhaus. J is cagey about the specifics of the band finally parting for good, but he feels White is a fitting final statement. “It’s funny,” he says. “It’s almost like we knew it was going to be the last one, subconsciously.”

And while plans for Love & Rockets include summer tour dates after the band’s April date at Coachella, at the time of this interview, J didn’t see the band heading into the studio. “That’s unlikely,” he says. “We’ll be happy just to play the old material.”

J himself, though, will most certainly be back in the studio, producing for other artists (perhaps even the Correct Sadists). He produced the recent Frank Black project Grand Duchy, as well as Silver pit guitarist Michael de Winter’s solo debut. “It’s quite satisfying when you can make it come off,” he says, “and the result being a really great piece of music, and to bring something out that’s kind of buried there and make it shine.”

Ultimately, it’s theater that has captivated J. He is already thinking about his next project for the stage, which might not even include music. “This is the way I’m going to go in the future,” he says. “This will be my main endeavor.”

OC Interview: Author Tod Wodicka

2008-07-08T18:27:00.006-04:00

Tod Wodicka has pulled off a tough mix of humor and drama in his debut novel, All Shall Be Well, and All Shall Be Well, and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well. His lead character, Burt Hecker, has made a mess of his life by running to the past, specifically, his love for medieval history, choosing to eschew almost everything that wasn’t available before 1200 A.D. This makes for some obviously comic moments, but Hecker is no nerdy caricature. He’s a 63-year-old man who has alienated his family in the wake of his wife’s death, and if you’re not sure whether to laugh or cry as he digs himself a deeper hole, do both. They’re both right.

The other amazing trick Wodicka pulls off is making Hecker’s choices seem almost normal in comparison to the other characters. Everyone in the book, and perhaps everyone reading the book, is stuck in some version of the past of their own making. So why should it seem strange that Hecker is stuck in 1200 AD?

I caught up with the Glenn Falls, NY native by e-mail to talk about the book, his inspiration, and his suspicion that Rikki Rocket of Poison wasn’t a very good drummer.

How long was this story in your head before you got to writing it down? Were you a scholar of medieval history before this, or did you have to study it to construct Burt Hecker?

No, I wasn’t a scholar of medieval history, or involved with re-enactment or anything like that. I do have a genuine love and interest in all things medieval though, and the novel, in some ways, was an excuse to submerge myself in that for a while. (In the same way my new novel is now an excuse to get all dippy-headed and esoteric and drive myself crazy with stuff like DMT, shamanism, experimental rock, dream research and … kinky sex.) Like Burt, I’m more of a romantic than your hardcore academic or scholar … I’d rather wander drunkenly around ruins and read weird history books than commit myself to the drudgery of learning Latin or anything like that.

The story of Burt had a pretty long gestation period, and I approached it in a manner I call Method Writing. To write as Burt I spent at least a year only reading medieval books, listening to medieval music, and visiting places Burt was to visit. I had to know what he knows for this to work. It was an immersive and, looking back on it, certainly kind of a sick (and possibly harmful) experience. (My now ex-wife kicked me out just before I started the book!) I took thousands and thousands of pages of notes and to top it off, shortly before I finished the novel, I even made a son of my own. Debatable whether I did this for art’s sake or not.

A lot of reviews have mentioned how you balance humorous and moving moments --what they don't mention is that they are often the same moment. The story of how Burt and Kitty meet, Burt talking to his daughter from a club in Europe -- they manage to be simultaneously funny and sad. How did you approach writing those moments? Was there any accidental humor there?

Primarily, I see the book as one about Voice. That was the hardest and most important thing to nail. Someone once asked me if I would or could tell the story in third-person, and the answer is no, that was never an option. Wouldn’t be interesting that way. For me, it was all about getting this voice on the page, and that voice, through Burt’s idiosyncratic use of language, self-delusion, screwed and myopic perspective, and general unreliability, is essentially a comic voice. He gives away so much without meaning to.

However, the story is anything but comic. It’s a melancholy book, a sad book, but because of the way this guy tells his tale, it’s my hope that it can be a funny book as well. I mean, some of shit Burt says still makes me laugh, but it’s always in the context of this life spiraling way out of control. I really like the humor inherent in a certain lack of self-awareness, stuff like Waiting for Guffman or the UK Office (though I like the US Office too) – these are tragedies, in my opinion, that are incredibly funny. I think Part One sort of sets things up as a picaresque kind of thing, gets the reader comfortable before pulling out the rug and jumping deep down into the heart of this mess of a man. Good times!

Burt often says, when speaking of the things most important to him, that he won't describe them. And that winds up telling us more about them somehow. Was it hard to discipline yourself in those moments, to keep from defining those things in too much detail?

No, it wasn’t hard. By the time I started writing I knew the character, knew so much about him that I simply couldn’t put it all in the book. This, for me, is a good way of working. Once you know the character and the book that well you can start leaving stuff out in very precise ways, and I think the reader can then sense there’s more going on than Burt’s willing or able to divulge and that makes the character and the reading of the novel that much more of a deeper experience. That said, and with 20/20 hindsight, there are a few occasions that I feel I did put too much in, but I won’t tell you where … For every character, and even characters I just mention in passing, I created incredibly detailed histories, I knew their whole life story and knew their family’s history. One of those characters, Howie Katsav, Lonna’s ex-husband, is now going to be in my new novel, actually.

Your descriptions are exacting and unusual -- "plebian trees," "a brass spider of a chandelier," the occasional beach ball floated like a doomed aria." Is there any particular writer or combination of writers that inspired that in your writing?

Oh, I’m sure. But I couldn’t really point to any off the top of my head. I mean, growing up I was a huge anglophile – Evelyn Waugh was a huge influence early on. But then when I moved to England and went to university there I discovered American writers, and it was like suddenly finding a voice that fit, a real epiphany. Pynchon, I’d say, sent me spinning, and mostly for his prose, his rhythm and imagery. Say what you want about his themes and inscrutability, the man is probably the best English prose writer living. I even got a Crying of Lot 49 tattoo when I was 19! Other writers I love and who have certainly influenced me: Philip Roth, Nabokov, W. G. Sebald, Gaddis, Fitzgerald, Bowles, DeLillo … the list is pretty long. Lots of old white men.

There's a strong feeling of impermanence in the book, that everyone is creating their own illusion. Is that something you see in everyday life, that people are doing that in their daily lives?

Yes, absolutely. I was first attracted to medieval re-enactment for its satirical purposes, however I soon began to see the beauty in it, and then I started seeing everything as a form or re-enactment, from family to culture. Again, probably not the healthiest way to look at the world, but there you go. Costumes, masks, illusions, self-delusion, re-enactment … I was also reading a lot of W. G. Sebald when writing the book, and though you couldn’t think of a more different author to myself than Sebald, he’s really sort of the Sad Prince of Impermanence…

Did living in Berlin inform the writing of the book at all?

I started formulating the novel in the US, at the actual Mansion Inn, where I worked as an innkeeper for about a year. Then I moved back to Prague where I did more research and eventually started the novel. I finished the novel in a nine-month race with the fetus that was to become my son, Louis. Is fetus the right word? Anyway, I finished the book in rural Germany, a deadzone of a town called Kleve, and only moved to Berlin after it was finished. I love Berlin but don’t like anywhere else in Germany all that much. So, short answer: Prague and rural Germany and the Mansion Inn influenced the book, but not Berlin.

You described Burt Hecker as an asshole with a heart of gold. To me, he seemed to fall somewhere between Ignatius J. Reilly and Chauncey Gardner. Were Confederacy of Dunces and Being There an influence on your character construction?

No, not at all. I’ve never read Being There - though I’m a big Hal Ashby fan, and like the film – and I’d totally forgotten Confederacy of Dunces when I started writing the book. (It’s an incredible book, Dunces, but I find myself less interested in satire these days – I remember when I read Dunces thinking that, for all its genius, it kind of went on a bit too long…) It was only later that people started mentioning Dunces and the obvious similarities between Burt and Ignatius. Doh! They’re kindred spirits for sure, but there wasn’t any kind of influence there, not overt anyway, and if I had remembered Dunces I probably would have changed a couple of things in my novel that might be seen as too close to the other book.

As a drummer, since you mentioned this in an interview, I will confirm it for you. Rikki Rocket does, in fact, as he told your sister, suck. Even if he spells Rikki with two k's and stands up when he plays.

Ha – you know, I was a big Poison fan in my youth. On the back of middle-school notebooks I used to design incredible sets for Poison to film their signature videos on. Incredible arabesques with drumsets set behind neon green waterfalls, bridges where C.C. could run across pits of lava while drooling out some solo or whatever, towers from which to sing down the Gods of Rock. Cages with women. Cages with toothy neon green animals. Drumsets with fifteen bass drums. Cymbals hanging from mechanical devices that spun around and lit up like that thing from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. AWESOME!

What made you decide to tell this story through the eyes of a 63-year-old man in Upstate New York? What sort of connection did you feel to him, personally?

Well, I’m from upstate NY. Town called Queensbury, which is next to Glens Falls. And the real Mansion Inn - www.themansionsaratoga.com – is in a town called Rock City Falls. Thus my Queens Falls. I’m setting my new novel there too.

As far as a connection to Burt – well, we have a lot in common. (It’s been said that maybe I’m an asshole without that heart of gold.) Obsessions, childishness, selfishness, a romantic disposition, a taste for alcohol … I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: I really only totally clicked with the novel when my girlfriend announced she was pregnant and suddenly the whole book became a kind of cautionary tale directed at myself. Don’t fuck this up, being the main thing.

As far as age, I’ve always been more interested in older people than younger people. I’m pretty disgusted with our culture’s obsession with youth.

Are you working on a follow-up book yet? It seems it would be hard to write something that felt of a piece with "All Shall Be Well."

Yes, it’s called The Household Spirit. It’s incredibly different in every way from my first book – because you’re right, there’s no formula to something like Burt, and I have no interest right now in writing another voice-based, first-person, character-based work. Burt’s a one-off for sure. The new book is third-person, and far more straight-forward as far as narrative is concerned. (But far weirder in every other way.) Maybe it’s something like an existential horror novel … with humor and, as I’ve said, kinky sex and psychedelic drugs and gay fathers and failed rock and rollers.

OC Archive: George Carlin 2002

2008-06-27T12:50:00.007-04:00

When I interviewed George Carlin for the Boston Globe in 2002, he was in the middle of a run at the GMG Grand in Las Vegas, and his 12th HBO special, “Complaints and Grievances,” was already out. He mentioned in the interview that he was working on a Broadway show called “Watch Your Language,” which would have covered his lifelong love of words, a subject that popped up often in his act. I was excited by the prospect of that, but it never happened. Some of it popped up in other work, like his “I’m a Modern Man” which was in his “Life Is Worth Losing” special.

If you read a bunch of Carlin’s interviews over time, you can trace his exploring of an idea and how it develops into what happens onstage. For example, this quote – “The role of comedy is to find out where the line is drawn and deliberately cross it. And I love doing that.” – wound up in his promotional interviews for his last special, “It’s Bad For Ya.” There was always plenty to talk about with Carlin, and here we discussed 9/11, one-person shows, and Carlin’s ever-shifting comic persona.

Where are you calling from?

I’m calling from Las Vegas.

You’re at your stand there at the MGM?

I do a certain number of weeks here every year and I do my regular shows too.

Does that make it easier to manage your schedule?

Well, it gives me a chance to continue to do what I do and not have to move cities everyday. Keep you from having to pack every day. You can sit and write and have a semi-routine life.

It gives you a chance to work on new material and such?

Well, I work all year round, but it gives me a chance to work in a concentrated fashion. It’s a way to not have to travel every day and still work at night.

I saw a note on your Web site that said your life and career are changing. How so?

Well, hmm. Traditionally what I’ve done – I’ve done twelve HBO specials. Been in partnership with them for twenty-five years. They’re changing their focus a little bit. The kind of shows I do for them are always shows with a variety of topics in them, and they’re always one-hour shows. You’re taping, aren’t you?

Yeah.

Good. A variety of topics, everything from one end of the spectrum to another. Some of them about language, some of them about what you might think of as large issues, some of them are little things about ever day life. So this has been my course, and their focus is changing because of all the series they’re doing now. I was the last stand-up comic they were doing with any regularity. They did occasional people in the last few years but I was the only one they were doing on a regular basis. Now they don’t want to do regular venues anymore, such as the Beacon Theater in New York, which is where I’ve been doing my last three or four shows.

So, I’ve been promising for five years to them that I’d be going to Broadway at some point, so they had always pushed me for that, and I was getting ready – I did a show in November, my twelfth show – and I told them I’ll have another one for you in two years. And they said, well, we don’t want to do any of the normal venues anymore. We want stand-up shows, if we’re going to do any of them at all, and we like you and we want you here, to be events, quote unquote.

That’s, of course, a big word these days in show business and sports. You have to have an event now. So that’s the way the Robin Williams show emerged, I guess, because he went to Broadway one day. And that’s kind of using Broadway as a prop. It’s not really a Broadway show. But it’s a way to use the name as a title and a promotional prop.

I said to myself, I was kind of happy because my own private schedule and my personal sort of plan to go to Broadway with one-person shows, so-called one-person shows, was forced into the front of my thinking. Rather than to continue to be a little bit lazy and just knock off these HBO shows, I needed to do the Broadway show for myself and to keep something out in front of the mass audience. So that’s what I’m going to do, and that’s what’s changing. In the fall of 2004, we’ll open a show on Broadway titled “Watch Your Language.” And it’s a normal ninety-minute to a hundred and fifteen minute show with two acts and an intermission and everything that is devoted entirely to one topic. That is what makes it different for me, for one thing. The length of the show makes it different. The thematic variety of show – the fact that it’s all language – is different.

It’s one of my strengths, actually, over the years, is talking about words and phrases and how we speak and abuse and use the English language in America. And all of the many branches that could come out of that topic. One thing that’s different about this show, too, is I intend to do it without any so-called “x-rated” language. Whatever is the right word for that kind of language. I don’t even know. I think of it as profanity. So I’m doing that because I want to signal that this is different. And I think that’s an important part of it. This is based on, I think, good sound observation and ideas, an exploration of things I see and patterns I see about American language. Nothing very profound, of course, but fun, and in some cases smart, I hope. Smart and somewhat sophisticated about this stuff. And a presentation that’s theatrical.

So, that’s a long answer to your question, but it’s a big, big, big change for me. And it has implications for the rest of my life because I have a couple of other good ideas with a lot of material in files already on them for subsequent Broadway shows. But I would try to get a Broadway run out of this. I would hope that I have enough accumulated interest and following among the public to run this for six months, of maybe eight months, and then take it on the road. And of course, that’s a little different when you tour a Broadway show. Because you can stay in the city for a week or two weeks at a time. For instance, Boston, I could stay there for a week. Toronto, Chicago, Los Angeles, all over. So somewhere in the midst of that, between Broadway and touring it, I would … And we’d have to try to figure out how to balance the fact that it would probably stimulate some interest in the show on the road and it might hurt a little box office. You always have to balance that out. I think the interest it stimulates overrides the fact that someone sees it and says, “Well, I’ve already seen this.”

Is this, would you say, a new direction?

Yeah. Unquestionably. What it is, it’s a new use of the thing I’ve always done. And especially one aspect of the thing I’ve always done, which is the language stuff. There’s been plenty of that in the shows along the way, and I do think of it as a strength. And it’s a thing that a lot of people comment on, so I think that I’m building on something that makes a lot of sense for me. So it’s a new twist in a familiar road.

What’s going to separate this from other comedians doing one-person shows?

It doesn’t have to be separate. But every comedian is different. Lily Tomlin brought her and Jane Wagner’s sensibilities to a one-person performance. Jackie Mason brings his sensibilities to it. People who are perhaps lesser known but nonetheless extremely talented have brought their own central identities. Spaulding Grey, Eric Bogosian – certainly they’re well-known. But even lesser names had one-person shows off Broadway, off off, or on Broadway, and all it is is just an exploration of your own theatrical persona. Whatever it is you do is now in a new frame. That’s really all it is. It doesn’t distinguish you from others in that it’s me. And I’m sure that’s all I can do.

Are you planning on using any material from your act in the show?

There are a couple of things from the past that I will put in there because they really belong in there. I don’t know to name them yet because I haven’t settled on them. I have one hundred and ninety separate computer files on language alone, over the years that I’ve accumulated. I have eighteen hundred computer files on all my things. Probably I could do ten more HBO specials if you could snap your fingers over a computer and have the finished product. So I have a lot to draw from, and I haven’t settled on everything yet, but there will be a couple of things that make brief appearances, but that belong in the show. I would say ninety percent of the show will be new, and there are a couple of aspects of it that will be very theatrical. It’s not a laundry list of words and observations. Each separate subtopic such as euphemisms or political talk or media talk or marketing language or current American jargon – each of those and whatever other ones there are will be couched in separate sort of performance styles. It’s not just, “and then this, and then that, and then this.” It’ll have a feel of a narrative flow. Not a literal narrative like a story, but it will have a flow and a linear sense to it that makes it more of a theatrical experience.

So you mean theatrical more in a sense of narrative than spectacle.

Well yes, absolutely. It won’t be a spectacle. For instance, the opening piece is a sort of poem – it doesn’t rhyme, it’s more like free verse, but it’s a sort of poem called “I’m a Modern Man.” It’s spoken in the first person. “I’m a modern man.” And then this modern man describes himself in all of the terms that we have grown used to. Familiar terms from our past in the last twenty, twenty-five years that have become so much a part of our lives through media repetition and through the quick growth of language and not quite slang, but jargon and argo and the kind of lingo – my file for this is called Broadway Lingo. It’s my shorthand for this idea. And it’s really – that piece, for instance, has a performance quality because it’s done in a kind of a manner of an actor on a stage, as opposed to a comedian looking at his audience and speaking to them. And there are other parts that are like that, that I’m putting into a form that [makes them different] from the standard sound of my stand-up. It’s a little hard to pin down verbally here, but I know it in me, and I have a feel for what I have to do with it. So there!

Do you think fans will be disappointed to not hear the “Seven Words” routine?

No. Absolutely not. No. First of all, I’ve done one hundred and thirty-seven, for instance, Tonight Shows, and probably a hundred other kind of television shows with routines, stand-up, not just sitting on a panel, I don’t mean that, where I haven’t used any bad language. So, people know in a sense, without having thought of it consciously, perhaps, that I can do that. No, they’re not going to be disappointed, because what people like in my material, I believe, the combination people have come to appreciate, is, whatever it is about my personality that they like, and secondly, the ideas. There are always sound ideas. Even when it’s the most bizarre sort of subject or something very risky, in a way, it’s usually based on some interesting twist of an idea we all know. That’s what interests me. That’s the kind of thing I wanna say. So even if I’m mucking it up with a lot of filthy language, and very irreverent references. For instance, the abortion thing, that goes back to ’96 I think. The abortion piece that opened that HBO show, even though that is just an attack on Christianity and its attitudes, and Catholicism in particular, because I was a Catholic, it is based on some very sound reasoning. It’s perverse, some of it. But, it’s a very well structured, logical dissection of this whole thing. I try to have that be one of the things that attracts people, and I think it’s in there. I think it’s in the package people look for. If they’re one of the people who says, “I really like him,” I think that’s one of the things they like. So this show will be just loaded with that.

Do you find yourself looking back to your archives very often?

Well, I own everything of my own. I own all of my albums. There are seventeen of them. All my HBO shows. So I was in the luxurious position of being able to do that sort of packaging myself, or supervise it. So I have, over the years, for various packages of that type, both audio and video, have, by necessity, been forced back to listen and see and experience some of the things. But it’s mostly a function of that, that I revisit them. Plus, they’re in my mind anyway as archives. You know, they’re in there. So sometimes I hear resonance between something I’m doing now and something I did and I want to see how I did and improve it. And I look back and I see that, gee I wasn’t writing as carefully then. God, I could have gotten another two minutes out of that subject. Why’d I leave it alone? So I think I’ve improved the craft part of what I do just by continuing, the same way I guess a violin player improves over time.

Is that what you think when you, say, see footage of yourself as a young clean-cut comedian doing Kennedy impressions?

Well, I’m proud of the fact that I was… I had a lot of things in those old stand-up television pieces, clean-shaven, suit and tie, that had good insight in them, and some interesting irreverence, that was sort of mild compared to later stuff I did, but for its time, which was a nice kind of a touch. I’m always very proud of what I did when I put it in the context of who I was when I did it. How old I was And I was operating purely by my instincts. I quit school in ninth grade, went into the air force, and got a job as a disc jockey when I was seventeen in the air force. So I kind of like invented my situation, and I’m kind of proud that I was able to push it along at such an early time.

Do you think it’s necessary to keep reinventing yourself?

I think if it’s part of how you function, it seems to come out of – I don’t know if the people who do that, and I think I’m among them, I don’t know how accurate, I use the word myself, “reinvent,” but I don’t know how accurate it is. I think it’s natural evolution, that you have more to do or more to say, not so much because you think the world is waiting for it as you need to say it. You need to say these things, you’ve got to get it off your chest. I guess that’s what all self-expression is about. I gotta sing my song, I gotta paint my picture, I gotta write my poem. And some people keep their poems and never show them to anyone, and some of us are more extroverted about it and need to have approval and direct, immediate gratification for it. So this is an ideal medium for me to get out there and hear it. And then you get to polish and fix, you know. A painter has to say, “Okay, the painting’s done.” A poet has to say, ‘I finished that’ and here it is to the publisher. But until the moment I get to perform it to the people who are going to appreciate it and change it along the way until I finally say it’s done and put it on a tape.

How much of the changes you go through, whether reinvention or evolution, is reactive?

I don’t know. I don’t think it’s very consciously reactive. If you want to refer to the biggest and most obvious change that I went through, from the short hair suit and tie to the so-called ‘hippie’ part of my career, that all happened very naturally and organically, so to speak, over two years in front of people. It wasn’t like Bobby Darin. I didn’t go away in a tuxedo and come back in buckskins. My hair grew, my beard grew, my material changed, in front of people in two years. Because I was in the wrong place and I had to fix that. I was what I think of as a mainstream comedian entertaining mainstream audiences in mainstream venues, and what happened was, during the years of the sixties, which were the years of my coming of age as a comedian, I started in 1960, during those years, the world around me changed. And I had always been a rather out-of-step individual. This suit and tie person was kind of a way of going along to get along. Because in order to be what I wanted to be, which was, I wanted to be like a Danny Kaye as a child. In order to do that, I had to do what you do, and that was go through mainstream show business. And so I was going through those things and using my skills – Hippy Dippy Weatherman, Wonderful Wino, all these things I did – using my skills to excel in that arena, the mainstream arena. But underneath all that, I was a pot smoker, and I was a kid who was always swimming against the tide.

I was a lawbreaker, a rule-breaker, I was kicked out of the air force, I was kicked out of the choir, the altar boys, the boy scouts, summer camp, three schools, and I ran away from home three times. So I was always a kind of an outlaw, let’s call it, with big quotation marks around it. And yet I had to act like the mainstream guy. So as the world changed around me in the sixties, I realized there was a place for this other part of me. There was a place for this other voice. This, “You’re full of shit” voice. This “Can’t you see the fuckin’ situation here?” And that guy was very lucky to be alive and beginning to function as a comedian when those changes happened. So I just let myself join that flow. Because I looked around and I saw – I was thirty at that time, by the way. 1967, I was thirty years old. I was entertaining forty year olds and above in nightclubs. And I was in sympathy, philosophically and otherwise, in sympathy with twenty year olds. The countercultural part of me inside, the guy swimming against the tide, he began to realize, I’m entertaining the wrong people. I’m entertaining, so to speak, the enemy here. Whereas, there’s now a whole culture forming that I’m more in affinity with. So, I let myself drift, my material, my writing and so forth, into the world that would accept and like those ideas, rather than keep banging my head against the wall with businessmen on expense accounts.

Do you find being an outlaw or going against the grain is important or necessary to comedy?

Well, it certainly I think it’s necessary for the most interesting comedy. Of course, that’s a personal taste. I can also laugh – you know, W.C. Fields and Groucho Marx, the Marx Brothers, Groucho and the Marx Brothers, in the 1930s they changed something In the 1920s the comedians of the silent movies were mostly people who were victims of the system. Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton. These were guys that always looked like the world was about to spoil their fun. And in the thirties, W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers came along and they were anarchic and they took over and they told the setting what was going to be happening. They became the aggressor against the system. And that is essentially what appeals to me in comedy, when comedy takes a stand, so to speak, and picks at the scab and looks under the rock. That’s what happened in the 1950s when comedy changed. Because all through the forties the famous comedians, they were nightclub comedians, a lot of them were borscht belt comedians, but it was all safe stuff. As risqué as they ever got were the “my wife has a headache” jokes. Or jokes maybe about the size of a guys wee-wee or whatever euphemism they used then.

In the 1950s, we began to get a mixture of things. You’ve got Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Dick Gregory, Shelly Berman, Bob Newhart, Nichols and May, and a group of people. Not all of them were social critics, but they all took different courses. They all became individual expressive artists of their own sensibilities rather than to do the thing that everyone did. So that was a big shift in comedy. And that is also when boomer humor began, which is the kind of Mad Magazine, eventually National Lampoon, Monty Python, all the improvisational groups, Second City. The ones that questioned authority. And I just think that’s always, the role of comedy is to find out where the line is drawn and deliberately cross it. And I love doing that.

How important was it, then, for you to get the free speech award with Dick Gregory?

Well, I don’t want to use the word important. Let’s put that in its perspective. It was nice. But as I wanted to explain to them, I didn’t really do anything. All I did was do my act. The hotel in Vegas fired me. The FCC went after a radio station that played my record. And in Milwauke, the police arrested me for just doing my act. So I didn’t make a stand or risk anything the way you would think a person who gets a free speech award, freedom of speech, like he was a fighter like William Kunstler, you know? Or something like that. So it just felt nice. It was an honorary thing. I just don’t feel I was much of a pioneer. I just was in the right place with the right material at the wrong time, or the wrong material at the right time.

You’ve also said you don’t consider yourself a political comic.

Yeah, not politics in the sense of the two-party system, but political certainly in that, political in the broad sense of it, meaning that every act can be interpreted politically. Running a stop sign can be a political act. I don’t do, for the most part, there have been exceptions or lines or routines, but for the most part I don’t do topical humor about political personalities. I never did Hilary jokes, I never did Clinton jokes, I don’t do Bush jokes. Those targets are too easy. That’s simple. And you sound like everybody else. You sound like you’re just another Jay Leno, or whoever’s out there talking about these things. If I’m going to talk about something that’s sort of in the news, it’s usually something that’s in the news as an ongoing, overarching thing, like abortion, like people squealing and the Patriot Act and spying on your neighbor. It won’t be about that news story, it’ll be about that part of the zeitgeist. So that’s why I say I’m not really political. But it is, of course, very political.

Do you find political comedians funny?

Not really. Mort Sahl was a past master, present master even, and genius at that. I find things... Bill Maher has interesting attitudes, I think. And some of the writing is very crisp and I like it. But for the most part, I’m pretty bored by topical humor. Because it has to, it’s so obvious exploitative – I looked that up once and there’s two different ways -- exploitive and exploitative. They both sound wrong. But it does sound like it’s just pandering to people’s recent passions about the news. And it’s easy. Anybody can make a joke like that. Another problem with topical humor is you’ve got to drop something after a month because it sounds dated. If you’ve worked on something for a month, it’s grown and changed for a month, usually you’re kind of proud of it. You’ve got a minute and a half on this issue, and you’re kind of proud of it, and now it’s beginning to sound stale. And you have to throw out a good piece of writing. So I don’t like to do that. I’d rather do something that I know six months later I can be still improving.

In Complaints and Grievances you got all of your September 11th material out of the way early on.

Oh, yeah. That was just something that I could not avoid and I was in New York after all, two months after the event, with a live audience on live television. So, I knew that, as I said there, it would be like the elephant in the living room. Why completely avoid it? What I like about what I did was, I never waived the flag, I never talked about this country, I talked about New York City, I put on the New York City t-shirt, I switched the game on them, on these flag-waivers and these shield-sniffers. I switched the game on them, and I still managed to, in a sense, acknowledge the event and make very little of it. Because it’s very easy to just fall in line on these things. It’s just a real boring thing to me now. I call it 7/11. When I worked on that night here, this past week, I said, “I hope you didn’t come here to hear any of that seven-eleven shit, cuz I’m not going to do it.” And they understood and they laughed at that, and I just left it at that.

You’ve not written any more material on the event?

No. Well, I have a file on it because I keep thinking of things on terrorism or suicide bombers or Saddam Hussein, and of course, Bush and Cheney, and I have a file on that. Because when I go on Imus, I do like to say a little something, if I have what I think of as a really clever line or a good observation. So I have files on those things because… They’re rather short but because I can’t stop my brain when my brain thinks of something, but I haven’t tried to make a routine out of it. The other thing about it is, that too, is a very fluid situation, and I could end up eight months from now saying, “Jesus, I can’t even use this ten minutes.” Hey, Nick, I’m going to have to call a radio station now. They gave me a half an hour to talk. So I really apologize because I’ve been carrying on, but I bet you can find something in there.

George Carlin: Complete Comedian

2008-06-23T11:20:00.010-04:00

George Carlin was the first big name comedian I interviewed in what has become a career covering comedy. I didn’t even have professional recording equipment at the time – I had a speaker phone and a handheld tape recorder that I placed as close to the speaker as possible. The resulting article was published in the Boston Phoenix, and you can read that here. I interviewed Carlin three times, and always looked forward to speaking with him. The last time was in March, just as his 14th HBO special, It’s Bad For Ya, had premiered. Here’s the transcript of that interview, and the Boston Globe article I wrote about the special.

In my estimation, George Carlin was the most complete stand-up comedian to grace the boards. He was hilarious whether he was offering fiery political or social insight or just making a funny face. His rampaging intellect should be studied by anyone who has any thought of becoming a stand-up comedian. People like to point to Lenny Bruce’s legacy and, rightly so, the barriers he broke through so other comedian could do what they do. In that light, it’s amazing to think that Carlin was arrested in 1972, six years after Bruce’s death, in Milwaukee for performing his “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” routine.

Bruce, Carlin, and Richard Pryor all occupy a special place in the American stand-up tradition, drawing controversy and influencing generations of comedians. What sets Carlin apart is that he remained funny and focused on the comedy until the very end, and those who felt his influence can point to the material he wrote and performed more than the idea of his myth or legacy as inspiration.

I’m saddened that we’ve lost a still-sharp mind, and selfishly, that I won’t get to pick that mind anymore. But one thing that makes me smile today is that, based on a piece from It’s Bad for Ya, there are hundreds of people, maybe thousands, maybe more, who will start to utter the phrase “If there’s anything I can do” to those who knew Carlin in some way, and will have to stop themselves as they remember Carlin’s routine.

If you don’t have a copy of Class Clown or Jammin’ in New York, go find one at the library or a local mom and pop music store. Find that dog-eared VHS copy of Carlin on Campus. Hell, watch Car Wash. Any one of those things should be more effective than reading this. But for the comedy nerds amongst you, here’s that first interview I mentioned. I’ll post a 2002 interview later this week.

I'd like to congratulate you on the HBO special.

Thank you.

This is your eleventh special?

That's right

And also on your role in Dogma, opening up at Cannes in a couple of weeks.

Yes, I guess that is not too far off, huh?

It's a couple of weeks. I don't know what the exact date is. About the specials -- you've produced and written most if not all of them.

All of them, yeah. I write all my own stuff, I always have for forty years. Producing my own shows began after the second HBO show was done. From there on, the last nine have been all produced by my company, and I bought the other two. I own all of them, but only nine of them were produced by us.

How much of a difference do you think that makes -- being in a position to produce your own material and release it on your own label?

Well, of course it keeps you calm. You don't have to deal with other people. I own all my own audio -- all my records, I own them. I own all of my videos. We promote all of our own concerts. So that's obviously the ideal position to be in -- just driving the bus all by yourself, and not to have to deal with other people. And the contributions they think they need to make in order to justify their existence. Such as you hear in network television situations, where people speak up because it's their job to just speak up. So you avoid all that.

You're also releasing a box set?

Yeah, Atlantic Records and I together are putting out a box set in the fall, which will have the six albums I did for Little David records, four of which were gold albums -- the first four -- and there were two more. So there were six albums, and we're putting a bonus CD in that's going to have an album's worth of -- not unreleased things from recordings -- it's all old stuff. Stuff from my nightclub days before I was discovered, so to speak, and stuff from my own tape recorder I had home as a child, as a youngster, and things of that nature. Air checks from my disc jockey shows. Curiosities, you might call them.

I know some of those albums have been hard to find, as a fan. I just found "On The Road" this past weekend at a used vinyl shop.

Good, good.

Do you plan to sign anybody else to Eardrum Records?

My partner and I Jerry Hamza own it, and we have always said we were open to that, but we both realize what a commitment in time and energy the care and feeding of an artist requires, in their work and their release. We've had so much to do of our own that we haven't felt the inclination to go ahead and do that. Theoretically it's still open, but we tend to shy away from complicating our lives.

How important is a live audience to you?

It is really the core of what I do. Everything else is secondary. You know, television acting or television performing or movie acting -- those things are kind of sidelines. The central thing I do is to write material for my own performance. And I need to do that obviously for a responsive, or at least a theoretically responsive audience. It's a circular exercise. You know, you put things out and they reward you at different levels of laughter or applause, and the contract is complete. It requires the audience for the whole thing to operate.

That's why the book was interesting to me -- to do the book and have a big selling book opened up for me a whole new world of possibility. That I could sit home, write, and have an audience without having to travel, without having to be somewhere at eight o'clock at night. So it kind of expanded my horizons a bit.

Would you consider doing something like that again?

Oh yeah, the second book is underway. It's called "When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops." And it's a follow-up to "Brain Dropping." It's a collection again of varying lengths and varying topics. Some innocent, some kind of sweet and childlike, and others rather strident.

Is there a story behind the name?

No. It's purely an arbitrary sentence that I had written down once that I thought was an interesting sentence. And I realized that it manages to offend all three of the major religions -- Muslims and Jews and Christians alike could find some offense in it. I really just want to see a title like that on the New York Times Best Seller list. I'm dying to see -- you know, right after "Conversations With God" and just before "Chicken Soup for the Soul," "When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops."

Are there any plans to reprint the first book, "A Little Brain Damage Can Help?"

Not really, but what I'm doing is borrowing from it for this next book. I have some things in that original book that I still think are interesting or clever or cute or whatever the right word for the individual piece might be. I have reasons to like them. Different reasons. I think there are things in there that I want to use -- to salvage, I'd call it -- and get them to a wider audience, so I'm going to put some of them in the next book. But, no. That artwork and everything -- that book was pretty much a marriage of text and the artwork. Kind of a singular thing.

Kind of like the Bukowski and R. Crumb books?

[laughs] Yeah, well. On a very introductory level.

I haven't been able to track that one down. I was interested in the contents of it.

You mean the "Brain Damage Can Help" book?

Yeah.

It's kind of a standard assortment of my kind of stuff. There's some miscellany, there's something about the dirty words. There are a few short fiction pieces, which are not fully realized fiction, they're just short bursts of things that don't qualify as comedy material, but they're sort of interesting forays into a fictional setting. So some of that will appear in this next one.

Words and language seem to have been a focus point -- not to sound obvious -- but as a particular topic. Who's were the first words you fell in love with, or that you really admired?

My father was -- I didn't know him, he was gone from the picture early. But he was very successful a newspaper space salesman -- the national ad manager of the New York Sun. And he was a highly sought after, as they say, after dinner speaker, and won several big speaking contests in the 1930s. So I inherited from him, and from my mother, a gift for language, both the delivery of it and the appreciation for it. My mother got that from her own father who was a New York City policeman. And he wrote out, longhand, most of the works of Shakespeare during his adult lifetime, simply for the joy it gave him. So there's a great genetic component in this, I'm sure. And then my mother encouraged that, and she was a colorful speaker as well, around the house, in ordinary discourse. She was very colorful, and would do voices and characters to highlight or illustrate something she was telling, and had a great concern and care for language. So that was passed along to me. And a lot of her words and phrases and expressions and things were the first things that caught my ear.

I'm not very well read. I spent my -- The years you're supposed to go to school I spent pretty much fucking off. And I quit school in ninth grade, so I didn't have a kind of planned, arranged introduction to the written word. It was just haphazard. I read a lot of periodicals, and I read a lot of nonfiction. I'm not to well versed in fiction, outside of the things I've learned from hearing other people talk. But it's not a firsthand experience.

You seem better versed in the language than some people who purport to be well read.

Yeah, I cared a lot for it, thank you. I care a lot for it, and I knew it was my key to what I wanted to do in life. I knew I had to become fluent and familiar with and comfortable with all the aspects of speech and language. A lot of it comes to you easily, if you're given that sort of collection of tools -- when you're born, your genetic tool kit. A lot of it comes very easily, and the rest is just pursuit, to look after it and find the things that improve you.

And you've passed that on to your daughter, making films now?

Yeah, well she does a number of things. She's writing some things and performing for, on the Internet, on Comedynet, and is working on a show of her own, as they call it, a one person show. She has written a film with her husband and they continue to do some of that. It's kind of a mixed bag that she's pursuing. Yeah, she has a great taste for language.

Getting back to "Brain Droppings" for just a second -- what's your take on the whole Mike Barnicle affair?

From a distance, and never knowing, of course, who's telling how much of the truth at any time, I assume, given his past run-ins with the paper itself over sourcing and different things, I assume that what seems to have happened is what happened. That he, or someone he counts on, someone he relies on to feed him things, gave him these ten jokes. And they changed them. They changed each joke just a little bit, not so much to disguise it because they weren't disguised, but just to -- I don't know -- maybe make him feel better. But each of the jokes was spoiled or degraded to some extent by the editing they did. I had worked for months and months and months, even if they were just one sentence, to get the sentence just right and take something out that was just a little bit in the way or clunky or whatever. And I had them down, and they just reclunked them, or whatever you want to call it. So that was amusing to me.

I spoke to him when it first broke and I told him, "Listen, I'm not going to be crawling all over you publicly so don't worry about anything from my end. Whatever happened happened." I took him at his word that someone else passed them along to him. And I haven't talked to him since that initial thing.

It seemed strange to me that you were the one person no one seemed to have asked anything about this.

Yeah. Only occasionally does it come up. But no, at the time there was no particular attempt to ask me. I was happy, low profile, because at the time the story about Barnicle broke, the "Brain Droppings" book had been dropping. It was in its last few weeks on the New York Times list and it was down to number eleven, and this incident with him bumped it back up to number seven, and it stayed at eight for a couple of weeks, and then nine. So I got some extra life out of it. And I thought, that's fine. Don't do anything -- just sit here. That's what I did.

The title of course of the new special and CD is "You Are All Diseased." Would you say your material has become more cynical over the years?

Yes. I'm not as comfortable with the word cynical as some. For my money, cynicism is, for instance, is what an automobile manufacturer does when they weigh the cost of paying off the families of people who died thanks to defects in their merchandise against the cost of improving the product. And say it's better if we go ahead and leave it the way it is and just take these law suits and let people die. That, to me, is cynical.

I understand it's also cynical to not believe much in things, and to be on that side of it. I understand the word is valid for both uses, but I think more of myself as highly skeptical, non believing, and that leads into cynical, I know. So I won't really, you know, argue with you much about that. But definitely the work has gotten more so, because the period of time you spend in this culture, is directly proportional to the degree, I guess, of disbelief you have for these beliefs and platitudes. I'm getting lost in my own sentences here, but it's directly proportional to the degree of disenchantment you have with all of these things that are presented to you at an early age as gospel, as iron-clad. These patriotic expressions and sympathies, religious ones, the assumption that certain things are more moral than other things. All of that -- it's just a matter of time before some of that begins to flake off like a bad paint job.

How important would you think anger is in comedy?

Well, this is another word that I probably argue about too much, or maybe haggle over too much. I don't experience it as anger. I experience it more -- and I know it plays as anger, and I know it's fair to call it that. I experience it as discontent and irritation -- milder forms of anger. And of course theatrically things are enhanced on stage because of the need to present them theatrically, and to be a full blast for an auditorium of 2,500.

And then there are times when the way the show is going on a particular night is bothering me, that irritates me, and that feeds a little into the other material, where I'm talking about something in the culture that disturbs me, and the anger of the evening will wrap over into that. So from my standpoint, I think comedy has always represented a kind of discontent and a subversive disbelief and an attempt to overturn and overthrow -- at least for the evening, for a few moments -- to overturn and overthrow the received wisdom and received cultural messages. So there's a good deal of -- These words all bleed over into each other. Anger is a fair one.

What would you think when you would see somebody like Bill Hicks, or a comedian like that?

Well I liked Bill Hicks. First of all it was a personal shame that he had to die young, of course. But outside of that, it was kind of a shame that he didn't get to mature more in these feelings and expressions that he had. Cause I didn't feel it was fully realized yet. I really appreciated what he was doing, but I think the balance of emotion to reason was still being developed in him. I think he might have had more fun later, really sitting down with those feelings and isolating them and putting them into careful sentences and paragraphs. And that's really not a criticism. I know it sounds like lukewarm support, but it's not. I'm just being analytical. I like him a lot and I liked what he was doing.

Do you see your influence in anyone specifically working today?

No, I think you have to be very -- I mean, we're all self-oriented -- but you have to be sort of slipping into that to a bad degree I think to be looking around and noticing stuff. I hear things from people. They'll say "such and such, so and so." And then I hear the person and I think, no, there's no comparison at all. They're just doing what they do. And some of these topics are public domain, some of these attitudes are public domain. I do think in the wrong picture, probably it's true, that my being successful, my finding commercial success with this sort of voice I've had, to varying degrees from the early 1970s, might have encouraged other to follow some of their own feelings more faithfully, rather than to try to conform to something that they originally might have thought was expected of them to be successful. But then they saw that I could do this and maybe they could get away with something, as it were. So I think in that respect, there's probably something. Some of those influences spill over.

What do you think the difference is between you and your stage persona?

Well, there's no difference in the beliefs. There's no difference in the beliefs and the degree of disenchantment. The difference is, on stage, energy is concentrated, a lot of it reads as anger, but basically I don't experience anger in my daily life. I'm like anyone else -- I can get impatient in traffic, and I have some nice things to say. But anger doesn't run my life to any extent that I can see. I'm very even-tempered. Anyone who has worked with me for a day or more, or even been around me for ten minutes -- a fan or anyone -- will tell you that I have a nice nature and that I'm very open and even-tempered. So they're quite different, and one is a performance to make the point.

How much of an influence was Lenny Bruce?

Well, a great deal, as he was to a lot of people. It was the honesty. For me it was his honesty, of being able to open these subjects up for investigation. He was, of course, extremely funny, and had his genius aspects in some areas of what he did. He had a great influence because, as I said about myself, he was doing this. Although he wasn't a big commercial success, he was a cultural success, and he was known and thought well of critically by those who took the time to look at it honestly and not look at it from a frightened and prejudiced perspective. That encouraged me, the doors he's opened, I can walk through them. And it was very encouraging and inspirational in its own way.

He also got me my start. He also got my partner Jack Burns -- by the way Jack and I met at WEZE in Boston in the old Park Square.

I was going to ask you about that.

We actually met when it was still in the Bradford Hotel and then it moved down to Park Square to the Statler building. But Jack and I got our first agent, our big agency -- there was only one, for us there was only one, GAC, they were as big as William Morris in those days. And Lenny Bruce directly got the president of GAC to sign us, based on a performance he saw of ours. So Lenny also had a practical influence, as well as the inspirational side.

Yeah, what do you want to know about Boston? Three months I lasted. I took the mobile news unit to New York. I was out buying drugs, and with my buddies in Harlem, we were in this news unit. I lived up in West Harlem and we used to score in Spanish Harlem. We were out doing that with this news unit with "WEZE news" all over it, and when they finally caught up with me on the phone that weekend, they said there had been a prison break in Walpole, and wanted to know why the unit wasn't there. I told them, "Well, I took it to New York. Listen, we can always cover that Walpole break next month because there'll be another one, sure as hell." Anyway, that was the story, and that was how it ended. It was just a three month job. I was a fish out of water, really. It was a network station, and I was from a rock and roll disc jockey background.

I was wondering why it was such a quick...

Yeah, that was it. And also I cut Cardinal Cushing off in the middle of the fourth sorrowful mystery, when he was reading the rosary once. And that didn't work too well in my favor either.

He had friends in -- well...

In high places!

I didn't mean for that to be a pun. It started --

That's all right. [laughs]

I had read that you had hipped Richard Pryor to Lenny Bruce.

No, I don't remember that. I'm sure by the time I met Richard in 1962 or three he was pretty aware of Lenny by then. I don't know how that might have become a little story.

You've said that you don't like topical humor.

Right.

But you've historically commented on politics in your routines.

I do a kind of, less than topical, more like timely. I like to do things that have political impact, but I don't do jokes about current events, is basically what I mean. I don't bother. I have a lot of notes now on Kosovo and Albania, and I have a lot of notes on Colorado now, but I don't go out of my way to put things in my show that are current, because I don't like the discipline it requires to keep them fresh, drop them when they're no longer timely. And you know you can develop a couple of minutes on a topic and really like it -- you have some good jokes, some well crafted stuff that you like and you're proud of. And if you do it too long it has a dated sound, and you have to just drop it and I don't like that. I like running my own game and not having events dictate my game. If a big thing breaks at five o'clock, I don't want to feel under pressure at eight o'clock that night to have something to say about it. Which would happen if I were known for current events. So rather than do that, and weaken my presentation -- cause I like doing a set show -- I just let it go. And I collect them. And sometimes they're useful in the larger sense. A year later there's still some value to talking about teenagers killing each other. Doesn't have to be specifically about Colorado. The thoughts I write down today still have some validity later.

Do you were about the unfortunate timing of something that may hit a nerve?

No, I couldn't wait to get onstage that night with the stuff I'm doing about kids killing each other. I had a thing that was already in place in my show about, "Every time some guy with an AK-47 runs into the schoolyard and kills three or four kids and a couple of teachers, the next day, the school is infested with psychologists and psychiatrists..." So anyway, it goes like that. And I knew it would make them tighten up in their seats and I just couldn't wait to get to that. I love doing that. And it's still valid.

I say -- here's the thing always hear. When kids kill kids, you always hear, well they're desensitized to violence. The video games, the movies, the TV and the rap music and the heavy metal music have desensitized them to violence. And I say, well, if that's true, what do they need all of this fucking counseling for? If they're so desensitized... You know? This counseling shouldn't be necessary.

It's more of that bullshit they give us. Some people have a gene that lets them be more violent than other people, and then it's either reinforced in some way or another at home through the father's behavior or not reinforced, or through associations with other kids, or likenesses, or things that bring it out and enhance it, and then there's further psychic damage for some reason. And then they're able to do something like this. But there are a lot of people out there who have this gene, it's never activated, they are other people out there exposed to all of these influences and they don't have that gene so they're not turned into killers by them.

That's what I love to write about and think about and try to point out. That most everything we hear is bullshit, with a germ of truth in it. And that's what makes it attractive -- the germ of truth. And it's just kind of fun trying to chip away the bullshit. I do it for myself, to tell you the truth. I don't care, the result of my work. Naturally I want to live nicely and have some income, but the main thing is for me to say stuff that I feel good about, that I feel good about saying. So that's my motive, and anything that happens after that -- the money, the fame, and then whatever people personally take from it -- those are all dividends or side effects that I can take or leave.

Do enjoy the reaction, if someone takes issue with something in your act?

Yeah, I do. I like if they holler. You know, I have this thing about businessmen who smoke cigars. Those are not the only ones who are smoking them, but it's an image of the fat, arrogant businessman with the cigar. I go out after them all the time. And occasionally I'll hear some guy in the audience and he'll go [approximates arrogant sounding shout]. Something like that. So I face directly toward him to finish the piece. The finish of the piece is really vitriolic. You know, it has some really nice name calling, and I just do it right in his direction. And I love that. I just really love the confrontational aspect of what I do.

Is there a moment you can remember in "You Are All Diseased" where something similar happened?

No. No I can't. No. Nothing like that in the actual tapings of these shows.

How did you end up in "Dogma?"

Kevin just liked me. He was a big fan of mine -- the director, Kevin Smith, liked my stuff, knows a lot of it from memory, and said when he was writing that part, he was writing it pretty much with me in mind. So, simple process director to performer.

How have people reacted to the "There is no God" routine?

Well, they get kind of quiet, which I like and I expect. But I can tell in key places -- the type of laughter, the quality of the laughter, that they're not completely put off by it.

I'm working in Las Vegas now, and it's quite a different audience, as you can well imagine. It's not as hardcore a fan base audience. It is more peripheral, they are casual type of people. People are interested in you casually. They know about you from a long time ago, they don't really keep up, and they're curious. Then there are some fans in the audience as well. In these kinds of settings, the people who aren't really tried and true with my kind of thinking get tense and they clam up and that has an effect on the others as well. People aren't as willing, in these kinds of settings, to express and expose themselves and their views. In the safety of a dark theater, it's different. And when they're all mostly fans, they're more homogeneous. Then you get more of their honesty -- what laughter should be -- an unexpected expression. Here it's more calculated. They hold back a little. And I expect that and understand it. But I can tell from the applause at the end, and from certain key laughs that they got me, that they're there okay. That they're with me. But they're just not very demonstrative.

What kind of feedback have you gotten in regard to the "Advertising Lullaby" routine vs. the commercial work that you've done?

Well, on the Web page I've had a few complaints, dismay, or whatever. And I've written something I want to put on the Web page as a sort of explanation of defense or whatever you want to call it. I haven't gotten it into its final form yet. It's a kind of first draft, or second maybe. It needs some more attention before I put it up there maybe. So I'm going to put it up there for the sake of those people who could not understand my decision.

What it amounts to, I'll tell you, naturally money is always the reason. In this case the reason the money was important -- I've had a twenty year fight -- this is going to be very shorthand, so it won't be very well flushed out. I've had about a twenty year struggle, is a more appropriate word, with the IRS trying to recover from some horrendous arrears I had around 1980. First of all, at that time, you must also remember that tax rates for my bracket were seventy percent. They dropped then to fifty, and then they've come down since then. But during most of the establishment of this problem I had a very, very high fiscatory tax rate. So I started out with a backlog of unpaid taxes. On top of that of course, there's interest and penalties, which really kill you. And then on top of that, they disallowed, in the couple of years following 1980, they disallowed some previous stuff -- large deductions, one of them for a film I was financing for myself. So, they disallowed it. And another one was the place where my daughter kept her horses. I decided to buy it make it all easier and convenient and we tried to claim that and they would allow that. So that was added to it. And it's been twenty years, believe it or not. The level of income I've been lucky enough to have to get this thing to where it's just about out of my way now.

To bring you up to date on the later part of this struggle: It goes on for twenty years, and of course I'm trying to pay current taxes, as well. Most of them at a fifty percent rate, to take the state of California plus Us -- this is a long explanation, but this is what happened. When you pay fifty percent on your tax, every dollar that comes in, fifty is already gone for that dollar that you earned, and then the other fifty has to go to the back taxes, and you still haven't bought a cheeseburger. So it's a very delicate dance, and it had to be carefully done, and done over the years. And what happened was, my wife died two years ago. And since that time I have met and fallen in love with a woman, and we're planning a future together, and I just decided I didn't want to wait three more years, which was the timetable to pay my shit off, and I didn't want to marry her with this shit over my head, so I said to my partner Jerry, I said, "Get me some kind of commercial or something that's passive income, where I don't have to go out every day to earn it. A windfall -- a piece of windfall income that I can pay these taxes off and get this lean off my house. They had a lean on my house for twenty years, and they were starting to make noises like they were going to come after the house.

So, in order to get out of that, I did these commercials. The saving grace in the commercials, I thought, was the fact that I wrote them myself, I insisted on the look, I insisted no other actors. I didn't want to be in a Tony Danza type of thing, doing sketches. I wanted to be myself, suggesting that I was onstage, in a way, in my own persona, and no graphics, or a minimum of graphics on screen. So I got my way on all that, and I felt pretty clean about doing it in that manner. And it wasn't a big oil company or something. At least it was communication, you know. So that's my story. I'm not real happy that I had to do that, but that's what happened, and I feel okay about it.

And just as a heads up, on the Web site right now, the two fan pages you linked to -- they're not there any more.

Ah, that's what I thought. I haven't been able to -- things have been in my foreground and I haven't really gotten around to tending to my Web page yet. Another reason this thing about the taxes has not gotten up there yet. I'm trying to move after twenty-five years in one house, I'm trying to move out of that, sell the house -- you know, just a lot of shit. I'm doing a speech for the National Press Club in a couple of weeks, and that's occupied a lot of my time. The Web page has been kind of a poor relative. I'll get some time soon, and I'll start monitoring it. It'll be a little more current, I think.

Do you think comedy is too tame these days?

Probably so. You know, it's not a field people set out to spend their lives in. They use it as a stepping stone. I approached it that way myself at the beginning. They see it as a way to get into movies or to get into television, and it works for a lot of people that way, but it's not something someone says, "You know, I'm going to devote my life to developing a stage persona, and an attitude, and I'm going to write in that attitude and in that voice, and become a single comedy performer. It just isn't done. Therefore, using it as a stepping stone tend not to want to offend that much because they're looking for that network deal. This is a little oversimplified but it's about what happens. They just don't want to offend. And I've heard that these comedy clubs -- what's left of them now -- have censored people a lot. No gay jokes, no jokes against women -- all of this kind of stuff.

They want to be the club that broke the guy.

Uh, yeah. I don't really think comedy has any kind of a mission or a life existence of its own. You know, Newsweek always says, "Where's comedy heading?" And that's just bullshit media stuff. It what it is.

And as the logical extension of the routines -- when do you think society will finally collapse?

Ah! Well, I would love to live for a long time so I could just watch this process. I don't know. I guess if they can get every single person in the world with their own Walkman -- I guess if these marketing people, these business guys can expand these markets into these places like Africa and Asia, and all the backwaters so that they're all like we are now, then I think we can really get serious about destroying ourselves. But I think everybody's got to have certain things first. Everybody's got to have a refrigerator. You've got to be comfortable before you go about destroying your own culture.

Like the elephant finding the ground to die?

[Laughs] Yeah, yeah, good.

I'm going to have to run.

That was the last question. I thank you very much for talking to me.

Thank you for all of the intelligence that went into your preparation. I do appreciate that. And I look forward to seeing what the result is.

I'll be sending that to Atlantic Records as soon as it comes out.

Thank you so much.

Okay, and good luck with your work.

Take care. Have a great May. That's all I do is wish people one month at a time.

Music, updates

2008-06-12T02:01:00.004-04:00

The Curmudgeon has been silent for a few weeks, which will happen from time to time when I am working on a different project, namely, my songwriting. I’ve been gigging a bit more lately, writing new songs, a few of which I’ll be playing tonight at Monet’s Garden Art Café in Beverly, Ma. It’s an early show – I’m going on at 7 p.m. and my friend Liz DeBiase is on at 8 p.m.

If you want to sign up for my mailing list, just stop by my MySpace Music page and type your e-mail in the nifty little mailing list button. You’ll also find a few songs streaming there. I am in the process of recording more, which I’ll be posting soon.

Back at the Curmudgeon, I’ll also be posting a few new interviews and essays soon. Watch this space.

Nick

No Depression No More, Editor Peter Blackstock Talks about the End of an Era

2008-05-09T10:13:00.007-04:00

When you see the latest No Depression on the stands, the one with Buddy Miller on the cover, pick it up and pause for a moment to reflect. The issue marks the end of a thirteen-year run of covering some of the best music being made in America (and sometimes beyond). Editors Peter Blackstock and Grant Alden and co-owner/co-publisher Kyla Fairchild decided in February to cease publication of No Depression, much to the dismay of music fans, especially fans of Americana (or alt.country or the new sincerity – they’ve always had a little fun with the breadth of the genre). On a personal note, I lose a consistent source of information on my favorite music, longform journalism about under the radar subjects, and a magazine that gave me some of my first legitimate magazine clips.

Conditions have never been worse for music magazines – shortly after the No Depression announcement, Harp Magazine and Skope Magazine also announced they were shutting down print operations. Declining CD sales have meant fewer music stores, which has meant fewer places to stock the magazine, and fewer advertisers.

The good news is, the Web site will continue, and Blackstock, Alden, and Fairchild will continue putting No Depression in print in a different form, what they call a “bookazine,” which they will release semi-annually with the University of Texas Press starting this fall. And you can still keep in touch with the No Depression mailing list, fitting for a magazine that grew out of a Web discussion group in the first place. No Depression will continue, but there will no longer be the anticipation of that issue hitting the stands ever couple of months, and the satisfaction of bringing it home and tearing into that cover story of your favorite artist no one else is writing about, or finding those new artists in the “Town & Country” section, some of them in your own home town.

I caught up with Peter Blackstock by e-mail recently to talk a bit about No Depression past and present.

What sort of reaction did you get when you announced that No Depression was ending its print run?

There was a pretty strong outpouring of sentiment from our readers. More than two hundred people have left comments on our website about it over the last couple months, and of course there was also a ton of letters, many of which we published in our final issue. A lot of people had some really kind words about how much the magazine had meant to them. Quite understandably a lot of them were rather disappointed we wouldn't be continuing as a bimonthly anymore -- no one was more disappointed than WE were, certainly! -- but I think that folks are only just now beginning to realize how tenuous a position the print journalism industry is in, especially when it comes to niche music magazines.

What was the first indication that you had to seriously consider ceasing publication?

It actually had never even come up for discussion until mid-January, about a month before we made the final decision to do it in mid-February (we sent out the announcement on February 19). Our advertising-base had been shrinking for a couple of years -- whereas we used to routinely publish issues of 144 pages (and occasionally larger), we'd more typically been around 112 for the past year or two. Still, things had more or less balanced out fiscally in 2007. But our first two issues of 2008 were both just 80 pages, which is smaller than we'd been since the very early days of the magazine, about 10 years ago. And the future prospects suggested things probably would only get worse, not better.

We realized that if we tried to continue, we could easily run ourselves into serious debt, and that's never been the way we've done business. We didn't want to be in a position where we could not afford to publish our final issue, as was the case with a couple of other magazines which closed up shop recently. It was important to us that we go out in the style of our finest work, which I think we managed to do with our May-June issue (thanks in no small part to many of our longtime advertisers, and even some new ones, who helped us get to 144 pages for the finale).

It seems like many of the same problems with marketing to a niche demographic have existed since the inception of No Depression, how drastically has the environment changed in the past year or two?

The "niche," musically speaking, is about the same as it ever was, although we obviously broadened it ourselves over the years. Early on we had fairly tight alternative-country boundaries, whereas over the years we expanded to cover a much broader range of Americana/traditional/roots music, as well as some occasional indie things (especially when they related to the roots realm). I honestly don't think our dilemma relates at all to the viability of the music, in large part because it was there long before we started covering it, and thus logically should be there long after as well.

What we managed to catch, when we began in 1995, was a sort of high-point in the visibility cycle for those artists -- part of which we contributed to creating or fostering, certainly, but partly there were just a lot of very good young roots acts who were getting major or semi-major record deals. But all the history still ran underneath everything, and it still does. And the ebb-and-flow of younger bands drawing upon that history continues, as evidenced by the surge in string bands that we recently wrote about in our March-April issue. So ultimately I don't think the "niche" has changed much at all; it's really just the business climate that has changed, in terms of how the internet has greatly affected both the music industry and the print journalism industry.

Was it frustrating to you that this happened at a time when the scene you’re covering is as fertile as ever? I’m in Boston, and just using this scene as an example, you’ve got younger bands like Three Day Threshold and Girls, Guns, and Glory, people who have been around the scene for a while like Mark Erelli and Alastair Moock, the Session Americana folks, along with stalwarts like Bill Morrissey and Dennis Brennan. And I know there are other scenes just as diverse around the country.

The string-band story in our March-April issue is sort of a reflection of that, yeah; we were quite intrigued to suddenly find so many really talented and creative young acts drawing upon old-time traditions seemingly reaching their peak right now, and we'd have been excited about covering them long into the future. (Many of those musicians are based around Boston as well, in fact, most notably Crooked Still, and also a couple members of Uncle Earl.) But I'm not sure there'd ever really be a "good" time to go out, in that it seemed that during our 13 years, there was pretty much constantly a good stream of quality roots-oriented music being made, by artists both younger and older.

Did you have a strategy for the Web and the “bookazine” before you announced the cessation of the print version?

We'd assumed that we'd continue the website in some form or fashion, but the bookazine deal with University of Texas Press came about entirely after we'd made the announcement. We decided to speak with them in part because they'd published our tenth-anniversary anthology in 2005, and in part because there were examples of other roots-related publications that had teamed up with universities (Living Blues at the University of Mississippi, Oxford American at the University of Central Arkansas). They were interested in seeing if we could work something out to at least continue us in print on a limited basis, in a way that did not involve being dependent on advertising. The twice-annual bookazine is what came out of those discussions.

Are there any other publications doing anything similar to that, anywhere you are looking for inspiration?

It's really pretty new territory. Grant (my co-editor) has looked at a few more literary-type things such as McSweeney's to get a vague sense of what form things might take, but to our knowledge nobody's really doing anything like it in terms of music content. Part of our intention here is to create something basically new, something that isn't already out there.

Can you envision a time when you would ever revive No Depression in print?

I think the market circumstances would have to change significantly, in a way that's not very likely to happen. People would have to start gravitating back toward print and away from the internet, and that seems highly doubtful especially as more and more younger music fans who were raised on the internet model keep flowing into the picture. On the other hand, I'm not entirely certain that web advertising will really pan out the way the advertisers are hoping it will; so far it doesn't seem like it has quite worked out to the degree expected. If somehow there becomes a booming demand for print ads again, then maybe. But that's pretty much what it'd take, and we're not exactly holding our breath for that.

Chris Coxen needs votes in a very silly competition...

2008-05-01T10:43:00.002-04:00

Those of you who know me know I love only two things in life: comedy, and underwear. So much to my delight, local comedian Chris Coxen has combined the two, and is dancing as Danny Morsel to win cash prizes from the folks over at Jockey. Here is his video appeal for votes:

To vote for him, click on this bit of writing right here.

His opponent apparently has a big e-mail list and the inherent appeal of a concave chest, so every vote helps. You have to register, so make sure to mind all the "opt out" buttons. It's fairly quick and painless, and if Mr. Coxen wins, count on even more elaborate productions like this weekend's show at the Cambridge Family YMCA Theatre.

OC Review: Tim and Eric Awesome Tour, First Night

2008-04-22T02:45:00.005-04:00

“Was it what you expected?”

“Yeah. Well, I don’t know what I expected.”

That exchange between two fans walking out of T.T. the Bear’s last night pretty much explains the first show on the first night of Tim and Eric’s Awesome Tour, which is, of course, based on the Adult Swim show Tim and Eric: Awesome Show, Great Job! The TV show is strange enough, an eleven-and-a-half-minute blast of absurdity, flashing lights, disturbing images of hairy babies, and awkward dancing that attacks viewers brains every Sunday night. (You can read more about it in a piece I wrote for the Boston Globe here).

There were a few starts and stops at the beginning. After a quick set from DJ Dougpound, the music came back up for what seemed like a long time. Then the music stopped for what seemed like a ling time, and, being good fans, the crowd remained silent. After all, this was Tim and Eric, and having fans stare at a blank movie screen that barely fit on a stage made for rowdy pub rock may have been part of an opening joke. It wasn’t. But no one seemed to mind. They shouted things like “Brule’s Rules!” referring to John C. Reilly’s recurring character on the show, and “Jeff Goldblum!” who was also on the show. The good thing about presenting a creative, free-thinking show is that you can count on your audience to entertain themselves for a couple of minutes while they wait for you.

When the screen lit up with the image of show regular David Leibe Hart, demanding the crowd pray for Tim and Eric (and, kindly enough, for Robin Williams), everyone recognized him and cheered. Then came a planned false start, with a video of Tim and Eric backstage. They finally made it to the stage for the opening musical dance number about ball swinging, and it was off to the races from there.

The big question for people who hadn’t seen Tim and Eric live would have been, can these guys take material meant for an eleven-and-a-half minute late night sketch show and make a funny, engaging hour-and-a-half live show?

They can, although over that hour and a half, the audience has a bit more time to step back and question what they’re watching. And when your comedy is so particular and strange, not everything is going to hit the audience the same way at the same time. At some point during the show, more individuals probably stopped for a moment to say, what the hell am I watching? But then Tim and Eric would pelt the audience with pizza or hot dogs, or better yet, videos like “Quilting with Will” starring Will Forte and other previews from Season Three, which is still in the middle of production. And they never lost the crowd of clearly devoted fans.

“Casey and his brother” is fascinating live, because the onscreen version uses a lot of awkward close-ups and animation. But Tim’s red-faced, squeaky-voiced, compulsively spitting Casey is just as frightening live, probably because T.T.’s is small enough that most everyone, save those crowding over near the bar, has a clear view of every pained facial expression. Then, of course, there’s Eric playing a toy saxophone or dancing in a hamburger suit. Which is where the comedy nerd in me could reference commedia dell’arte or theatre of the absurd, or I could just admit that seeing a man Eric’s size furiously pumping his knees in time to cheesy music while dressed as ground chuck makes me giggle like a moron.

There was a quick encore, consisting mainly of the “James Quall Dance Contest” and Tim and Eric addressing the crowd as their surprisingly earnest, laid-back selves.

An odd bit of trivia – Tim and Eric were supposed to play Boston last year, but had to cancel the date because of their association with Adult Swim during the Aqua Teen Hunger Force Mooninite bomb scare. Both said they were happy to have finally made it to Boston, apologizing to the crowd for having to have cancelled last year’s show.

After the show, I asked Eric what he thought of the venue and the show. His response?

“Awesome.”

I should have expected that.

Kids in the Hall: Reunion Tour May Lead to More

2008-04-19T05:52:00.004-04:00

The new Kids in the Hall reunion tour has been a pleasant surprise for me. I had enjoyed their previous post-television tours in 2000 and 2002, and I didn’t know a new tour had been planned until I saw an ad for their show at the Wang Theatre for April 17. I reviewed that show for the Boston Globe (you can find it in today’s edition here), and spoke with them backstage at the Wang afterwards.

It was a mellow, friendly atmosphere backstage, or, more appropriately, in the mazelike basement-level dressing rooms under the Wang. Mark McKinney, Bruce McCulloch, Dave Foley, Kevin McDonald, and Scott Thompson were winding down after a little over an hour and a half of new sketch comedy, with a few old favorite characters like Thompson’s Buddy Cole and McCulloch’s Gavin thrown in. The not-quite-sold-out but sizeable crowd had reacted warmly and enthusiastically to everything, old and new, and there was a palpable sense of gratification amongst the Kids, possibly even a sense of relief that they had been welcomed back so readily.

The Kids had reunited last year for the Just for Laughs festival in Montreal, and had been kicking around the idea of getting together again, but never quite found the time. Earlier this year, they finally found a break. “The writer’s strike did the impossible and freed us all up for a week,” said McKinney.

Rather than just dust off old sketches from the television show or previous tours, the Kids set out to write as much new material as possible. According to Foley, this meant doing a series of surprise club shows in L.A. on short notice. “It was an exercise to see if we could write a 90-miute show in three days,” he said.

Again according to Foley, they were surprised both by how well they wrote together and how much they enjoyed performing together. The new sketches were strong, and there were a couple new short films, most notably an odd, lewd bit about “carfuckers,” that hit the mark (McCulloch, who has been busy directing the sitcom Carpoolers, mentioned he has been working the Russo brothers, of Arrested Development fame, on some film shorts). Everyone seemed to agree that there is some momentum building, which should mean another project of some sort when the tour ends in June, most probably a film.

OC Interview: The Daily Show's John Oliver

2008-04-20T01:55:00.009-04:00

John Oliver rarely gets a break from his job as a correspondent for The Daily Show to do stand-up, but last November, I was lucky enough to catch him at Boston's Comedy Connection. The election cycle was already in full swing then – the field of candidates hadn’t been winnowed down much, and multi-candidate debates seemed to be springing up every week. Oliver studied English at Oxford before striking out to write comedy for the BBC and test his hand at stand-up. But he was always interested in politics and comedy, including American political satire. He admired Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce, but never got to see America firsthand until he was hired by The Daily Show. And it’s all been a strange trip since then.

Oliver’s hour-long stand-up special, Terrifying Times, debuts tonight on Comedy Central, so I thought I would give an almost full transcript of our interview for the Boston Globe (you can see the full article here). Only a few boring bits were left out. Those were mostly my fault. Oliver is an engaging fellow, and based on his show at the Connection, I’m looking forward to a thoughtful and incisive special tonight.

Have you played America much as a stand-up?

Yeah, I guess, that was my job before I came here. And so, when I can, which is maybe not that often. I’ve done college gigs and clubs in and around the east coast.

Had you played America before the Daily Show gig?

I’d never been to America before The Daily Show. I’d never even visited. So it happened pretty fast. It was quite a major life change.

I know when they were auditioning people, they were looking a lot of different places and they didn’t know exactly what direction they were going to go.

To be honest, I’m still not entirely sure what happened. You always have imposter syndrome with stuff like this and I’ve deliberately not asked how it came about out of fear that something went wrong. I don’t want to highlight the mistake and have them go, "Oh, oh yeah, that’s not who we meant at all." So I don’t really know entirely what happened or what they were looking for or why they were looking abroad.

Did you audition or did they know of your work and hire you that way?

They asked me send a tape. I don’t know how they knew who I was. They asked me to send a tape, I think it was maybe through, Ricky Gervais met Jon and said, "you might want to look at this person." But I don’t really know. I sent the tape and then got invited over, and then it all moved very quick. It was a pretty amazing experience.

Did you get any time to adjust before you were thrown on the job?

No. I got in really late Sunday night and thought, I guess they’ll break me into work slowly. I got in Monday morning, having woken up on the sofa, and they said, "All right, you’re on tonight." Bush had said something to Blair. It probably worked out best because I didn’t have time to realize how scared I was. It worked out pretty well. I had absolutely no time to acclimatize to either America or this show. It’s really knee-deep in both.

Have you gotten time to look around and explore at all?

America? No. The only way I’m able to travel is through work, so I guess it’s going to get worse as the year goes on, especially once we get to the twelve-month countdown for the election. The traveling I’ve done has usually been for field pieces. So it’s either been to things like the presidential debates – we’re going down to Baltimore tonight for the Morgan State Republican Black Debates, that only half of them are bothering to turn up to. And then I guess big places in the middle of nowhere where the classic field piece crazies are, the middle of Colorado or Ohio. So yeah, I haven’t gotten to see much.

Do you think you’re getting a strange view of America?

It’s really warped. Also what makes no to me, the first time I flew to the west coast, as a European, it makes no sense to me to fly for five hours and land in the same country. That just makes no sense. You couldn’t even be on the same continent where I’m from. To see the same flags, it’s something like that that really brings home how enormous this country is.

What was your expectation before you got here?

Of what? Of the country?

Of the country or of New York. I realize it may be way too broad of a question, but I wanted to get a sense of what you thought you may be coming to.

I had no idea, really. It all happened fast, and this was my favorite program when I was back home. I kind of knew it pretty well. But that comes with being sort of intimidated as well. I had absolutely no idea what to expect. Obviously the European perspective on American politics is relatively negative. I’ve always been very interested. I’ve always followed American politics, I like politics. So it’s been interesting to delve slightly closer, in more detail.

Have you been surprised about anything you’ve found about American policy?

Not really. We know quite a lot about American policy in Europe because it has significant effect on how we live our lives. So there’s no real way to not, unless you really stick your head in the sand, but American policy is largely our policy as well. Both the European and even more so in the British sense because of our incredibly special relationship, which we’re very grateful for, don’t get us wrong. Don’t listen to what anyone says. We’re very lucky to have you.

I think it goes beyond politics in that way, I think that at a certain point, the populace of England and America sort of realize, or at least I hope they do, that whoever’s in office isn’t necessarily your country.

Yeah. That is the big thing, I think. That is the big problem with the way America is perceived in Europe is that America is presented to us as a united front, you see the news footage is very much people standing behind their country. And I think it’s easy to forget that you’re looking at a president who, at whatever time, who is usually dotting the margins in terms of votes, you know, 51/49. You’ve easily got half the country unhappy with whoever’s there. And that is not presented to us.

It’s probably similar here, in that people probably look to the prime minister and that’s largely what they think of the politics in that country.

I think so. It’s convenient that way. It’s convenient to ignore significant dissent, which people do to other countries and governments do to the people in their own countries, as well.

Do you think that’s changing at all? It seems there’s an acknowledgment of the opposition as something other than that umbrella description of them – prime minister and opposition. Now it seems a little more varied.

Sure. Partisan politics, I don’t think is ever going to be particularly healthy. Although you always want a strong opposition. It doesn’t do anyone any good to have the opposition party in chaos. But the way that America is at the moment, it’s a fascinating time to have no incumbent and some relatively significant choices which the electorate is going to make in terms of where they want their country to go and how America will be perceived worldwide. Because there’s no doubt that either a woman or a black man will have enormous repercussions straight away in terms of how America is perceived abroad, if we go down that road.

Have you gotten to know many of the candidates, not necessarily personally, but –

Not personally, very much not personally. I’m watching closely, but…What’s more odd is them knowing what you’re doing. When we turned up to the first debate in Simi Valley, you just see them out of the corner of their eyes going, ‘Uh-oh.’ How can you know? I’m sure they’ve not watched but they’re clearly briefed, that’s ‘The Daily Show’ over there, they’ll be coming over here and asking ludicrous questions.

Is "The Daily Show" printed on the camera or anything so they sort of know?

Yeah, you have to say at the start. If it’s the spin room you have to say who you are. But it is amazing. It’s I guess the key difference in terms of American and British politics is the role of religion, where it seems impossible for any candidate to campaign with anything other than an overt faith in god. Whereas the opposite is the case, Blair was a devout Catholic and he could never talk about that. He’d never be photographed going to a church because people would be suspicious of that. You should serve the country, not any idea of what is right in a Biblical sense. And that’s taken a lot of getting used to.

That first debate when Huckabee and two others put their hands up for, "Who here doesn’t believe in evolution," I think that’s ludicrous. He cannot surely be a credible candidate now, but his approval ratings are going up. That’s absolutely insane.

I’d imagine that doesn’t speak well for us abroad. I know that in Europe they’re familiar with policy, but do things like this get play on the news, on the BBC.

People are concerned, I think. The worried thing was ’04. You kind of get cut slack electing someone once and then not knowing how they’re going to behave. But to reelect, that was troublesome.

Do you think you have to work harder to get an American audience to except political humor or your critiques of America?

Not really. I don’t know. The places I’ve tended to play at the moment around this east coast area, just for geographical simplicity, are probably areas that are not big fans of this administration anyway. And also of course, the people coming to see me are ‘Daily Show’ fans. So there’s an element of preaching to the choir, as well. But I would certainly want to go and do stand-up elsewhere, a place where people would not be happy to hear you insult the commander-in-chief, let along a Brit, who they successfully kicked out of the country a hundred and fifty years ago.

Yeah, not really, I’ve not had any problems with it. Also, I tend to talk, as well, to balance that out, I tend to talk about how, you have no idea what it’s like to be British. We’ve done terrible things to the world, and you’re not even getting close to our record. You watch the news, there’s trouble in Kashmir and Iraq, that’s essentially our fault. Take it any distance of time back, we did that. We did all that. We’ll be sitting back here, doing absolutely nothing about it now.

Is there any sort of recognition of that do you think in general in England when they look at what America is doing now? Is there resonance?

That depends. If you want to take a black and white lazy view of the world, you get a lot of idiotic British people saying, yeah, well, they’re history tends to start from the second world war onwards because it’s a lot more convenient. But I would hope that people have an awareness of the shame which is flecked across British history. It’s certainly more interesting that way.

You look at the historical view of it, it’s easy to get discouraged, looking at the people in charge now. But then you take a historical view of it, if you read Candide, the world wasn’t much better off then, and you wonder, well, should you just ignore all of this and hope the world is going to be okay just like it was?

That’s the thing, it’s like with the Candide thing, you’ve just got to have some half-hopeful voice saying, let’s hope our gardens grow at the end of the day. That’s pretty much all you can hope for.

I’ve labeled myself an optimistic curmudgeon.

I think that’s the best way to be, though. That’s the only to balance it out. There’s no point in being cynical all the time. But equally, blind optimism just seems willfully inappropriate.

If you can’t let yourself laugh at a fart joke –

That is why I’ve always been, this comedy offering’s always been about more serious issues, I guess. I guess that has always been my coping strategy with the world. If I can’t laugh at something, I don’t really know how to relate to it. That’s kind of got even more entrenched working here. Because now, when you see the news, something terrible, it’s the same awful things. And my instinct is always no, oh, that could be funny. There’s something funny in that. Well, wait a minute, let’s just let the gravity of the reality sink in. Then we can trivialize it.

Were you always a political comic or did that evolve later?

Pretty much. As I got better as a stand-up, I became better, that’s the way it works, I became better at talking about the things I was interested in. As I moved into my twenties I got interested in kind of single-issue protest politics rather than party politics. From then on, I became very interested in it. And it’s what I think is most funny.

Where did you start as a comic?

I left university and worked as a comedy writer, and I started doing stand-up around the same time. And I went to the Edinburgh Festival every year, and that’s really how I learned how to do it and how to get better.

You were a writer for BBC radio shows?

Lots of stuff. I guess I did three series of this show called The Department which was this fictitious government think tank that was solving a different world problem every week. That was a substantial project. That took a long time to write each series.

What made you move on to stand-up from that?

I was always doing stand-up at the same time. I’d get really bored of one, or frustrated at one thing. So I like to do both all the time. I would get bored of stand-up and want to do writing.

You said on your Web site that people might have seen you looking bored on Mock the Week. Do you find that the political shows on the BBC don’t offer you as much as The Daily Show does?

They’re terrible. Absolutely universally appalling. Panel shows are not the way to go about political satire because you have to have a kind of uniform voice to it. That’s where The Daily Show works, it’s all based around Jon Stewart’s voice. So, we’re all pulling in the same direction. But when you have six disparate comedians, it’s just going to become a macho jokefest where usually the quickest and the most lukewarm style of comedy is going win out. That particular show isn’t being particularly political now. It’s just kind of about the news in general, not a political element of the news.

Do you find the American and British traditions of political stand-up comedy terribly different?

Not really, I think they’re pretty similar. Both have their best practitioners, I guess Jon Stewart being one of the best here, and Colbert. The you have Armando Iannucci and Chris Morris back in England. Political people who were just stand-ups but who were extremely good.

I know this is the standard hack question, but who influenced you as a comic?

Oh, a lot. In terms of stand-up in England, Stewart Lee I think was amazing, and Tommy Ginn. And I wrote with a guy named Andy Saltzman. We learned a lot from each other. All of the stuff that Armando Iannucci did on radio and TV was fantastic. And I was also really into American comedy, as well. In terms of stand-up, again, obviously Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce, but also I really loved Dennis Miller. I loved his way with words. I’m a comedy nerd, really. I’ve always loved it.

There ought to be an organization for comedy nerds. I write the comedy column every week for the Globe and my wife gets tired of me dragging her to comedy sometimes.

There is no doubt I have invested throughout my life far more importance than is appropriate. And so, a lot of ex-girlfriends in the past, just the despair that crosses their face when I run into someone who also has an overblown sense of its importance, and has to sit back as two people yabber away about something that is really just supposed to instigate laughter.

I got lucky that my wife is a Monty Python fan.

Oh, wow. Great. You did get lucky.

We went to Spamalot together and she actually enjoyed it more than I did. I was nitpicking.

Wow. That’s fantastic.

Do you do anything similar on The Daily Show that you got to do on the BBC?

No, the BBC shows were more panel shows. So they weren’t a kind of sppof news program like this is where you’re kind of playing a correspondent, or being a correspondent. So no, not really similar to this.

Do you find people back home are watching more now that you’re on the show?

Oh, no. I doubt that. If anything, I would imagine less so. If anything, I’ve damaged the ratings rather than advanced them at home. You’re talking a very small digital channel. So I think it only gets a hundred thousand people watching. And I wouldn’t be surprised if that went down to 90 after my first appearance. The show is ruined now. It’s ruined.

I’ve especially enjoyed the Wilmore/Oliver Investigates clips.

Oh, great. We’re going down to this debate tonight, it’s on tomorrow night. That should be fun.

You guys have a really good chemistry. It seems pretty natural, like you’ve been working together for a while.

It’s pretty weird, obviously we’d never met each other and then with the ‘N’ word piece, we just… All I had was this idea of, every time I needed to say the word I would point at Larry in the interview, and from that point it was very odd. It was like being a married couple. We were able to kind of weave in and out of each other’s sentences. But also, in terms of a technique for an interview, it makes it very hard for the interviewee because we change our points of view all the time. And it’s just completely unfair, you just get blindsided. That’s what we’re planning to do tomorrow.

Is it tough to pull off? It seems to me there’s a dynamic at work where you have to make yourself the butt of the joke and still pull off intelligent satire.

That’s right. It’s a balance. It just takes constant thought, really, so you just think, what is this? Is it clear enough that the joke’s on me?

I read your comment about how you can’t listen to Bush anymore when you see him on TV. There’s a political satirist by the name of Barry Crimmins out of Boston who said that that’s what’s been saving Bush, that no sane person can listen to him for more than fifteen seconds.

When he did that Vietnam comment, we were all in the office walking past TVs, you could hear people say, ‘Did he just really say it was like Vietnam in a good way? Is that my mind rearranging stuff? Oh, he did actually say that and he’s not winking? That’s terrifying.’

Is there any similar sort of dissatisfaction with politicians in England? I mean, I know that there is, but is it the same sort of screaming at the TV frustration?

Absolutely. Blair was loathed. People will never ever forgive him for what he did. It’s very sad. And inexplicable. I will be really interested to know what he thinks he did, whether he regrets it at all.

It seems he had a real chance to bring people together.

Yeah. The biggest democratic mandate we’ve had in years. His first term he played very safe when he really could have been much more bold with the majority that he had. And for a man so obsessed with his legacy, Iraq just makes no sense. I have no idea what he was thinking.

Are you surprised at the amount of handicapping that goes on in political races here, especially on network TV?

Of course.

I saw one local station that put the names of the candidates on horses, and when they answered certain questions, would put them farther ahead on the track.

We’re getting closer to that. Our last election, it was talk of a landslide, so they decided we’re going to have this graphic, they’d be walking along, the candidates, and then land would gradually collapse on top of them. How old are you people? How bored is your graphics department.

Fox is always trying to downplay The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, saying they don’t get many viewers and it’s just a basic cable show. Have you seen that criticism?

They got it right. We are on basic cable, we don’t get many viewers. They may have inadvertently stumbled upon a fact there.

How do you go from [studying] English to political satire?

I wasn’t that interested in the ins and outs of my degree. I did footlights and was writing comedy while I was at University and quickly decided that was what I wanted to do, rather than analyze Chaucer, to the significant distress of my tutors. I don’t really know how. It seemed like a natural progression to me.

Do you expect to do more as a stand-up? I know the election cycle will probably be hellacious for you.

I think I’m going to do an hour special for Comedy Central for Indecision. But otherwise, next year I’ll be doing almost nothing but working on this show. It’ll be great. I’m not saying that in a bad way. But I don’t think I’ll be able to do much stand-up.

Do you think audiences will be surprised at who you are as a stand-up as opposed to who you are on The Daily Show?

I don’t know, really. It’s probably pretty similar. I’m not going to come out with a bag of props like Carrot Top.

Right now, somewhere...

2008-04-17T01:48:00.003-04:00

It's a strange world out there. And while you sit here reading, right now, somewhere...

* The Pope is looking at his watch and saying, "Sheesh, look at the time."

* One of your relatives is thinking about how much of an asshole you are.

* A fat, naked man is sitting in front of his computer fantasizing about Japanese cartoons.

* Someone is watching a VHS copy of Mariah Carey’s Glitter, and loving it.

* A powerful world leader is tapping his toes to the Toby Keith song playing in his head trying to look like he is paying attention to a meeting of his chief advisors.

* Your parents are listening to Poco and making out on the couch.

* Boston city planners are thinking of what to do when the Big Dig becomes outdated.

* New parents have settled on the name Eugene for their first born, setting forth a chain of events that will either lead to indictment or a career in folk music.

* A Hollywood executive is planning a Saturday morning cartoon based on Brett Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho.” Elsewhere, another executive is making plans to bring “Straw Dogs: The Musical” to Broadway.

* Your doctor is listening to P-Funk, staring at the office aquarium, smoking a big fattie.

* Your cat is humping your favorite bed pillow.

OC-Ed: Late Night Humor vs. Democracy

2008-04-14T05:24:00.003-04:00

The topic of Michael Crook’s A Funny Guy blog over at TheLedger.com – “Does Political Comedy Undermine Democracy” – was preposterous to me when it came up on my Google alert. It seemed like one of those inherently flawed questions that people like me in the media often ask to try to get provocative answers and stir up some kind of debate, which is usually about as nuanced and useful as a metal geek slap fight over VH1’s “Top 100 Guitar Solos of the 80s.”

But it turns out, the premise was neither Crook’s not Stevenson Swanson, who wrote the article for the Chicago Tribune that Crook reprinted for his blog. The idea actually belongs to University of Iowa professor Russell Peterson, who has written a book called Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy Turns Democracy into a Joke. Peterson, the story notes, tried his hand at stand-up comedy in the early 1990s and has also worked as a political cartoonist. And there are a couple of interesting side notes to his premise.

You can read the piece yourself on the Tribune site here, or, if that link stops functioning, at Crook’s blog here.

To be fair, I haven’t read Peterson’s book, so you’ll have to take any criticism of his premise with a grain of salt. But if his thesis has been presented correctly in the Tribune article, Peterson believes that late night comedians are a threat to the American system of democracy because they promote the belief that it makes no difference who you vote for, that every candidate is equally bad, and there’s no point in engaging in the process.

"I really do think that this sort of belief, that it doesn't matter, is one of the most damaging beliefs that a democracy can harbor,” Peterson is quoted in the Tribune as saying, adding later, "I don't think comedy invented that belief, but it's one of the most important avenues through which it is expressed."

I was about ready to tap out at that point. Certainly the rampant corruption at the presidential level on down for the past twenty-five years and the general disrespect that politicians show for each other and sometimes their own office has to be the more pressing problem here.

Watergate, Iran-Contra, the Lewinski affair, and the current administration’s bumbling of everything from the so-called “War On Terror” to the hiring and firing practices at the Attorney General’s office – the list is long, inglorious, and stretches back to around the time I was actually conceived. I love political comedy, especially the hardest hitting stuff by firebrands like Barry Crimmins and Bill Hicks and the above-the-fray perspective Mort Sahl is still offering, if you can catch him. But as much as I admire someone who can connect with a solid swing of satire, these people are generally only pointing out the damage politicians have done to themselves.

In that respect, if you are going to blame comedians for undermining democracy, you have to put them fairly far down on the list of the indicted, with the politicians themselves first on the list, and anyone who actually tells us what they’re doing second. It’s like arresting a guy for arson when he calls 9-1-1 about a burning building.

But that’s when the story got interesting. Apparently, part of Peterson’s thesis is the idea that late night comedians are helping to create an indifferent attitude toward the system because they are not dealing with substantive issues. In other words, their very inertness makes them dangerous.

Stevenson summarizes the idea thusly: “Political comedy, at least as it's practiced on the Leno, Letterman and O'Brien shows, tends to focus relentlessly on personality flaws, such as Bush's verbal gaffes or former President Bill Clinton's skirt-chasing, instead of on questions of political policy.”

This is the difference between topical comedy and satire, which is not often discussed, since it is admittedly a bit of comedy nerd hair-splitting. But there is a difference. Some comedians have gotten credit as satirists simply because they told a blow job joke about Bill Clinton or dared to call George W. Bush dumb. The jokes might be funny, depending on the skill of the particular comic, but they don’t tend to delve too deep into the details.

According to the story, Peterson finds Leno and Letterman are going for cheap laughs, and gives a bit more credit to Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, and Stephen Colbert for bending more toward the satirical. There’s a decent argument there, especially considering that Leno and Letterman, both on network television, have a much larger audience to please than Stewart, Maher, and Colbert, whose shows air on cable. Leno has professed a sort of fast food philosophy to writing for the Tonight Show (you can find the exact quote if you can find his 2004 appearance on Inside the Actor’s Studio), and when you’re in a ratings war, you’re going to have a hard time doing anything edgy or potentially alienating, a concept to which the Tribune article also alludes.

But even if you accept the premise that the glib nature of Leno and Letterman’s topical humor make for lower standards, it’s a tough leap to say that makes them dangerous. And it’s a bit of a logic puzzle, at least in terms of Peterson’s argument, to think that the more satirical comics are less dangerous than more inert comics because they might actual damage a politician’s reputation in the minds of their audience by dealing with more substantive issues. Start picking at details like that, and suddenly you’re trapped on M.C. Escher’s stairmaster.

Ultimately, it’s a classic straw man argument. If late night television disappeared right now, democracy wouldn’t suddenly regain its buoyancy with a flood of informed participation. I’m fairly sure that’s not Peterson’s argument, but if not, what could possibly be filling all those pages in a book called Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy Turns Democracy into a Joke?

I’ll report back if I get my hands on it. If anyone has read it, please comment on this post and let us know what you think.

OC Interview/Review: Go See Gary Louris!

2008-04-10T02:12:00.009-04:00

On April 1, Gary Louris and Vetiver put on a fantastic show at the Somerville Theatre for about fifty people. I had mixed feelings, enjoying such a great night of music, wondering why one of America’s best songwriters can’t draw more people on the strength of his catalogue with the Jayhawks, not to mention Golden Smog, and with a solid, tuneful solo album – his first – in stores for a couple of months.

Louis and company started out with “Omaha Nights” from the new Vagabonds album, and meandered through Louris’s considerable history all night long. Jayhawks classics “I’d Run Away,” “Blue,” and “Waiting for the Sun” pleased longtime fans, as did the lost nugget “Everybody Gets By.” But no one got antsy during the new stuff, either. The traditional country of “She Only Calls Me On Sundays” and the delicate “D.C. Blues” were much enhanced by Eric Heywood’s ace pedal steel playing. “To Die a Happy Man” and “Vagabonds” fit well with one-offs like the Dixie Chicks co-write “Everybody Knows” and the pure pop joy of “Every Word” from the movie Wordplay. “I Wanna Get High” went from psychedelic folk to blistering acid rock.

Louris was relaxed and in good humor throughout, pointing out his in-laws in the audience (his wife is from Worcester). He came back out for a solo encore, introducing the Golden Smog song “Listen Joe” by saying it was a happy little tune, and now every time he says “surprise, surprise” his young son replies, “everyone dies.”

I had tried to see Louris with a friend of mine a couple of weeks prior when I was visiting L.A., but his gig at the El Rey was canceled due to poor ticket sales. In light of that and what I saw, I would urge any Louris fans to see this tour. Vetiver is a more than capable backing band, and their nimble, earnest folk rock set is a perfect opener to the show.

To familiarize you a bit with the new album, here is an interview I did with Louris last October, while he was still mixing Vagabonds. Part of this wound up in an article for Harp Magazine (which, sadly, just ceased publication). I had only gotten to listen to a few unmixed tracks, e-mailed to me by Rykodisc so I could ask more specific questions. I was more than pleased with the final version, once I got a hold of it a month or so later. New Seasons, the album he produced with the Sadies last year, is also well worth picking up. And I look forward to the new Louris/Mark Olson record, due out within the next few months, which Louris also talks about here.

Has it been strange to be in the studio without the Jayhawks?

It wasn’t. I’ve been in enough other situations in recording studios with different people. Maybe that was part of the reason I was surrounded by some friends on this session. With Chris Robinson, I felt comfortable. Some of the guys in the band I had known before. So there was already a camaraderie built up.

Who are the other players on the album?

A guy named Otto Hauser, he plays in bands like Vetiver, and I believe Espers and bands like that. A guy named Jonathan Wilson who’s kind of an L.A. friend of mine who kind of hosts the infamous Wednesday night jam sessions up in Laurel Canyon every Wednesday which really has become kind of a clearing house for a lot of L.A. musicians and people who are passing through. Any night, there might be like four different drummers, three different keyboard players, different singers, guitar players, and bass players. Everybody from Maroon 5 to Beachwood Sparks to anything. There are a lot of different people who go up there. That’s kind of how I got to know a lot of people who play on the record.

And also Adam MacDougal, keyboards. Jonathan Wilson played bass and guitar. Josh Grange played pedal steel. And then we had this group of people who sang depending on the song. There were a few songs where everybody sang, and it was like Jenny Lewis, Susanna Hoffs, Chris Robinson, Jonathan Rice, and Andy Kick-Havic, he’s the lead singer in Vetiver. The Chapin sisters. I’m trying to remember who else. That’s mainly the main voices on it.

It’s amazing how that Laurel Canyon scene persists, going back to the days of Frank Zappa and all those folks.

Yeah, I was just at a party last night at Frank Zappa’s house, the famous log cabin. I thought it burned down, but I guess it didn’t. Yeah, it persists, you know, because it was such a magical time and a convergence of all different kinds of musicians. It’s hard to let go of. IT appeals to me just because of the music that came out of it. And you know I just found it’s just really a great group of people. They’re into the music, there’s not a lot of posturing that sometimes you get in rock bands. People just want to play and hang out and I’ve made some real good friends.

Do you live around there?

No, I live in Minneapolis. I still live in Minneapolic, but I come out here. I love it out here, actually.

Where was the album recorded, mostly?

It was all recorded at a place called Sage and Sound in LA. It’s a little kind of old school LA studio right near Ocean Way off Sunset.

Is there any particular reason behind choosing that spot?

Chris Robinson had been aware of it and I had actually been there in the 90s when we were recording at Ocean Way. I walked in and remembered it. It was a good deal, and had a vibey-ness to it. Those two things worked for us.

How did you collaborate with Chris? Who did what?

Well, Chris was kind of the executive producer dude. I trust his musical ear, because I don’t know anyone who’s more into music than Chris, and who’s been a supporter of mine since the early nineties. So there’s a trust factor you have to have with a producer and I just had it with Chris. And I didn’t need anybody to tell me necessarily how to record, because I’d been in enough and I’ve produced things on my own. I just needed somebody who would get the vibe going, you know, who I could lean on if I was unsure of a song or whatever.

Chris basically helped me sift through the numerous songs and kind of whittle it down and kind of helped to assemble the band. And Thom Monahan, who was the engineer and really kind of co-producer was brought on board through Chris. He assembled a lot of the players and helped me sift the songs. I can be somewhat unsure and a little bit negative and he was always a positive energy in the studio. He’s a high energy guy, you know? And I think that was good for me.

Did you share a producing credit on the album?

No, I think it was really Chris and I think Thom might have some production credit on it. I’m not sure how that works.

Did producing the Sadies make you approach this album differently?

No, not really. I’d done things in the past, production-wise. I suppose there are things that creep in. I know just from producing bands that I try to walk the walk, you know? If I tell them I believe in something and tell them that’s the way it should be done then when I go in and make my own record I should really do it. In this case, I really wanted to do it in as much of a live situation as possible. I just feel like, if that can be done, that’s the best way to do it. It’s the peak of creativity. If you get people playing together and off of each other, you get that synergy or synchronicity or whatever you want to call it, I think it makes the most important music. Obviously you can spend two years like Brian Wilson with ‘Good Vibrations’ trying to make something magical if you have the players at your disposal. But otherwise, if you can make it live and quick, it’s the most inspired kind of music.

Was most or all of the album recorded live with everybody playing in the same room?

Yeah. I’d say 90%. My lead vocal and guitar, the steel guitar, keyboard, drums, and bass were all live. And then the choir, I call them the choir, but the background vocals, were overdubbed. Percussion or occasional guitar parts or keyboards were overdubbed. But I’d say 90% was recorded live.

Is that the way you’ve generally recorded in the past, with the Jayhawks and other bands you’ve produced?

Not always. I think starting with – Sound of Lies I don’t remember. A lot of that was live. But Rainy Day Music was when I was working with Ethan Johns and he really convinced me that I can do it, that you can sing and play and keep it. You don’t have to lay down a scratch and go back. You can do it. When play at the same time as you sing, you sing around your guitar playing and you play your guitar around your vocal naturally. If you overdub it, you kind of mainline everything. It’s very solid, but the dynamics aren’t as good. So I kind of try to do that with whoever I can whenever I’m producing. But it doesn’t always work. With the Sadies we didn’t do it that way. It just wasn’t the way they wanted to do it. And it worked out great. You know, there’s many ways to skin a cat. When possible I like to do it live. But the early Jayhawks records weren’t that way. They were all overdubbed.

Hollywood Town Hall and --

Hollywood Town Hall, Tomorrow the Green Grass. Those were all done where you just go out and sing scratches and you keep the bass and drums and not much else and you build back up.

Did you feel any pressure, either internally or externally, to make this record sound any different than the Jayhawks?

I did want it to sound different but I think it wasn’t a pressure situation. It was just that I was just in a different mode of working and songwriting. I think most people who have heard the stuff think it sounds like me but doesn’t necessarily sound like the Jayhawks. I guess that’s a testament to the Jayhawks, to the other members, that they just couldn’t be replaced. It’s me and it still has a Jayhawks element because I was a large part of the Jayhawks, but different at the same time.

And the other reason to use that studio and Chris was because I’d made a record in January of last year with Mark Olson. To do that, we really wanted to get somebody who would make us feel comfortable in the studio because we hadn’t played together in a long time. And Chris was just a friend and he got us in Sage and Sound and everything went so well. And that’s when I thought, well, I think I could do my own record with Chris also, in this studio.

I have about five tracks that were sent to me today, so if my grasp of isn’t so deep, I apologize. But your voice is a lot more up front on this without quite as much harmony. That’s what impressed me about the songs I’ve heard so far. Was that purposeful, or was that just a function of this being your record as opposed to a band record?

It wasn’t really purposeful, it just came naturally out of what I was writing and feeling more like a solo guy. I know that a good friend of mine who’s a musician came in and listened to what we were doing as we were doing it, and he said, it’s you but it’s different. It doesn’t sound like we’re waiting for the guy to come in and sing his harmony on it like a Jayhawks song. It doesn’t sound like that, it doesn’t sound like we’re waiting on that other track that you sang on to make it that dual harmony thing. And I did that, Mark Olson and I did that total duo harmony thing and it was great and I still love it. But for this record, I was embracing the singer/songwriter dude in me, I guess.

I haven’t put my finger on what’s different exactly, yet. I have “To Die a Happy Man,” and that’s more delicate maybe than what I’ve heard in the past. I can’t put a better description on it just yet, I have to listen to it a bit more to get the vibe.

I think part of it was I got into the finger-picking, kind of the English and straight folk finger-picking and some alternate tunings. I don’t think there is on that song, but on a couple of other songs. I think that changes the feel. I’ve never done that before on any Jayhawks record, where we actually got the real folky finger-picking.

“She Only Calls Me on Sundays” was a bit more traditional country. Was that something you were eager to explore?

I guess I’ve always felt like we have touched on it, but I think that’s probably the most traditional country song I’ve ever written. It wasn’t like, I’m finally going to get to do this or that, it wasn’t that kind of approach. Just kind of happened. I wrote these songs, and these were the ones that made the final cut. There were a lot of other ones, maybe some sounded like the old Jayhawks that didn’t make it. I didn’t sit down and plan it. Although I did plan for kind of a more folky approach. It ended up becoming a bit more of a rock record than it had originally planned to be. Just naturally kind of grew out of it once the band started playing together. But I didn’t even really have a band until a week before I showed up to record. I came out a week early and we had a few days with the bass player and the drummer, and the keyboard player joined us a few days after that. And the last day the steel player joined us for rehearsal. So after four or five days we kind of coalesced as a band kind of organically. Put it that way.

Should I say there are plans to tour?

There are plans to tour. In today’s world if you want to sell any records you kind of have to get out there. I don’t think I’ll be one of those guys who tours ten months out of the year. But I miss playing and I’d like to do a fair share. And I’d also like to do a little bit more where I go out on my own, like a one-man person – [laughs] a one-man person – like a solo show kind of thing once in a while, too. That’s something I’d like to develop. A lot of these songs, I was in an isolation booth, and if you just put those two mics on, it’s just me and the guitar, a lot of those songs work that way. Si I’m hoping to do some things like that, I hope.

The things that I’ve heard so far seem like they would adapt well to a one-person sort of environment.

That’s how they were written and they weren’t demoed into big productions. I have some songs that we didn’t record with the band that I demoed. They’re a little stranger, a little more experimental. Those I might use as bonus tracks or b-sides that I just played in my basement.

Were any of these songs you had kicking around for a while that didn’t quite fit other projects?

None of them have are old enough to have been around for a Jayhawks thing. They’re all things that I’ve written in the past year or two. Nothing was like leftover from a Golden Smog thing or a co-write. These are all things I wrote for this record.

Are there any more electric tunes on the album?

Not knowing what you got already… I didn’t play a lot of electric guitar. There’s only a couple of songs I actually played electric guitar on. And maybe on the next record I’ll do something where I become more of a lead player again. But right now I wanted to be the guy singing the song with the acoustic guitar. That was my vision at the time. It still rocks, but it wasn’t intended to be a rock record.

Was that with an eye toward doing solo shows?

I think I really started getting the bug for it when I went out with Olson on some tours and just the simplicity of being a guy with a guitar, just showing up. It’s not out of laziness, but at times, it’s just a great way to tour. It’s really rewarding to play without having a wall of sound. And also, I just found over the years, I don’t have a loud voice. I don’t have a rock voice. I have a softer voice and sometimes it’s been hard over the years for people to hear me. And I think this approach is going to be better for the singing. And that’s my own damn fault, because I used to be the loudest guy onstage with the electric guitar. And I’m not saying I don’t want to do any of that, but I do like the idea of, I think my strength is my singing and songwriting in a quieter form.

Was that maybe how the Jayhawks style formed, with the harmonies being so prominent? You felt your voice wasn’t quite loud enough to handle it by itself?

No. I don’t think that was it. I think it was just a natural progression or the kind of music that we were listening to, the fact that Mark and I found we could sing well together and we complimented each other. It wasn’t anything to do with volume. Mark had a pretty good voice, and as long as I was singing up high, it kind of cut through. But as far as the lead male voice, sometimes it was a struggle to hear me.

That’s something I hadn’t thought of, that I hear more of your lower register on this. Is that where you’re more comfortable singing?

No, I think I have a higher voice, and that’s where I get my power. But when it’s quiet, I can get down there and people can hear it. I think it’s a range that some people aren’t really familiar with me singing. That’s what maybe people are finding makes it sound so much different from the Jayhawks.

Do you enjoy singing down there a bit more?

I like being all over, but there’s nothing like hitting the high notes for me because that’s where I can really push it. The low notes have to be very breathy and kind of almost spoken because I’m not naturally a low singer. But that just seems to be how my songs work. You have the low verse and the high chorus kind of thing.

Did you do anything in the studio this time that was a huge departure from what you’d done before?

Only the fact that I was playing with a bunch of people I hadn’t played with, it wasn’t a Jayhawks situation. On Rainy Day Music on that song “Madman,” we really got kind of a group ensemble playing all at once. On this record, all the songs were like that. And I think the players all kind of rose to the occasion. When I listen to it, I’m just amazed at what good parts everybody came up with and how they played off of each other. “Rainy Day Music” we played it mostly live but it was mostly just the three of us, and then we augmented it with overdubs afterwards. This is more of a pretty much the song was done almost when we took off the headphones and walked into the control room, the song was 90% there or complete. Other than that, we had just a little bit more instruments that you might hear on an English folk record or a psych-folk record. Harmoniums and some weird kind of ear candy kind of celestes and things. But we didn’t do anything really bizarrely experimental as far as the recording goes.

Seems like with your solo album and the new album with Mark Olson, it would be tough to avoid the shadow of the Jayhawks. Especially with the duo album.

That’s okay, I’m not trying to totally escape. I’m really proud of who we were and I’m not going to be one of those guys who never plays a Jayhawks song because that’s kind of silly. I don’t want to hide from it, I don’t want to confuse people, either. If you feel like making a record with a guy who used to be in your band, you just can’t worry about those things. It’s just something we wanted to do. If that confuses people, then so be it.

But it was deliberate that you wanted it to come out after your solo album was out?

Well, it wasn’t my idea so much as the label’s. I think they wanted to, again, not confuse people and say, this is Gary’s thing, and then there’s also Mark and Gary. But I think they wanted to the first thing that comes out post-Jayhaks to be my solo record. And Mark has his record out, which is a great record. So he’s doing his thing and I’m doing my thing, and then we’re going to join up.

For me, part of the reason that I got out of the Jayhawks was to be able to be free to kind of move around and do a number of things and not be beholden to other people. When you’re in a band, you have to do things as a group, you have to consider other members, if they want to play shows or tour, and I just couldn’t do that anymore. I needed to spend more time at home and those sorts of things. And have more time to work with some different people, even it’s somebody I had worked with in the past, or produce somebody. I just wanted to have that freedom. There was no real problem with the band itself.

So you don’t see either the solo stuff or any other albums as sort of your main gig.

I think I see my record as being a bit more of my focus. But the Olson/Louris record is also very important to me.

I mean past that, I mean down the road, from here on out, seeing yourself more as a solo player.

Yes. I think that’s fair to say. I still like a band situation, and if I can float in and out of some band situations I would still do that, too. I just can’t be in one thing, doing the same thing over and over again.

Barry Crimmins Interview on MediaBistro.com

2008-04-07T23:49:00.003-04:00

MediaBistro contacted political satirist Barry Crimmins for his thoughts on the recent Randi Rhodes story. Short but insightful. Take a look.

OC Archive: Jonathan Katz

2008-02-13T02:52:00.008-05:00

When I originally interviewed Jonathan Katz for Boston's Stuff@Night for this interview, which appeared in the June 22, 1999 issue, he was still working on his Comedy Central show, Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist for what would wind up being the show's final season. Since then, he has gone public with his MS, shied away from the spotlight, and then come back to stand-up. He released his first comedy CD, Caffeinated, last year, and Comedy Central released the complete Dr. Katz on DVD. And you can listen to his podcasts by going to his site, JonathanKatz.com.
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The career of Newton resident Jonathan Katz has taken some interesting turns since he started out as a musician and songwriter more then twenty years ago, fronting a band called Katz and the Jammers. At some point, Katz noticed that people were talking through the songs and paying more attention when he spoke. So he started to talk more. And it has paid off.

Katz has been all over the map, from his collaborations with David Mamet to appearances on TV Nation and The Larry Sanders Show. He even played Leo, the Angel of Death, in the short-lived sitcom Ink. Now, as Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist begins its sixth season, he is busy developing other ideas for film and television and is hard at work on To-Do Lists of the Dead, his first book under his name (not as Dr. Katz).

So, what's in store for the new season of Dr. Katz?

Can't talk about that. Just teasing. Well, first of all, in terms of story line... my son, Ben -- very troubled kid -- he threatens to join the army.

That has to be traumatic. For Dr. Katz and for Ben.

Traumatic for the army. He also gets his wisdom teeth removed, which is probably the most violent episode we've ever made.

One of my favorite episodes is called "Past Lives"; Ben and Dr. Katz take a past-life regression course together. And Dr. Katz discovers that in a previous life he was a barmaid in the Old West.

Is the show set in Boston?

We're kind of coy about that. We haven't picked a location yet. `Cause it's a cartoon, we haven't had to purchase any real estate. A lot of people speculate about where it is.

Are there any upcoming guests that you're particularly excited about?

Well, Dom Irrera is going to be returning to the show. He's my favorite patient. Jeff Goldblum is wonderful.

How did you decide to focus on comedians as patients, rather than just having celebrity guests?

Because the chances of one of these comedians' saying something extraordinarily funny is greater. You know, you don't go to your psychiatrist to plug something; you go to try out material.

In Newton, I guess, there is a high density of psychiatrists?

It's the highest per capita of anywhere in the country. I'm surrounded by them.

What is their reaction to the show?

Some pride, some resentment. A lot of advice. You know, there's a shrink named Randy Glassman who has helped me more than anyone with the language of therapy. When the show first started I was really intent on being a good therapist. And I do have a lot of empathy for people. And I have a lot of respect for people who are therapists, professionally. Especially if they can stay awake.

What's the difference between you and Dr. Katz?

Dr. Katz does his own stunts.

How do you choose the guests?

It's just like every other show. It's alphabetical.

I never noticed that.

Oh, yeah. Watch all these talk shows. They're almost up to the Zs.

How did you and David Mamet start working together?

The real question is, why did we stop? No, we started working together because we're friends and have been for 35 years.

And you co-wrote House of Games, or the story that became House of Games?

We co-wrote the story over a pool table one day of the movie that became the House of Games.

And you said, "Why did you stop -- "

No, I was just being glib.

You also have To-Do Lists of the Dead coming out.

The new book I'm working on. That's something that I started doing in an airplane at La Guardia. I got stuck on the runway. So I was working on my own to-do list, I got bored, and moved on to Lincoln. I wrote three items on his to-do list: "Free slaves, think of fancy way to say '87 years ago,' and beef up security at Ford's Theatre." And the first two items are checked. Then I moved on to FDR, Eisenhower, George Washington, Kurt Cobain, Charles Darwin, Judy Garland, Sammy Davis Jr. Anybody who's dead is fair game. Gene Siskel.

Do you still perform stand-up?

Well, I did something at Symphony Hall about a week ago with Ray Romano. We did a benefit for Children's Hospital. Every once in a while I'll do something. There's usually a cause involved. I, for the last few years, have been trying, along with my colleagues, to raise money for syphilis.

To help people get their start?

I'm raising money for the actual virus.

Was this always your stage persona, or did you try other personas?

I tried the wacky guy with the banjo, and I had a box full of props. I worked with a puppet for a while. Actually, the puppet's doing very well.

A solo career.

Yeah, he didn't need me. I was bringing him down. No, no, this has always been what I do. Not because of my courage and strength and belief in what I do. It really is more of a limitation. I can't do anything else.

OC Interview: George Carlin

2008-03-14T14:20:00.004-04:00

After speaking with George Carlin, it’s always tough to write just 800 words about him, as I did in today’s Boston Globe, covering his 14th HBO special, “It’s Bad For Ya,” and how he views his development as a jester, philosopher, and poet. Carlin’s a thoughtful guy, which is why when you’re making a documentary on comedy, whether it’s The Aristocrats or History of the Joke, you automatically seek him out. There were a lot of good thoughts that didn’t make the final cut, and I’ve mostly stayed away from reprinting them here. Click the link on the Globe story for that. And catch him tomorrow at the Wang Theatre, if you can.

It feels like there are so few constants in life, but I know that every two years, you’re going to come on HBO and tell something that’s interesting or funny that I’m going to want to hear.

It’s turned into a ritual with me. It’s turned into like the equinox or the solstices. You’re right, every two-and-a-half, three years. It’s been 31 years now and there are 14 of them, so I’m on schedule.

Is it something you look forward to, that you have an anticipation for?

If HBO weren’t part of the deal, I don’t know exactly the shape my career would be, but there’s a certainty that I’d be touring and doing these shows. And probably what I would be doing is turning each show into a CD and moving along.

I write for the stage show. HBO is just a way of taking pictures of my stage show and sending it to people’s houses. It’s just a delivery system. It’s for the stage, it’s for the performer. The writer gets to work and do its homework and be a good boy and cross the t’s and dot the i’s, and then the performer gets to show off, gets to take it out onstage and play and be the asshole in the fifth grade. So I get to exercise both parts of me now. When I was a young boy in school, I was a smart kid, but I wasn’t interested in doing the work. I wasn’t interested in doing assignments. I could pass a quiz, I could do certain things and acquit myself well in the classroom. But I didn’t do book reports. And beyond high school, the other half of me, the performer, had already begun to have concrete plans about how to go about things, how to set about in life to do what I wanted, so school took on even less importance in my mind. As long as I had a good grasp of the English language and as long as I remained curious and wanted to read and find things out and seek knowledge and inform myself, I knew I’d be okay. So I quit school after ninth grade. The bet paid off. But I just had a solid, certain feeling that I could do something with this show off talent. I didn’t know what it was for sure. I knew comedian was a possibility. I thought actor, announcer, disc jockey, impersonator. I wrote them all down when I was a kid. I just didn’t know which one. But I knew I needed to stand up and call attention to myself. So it worked out.

Do you think you definitely found the right path for you?

Yes, I forget whether they’re talking about happiness or success but it fits for either one -- if you do something you love that you’re really good at, and people recognize you for it, you’ve got the package. Those are the three elements that give you your real satisfaction, your real successful feeling. Whether or not there’s money involved. In a lot of cases, money comes along with the package. But the mains things – are you good at it, do you do a good job with it, and does everybody notice and say good job, pat you on the back. I’ve got that.

When you look back on all of your old specials – I know you had the boxed set last year – do you ever find yourself reflecting on that material, saying this part was especially good or that part was especially bad?

No. I’ve been very lucky in that, first of all, I chose deliberately not to do topical subjects, because they’re perishable. They have a shelf life, and after a very short period of time they seem dated and you seem dated and it seems pointless and stale and stupid. I don’t like developing something that’s useful for a month into a nice three or four solid minutes with good thoughts in it and have to throw it away because it got old. I’d rather talk about things that more or less will always be true about us, people, we Americans, we humans. I aim for that. Now there are sometimes in passing there are references to people who are of a certain time such as a Bush or a Nixon or whatever, but the thing never hangs on that. It’s just incidental, and sometimes those things hold up because they’re not tied to events, they’re not tied to a time, they’re tied to a person, and we know him for many years, so it’s still valid about him or her.

You’ve said recently also – and I know this is somewhat tongue-in-cheek – that you’ve sort of dropped out of the species so you can look at things as an observer. That was obviously tongue-in-cheek, but what is the practical, day-to-day effect or function of that outlook?

It seems to me, at least, in my personal ability to see things, it seems to me that it’s all rather pointless, that it’s all rather pointless, and that all of this is a temporal adventure. This stuff happens in a moment of time, when you look at the age of the universe and given the age of the Earth itself, and even the age since life has been around from the one-celled animal, this is rather meaningless, short-lived drop in the bucket, and I just don’t want to invest the importance in it that everyone does. You know, a lot of Eastern philosophy and stuff that’s grown out of Eastern thought talks about living in the now, living in this moment. And I understand mindfulness, and I understand the value that that offers. But I’d rather live in the always. I kind of feel like, at least I’ve chosen to think of it, that I live in the always.

I’m very fascinated by the cosmos and the history of life and time and space and atoms and quarks and sub-quarks and so forth. I’m fascinated by all these things. Archeology interests me a great deal. I mean, I don’t study these things in-depth, but I read about them a bit to inform myself and I’m very interested in that. I’m interested in history. I like seeing the whole picture, and I’ll often say, ‘Gee, I wish I could live or observe another thousand years, it’s going to be so interesting, the rise of China, the decline of the white race on the planet, because the white race is not reproducing at a replacement rate that’s sufficient to sustain it. The other races reproduce more abundantly. Russia will come back and be strong again, China will rise, India will rise, the Moslemization of Europe is taking place, and the American empire is showing signs of being at the last stages. When you employ mercenaries, when you have bases in, I don’t know, 70 or 80 countries around the world, and you spend so much money on your defense, I mean, all of these are signs that a lot of the previous empires that have fallen have shown. The British empire, the Romans, the Greeks, the Persians, the Spanish. All of them have shown certain characteristics that we’re now echoing. To me, all of that stuff’s interesting, and that’s what I mean about divorcing myself from what’s going on – I really don’t feel like I have a stake in this shit. It’s so much of a show. I’m here for the performance, I want to see the show.

It seems unusual that a lot of comedians aren’t really interested in all of the things that you’re talking about, that sort of macro picture, history repeating itself. It seems, of course you should be interested in that if your job is “comedian,” but it doesn’t seem like a lot of people are.

I don’t think I would try to figure out a template for all comedians because the first job is to get laughs. The first job is to amuse people, take them out of where they are and put them in your crazy little upside-down world that you created. In comedy, whether you’re doing very simple sort of club comedy, and there’s nothing wrong with any kind of comedy – Some people are performers, primarily, and some people bring a writer along for the ride.

It’s not fine art. It’s not high art, it’s low art. Stand-up comedy is a vulgar, people’s art, but if the writer is at work there’s artistry involved, and sometimes a person grows. I’ve been trying for 50 years get people to laugh and get people to be entertained and watch me and listen to me. So over those 50 years, I have grown and changed and matured and seasoned, and those things show. And I’ve been lucky enough to have the kind of career where I could do that. I didn’t get sidetracked into movies. I thought at one time that I wanted to be a movie actor and I wanted to be in a sitcom and all that kind of stuff, but after a long time of dabbling with those things, I could see that they were really a waste of time and they were besides the point. My point being, that I like creating material. Writing it. And performing it. Or putting it in a book now. I can do that. I have two delivery systems.

A lot of comedians make me laugh who don’t make me think. I don’t think the job of the comedian is to make you think. And I don’t think that’s my job. My job is to feel good about what I’m doing and enjoy what I’m doing. Sometimes an interviewer will say, “Are you trying to make the audience think?” And I say, “No, that would really be the kiss of death.” What I want them to know is that I’m thinking. Look at me, ain’t I cute, ain’t I smart, look how I’m thinking. I guess when you drop out of school, too, you have this deficit all your life. It’s not serious, it’s not crippling, but there’s this feeling that you’ve got to keep showing how smart you are.

Was there ever a time where you felt like you were doing comedy to try to change people?

No, never. It was always singing my song. That’s all it’s ever about, just sing your song. Hey, listen to me, this is what’s on my mind, this is what’s on my chest and in my heart, here it is, this is how it goes. Then when they like it, you just go home really happy.

Is it flattering to you that people keep coming to you as an authority on humor?

Well, it’s a good feeling to have lasted long enough that that’s true, I’ll put it that way. It’s a good feeling to know that the accumulated time and output puts me in a good spot with them.

Where exactly do you stand on the concept of god and religion? It seems to me that you reference it but you don’t exactly deny it.

Well, yeah. First of all, I think religion has given god a bad name if there is a god. That’s not my original thought, of course. I reference it because it’s a cultural artifact, it’s part of our common body of knowledge and information and theory. It’s part of what we have put in place. So it’s a reference point – something to talk about that everyone understands. And it has qualities, should it be true, has qualities that are quite spooky and outstanding and awesome. So it has a good dramatic potential. I’m like everyone else – even the ones who think they know – I’m in the dark. I don’t know nothin’. I don’t know dick. I was an atheist, but I realized that was a belief, so I fit more comfortably under the idea of agnostic. I just don’t know what the fuck’s going on. My brother calls it ‘the big electron.’ That’s as close as you can get, probably. That’s close enough for me.

It seems to me what you have a problem with is peoples’ concept of god.

Yeah. Right. Speaking for him and killing in his name. No. Just the worst acts on the face of the planet have been committed in the name of god. And god’s got a lot to answer for. I’ll put it that way. God’s got a lot to answer for. My partner, my ex-partner Jack Burns, who I started my comedy career with back in 1960, Jack once said, ‘If power corrupts, and if absolute power corrupts absolutely, where does that leave god?’ And I’d just as soon leave that out there for people to think about, too.

OC-ed: The Experience Issue

2008-03-10T15:01:00.002-04:00

Hillary Clinton's supposed turnaround last week hung on her asking the rhetorical question, when the phone rings in the White House at 3am, who do you want to answer? Although that seems more like a qualification for Accoutemps than president, Clinton's point was that Barack Obama just doesn't have the experience to be president. Apparently, four more years in Congress really makes all the difference between two laywers who want to rule the free world.

As usual, Barry Crimmins offers a whip-smart perspective on the issue.