Freakonomics Radio
Hosted by Stephen J. Dubner
Lessons from Tom Petty's rise and another rocker's fall.
7,557 words · 9 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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Before we start, here's a way to turn Steve down and make me louder.
Just to prove that I've been in a band?
Yeah, exactly.
I don't need so much Warren in here. That is, like, basically the only thing that people in bands ever say. More of me, please. An atypical Freakonomics Radio episode today. It's a conversation with an old friend about music, but mostly about success and how success can be gained by people of whom little is expected.
If someone had said to me, you know, "Look at the four guys in the Del Fuegos," or "Look at the 400 guys in all the bands you know," who would be the least likely to end up with a PhD? It would have been you. It really would. No offense, but it would have been you. So does that trajectory seem as strange from the inside as the outside? Or no, does it not surprise you so much in retrospect?
It does surprise me when I try to make contact with myself as the young kid in the rock and roll band with the chip front tooth. I don't see him getting to where I got.
So where did Warren Zanes get to? He is the executive director of Steven Van Zandt's Rock and Roll Forever Foundation. Before that, he was the vice president of education and public programs at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. And he writes books, including a new, very in-depth, and very personal biography of Tom Petty.
He's been my hero since I was 11, you know, someone I really looked up to.
As it turns out, Tom Petty's potential for success was no more evident to the people around him than Warren Zanes's was to me.
Something that several of the principals in Gainesville, Florida, said to me was, "I wouldn't have put my money on Tom Petty."
You know, you had Steven Stills.
You had Don Felder and Bernie Leadon, who went on to be in the Eagles.
You had the Allman Brothers, you know, close by, playing in battles of the bands. There were people who just looked like they were all set to go. These guys are finished products.
And describe him as a teenager.
I see a guy who wasn't in touch with his confidence completely yet, who did not yet know what he was going to be as a songwriter. You know, I think you see another player among a community of players, but not the superstar.
Today's conversation is also about one of the most fragile, most volatile, most sublime social units ever invented: the rock and roll band. The alliances, the distortions, the deep bruises, and the absurd elations that can never be explained to an outsider. Also, the inevitable failures.
You know, I think that the music business is best for those who have a capacity to weather a chain of disappointments. You know, because if you can only handle one, you should probably go work at the florist, you know?
From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.
Warren Zanes is 50 years old. I knew him a little bit a long time ago when we were both in bands. His band, the Del Fuegos, was out of Boston, and for a few years, they did really well. My band, out of North Carolina, was called The Right Profile. We never put out a record. We'd signed a deal with Arista and moved to New York, but then, while we were in pre-production on that first record, I quit. The closer I was getting to the rock star dream, the less appealing it looked. And I went cold turkey. I lost track of pretty much everybody I knew from then, including Warren Zanes. All I heard was that he too eventually parted ways with his band, which was probably pretty complicated because his band was run by his big brother, Dan Zanes.
Now, at that point, I would not have been surprised if I'd heard that Warren Zanes came to a bad ending because he was pretty, how shall we say this? He had a little bit of Icarus in him. He really wanted to get close to the sun. But he pulled up just in time. His wings did not melt, which is good news for him, for me, and especially for anyone who cares about Tom Petty.
Why'd Petty want you to or let you write a book about him? So when the idea of a book came up, he said, here's how it would happen. It's not ghostwritten. It's not co-written. It's not authorized. It's your book. And I said, why not authorized? And he said, when I see authorized on a book, I know it's bullshit. It's whitewashed. So you write it. All I ask is the opportunity to read it when it's finished and respond to that which I feel the need to respond to. With any guarantee of you're changing it or not even?
He said, I can't tell you what's in or what's out. I just, you give me space to respond if I feel the need to respond. So this is not typical. You know, basically, he's relinquishing control. With access, however. With full access. I was never denied an interview. There was never a question I asked that he did not answer, and I think it was hard. He's somebody who has been quite private, at times, pretty reclusive. And there I was, telling his story. Life stuff. There's heroin. Happens. Yes, there's drug use. There's stage fright.
Yeah, yeah, stage fright, a family falling apart, you know, a band going through real turmoil.
There was something very primal going on as I went through these pages.
Zane's first remembers hearing Petty on the radio as a kid back in Boston in 1976. WBCN played Breakdown. Zane's grew up listening to Josh White records and Pete Seeger records and Lead Belly. What's your favorite Tom Petty song, if you can?
It's difficult to say what my favorite Tom Petty song is because it's a shifting category. But I would say today, that from the first record, the song "The Wild One Forever" is my favorite song.
Really? Why that one?
When we were talking, Tom Petty started going into early failed romances. And these are the romances that were happening up in his head, but not yet in the material world.
He talked about one young woman named Cindy in particular, who, for a minute there, he thought something might happen. And he really never forgot her. And he said to me, "She's in more songs than you would ever realize." And he mentioned the song "Even the Losers" from Damn the Torpedoes being about a night that they came together. And in the morning, she said, "That's all there is." And I went back into the records and you could begin to speculate where else Cindy was appearing. And I think even "The Wild One Forever" is absolutely a Cindy song. And there's an ache to it.
Zane's met Petty many, many years before this book would even begin to happen, in the 1980s. Petty and The Heartbreakers were already big, on their way to huge. Zane's and the Del Fuegos were, in their minds, on exactly the same path.
We first met Tom Petty when we were doing a three-night run at the Roxy, which is on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. It's legendary. We're doing three nights, and every night from the stage, we would say, "We hope Tom Petty comes down." We were unencumbered in being Tom Petty fans. And on the second night, a woman by the name of Alison Reynolds, who became my girlfriend, came backstage and said, "In fact, I know Tom Petty, and I'm going to see if he can come down tomorrow night." And so we thought, "Great. Night three. He's going to show up."
And then we take a victory lap. We've achieved what we wanted to achieve. And the next night, nothing.
The shows are over, and I was in my hotel room. I had an adjoining room, actually, to the bass player. And so there was the usual party after the show, debauchery of all the most expected kinds. And the phone rings in my room, and it was Tom Petty. And he said he was sorry he couldn't make the show and invited us out to his house the next night. And we sat with Tom Petty. I think he might have viewed us with some amusement, and we looked like a rock and roll band. He'd seen a lot of those.
So you ended up, a while later, opening for him, yeah?
Yeah. He came and he sang on one of our songs on our third recording. And shortly after that, brought us out on a summer tour, which is about a three-month tour.
All right, let's back up. Zane's joined the Fuegos right out of high school. He was 17.
The Del Fuegos as a band started before I was a member. So initially, it was at Oberlin College. You had three students put together a band, playing rock and roll covers. Now, I was away at boarding school, and I would sneak out. I would put on my black ski mask. You know, it was after hours. And I had a friend who was a, you know, what they call a townie. And he'd drive me into Boston and would go to shows. And I just had to be back to boarding school by sunup. And I fell in love with that scene. And I didn't have any ambitions to be a part of it so much. But my brother asked me to join the band, right?
As I was getting toward graduation. And it was just, it was convenient that I hadn't filled out any college applications. You know, I didn't have a plan B. So when he said, do you want to be in my band? I was, I was all over it. And I was already invested in that, that world that he was in.
How was your guitar playing at that point?
When he asked me to join the band, I said yes to joining. And then asked him what instrument I would be playing. And he said, you know, you'll be the guitar player. And we went to a music store and we bought a guitar for me to play. And he wrote out some chords on a piece of paper and, you know, a couple of songs. You know, Everly Brothers, Bird Dog. Got me a copy of the Rolling Stones Now, an early Rolling Stones album with Brian Jones on it, and said, study this. And, you know, three months later, I was in the band. And my first gig was just a couple of weeks later.
And six months after that, we had a record deal.
Their first record in 1984 was called The Longest Day. It did sound a little bit like early Rolling Stones. I met the Fuegos on their tour for that record. They were playing in a bar in Greensboro, North Carolina. We were backstage between their two sets, just hanging out. And in walks the guitarist Niels Lofgren, who was playing with Bruce Springsteen's band at the time. Apparently Bruce was playing the Greensboro Coliseum the next night. And then, a few minutes later, in walks Bruce himself. Now, the Fuegos invite Bruce and Niels to join them onstage for a couple of songs at the end of the Fuegos set.
It seemed like the natural thing to do. And then, when we stepped back out of the dressing room, it was as if everyone in that room had called five people.
Mm-hmm.
Get down here fast. And this is pre-internet, so it was viral without the technology that makes it easy to go viral. And we went up on the stage and we did "Stand By Me."
Mm-hmm. Hang on, "Sloopy" also.
Hang on, "Sloopy." And I just turned around to my amp and I turned the volume down to zero. And, uh, and really, I just watched. And then, you know, how would I remember that night? I'd remember that night because for the next two years, the first question in every interview was, "What was it like to play with Bruce Springsteen?" And then I realized that when Bruce came down to play that show, in many ways, he was doing us a great favor, giving us this experience. But on another level, we became his missionaries.
And I don't want to reduce his good spirit to a business move, but I saw the power of what he did. Because it wasn't just in interviews. I told the story of Bruce playing with us so many times, it was like I was a one-man promotion machine for Bruce Springsteen.
So, there were a lot of bands around then, as there are now, and you guys, the Del Fuegos, even though you didn't become a huge band, became a pretty big band, a really a likable band, a well-reviewed band, with good songs and good performance, energy, and all that. What was it like to be on that ride? And did you recognize that you were in the minority of bands that kinda, where it happens that well and that fast?
Well, I mean, I would say we got big enough so that it started to hurt.
I don't look back and think of it as a particularly fun time. I look back, I think it was an invaluable education, but it was not the kind of fun I would have thought I was getting into. And I think if you're young and you're in that business of dreams, you're always looking at the guy who's got just a little bit more than you, and you're measuring yourself in relation to that, and you always come up the loser.
I think maybe that was just us, but I think my brother thought like that, I thought like that. And so you always felt like, oh, you know, oh, that's great. We sold 350,000 records, but we don't have a gold record. And that's where the party begins. We were hell-bent on becoming rock and roll stars. And I think, it's not necessarily a flattering thing to say, but that's what, that's what we wanted. We were out to get as big as we could possibly get.
Why do you think that's not flattering?
Because, you know, in that culture, there's some sense of, we do it for the music.
So how long did you play in the Del Fuegos?
It was three records, five years in human years. That's about 50 years.
And, and what happened at the end?
At the end, I went to my brother and said, I want a larger piece of the creative pie. And I want to-
Meaning you wanted to write songs for the band?
Yeah.
Right.
And I had been writing, and I'd given him things, but the band never tried any of my songs.
Toward the end, when you were frustrated that your songs weren't getting an airing, what was your relationship like overall with your brother?
We were, you know, just tragically repressed. I mean, this is the problem in any relationship, you know, marriage or band, whatever. If you're not sharing the dreams you have in your head with the people, you know, with whom you're in closest proximity, you're entering dysfunction. I think we were so afraid of our own dreams and so afraid of the failure of not realizing those dreams that we just didn't talk about it and we went straight to the bartender.
The Del Fuegos had by now put out their third record.
Radio wasn't excited about it.
The critics weren't excited about it. Everybody was looking at it like, we're not entirely sure what you're trying to be here. We appreciate that you're trying to be something, but we just don't know what it is. And so the record wasn't doing well. And it turned out that Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers had just put out their record and it wasn't doing as well as they expected. So this tour where we were opening up for the Heartbreakers came to be called The Rock and Roll Caravan. And right in between the two acts, another band was added, the Georgia Satellites, who had a number one song with Keep Your Hands to Yourself. And so I remember watching them just be having this summit experience.
They were a great rock and roll band.
So you played how many shows roughly with Petty and the Satellites?
It was around three months of shows.
And was it, I don't know, fun, thrilling, grueling?
It was the thing that should have been fun that was grueling.
That's the worst when you... Some people say that the key to happiness in life is just to meet or exceed expectations. So the lower you can set your expectations, the better you are. And once you have high expectations, you're screwed.
One of the challenges for me in this is that it was so obvious that the dream was coming true that I was afraid to say anything to anyone about how it actually felt.
And how it actually felt, I was just at a level of disappointment in that experience that was, that was hard to get past. And I was doing a lot of medicating, you know, my feelings. I felt like I was on this fantastic tour and somehow I was, I hadn't earned it. I wasn't worthy of it. And that's a hard feeling to live with for three months. In retrospect, it's not that surprising to me that I wasn't in the band too much longer after that. I was, I was uncomfortable in the world. When Zane's quit the band, he was 22 years old. I mean, my first ambition when I left the Del Fuegos was to create something that
would show the world that I was superior to my brother. Meaning a record presumably, yeah? Oh, yeah. I mean, I knew of no other, you know, there wasn't going to be bullfighting, you know? But as Warren Zane soon found out, once you're not in the band, you are not in the band. After I left the Del Fuegos, I remember the last time I saw Tom Petty was at his Christmas party. So I had quit the band, but I was still out in Los Angeles and had been invited to his Christmas party. And I showed up and Tom had given me Beatles
magazine. And I heard during the course of the evening that George Harrison was in the building. You know, when a Beatle comes onto the grounds, there's a murmur that passes through the, the group that's assembled. And I heard that murmur. And I went to Tom's then-wife Jane and I said, you know, Jane, I'm not an autograph hound type, but he gave me this Beatles magazine and I heard that George Harrison's here. And she took me down this hallway and opened the door to what was Tom's office and did it in such a way that it probably to the people in the room, it looked like I ran in there. And, but on my side, I felt like I'd been pushed in.
And in that room, behind the desk was George Harrison. To one side was Tom Petty. To the other side was Jeff Lynne and Petty's guitar player, Mike Campbell. And they're all playing. So it's, you know, three fifths of the Traveling Wilburys. And they're playing a song and they stop because this kid just ran in the room. And George looked at me and said, "It's Brian Jones, back from the dead." And then he started playing this song about a dandy. Because I was wearing this, you know, it was the 80s. I was wearing this heavily embroidered jacket. It was all too much. And I was a dandy of sorts.
And so he's playing the song and everybody's having a bit of a laugh at Warren's expense. And I'm holding this Beatles magazine. And at the end of it, he, George takes the magazine. He signs it for every Beatle. Because they learned one another's signatures so that they could sign. And Tom Petty sees the level of discomfort. You know, this is like too good and too awful at the same time. He's like, "It's okay, you know, you can hang out." You know, sit down. And I said, "No." And I left. And that was the last time I saw Tom Petty for quite a while.
It sounds like some Greek tragedy where you'd crossed boundaries, kind of intentionally, but kind of not. Even though you had done it intentionally and you were okay with being on the other side, immediately someone recognized you as not being part of the tribe anymore.
Yes. Just prior to this, I had had a moment in Petty's office, just the two of us. And we were talking. And he asked, "So, you know, you're not in your rock and roll band anymore. What are you gonna do?" And I was giving him the plan, which was to stay in Los Angeles and to put a new band together and to take over the world. And he just looked at me and said,
This isn't where bands come from. You should go home. It was so deflating for me because I had another story about what was going to happen to me next. And looking back, he was teaching me something that he had learned. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers didn't come from Los Angeles. They came from Gainesville, Florida. And they did their becoming there. And they only went out to Los Angeles when they were at a pretty advanced state of becoming. So what Tom Petty was telling me was, go home. Find a thing. See if it holds water.
So Zane's went home, wrote songs, made demos, sent them out. He got interest from a major label. He was pretty sure things were going to work out. Now he just had to be patient, wait for that record deal. Meanwhile, there was a girl in New Orleans. All right. You moved to New Orleans for a girl. What was your ambition in your head at that point? What did you think you'd end up doing?
I thought I was going to have sex with her.
I meant long term, but I appreciate the short term view.
I thought I was going to New Orleans to just wait to make a record. It didn't get made and nothing came of it. Eventually, I had to embrace reality and get a job. And I got a job working as a bicycle mechanic outside the French Quarter. And it had been like a year and a half since we'd been playing Madison Square Garden opening up for Tom Petty. And I remember a vivid scene. I'm in this bike shop. My hands are covered in grease and I'm trying to fix this rear derailleur on a Schwinn.
And the new Tom Petty song comes on the radio.
And I'm just looking at the grease on my hands. And it was one of those, "Look how far I've fallen" kind of moments. It was a little bit more than the young person that I was could handle. But I'd just been riding on a tour bus, parking next to that guy's tour bus. And he's on the radio, and I'm trying to fix this rear derailleur on a Schwinn.
Sensing that his girlfriend might break up with him because of his lack of ambition, he thought about going to college. One problem, his car had just been flattened during a storm.
So when it came to playing with this idea of going to college, I knew I had to walk. So I took out a map and I looked for university icons. And the closest one was Loyola University. And I didn't know that Tulane was really like 20 feet further. I was just thinking, I don't want to have to walk too far. So I went into the admissions office and said, you know, here's my situation. I'm trying to stay in this relationship. I only want to take a couple of classes. And I don't really have time to go through the application process. And I just took two classes.
I took a history of philosophy and a women's literature, thinking that this would make me smarter and more attractive to women. And after, I remember at the end of these two classes, the woman, Carol Siegel, was the teacher of the women's literature class. And I think she recognized that I had really fallen in love with the classroom. And she sat me down. She said, Warren, I just want to give you some advice. Don't do what I did. And I wasn't quite sure where she was going with it. She said, "Don't go from here all the way through to a PhD."
And I almost swallowed my tongue. I was gonna, you know, like, "Hey, I liked your class, but please get over yourself." Like, PhD. And of course, I went through and got the PhD. Where'd you get your PhD in and where? The PhD I got from University of Rochester in Visual and Cultural Studies. I really worked hard. I worked pretty quickly, but I was reshaped. My mind is the same mind I had going in, but it was retooled. It was given a new plasticity. It was given opportunities to, you know, think differently in relation to different
subject areas. That was my process of becoming. So, yeah, it would be hard to see the kid in the band getting to the other side of that. But 12 years, however quick, that's a pretty long time to rejigger yourself.
Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, how did Tom Petty triumph in an industry known to eat its young? By emulating the heroes of his favorite movies, westerns.
And then you got the cowboy, who works with his own set of values, his own laws. He's operating just outside the system.
And crazy idea warning here. Should everyone be required at some point to join a band?
I think you're absolutely right. My most important degree was five years in rock band.
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Tom Petty, with The Heartbreakers more often than not, has turned into one of the most enduring songwriters and performers in the history of rock and roll, which not many people would have predicted at the outset. He was part of a big and vibrant music scene in Gainesville, Florida, but Petty was hardly a superstar in waiting. Among other potential detriments, he was on the laid-back side. You'd never catch him breaking loose like Elvis Presley or preening like Jagger. Even when he sang, he barely raised his voice. Yeah, there was a sneer in his singing sometimes, occasionally a snarl, but for the most part, he had the affect of a teenager
who sits in the back of the class in a leather jacket, picking his nails, not wasting his breath on anyone. He wasn't much of a student, wasn't athletic at all, so looking at him, you might have got the impression he really didn't care about something as bourgeois as success. And you would have been wrong.
Well, Mike Campbell, the guitar player in The Heartbreakers, says, "No one's as ambitious as Tom Petty." And he goes on to say, "Thank God somebody was in this band." You've got to have that guy. And that's one of the ingredients that goes into the bandleader. In American rock and roll, The Heartbreakers are our Rolling Stones. They're hitting 40 years together now. So you had a bandleader who was able to pull off that magic trick. And part of it related to ambitions.
Warren Zanes's new book, Petty, tells the whole story.
When you look back at Gainesville, Florida, after The Beatles have been on Ed Sullivan, it was much like other towns, where you had all these garage bands coming into being.
But in Gainesville, you also had guys peeling off and going and having big careers. So as time passes, locally, they had the Tropics. The Tropics were a hot Florida band, and they end up being up there with Dick Clark on TV. It's like, wow, that's possible. Then you have the Allman Brothers. Then you see Bernie Leadon going out to California. He's in the Flying Burrito Brothers. Then Don Felder follows him, and they form the Eagles. So the message there is, this could be you. It's the Beatles' message carried through locally. And that kind of gives Tom Petty's ambition liftoff.
And he talks about really getting the message from Don Felder. Before Don Felder went out to join the Eagles, Felder says to him, you know, if we keep playing cover songs, we're not going to be making records. People don't make records of cover songs. And Petty really hears it. And I think there's no turning back from that point, once he sees the power of songwriting.
Petty was in a series of bands over the early years. The latest one, known as Mudcrutch, gets a record deal and relocates to LA. They worked with the producer Denny Cordell.
He gives them this idea to do a reggae feel to this song, "Depot Street." And it ends up, in Petty's view, it's like a novelty record. They were trying to figure out what they were.
The record didn't sell, and what they were soon changed. Petty, the main songwriter and lead singer, got his name above the title. The first album was just called Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
The first record died before it was a success. And then it hits in England, not in the States. And then, only because there was a promo man who listened to it and said, I can't believe this record stiffed.
But they get that first top 40 single with Breakdown. And by the time it hits, they have to be making the second record. And so they're thrown very quickly into the album cycle. And that's where Petty lives most of his life. Write the songs, record the songs, release the songs and support them. Write the songs, record the songs. And so he comes into this situation where there's always somebody with their hand out looking for more songs.
As the band got more and more successful, Petty was invited to reassess how the spoils were being divided.
It was his band as he started it, but it was an equal split among the band members. And Petty's there doing all the work, keeping the band together. Success starts to happen and everybody in the band's making as much as everybody else. And they have a manager come in to work with their existing manager, Elliot Roberts. And Elliot Roberts was at the time managing Bob Dylan and Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. And Elliot looks at this situation and goes to Tom and says, if you keep up with this equal split among band members, you're going to get so resentful that you won't have a band.
He said, now's the time to address it. As bandleader, it's not an equal split anymore. I'm the bandleader, I'm the songwriter, I'm getting a bigger piece of the pie. It's going to be a highly unpopular decision, but it's going to allow you to keep your band together. It's counterintuitive in that way. And Petty goes with Elliot Roberts. But Petty doesn't go to the band and tell them he has Elliot do it.
And it turns out that that's a pretty typical move for Petty going forward, right? He was good at delegating, especially the tough stuff.
Yeah. I don't know if that's totally fair. I mean, I think Petty's starting to go, this is business.
I mean, I think. The band that is going to stay together is probably not the band that's doing group hugs and high fiving one another backstage. The group that stays together is probably going to be the one that sets up appropriate boundaries.
Petty also discovered that even though they were selling a lot of records, they weren't making much money from songwriting royalties.
Well, he signed the kind of deal that most young artists sign, which involves giving your publishing away.
And you write entertainingly, I mean, in a tragic way, that he thought publishing meant like published songbooks, right?
Yeah. Yes, he thought it meant songbooks.
As opposed to ownership of the songs.
Yeah. He didn't know, you know, when they came to look at this later on in court, he just said he signed something under duress. And that, to me, is close to the truth.
Why?
Because it's duress in the wide sense. It's somebody sitting there and, you know, there is a pressure to sign that thing. And it's the pressure of, I want to change my situation. You know, I want the dream to come true. It's not when musicians do their clearest thinking, when they're signing their first deal, they're young. Again, I've said it before, but it's that head full of dreams effect. This is an industry that they know the next young person's coming, and they know that person has a dream. And they're not going to scrutinize a contract.
And even if they did, they could tell that kid to get lost because there's another 50 in line behind him. And several of them are talented. So is the company in the wrong signing deals where the company makes the bulk of the money and the band is oftentimes in debt? Why should record companies be the exception to the rules of capitalism?
So Petty fought back. It turned into a lawsuit between him and his record label. Meanwhile, he and the band were recording the record that would become Damn the Torpedoes. Petty was worried that the label would seize the tapes.
One thing that I love about Tom Petty is he's one of these American kids who grew up on westerns. And what is the western? The western is a situation in which you've got characters who are kind of making up their own laws in the face of the law. So you've got the sheriff, but the sheriff is often a kind of stiff, ineffective character. And then you've got the cowboy. He's operating just outside the system. Petty loved westerns. When it came to Petty finding himself in a music business where he wasn't getting compensated
as he should have, yet the record company was making a lot of money on his back, I think he started to think like a cowboy. And Elliot Roberts, his manager, is giving them the money to record, but they're doing it outside of the system. Nobody's supposed to know about it. So at the end of a recording day, they hide their tapes. They give them to Bugs Waddell, who's the roadie. Roadie from the beginning up to the present. And it's that cowboy character. This system isn't working for us, so we're going to work just outside of it. So simultaneous with him declaring bankruptcy, he's recording his new album and they're hiding the tapes at night.
It's not what you hear of in a typical rock and roll story. But to me, this is a kid who grew up thinking about cowboys.
So Petty's been in bands for 50 years, right? And you've been in bands for a while, sometimes more intensely than not. I was in bands for a shorter time than you, but still for a bunch of years. Reading your book, my big takeaway from it was that being in a band and all that that entails, all the economics, all the psychology, all the anthropology, all the everything, is, in a way, like, excellent training for the rest of your life.
I think you're absolutely right. And I will say to people, talking about my life in the university, I told them what degrees I got, told them what my dissertation was on, and then I said, "But my most important degree was five years in rock band. That's where I learned the most." I needed the university to process that. But the most important part of my education was playing in a rock and roll band.
So I've often harbored this fantasy that America would institute a kind of mandatory rock and roll service. Clinton used to talk about like the Peace Corps, you know, or some kind of service. And in Israel, everybody has to go join the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, which has become this bonding thing. So I can't think of anybody in the world who might even come close to approving of my fantasy mandate, other than you. You think it's a good idea to...
I think it's the only idea.
Hey, nice book. Congratulations.
Thank you.
I am a sucker for reinvention stories, so I hope you can appreciate why I am so appreciative of Warren Zanes's reinvention as an academic and an author. He also still makes solo records, by the way. And his big brother, Dan Zanes, also pulled off a beautiful reinvention. About 15 years ago, Dan started playing music for kids, but great kids' music, some original and some pulled from the fringiest fringes of the American songbook.
Now his band is known as Dan Zanes and Friends. He's won a Grammy Award for his music. And even though I am way, way older than his intended audience, the power of good music is such that when I'm far away from home, on a plane maybe, and missing my family, there's a Dan Zanes recording I always reach for. It's an old song called "I Was Born Almost 10,000 Years Ago." It is the weirdest history lesson in history. I don't know why, but it makes me smile every time I hear it, and I hope you find a smile in it, too.
I was born almost 10,000 years ago. And there's nothing in the world that I don't know. I saw Peter, Paul, and Moses playing Ring Around the Roses. And I'm here to lick the guy that says tain't so. I saw Satan when he looked.
Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. Today's episode was produced by Kasia Mahalovich and Irvan Gunja. Our staff also includes Christopher Wirth, Greg Rosalsky, Jay Cowat, Merritt Jacob, Caroline English, and Alison Hockenberry. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find our entire podcast archive and lots of extras, including a song by my old band, The Right Profile. The song is called "Cosmopolitan Lovesick Blues", and it's at the end of the blog post for this podcast episode.
Coming up on the next Freakonomics Radio, what happens when a bunch of economists set up an experimental preschool to help underperforming kids?
It was one of the most difficult things I think we could have tried to do.
How successful was their effort? Yeah, I think it's a mixed bag. And why preschool may already be too late to attack the education gap.
It's really in those first three years of life when a huge amount of the physical brain is built.
That's next time on Freakonomics Radio.
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