#2550 - Rick Springfield

Rick Springfield is a Grammy Award-winning musician, actor, and author. In addition to his work as a solo artist, Springfield fronts the rock supergroup The Locustz. Their most recent album, “Buzzkill,” is available now.www.youtube.com/@RickSpringfieldOfficiallocustzbuzzkill.bandcamp.com/album/buzzkilllinktr.ee/rickspringfieldwww.rickspringfield.com Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. Don’t miss out on all the action this week at DraftKings! Download the DraftKings app today! Sign-up using https://dkng.co/rogan or through my promo code ROGAN. This video is sponsored by BetterHelp. Visit https://BetterHelp.com/JRE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Training by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

• 0:12Speaker 02

  You believe? Mm-hmm.

• 0:15Speaker 03

  I think something's going on. I don't know what that something is.

• 0:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know. It's the whole argument of, you know, a species living long enough to, surviving long enough to actually have faster than light or faster than light travel is, it's a tough one.

• 0:34Speaker 03

  It is a tough one. Are we rolling? I think they probably have some unique propulsion system that has nothing to do with moving in one direction to another. I think they fold space and time.

• 0:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 0:48Speaker 03

  This is what, yeah.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  What is it? The wormhole that brings the two things together so you skip all this?

• 0:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's the theory, but I mean, obviously in practice.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  But then it's them living, that species existing long enough, because we're like, we're getting close to, you know, and we're nowhere near that. So the species living long enough to achieve that and then come here is, you know, that's the stumbling block I have.

• 1:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, a lot of people have that stumbling block. I think it's also the possibility that they didn't evolve in the same violent world that we did. But then there's the question, well, then what gave them the motivation to innovate and move forward? Because for us, a lot of it is survival and competition, and that's the reason why people innovate in the first place.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  Yes, wars create great innovation.

• 1:43Speaker 03

  I mean, the real, the more interesting theory is that they're monitoring us to make sure that we can successfully pass this sort of adolescent phase of evolution that we're currently in.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:57Speaker 03

  That's why they hover over nuclear bases and shit.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  We hope, we hope we'd get there. It's very debatable.

• 2:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, listen, man, thank you for being here.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:09Speaker 03

  It's kind of cool to meet you. It's fascinating. I mean, I listened to your music when I was in high school, which is crazy. And to see you look as good as you look now, I mean, we played a video, I don't know if you ever saw.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:22Speaker 03

  We were freaking out, like, this guy's like, how old are you?

• 2:25Speaker 02

  Seventy-seven.

• 2:26Speaker 03

  Seventy-seven. That's fucking incredible, dude, because a lot of your contemporaries, when they've, you know, even guys younger than you, they're falling apart. And you were out there singing Jesse's Girl like you wrote it a week ago. It was crazy.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  That was actually a great comment. I really appreciate that, because it's, I'm still very passionate about playing music and, you know, and they say, how do you, how can you deliver a song that you've played a million times? It's because the energy of the audience, you know? I mean, I wrote the song to see an audience react like that to it. It's pretty difficult to just sit back and go, you know? So it charges me up, too.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  Well, it's nice that you still enjoy it and appreciate it, because I think, even though it's the dream for everyone to become a rock star, for some, I mean, for some people, something happens along the way and they just get so accustomed to it and they get, you know, worn out by it. And then they don't love it anymore, which is crazy.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  I know. Well, I, obviously it depends on the person, you know?

• 3:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  And it depends on whatever experiences they have. I've had pretty good experiences. And I just, I've always wanted to do it, you know? I mean, since I was 11 years old, when I first saw and held my first guitar, that was what I wanted to do. And really, it's kind of centered around playing guitar, although that's not what I'm necessarily known for, but that's what I enjoy the most, you know? And when I started to write, that, that kind of changed everything for me, too. You know, it gave me a great forward focus, rather than just playing, but going somewhere with the writing.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  How old were you when you first started performing in front of people?

• 4:28Speaker 02

  About 15, 15 I started playing. I, you know, I had a school band together. And then I got kicked out of school, actually, I got kicked out of 11th grade.

• 4:39Speaker 03

  For what? What happened?

• 4:41Speaker 02

  I didn't show up anymore. I just, you know, I discovered the guitar and I was having, I was, I had a serious depression when I was a kid. I still deal with it, but, but I was failing in the only arena that was available to me at the time, which was school, you know, with friends in school and work and all that, schoolwork. And I just wasn't doing well, and it was really dragging me down. And I started, I discovered the guitar, started staying away from school because I couldn't face going to school. But, you know, instead of playing video games and getting stoned, which wasn't available

• 5:21Speaker 02

  to me at that point, I was reading Robert Bloch and August Derleth, and great writers, because I loved horror, and playing the guitar. And that was my education, really. After, once I learned to read and write, you know? That was what I took out of school.

• 5:42Speaker 03

  Where were you living?

• 5:43Speaker 02

  I lived in Australia till I was 10. Then we moved to England till I was about 13. And that was a big, that was a game changer for me.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  Because your accent is weird.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:55Speaker 03

  It's like, it's all over the place.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  It is, yeah.

• 5:57Speaker 03

  I'm trying to lock it in and figure out what the hell's going on.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  I know, there's some words I can't say with an American accent. I can't say Australia without, with an American accent. It's just not possible. Yeah, but we moved to England, that's when I discovered girls and guitars. And that was like the beginning for me. It was a band called Clifford and the Shadows, Cliff Richard and the Shadows. They were before the Beatles. And, yeah, it was, and then I moved back to Australia, and then I went to Vietnam for a couple of months, and then I was.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  What were you doing in Vietnam?

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Sixty-eight, sixty-nine. It was, there was promoters in Saigon and Da Nang, and they were looking for, the closest occidental country was Australia. So the GIs wanted to see, you know, girls that reminded them of home. So as long as we had a couple of girls in the band, they would hire you and you could tour Vietnam during the war zone.

• 6:54Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  It was pretty insane. We were there for about four months.

• 6:58Speaker 03

  What was that like?

• 6:59Speaker 02

  It was insane. I thought, oh, great, we'll make money, you know? And of course, we didn't make any money. We spent it all at the PX, and we weren't making much money anyway. But we, based out of Saigon and Da Nang, and we toured from Cameron Bay up to the DMZ. We were at the DMZ, the tet after, the tet where they'd crossed over, the vehicle had crossed into the cities and everything, and like done the big assault, you know, the tet assault. We were there, we were two miles from the DMZ on that next tet. And I remember near as eve and the flares, you know, parachute flares started going off like this, and we're, and there's like a line of guys heading towards us.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  And it was freaking freaky. They, you know, they kept them to bay, but we got shot at and rocketed, and we'd be planned, and there'd be mortars landing.

• 7:53Speaker 03

  Holy shit.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  Stayed over, and we befriended some Navy guys at Marble Mountain, which is outside Da Nang. And we went back there for, to give them a free show, you know, because they were so appreciative, you know? I mean, they loved seeing the girls, but they, they wanted connection with home, you know? So they'd take you into the tents, and we'd play Hendrix and get stoned and, you know, I mean, even though we're Australian, there still was, there was a connection there. And so we met these guys, and we really got along well, and we stayed overnight with them at the, and we went, all got in the bunkers, in the perimeter bunkers, and I stayed in the radio shack.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  And we got attacked, and I'm throwing mortars down the frigging tube of the radio shack.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  You were throwing mortars?

• 8:42Speaker 02

  It was freaky. Yeah, this is before, you couldn't do any of this now. This is 1968, 69. And it was, you know, you'd see traces going off, the guys, the rest of the band were in perimeter bunkers. And it was, it was pretty insane.

• 8:57Speaker 03

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• 11:27Speaker 03

  Holy shit, man.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  We actually went up on a mission in Apache helicopter, too. Cause they said, "You guys wanna come?" And we're all like, "Yeah." But it was, you know, we, uh, it was, uh, pretty hairy.

• 11:41Speaker 03

  Holy shit, man. That's gotta be insane. Were you, when, when you were over there, were you like, "What the fuck have I done?"

• 11:50Speaker 02

  It was fear, it was fear. Sorry, I went down the wrong way. It was pretty much a fear factor the whole time.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  Holy fuck, man.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  We'd be, you know, we slept with, um, hang on. As you get older, you get a dry throat. We slept with, a lot of the times where the GIs slept in their, you know, their hooches and wake up with, with dust.

• 12:22Speaker 03

  Is that you over there?

• 12:23Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, there we are.

• 12:25Speaker 03

  Holy shit, man.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  That's where we slept in, uh, the hooches a lot of the time.

• 12:29Speaker 03

  How old were you then?

• 12:30Speaker 02

  Um, I was like, uh, sixty-seven, sixty-eight, sixty-nine, I was eighteen.

• 12:38Speaker 03

  Wow. Wow.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, and those jeans hadn't been washed in about three months.

• 12:48Speaker 03

  You, you had to be like rethinking that decision to go over there.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  Um, I was there and it was, okay, we make the best of it. I mean, there was, you kind of fall into a mindset, although I wasn't, you know, I wasn't going out, you know, shooting with, uh, the GIs, and that you fall into a mindset there that everything's legal, you know, you could, anything, anything goes. We, um, we did some pretty nutty things. At one point, we were standing in line with forty other guys in a, in a hut and, uh, being serviced by this one, one Vietnamese hooker and it was just...

• 13:28Speaker 03

  Forty guys waiting for one hooker?

• 13:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  Holy shit.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Um, and there was nothing much to do but smoke, you know? I smoked dope, started smoking dope there.

• 13:40Speaker 03

  That was the first time?

• 13:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I haven't, I didn't, I haven't, not really been a doper, you know, but I did there and it was kind of considered just the thing to do. Everybody was stoned, all the soldiers were stoned.

• 13:53Speaker 03

  All the time?

• 13:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  You know, they...

• 13:57Speaker 03

  The last thing I would wanna do is be high in a war zone.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  Uh, dude, I, we were in a, we were in the Trang, right? Uh, which is this beautiful, uh, beach town and, and they go there for R and R cause they could surf, right? But it was still dangerous and, and we were in a, uh, we stay in these, sometimes if we weren't with the, staying on an army base, we'd stay in these old villas that were all French villas that were once beautiful and now were rat infested, you know? I mean, we'd be sleeping on cots and rats would be going underneath. We, we got stoned, I remember one night we got stoned and the next thing you hear, machine gun right outside the house. And you hear the guy goes, "Hit the lights, hit the floor." So the lights go out and we all hit the floor. And you didn't know what was going on, but when you're stoned, it's like, oh my god.

• 14:45Speaker 02

  It could've been anything, you know?

• 14:47Speaker 03

  Holy shit, man.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  But it was, it was freaky, but the, but being stoned helped you deal with it, you know, not have the constant fear, although when the fear hit, if you're stoned, it's like you'd go over the, over the top, you know? But it was just the way we deal with it. I mean, I remember, um, we'd be playing for the troops, you know, that we'd play on the back of a truck and we played in, in, um, uh, uh, firebases. We didn't, you know, I, we all thought it was gonna be like a Bob Hope tour, you know? You come in a fleet of helicopters, you play, they, you know, they're sitting in bleachers, they applaud, you get in a helicopter, fly away. It was nothing like that, it was just a, a guy out of Saigon that hired, hired us and,

• 15:30Speaker 02

  um, uh, what was I, what was I talking about? I get lost very easily, I have A, ADHD and there's so much awesome shit around here to look at that I'm kind of a...

• 15:41Speaker 03

  Um, we were talking about getting stoned and, uh...

• 15:44Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, and we were sitting on, playing on a, on a, on a back of a truck and there's the guys sitting there on their helmets with their M16s, right? Just watching the show. And if, and we finish and this guy comes up to me and he's stoned out of his head, he goes, "I'm gonna go out, see what I can kill now, man." And he puts his helmet on and walks out into the jungle with a, with a company. But it was just bizarre experiences like that, but now I look back and go, "What the fuck was I thinking?" You know, it was, uh, it was unreal. And, and it's so weird, cause I, I remember Arthur C. Clarke telling the story about how he's sitting with a guy on a plane, he said, "What do you do?" He said, "Oh, during the war." And he went on for two hours about what happened during the war.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  And he says, "What do you do now?" He says, "Oh, I'm a insurance salesman." And that was it, you know, like, what he does now was a...

• 16:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  But the whole, the war experience, you know, it, it, it's, it's, you could go on forever because it's so much happens and it's such a, in a space, so much is lived, you know? And it, the fear is, uh, kind of one of, you, you, having that much, that much fear constantly is, is, is pretty taxing. And now it wasn't, we, we weren't even going out and shooting, although we did, uh, we'd shoot everything from forty-fives to tanks and we, and, um, you know, we'd be driving along, get shot at and, and like I said, we'd be playing and the rockets or the mortars would start landing and they'd hustle us into a, into a bunker, but it was, uh, you know,

• 17:21Speaker 02

  we weren't actually going out like those guys were and walking point, you know?

• 17:26Speaker 03

  Well, that was also one of the strangest wars ever, cause it didn't make any sense that, while we were over there and then when the soldiers came home, instead of being greeted like heroes, like they were in World War II.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  It was bad on them.

• 17:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it was, uh...

• 17:41Speaker 02

  It was really terrible for them, cause I, no, it's, meeting them over there, they go, you know, they, you'd think, oh, when they get over there, probably, yeah, we're here, we'll do a job, you know? All the ones I met were, dude, I don't know why we're here, I don't know what I'm doing here. All of them, while they were, you know, fighting, so it's, uh, it was, it was a, it was a bad war, for sure.

• 18:04Speaker 03

  No, one of the worst wars ever. And these guys coming back from that, it was, it just, that, that experience must've been so different because you're over there, you're killing people, you don't know why you killed people, and then, then you're in the grocery store, like that scene from, uh, what's that movie? You know the movie I'm talking about?

• 18:24Speaker 02

  Apocalypse?

• 18:25Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Um, Hurt Locker. Remember when the guy comes back, he was, uh, you know, uh, diffusing IEDs? He comes back and he's walking to the grocery store and he's just like, "What the fuck am I doing?" Like, the, the contrast between the two places is just too much, it's too crazy.

• 18:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, uh, my mom said when I came back and they picked me up at the airport, uh, she said a car backfired and I like jumped and, I don't remember it, but she said, you know, my eyes looked kind of haunted.

• 18:58Speaker 03

  I could only imagine.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  Took me a while to kind of get through it.

• 19:01Speaker 03

  Did you see people die over there?

• 19:02Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 19:03Speaker 03

  Did you see people die over there?

• 19:05Speaker 02

  Um, we saw trophy albums, which were kind of scary. They, so a lot of the GIs kept trophy albums where they'd photograph like body parts or a guy that had a fifty millimeter shell go through his head, you know, and... It was, um, pretty freaky. Um, the, the leader of the band actually died when we got home from a disease he picked over, picked up over there, a lung disease, died at twenty-five.

• 19:32Speaker 03

  What was it?

• 19:33Speaker 02

  Um, his name was Pete Watson, he was the leader of the band. I was the guitar player in the band, I wasn't the lead singer or anything. And he, um, we, he must've gone somewhere where we didn't go on the days off and, you know, picked up something.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  Just some jungle disease?

• 19:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, the guy, the doctor said, "You've been anywhere exotic lately." He said, "I just got back from Vietnam." "Why?" He said, "Well, you got this thing in your lungs that is pretty rare." So I, you know, I didn't know if it was Agent Orange or if it was something you picked up from the, from, you know, whatever was in Vietnam, but yeah, he lasted about a year.

• 20:10Speaker 03

  Oh, wow. Unfortunately, none of you guys got it.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, we all, we all raced to the doctors and got, you know, chest X-rays and, but it was okay. But, uh, yeah, he, it's weird, he, um, I said, I was looking, looking him up the other day and it's, uh, didn't realize he was so young when he died, you know? He was older than me then, so seemed like an older guy, but he was only twenty-five.

• 20:34Speaker 03

  Wow. How much time in total were you over there for?

• 20:39Speaker 02

  Uh, about four months.

• 20:41Speaker 03

  Holy shit, man.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  And there was a point where they wanted us to go play in North Vietnam. They said, "We'll keep the choppers going, uh, there's a troop over there that wants you to come and play and we'll keep the choppers going, so if we, if we get into trouble, you can get," you know, and luckily he said, "No, we're not doing that."

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• 22:14Speaker 02

  We'd had enough, uh, you know, of that experience.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  What was the decompression like when you got back home?

• 22:20Speaker 02

  I don't really remember because, um, it's just one of those, I, I mean, I...

• 22:27Speaker 02

  The hardest thing for me was that I'd thrown a mortar down and it had hit somebody. And they came in the next day and said, hey, you got one, you got one. And that was, it still has a place, hard place to land in me, you know?

• 22:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  That's really the, kind of the one thing I brought back with me, that I couldn't really find a place for that to land. And still, it still seems like, you know, years ago, another, another guy, another place.

• 23:06Speaker 03

  So, explain to me how this is happening, like, where are you, where you're throwing these mortars down?

• 23:12Speaker 02

  I was in a place called Marble Mountain, Marble Mountain, outside Da Nang, and it was a Navy encampment on the beach. And, and I was in the radio shack. And, and the guy, the band members were in the perimeter, the perimeter boxes, you know? And they said, radio, you know, it was like the movies, radio came in, actually, we're seeing movement over here, check for friendlies. And they said, no, no friendlies there, so they said, hey, you wanna throw some mortars down the tube? And it was John Wayne time, you know, I mean, I, as a young kid, I didn't really understand what I was doing. I said, oh, yeah, let's fire a gun, you know?

• 23:56Speaker 02

  So I threw the mortars down, about five or six mortars, which I could have easily lost a hand, you know, I mean, you, that kind of thing. And, and then they came in the next morning and said one of them had hit a VC.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  Wow. How long did that sit with you for?

• 24:17Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 24:18Speaker 03

  How long did that sit with you for, like, how long?

• 24:20Speaker 02

  I think it's still there, you know, I mean, it doesn't, I, it's, it's hard for me to, you know, kind of face that I was responsible for the end of a, you know, a life, even though it's distant and it's war and I didn't really have anything to do with it and didn't really know what I was doing. But, you know, as a kid and playing, like I said, John Wayne, but it was, it's, it's pretty heavy when I, you know, when I think about the reality of it.

• 24:54Speaker 03

  Did you write any songs about that experience?

• 24:58Speaker 02

  No, I wrote about it in my autobiography, but it's not really, well, not yet, hasn't been so material.

• 25:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, 'cause it seems like there's probably something there.

• 25:15Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, there's definitely some, something there, for sure. I have, I mean, not to, to commercialize it, but I have a record, new record coming out that deals with, which probably could be elements from that, it deals with getting older and, you know, like my first album, Working Class Dog, was, when I was 29, 30, it was all about getting laid, you know, 'cause that's all a guy thinks of, and that's what you're right about. But as you get older, there's other things to think about. So there's, you know, getting older, you know, the thinking of death as in, somewhere

• 26:00Speaker 02

  out there. And so you write, I write about stuff that I think about, and that's what I've been thinking about. You know, sex is still in there, but not as much as it was when I was 29 or 30.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  Of course not, yeah. Well, it's kind of amazing because when you were young, and when you first started on this musical journey, there were no 76-year-old rock stars. It didn't exist.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  No.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  And it was thought to be a young man's game, period. And when people got to be a certain age, they just stopped playing.

• 26:35Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  And, you know, the Rolling Stones were like, sort of the first to defy that.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I remember in 88, they put out an album, and it was a big deal, that, God, the Rolling Stones put out a new album? This is crazy. These guys are gonna go on tour? This is crazy.

• 26:55Speaker 02

  I know, and they just recently said, well, I don't know if I can do it anymore. Keith did, right?

• 26:59Speaker 03

  I know, recently, now. I saw them at Circuit of the Americas, the racetrack out here, it was like 100,000 people, four years ago, three years ago, whatever it was, when they played in Austin, it was fucking incredible, man. Mick has two trailers that are just gym equipment. He has two huge tractor trailers, and the inside of it is just a gym.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  That's awesome.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  And that guy works out every day, just so he can keep doing it.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, he's the inspiration, as far as how far you can push it.

• 27:35Speaker 03

  He's the canary in the coal mine.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  The last, I mean, their last album, he sounds incredible. He sounds like he's 18, you know? I mean, Paulie is now starting to, you know, I love Paul McCartney, he's been, he was the guy I looked up to as a kid, you know, and he's starting to get a little, you know, a little weaker, but, but he's still amazing. I mean, to me, he's one of the great rock voices.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  Oh, for sure.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  But Jagger, it's crazy, I mean, he still sounds the same.

• 28:05Speaker 03

  Not just sounds the same, but when he's on stage, he's moving.

• 28:09Speaker 02

  He's non-stop.

• 28:10Speaker 03

  Non-stop, and dancing and moving and singing with emotion and, and it seems, just like I, when I saw you perform Jesse's Girl, like, he's singing it like he still loves it, like, he still appreciates the experience.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:27Speaker 03

  And never got jaded by it all.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I mean, I saw an interview recently with him, and he said, and the guy said, you know, do you feel different? Because, you know, you've been this all your life. He goes, yeah, I feel different than other people because of it, you know, I feel separate from them. And I, and I understand that, there is a degree of that that just happens. 'Cause it's, it's not normal to get up in, in front of, you know, a thousand, a couple of thousand people and have them wanna be there and to be with you and to sing, you know, it's, it's, I guess that's kind of the element of everyone wanting to be a rock star is, as an actor, you're not, an actor's done on film or whatever and then played,

• 29:14Speaker 02

  you know, but the, the rock star has it on record, plus he's got it live. That live connection is, I think, what everybody kind of looks at in the end, as far as, that's what I'd love to do.

• 29:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  Is have all those people go, yeah.

• 29:30Speaker 03

  Well, it's also, that experience is such a positive experience for everyone.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 29:36Speaker 03

  For you, for them, it's, when you, when I go to a live concert, I'm always amazed at how good it feels. Like, there's a, it's like you're on a drug, like, you're feeling it, like, it's like, everyone is loving the music, the sound, the performers there, and the fact that they're actually right there, there's so much going on, that it's like, you walk out, they're like, that was fucking awesome.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  I know, I feel like it's kind of taken the place of, of church, you know, where we go to commune with, with our fellow, you know, humans, and we're all, it's different than a sports event, 'cause sports event is generally two sides.

• 30:14Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  But when you're at a concert, everyone's pointing the same way.

• 30:18Speaker 03

  Also, it's all positive.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:20Speaker 03

  Like, if your team loses, you don't leave there, dejected.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:23Speaker 03

  If you're there to see, you know, fill in the blank, whatever band, and you leave there, you're like, fuck, that was awesome.

• 30:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I, I say, actually, that our, our job is to give the audience 90 minutes, two hours of freedom from the crap that bothers them during the day.

• 30:39Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  And it frees us, too, you know, frees me, one of them. I don't think of all the shit that, that, you know, that the monkeys talk in my head. So it's mutual, you know, mutual good feeling.

• 30:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, 100%. And it's also, it's like, such a uniquely positive thing that you can give to people. And if you, if you can perform to your fans every night, the amount of positivity you're spreading, and the amount they're receiving and you're receiving, is just, what a unique life. 'Cause the average person will never experience what you experience on a normal night.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's probably true. I, I think there are different, very, you know, versions of that, I mean, like you're, you know, you, you understand that, you get a lot of attention for what you do, you know, it's basically, somewhat, and somewhere inside you're going, someone's noticing me, what I do. I'm not just, it's not just, you know, 'cause we create art.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  Art, art, we create art because we just have to. And art doesn't exist to be liked. Our ego wants it to be liked. And it's our ego. I think that that whole thing charges, you know, the whole audience thing charges, but I think if you don't have any ego, you're not gonna get into the business anyway.

• 32:15Speaker 03

  Right.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  And I think it feeds that. And I think it's, it's the smart person who can try and put it into perspective and not, you know, like certainly Mick Jagger has put it into perspective. He's certainly had time to put it into perspective and his is, you know, a huge experience. But I think Paul McCartney, the same way, is very, seems, you know, considering what he's done, he's amazingly grounded, I think.

• 32:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, just to be not completely insane.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:51Speaker 03

  When you're that famous for that many years.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  The most famous.

• 32:55Speaker 03

  I think everyone has to have an ego and the ego kinda gets you to the dance. But if, I think if you're objective about it and if you're smart about it, you realize that like serving the ego is, it's a fruitless effort. It's, there's, that's not the way to do it.

• 33:14Speaker 02

  No, I, I agree.

• 33:16Speaker 03

  I think the way to do it is to eventually transfer from, I want all these people to like me to, I wanna put all my energy into whatever it is, the craft, whatever it is in making it amazing. And don't think about anything else like, oh, they're gonna love me for this.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 33:33Speaker 03

  That, I think that poisons the well.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  I think so. I, I agree. And I, and I think that's what I meant by, you know, art just is. You just create art out of, you know, because you have to, because you need to. But it, but it's the ego that makes it wanna be liked, you know, which is not, I don't mean that's a good thing. I just mean that's...

• 33:53Speaker 03

  It gets you to the dance.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:55Speaker 03

  There's no, without ego, without wanting that, and most, most people who start out in it, they start out from a place of being an outcast and feeling like they don't get enough attention. So, well, me too. And then you decide, oh, uh, this will get me way more attention than I've ever had in my life and it'll fill that hole.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  Fill that hole, but it never does.

• 34:16Speaker 03

  Never does. But I think, once you become centered or grounded in this experience, then your focus should not be on you and attention. All of your energy should be into what you're doing, whether it's making songs or writing jokes and performing them, whatever it is. It's like, then it becomes, okay, now the, the new task with all this energy is just, let me do the best I can with whatever this thing is that I'm doing.

• 34:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. I agree. I, I think like the first, I always say the first couple of years when I, when it first hit for me, I thought it was all about me. And then I realized it was all about the audience, all about the fans.

• 35:01Speaker 03

  Was Jessie's Girl your first big hit?

• 35:05Speaker 02

  Um, I had had one when I first came over here in seventy-two from Australia. I had a song called Speak to the Sky. That was, it got me the deal over here. It was a first hit, solo hit I'd had in Australia. And it was, um, like number ten, oh, got to number ten over here and was a hit in Canada. But it was, it was kind of a weird country, you know, holy roller kinda song. I wrote it for my mom. And, um...

• 35:31Speaker 03

  Oh, that's cool.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  Very different than, you know, what I became known for, but it was, uh, that was a kind of the first hit. And then they kinda, they, managers, I started getting picked up by teen magazines, which I'd never seen before. In Australia, they didn't have them. They had one music paper and that was it. And they're asking me, you know, doing all, I'm doing all these interviews, music interviews, and I, I look at the, the finished article and it's like, you know, cuddle up with Rick.

• 35:57Speaker 03

  (laughing)

• 35:58Speaker 02

  You know, is Rick too tall, Rick too tall to love? I'm like, what the fuck is this? This is not what we talked about. I talked about, you know, yeah, I come over here, I'm, I'm a songwriter and I wanna, you know, all this kinda stuff. And I'm going, what is this? So I started, um, you know, I, I, my, my ego got the better of me and I started going, well, I'm, you know, I'm getting noticed in America. It's a big apple, you know, um, so I, like, should I kind of lean into this, I guess, you know, cause I'm getting a lot of press? So I did for a little while and it was going nowhere. It was, I wasn't writing the music that, you know, I was writing songs about a guy that

• 36:40Speaker 02

  committed suicide, writing songs about a woman that was trying to decide if she should leave her husband because he's cheating on her. And, and they're going, where's, where's Cherish? Where's, doesn't somebody wanna be wanted? We're giving him all this press, you know, and there's no, he's, there's no hits here after Speak to the Sky. So I eventually left my managers who were kinda pushing me in that direction, which was a drag because I loved, one of, one of the guys was Steve Binder, who actually I still talk to, who was the director of the Elvis special, you know, the comeback special.

• 37:11Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  And I met Elvis on a plane once and, uh, and, and I said, you know, my manager, Steve Binder. And he goes, I love Steve. And the...

• 37:21Speaker 03

  You met Elvis on a plane?

• 37:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Going back to Australia. Cause I was having, uh, trouble with, with, getting a visa here. I had to prove I wasn't putting in America and out of work, right?

• 37:33Speaker 03

  (laughing)

• 37:35Speaker 02

  That was, that was their phrase.

• 37:37Speaker 03

  Who was president back then in America?

• 37:39Speaker 02

  Uh...

• 37:40Speaker 03

  What year was this?

• 37:41Speaker 02

  It was seventy-one, seventy-two, seventy-three.

• 37:43Speaker 03

  So that was post Nixon? Was that Lyndon Johnson? Or was that Nixon? When did Nixon get kicked out?

• 37:48Speaker 02

  I think, is it still Nixon?

• 37:49Speaker 03

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• 39:26Speaker 02

  Uh, Watergate was when I was over here, so...

• 39:28Speaker 03

  Seventy-four? So it was Nixon?

• 39:29Speaker 02

  Seventy, yeah. Yeah, so I had to prove, you know, and we're taking all these, like, it was really weird. We're taking these scrapbooks full of this, these crappy stories from the teen magazines.

• 39:40Speaker 03

  Ah, cuddle up with Rick.

• 39:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. Look, here.

• 39:44Speaker 03

  Mr. President.

• 39:44Speaker 02

  Look how much press I'm getting, you know? An American, this is not gonna put an American out of work. Anyway, so I, the plane stopped at Hawaii before, to refuel because they couldn't go all the way to Australia back then. And I get on the plane and I walk in and there's Elvis sitting like right there. I was in the back of the bus back then. Elvis sitting in the, in the first class. He looked great. He was skinny, jet-black hair, his skin looked great, powder blue suit on. Looked really, just, I go, I wasn't a fan really back then because I was more into the British Invasion, everything. But he said, oh, that's Elvis, that's cool. So I go back there and, um, and I, I had a girlfriend in Australia at the time who was a giant Elvis fan. So he did a thing I've never seen anybody do.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  Now, when you get in a plane and you see a celeb, they got like a hood on and the glasses and they're, like, they're looking down. He got up before the plane landed in Hawaii and walked back signing autographs and taking photos with all the, all the people in the plane.

• 40:43Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  And he got to me and I went, uh, hey, um, uh, Steve Binder, my, my manager. You know, cause I know him and Steve got along really well on the, on the Elvis special because the Colonel wanted it to be Elvis in a Christmas sweater singing Christmas songs. And Steve walked into the dressing room one time and there's Elvis playing with his buddy, his buddies, you know, and he goes, I wanna put that on film, which became the, you know, him jamming in the boxing ring. And, uh, and the Colonel's going, absolutely not, absolutely not. We're keeping it, you know, a family thing. And we, and so they butted heads like crazy. But Elvis was on Steve's side and for once Elvis took, yeah,

• 41:26Speaker 02

  I wanna do this. You know, he didn't go with what the Colonel said. So, uh, I know he got along really well with Steve. So anyway, I'd heard that before I met him and, uh, and I, and said, yeah, I love Steve, he's a great guy. And I said, would you sign this to Allison, who was my girlfriend at the time? And he signed it. And I put, I had my little tape recorder that recorded all my songs and then I put the autograph in there. And we went through Australian Customs and they saw my tape recorder and said, oh, we're gonna see what's in this, mate. Might, might be porn in here, who knows? You know, so they took it and came back and the Elvis autograph was gone.

• 42:00Speaker 03

  Oh, they stole your Elvis autograph? These motherfuckers.

• 42:04Speaker 02

  I know, don't trust them. They bastards.

• 42:07Speaker 03

  Oh, back in the day, too. They don't, they didn't have any cameras on them either.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  No, exactly right.

• 42:11Speaker 03

  Ugh.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  I know.

• 42:13Speaker 03

  Dirty people. Oh, that must have been so wild. His relationship with the Colonel was so creepy. That movie was fantastic.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:21Speaker 03

  What did Tom Hanks kill it as the Colonel?

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:23Speaker 03

  It was just like, what a

• 42:25Speaker 02

  I know.

• 42:25Speaker 03

  creepy relationship. And it's so common, for whatever reason, for these really talented people to have some person managing them, this like fucking creepy character.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  Clueless.

• 42:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  Weird.

• 42:38Speaker 03

  And then enabling them.

• 42:40Speaker 02

  The Beatles were, were rare in the respect that they had Epstein, Epstein, however you pronounce his name. Uh, Brian Epstein, that was um, a smart guy and on the cusp of like pop really happening. And, and did good things with them, you know, cleaned them up, uh, told them, you know, bow and they stayed with the music was their music. But he was one of the really few that really, I don't think he knew what he was doing, but he had a good intent. And so he found ways to make, you know, do the right thing. But, but I've never met anyone or read anything that the Colonel wasn't a friggin jerk, you know?

• 43:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I just don't understand how Elvis had no one who was capable of separating him from the Colonel.

• 43:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, if anyone could have, Steve Binder could have. But, but he, I think, you know, he felt secure around the Colonel, I guess.

• 43:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, there, there's certain people that, especially because Elvis had a pill problem, right? So it was probably, he was his enabler.

• 43:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:44Speaker 03

  He was, you know, shielded everybody from him, kept him safe and

• 43:50Speaker 02

  And he's all grouped it too, you know?

• 43:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:52Speaker 02

  Ah, it was great, Elvis. How was the performance? You know, when he was overweight and

• 43:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  Ah, it was great, man. You were great.

• 43:58Speaker 03

  One of my favorite performances of his was when he was really fat, when he was singing in Vegas. And he sounds like he's mumbling and it's, and then what is the song that, do you remember the song, Jamie? We've played it before.

• 44:11Speaker 02

  Wish.

• 44:13Speaker 03

  But he, once he starts, once he starts belting out the song, you're like, my God, he's good.

• 44:19Speaker 02

  Oh. On the piano, he's on the piano.

• 44:23Speaker 03

  What is it?

• 44:23Speaker 00

  Unchained melody?

• 44:24Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, unchained, yeah, right.

• 44:25Speaker 03

  Unchained melody. My God, it's good.

• 44:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:28Speaker 03

  And you just realize, like, you see him and the way he's talking, he's clearly high as a kite. There's something wrong. He's so fat. It's like so sweaty and he looks terrible. You're like, oh my God, poor Elvis. What's wrong with him? And then you see, you hear him sing, you see him sing, and it all goes away. You're like, who fucking cares?

• 44:48Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 44:48Speaker 03

  Who cares? My God, that's magic. That's magic. That is live performance, like, personified. There's something about the magic of an insanely talented person performing live. And that one Elvis song was that.

• 45:03Speaker 02

  And it came through all the drug use and everything and all the, yeah, it's pretty amazing. I mean, I, I know exactly the, the thing you're talking about.

• 45:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, here it is.

• 45:12Speaker 00

  I can't, can't play it? No, it's, we're getting, it's getting harder and harder and harder.

• 45:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, we could get kicked off YouTube.

• 45:19Speaker 02

  You can't play the music?

• 45:20Speaker 03

  We did copyright strikes and shit, you know, which is unfortunate because like, look how fat he is.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:27Speaker 03

  Poor guy. And that's when he was performing, was that, was he living in Vegas?

• 45:32Speaker 02

  Oh, uh,

• 45:35Speaker 02

  I think it was probably, I think it might have been after that, but he was doing the Vegas things right to pay for the Colonel's gambling debt.

• 45:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, isn't that nuts?

• 45:42Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 45:43Speaker 03

  Well, I bet it also was probably easier for him too, to not have to go anywhere.

• 45:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. He didn't like planes, I heard that. So.

• 45:51Speaker 03

  Nineteen seventy-seven. My God. So that's right before he died, right? Didn't he die in like seventy-eight? When did he die?

• 45:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's uh,

• 46:02Speaker 02

  yeah, I know where I was when he died.

• 46:04Speaker 00

  Wait, what day did I say that I was? That was two months before he died.

• 46:07Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  Two months before he died.

• 46:10Speaker 00

  He died on August sixteenth, nineteen seventy-seven.

• 46:12Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 46:13Speaker 02

  And he, and how old was he? Like forty?

• 46:16Speaker 03

  Forty-two. Isn't that insane?

• 46:19Speaker 02

  That's crazy.

• 46:22Speaker 03

  And look at you. Keep on trucking, dog.

• 46:28Speaker 03

  What do you do to stay healthy?

• 46:31Speaker 02

  Um,

• 46:33Speaker 02

  I work out every day, or six days a week. I eat well. My dad died early. My dad died when he was uh, well, he died twice, actually. He died when he was fifty-one and they brought him back. And um,

• 46:50Speaker 02

  he, he, he had an ulcer on his uh, major artery in his stomach. And uh, he was worried about it and he didn't, he thought it was cancer. And so he wouldn't, didn't want to go to the doctor. He didn't want to hear the bad news, you know, he thought uh, what you don't know, you know?

• 47:10Speaker 03

  Right.

• 47:12Speaker 02

  So, and, and he eventually, I was at home, actually, when he passed out and they took him into the hospital. And he's in bed and he's, but the ulcer bursts and he starts bleeding, uh, coming, blood coming out everywhere. Luckily, there was a doctor just down, a couple of beds down. They rushed him into emergency. But he did die. His, uh, and his heart stopped and they took fifteen minutes to get it going again.

• 47:35Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 47:36Speaker 02

  And he came back, uh, you know, he's a real in charge guy, just really loving, really amazing person. He came back because he's basically a five-year-old.

• 47:47Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 47:47Speaker 02

  And uh, I, I remember sitting in the backyard trying to help him remember who was who in his life. And he, I go, um, so Michelle is married to, no, no, George, Michelle is George's daughter. He's married to Nan. He go, okay, so Nan is the daughter. No, and it was just, it was heartbreaking trying to get him to remember his old friends. And um, so I, that stuck with me because he hadn't paid attention to it. And so I'm kind of the opposite now. I do prenewvo, I do blood draws.

• 48:29Speaker 03

  What's prenewvo?

• 48:29Speaker 02

  Prenewvo is a body scan.

• 48:32Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 48:32Speaker 02

  Uh, MRI body scan. I mean, you were asking about, you know, just how I stay in shape, but this is all part of it, is knowing what is going on inside you, you know, and not ignoring anything. Which is not to say, you know, I won't slip off a curb and get hit by a bus one day. But you, you know, you do what you can as you know.

• 48:53Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 48:53Speaker 02

  You know?

• 48:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:54Speaker 02

  Um, I have a blood draw as soon as I get home, actually, just to keep an eye on things. And anyway, so he, so he didn't pay attention and uh, and that's that kind of stayed with me. And so I started focusing on what I ate.

• 49:08Speaker 02

  I started uh, being aware that earlier, maybe than normal, that, you know, there, there is a use by a date, you know?

• 49:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:19Speaker 02

  Um, so I guess I started uh, I started running. Running just happened to be a new thing uh, in the early seventies. So I started that and that, and I'd always loved running. I, it was the only thing I was good at at school was actually was running and English. And um, so I started running and that kind of got me into the whole,

• 49:44Speaker 02

  well, if you're running, then you maybe may as well eat well and, and you want to get some upper body strength and work out. So I just started doing, I've run all my life um, until about fifteen years ago, when my knees suddenly said, nah, we're not going to do that anymore.

• 50:02Speaker 03

  That's pretty good.

• 50:02Speaker 02

  Fly something else.

• 50:04Speaker 03

  To, to get that long running is pretty incredible.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was, it was great. I did love running. I'd get like on the tour bus, I'd, we'd, I'd get up at the tour bus and wherever we were, I'd just put on clothes, running clothes and start running. I'd run twenty minutes one way, twenty minutes back. Sometimes I'd go into some pretty weird areas, you know, of, of a city. And uh, you should start worrying about who was around, but it was uh, was, you know, a great way to stay in shape. We actually went on, came off the road in more, better shape than we went on. We'd go to gyms and, and work out and I wasn't a big druggie or, or alcohol guy back then. And uh, so it was, that was what I did with my time off was uh, was stay in shape and, and watch what I eat. And my wife's an amazing chef.

• 50:52Speaker 02

  And we always eat real clean, organic and uh, and I have, you know, she turned me on to, to, to skin routine. Back when uh, I was kind of too embarrassed to tell my band members that I took care of my skin. They'd call me a freak, you know?

• 51:10Speaker 02

  I thought skin was, you know, I thought, well, guys' skin's different from women's skin, you know, we've got whiskers, if you don't need all that stuff. But skin is skin. And um, and she got me, my wife, she got me and my girlfriend then, she got me into, you know, taking care of my skin. And I still do that. I still take care of my skin. And um, uh, I'm actually in a trial uh, with a company called Bemmi that uh, is really neat. And I've been in the trial for four years with this stuff, um, where they take a a sample of your cells from behind your ear and they grow your cells. And the growth serum, they pull the growth serum from that and put it into something that you put back on your face.

• 51:52Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 51:53Speaker 02

  And it's, have you heard of, uh, SkinMedica has one, only they use uh, a baby foreskins.

• 52:00Speaker 03

  Baby foreskins for real?

• 52:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, newborn foreskins.

• 52:03Speaker 03

  Really?

• 52:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what they get the, the, the, the growth factors from. But this is your own growth factor. So you're putting that back on your own body, back in your, you know, on your, on your face. It's been pretty amazing.

• 52:15Speaker 03

  I would prefer your method.

• 52:16Speaker 02

  What's, yeah?

• 52:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm not into baby foreskins on my face. I know they're doing it with different stem cells. They're doing it with um, what they do is they do microneedling.

• 52:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:25Speaker 03

  And so they kind of like microneedle your whole face. And then they use exosomes and they also use something called Mew cells, which is the latest and greatest version of it.

• 52:36Speaker 02

  Right, but that's, that's outside stuff. This, the Bemmi stuff is your own cells, which is pretty great.

• 52:42Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  You know, I, I think that's a difference.

• 52:44Speaker 03

  I think the thing that's different is that with your own cells, as you get older, they're just not as good, you know?

• 52:51Speaker 02

  Oh, you think the, the younger ones work?

• 52:53Speaker 03

  Well, it, it, they certainly seem to, like Mew cells in particular, which is the newest iteration of uh, stem cell technology, seems to work much better than cells that, cells that they used to get from either uh, fat. They used to get it from your fat.

• 53:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 53:09Speaker 03

  Or they used to get it from bone marrow.

• 53:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've had the bone marrow stem cell done. I had that injected into my hips.

• 53:15Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 53:17Speaker 02

  It works.

• 53:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, it definitely works. It just doesn't work as well. These mu cells, I mean, there's people that are going over to Saudi Arabia and doing it in Dubai.

• 53:26Speaker 02

  That's right. It's always, it's never here. And I got into regenecine, orthicine.

• 53:30Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm. I've done regenecine.

• 53:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, uh, cause Kobe used to have to go to Germany for it, right? And now they've got, by passed the law somehow. And so I, I get that pretty regularly, not regularly, because it lasts a couple of years, but I'm due for it now in my, my shoulders. Cause you know, that's, uh, lifting weights, you know, no matter what, what, how heavy you go, you still, you know, as you get older, you, where it just happens.

• 53:58Speaker 03

  Um, how long are you in town for?

• 54:01Speaker 02

  I'm leaving after this.

• 54:02Speaker 03

  Oh, okay. I was gonna send you down. This is a great clinic that my friend owns, uh, in Austin called Waste Well. And they do all the latest and greatest, like state of the art. All the latest and greatest stem cell technology. They have hyperbaric chambers, red light therapy, all this. I mean, everything that's state of the art, they have.

• 54:23Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 54:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. I wish I'd known that you had a bunch of injuries. I would have had you come in there.

• 54:28Speaker 02

  I'd make a trip back to check that out.

• 54:30Speaker 03

  Uh, Russell Crowe comes down all the time. He comes down specifically just for that.

• 54:34Speaker 02

  So they do, uh, red light?

• 54:38Speaker 03

  Oh, everything, everything.

• 54:39Speaker 02

  I've done hyperbaric.

• 54:41Speaker 03

  You should get one. You should get one in your house. It's a fucking game changer.

• 54:45Speaker 02

  Really?

• 54:45Speaker 03

  Yes. There was a study out of a, a university in Israel. They did these, um,

• 54:50Speaker 02

  Right.

• 54:51Speaker 03

  They, they did, the protocol is sixty sessions of ninety minutes over ninety days. And they show that it lengthens your telomeres. It's equivalent to a twenty year difference in biological age.

• 55:02Speaker 02

  I saw, I read that too.

• 55:03Speaker 03

  It feels different. Like when you do it, you feel better.

• 55:06Speaker 02

  Do you have one at home?

• 55:07Speaker 03

  Yes, I do. And if you have like a whoop strap or an aura ring or anything like that, it'll show that you've had an incredible recovery. It'll like specifically show from one session, you have an amazing recovery today. And it's specifically because of this hyperoxygen saturated environment of the hyperbaric chamber.

• 55:26Speaker 02

  I wonder if that'd help me sleep. I have, I have a trouble sleeping.

• 55:30Speaker 03

  Do you?

• 55:30Speaker 02

  Trouble sleeping, yeah.

• 55:31Speaker 03

  What, why do you have trouble sleeping? What's going on?

• 55:33Speaker 02

  I don't know. I wake up, uh, every, you know, every couple of hours and, uh, haven't been able to sleep all the way through for quite a while, actually.

• 55:41Speaker 03

  Huh. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Imagine waking up tomorrow with perfect discipline. Whatever you decide you're gonna do, you just do it. No procrastinating, no negotiating with yourself, no making excuses. Yes, it's a little unrealistic, but everyone wants to be better at something, right? Better is a feeling defined by you. And for BetterHelp, it's a BetterHelp therapist who really gets you. It's a focus on global emotional wellbeing with thousands of therapists and millions of members in over one hundred countries. So while it can't magically help you keep plants alive,

• 56:23Speaker 03

  it can help in other ways, like teaching you how to set and stick to goals as you chase your horticultural dreams. Sign up and get ten percent off at betterhelp.com/jre. That's better H E L P dot com slash J R E. Do you ever do sauna before you go to bed?

• 56:44Speaker 02

  Mm-mm.

• 56:45Speaker 03

  Do you do a sauna at all? Do you do that?

• 56:46Speaker 02

  Uh, not a lot, no.

• 56:48Speaker 03

  Okay, that's another one. There was a study out of Finland that followed. No, no, no. Red light, eh. The thing about red light is like, um, infrared, I don't think there's anything wrong with it. I think it's good for you, for sure. But there's not robust studies on it like there is with the dry sauna. So the Finnish have been using dry saunas forever. And they did a study over twenty years with, uh, quite a large sample group. And they found that the people that used the sauna four times per week for twenty minutes had a forty percent decrease in all cause mortality. Forty percent less strokes, cancer, heart attacks, everything. And it's because of heat shock proteins that your body develops when you're exposed to that.

• 57:31Speaker 03

  It's, uh, it also, it has an effect of increasing your endurance, because it's essentially like static cardio. Cause as you're sitting there in that heat, your heart beats faster. And it actually literally increases your cardiovascular output.

• 57:45Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 57:46Speaker 03

  It's incredible. And

• 57:47Speaker 02

  I'll check into that for sure.

• 57:49Speaker 03

  And one of the wing, the ways that they use it, um, is contrast therapy. So what they do is they'll go in the sauna for twenty minutes and then they, they usually have their saunas by a, a lake. And they'll like go in the cold water of the lake and then back into the sauna. And so what I do is I have a cold plunge. So I have a cold plunge just right next to my sauna. And I go back, thirty-four degrees.

• 58:11Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 58:11Speaker 03

  And so I go back and forth. It's, it seems cold, but I'm so used to it. It's not cold anymore. I mean, it is cold. No, no doubt about it. But I'm so used to it. I just climb right in and it's nothing. In the beginning, I was like, I can't do this. This is crazy. I think the first time I did it, I did it for like a minute. I was like, this is, this sucks so hard. I gotta get out of this thing. And then eventually, I got to the point where I do three minutes like it's nothing. It's easy. Yeah.

• 58:38Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 58:39Speaker 03

  But that's also incredible, not just for your body. You don't wanna do it after workout. So one of the things about after workout is it's bad, it's not good. It's not terrible for you, but it's not good in that it decreases hypertrophy, which is like increasing muscle size. Because a lot of that is dependent upon the inflammation that happens during exercise. So when you exercise and you, you know, you break down your tissue, the, the strength comes because your body heals after the exercise. So you blunt a little of that recovery by getting in the cold right after exercise.

• 59:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:13Speaker 03

  So the way I do it is I get in the cold before I exercise. So the first thing in the morning, I hop in that thing.

• 59:20Speaker 02

  Every day?

• 59:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. I do three minutes. And then after I do three minutes, then I start my workout. And the first thing I do is a series of mobility exercises. I usually do those right after I get out, right outside. Right after I get out, I start, I do these like swings and twists and all these different things. These like golf swings. And it's all just loosening the body up and getting my heart rate up and cooling, warming my body up since it's been cooled down. And then I start my strength workout. So I do my workout after that. And then after I'm done with my workout, then I get in the sauna.

• 59:52Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 59:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's awesome. You feel so much better. First of all, the, just the cold, when you get out of that cold, your endorphins are flying. Your norepinephrine spikes, your dopamine spikes. You feel fucking amazing.

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:07Speaker 03

  It's worth it just for that. It's worth it just for, if you could sell a pill that makes you feel as good as I feel when I get out of that cold plunge, that shit would be on every shelf. Yeah, without the cold plunge. But it's available. You just do it. And also it, it gives you a certain amount of mental toughness. That's about

• 1:00:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know. I get that.

• 1:00:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  The discipline of it.

• 1:00:30Speaker 03

  Perseverance. You have, there's like, there's a thing where you don't wanna do it, but you do it. And when you can just train your mind to just do things you don't wanna do routinely, all the time.

• 1:00:42Speaker 02

  That's what I do with working out. I hate, I hate walking into a gym and I love walking out.

• 1:00:46Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. Everybody feels the same way. And that's, so many people, it's the daunting task is the first few steps. It's just so hard to get going. But once you get going, then it's not hard at all.

• 1:00:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree. I agree. It becomes the good habit, you know, rather than the

• 1:01:02Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:01:03Speaker 02

  And I, and you make it, you know, I, I had, I have a gym. I don't, I work, I've had a gym at home for a while, but I prefer work, going to a gym. So I work out, but I have it close by. So I don't have an excuse, you know, to, ah, it's late, you know?

• 1:01:16Speaker 03

  Right, right, right.

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  So, um, yeah, I get, I get all that. I do. And, and, uh, being on stage, when you said the endorphin hit is kind of, I get that on there too.

• 1:01:27Speaker 03

  For sure. Oh, for sure.

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  Like, wow.

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. The thing is like, you can't live on that. Like you can't perform every day just to feel better. You know what I mean? Well, you can, I mean, guess if you're on tour, but, but it's nice to have that in your actual life as well as your performing life.

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  I get it.

• 1:01:46Speaker 03

  Are you a supplement guy? Do you take supplements?

• 1:01:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do, actually. Um, I've been through a lot of different, uh, ones, but, uh, right now, I'm, um, I'm doing, uh, I, I am eight, is it? I am eight? That's the one in, the one, all in one.

• 1:02:07Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 1:02:08Speaker 02

  Um, and I do, you know, creatine before workout and the protein after.

• 1:02:13Speaker 03

  Creatine is actually good just for, um, mental benefits. Creatine increases cognitive performance and it's really good if you're tired. One of the studies they've shown is that, uh, people that have sleep deficit, like if you're sleep deprived, um, the, one of the very best things for performance, mental performance is creatine.

• 1:02:33Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:02:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. It does

• 1:02:34Speaker 02

  So you take it before you work out too anyway? Right, that's what I do.

• 1:02:37Speaker 03

  It's good for just overall metabolic health, but, uh, taking it just as a regular part of your day, pre or post workout, doesn't matter. Just taking it as a regular part of your day will increase your mental performance. But like, if I'm flying and if I have to go somewhere and I'm on the road and I might be tired, I bring, I take it every day anyway, but I bring it with me everywhere. And I, like routinely, if I'm tired and I know I'm gonna be tired, I take creatine. I can soar through.

• 1:03:05Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:03:06Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:03:06Speaker 02

  Instant, uh, you feel it right away?

• 1:03:09Speaker 03

  It completely mitigates any of the sleep deficit brain fog.

• 1:03:13Speaker 02

  How much do you take?

• 1:03:14Speaker 03

  I take ten milligrams twice a day, or ten grams rather, twice a day. So I take ten grams in the morning and I take ten grams at night.

• 1:03:20Speaker 02

  How much protein?

• 1:03:21Speaker 03

  Do it. Me? I eat mostly protein. My, my diet is more, more like ninety percent meat. That's mostly what I eat. Yeah, I eat meat and fermented vegetables. I'll fuck around and have a sandwich or a slice of pizza or some pasta. Like last night I had chicken Parmesan. It was great. But most of my diet, like eighty to ninety percent is meat. Yeah.

• 1:03:44Speaker 02

  I can't eat chicken. It's off, off the, off the menu. I had chickens when I was a kid that I named. And then we ate them.

• 1:03:55Speaker 03

  I have chickens now and I still eat them. I don't eat my chickens. My chickens are pets, you know, they're wandering around the yard. I talk to them like, hey ladies.

• 1:04:04Speaker 02

  We used to do, only my dad, every Sunday would, and I, you know, I was like a kid, oh, I wanna jump his head up, dad. So, and he'd throw it and it would like flap around and then, and then he'd take him and he, and he dropped, we had this laundry room and he'd throw it in the laundry room and like boil it hot water in the laundry room to get the feathers would come out easier. And that smell, I walked into a, a, a group dinner somewhere and they were having chicken. And that smell came back to me about, when I was about thirty and I have not been able to touch chicken ever since.

• 1:04:37Speaker 03

  Really? Wow, I have no problem eating chickens.

• 1:04:41Speaker 02

  I know, it'd be much easier for me. I eat turkey, which is weird because it's not much different, right? It's just a little stupider. But, but I, just the thought of chicken, I just can't, well, I just can't.

• 1:04:52Speaker 03

  You think turkeys are stupider than chickens?

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  Uh, they're the one, they're the ones that will drown if they, oh, they're, look up at the rain and rain will drown them. Oh, they're stupid, man.

• 1:05:04Speaker 03

  Well, they're very cautious and they have, they have very good eyesight. I've turkey hunted before. It's like.

• 1:05:09Speaker 02

  Oh, really? Oh, wild turkeys may be different from, you know. I mean, if they're on the wild, if they're wild, they're probably.

• 1:05:18Speaker 03

  There's a lot of them in my neighborhood, actually. But they're, uh, they're, they see really well. Like you can't move at all if, you know, you're turkey hunting. You have to be very cautious. Yeah, they, they have some of the best eyesight of any wild animal.

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:05:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, that's why you see guys when they turkey hunt, they have these crazy ghillie suits where they're completely covered. And they sit with like their back to a tree where they're like completely motionless. And then, and they usually have like a fake turkey, like a turkey decoy sitting out there and they make noises like.

• 1:05:51Speaker 02

  I'd probably rather not go turkey hunting if that's what I gotta do.

• 1:05:56Speaker 03

  You'd probably like to go turkey hunting?

• 1:05:58Speaker 02

  Probably not go turkey hunting. If I had to sit there and go.

• 1:06:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, you have like a little box and I have this little box and it has like, it's almost like a fiddle.

• 1:06:05Speaker 02

  And it makes a turkey noise?

• 1:06:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:11Speaker 02

  And you've done that?

• 1:06:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've only done it once. The thing about it is, my thought was we hunted for a few days for one meal. And I'm like, I would rather go deer hunting or elk hunting.

• 1:06:22Speaker 02

  You got a week's worth.

• 1:06:23Speaker 03

  Months and months of food and, you know, and it's better food. Like I'd rather, way rather eat elk than I would turkey. There's nothing wrong with wild turkey and I certainly would do it again. It's just not what I prefer. I prefer mammals. I eat mammals. I think they're better for you. They're, they're more nutrient dense. There's a lot more iron and a lot more amino acids and all the.

• 1:06:46Speaker 02

  Have you had kangaroo?

• 1:06:47Speaker 03

  I have had kangaroo, I think. I think I had it when I was in Australia. Let me make sure I did. No, I had, I've, I've had ostrich a bunch of times.

• 1:06:57Speaker 02

  Emu.

• 1:06:58Speaker 03

  I haven't had emu.

• 1:06:59Speaker 02

  I don't think they've.

• 1:07:00Speaker 03

  God, I don't know if I've had kangaroo. It was so long ago, the last time I was in Australia. Maybe I didn't.

• 1:07:06Speaker 02

  That's gamey.

• 1:07:06Speaker 03

  But, uh, I have some friends that live over there and they've had it a bunch of times. There's an infestation. Australia is crazy.

• 1:07:15Speaker 02

  Camels, got more camels in Australia now than there are in, in like, you know, any of the Arab states. But kangaroos for sure. And they had rabbit that infestations. They bring, except for the, the, the kangaroos, everything's imported, you know, but kangaroos are like, you know, you've seen the videos of them on the golf course. They come up and steer, steer at you while you're about to whack a ball. It's friggin hilarious.

• 1:07:39Speaker 03

  Well, I've seen these videos of these fields where you have like thousands of kangaroos bouncing down these fields.

• 1:07:46Speaker 02

  It's a wild look. It's a wild, there's have so many wild animals in Australia. I didn't appreciate it when I lived there, but it's, it's pretty freaky. They brought, Captain Cook, uh, who, you know, supposedly discovered Australia, brought back a platypus to England. They thought it was, uh, they thought it's stitched together from three different animals. Cause had a duck bill, a body like a beaver, no, a body like a, like a, um, you know, uh, yeah, I guess like a beaver and webbed feet. And it laid eggs. And they, they thought, oh, this is not a real animal.

• 1:08:19Speaker 03

  Well, it doesn't seem like a real animal. It's such a strange.

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  Everything kills you in Australia.

• 1:08:24Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah. I have a good buddy, my friend Adam Greentree, he lives there and it's, uh, the, the, there's so many weird things they've done in Australia by bringing in invasive animals to deal. Yeah, they brought in a bunch of cats to deal with a bunch of different animals. Then the cats wind up killing all the native stuff.

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  Something in for that.

• 1:08:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 1:08:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, the cane toads where they brought in to get rid of the rats in the, in the cane fields. And now they're the problem. They're like everywhere. Uh, they, they did that with rabbits, rabbits, the English brought the rabbits in cause they wanted, you know, for food and they're friggin everywhere now.

• 1:09:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, Australia is very strange in that a giant percentage of the animals that are there are completely invasive. The, the Asian water buffaloes they have.

• 1:09:10Speaker 02

  Do they?

• 1:09:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, the North Territory, yeah.

• 1:09:12Speaker 02

  Well, the ones that kill you are all the local ones.

• 1:09:15Speaker 03

  Well, those water buffaloes will kill you too. They're huge. But they're massive and they're everywhere. And, uh, you know, they, the only way they die is by people hunting them. Cause these are just.

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

  Okay, I got a color kangaroos too. They're just, you know. I mean, there's, I, I would, you'd often see, uh, kangaroos lying on the side of the road out in the bush. Cause you get hit, hit by a car, it would demolish your car.

• 1:09:41Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Some of them are huge.

• 1:09:42Speaker 02

  And you had to see the guy defending his dog with the.

• 1:09:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, we punched it. He's lucky that kangaroo didn't fuck him up.

• 1:09:51Speaker 02

  No, they, if they get up, the red kangaroos can stand on their tails and with their back legs, they can disembowel a guy.

• 1:09:58Speaker 03

  Those are the big ones, right? Some of those get like six feet tall.

• 1:10:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, what do they say? They're like, uh, deer that went to prison.

• 1:10:07Speaker 03

  That's a good way to describe it. Do you live in America now?

• 1:10:10Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 1:10:10Speaker 03

  You live in America now?

• 1:10:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm a citizen. I became a citizen, uh, a bunch of years ago because, um, I love this country and cause I wanted to be available for jury duty.

• 1:10:23Speaker 03

  Have you done that yet?

• 1:10:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have actually. I was.

• 1:10:28Speaker 03

  That must've been weird for people, you know, you're getting tried. Is that fucking Rick Springfield? Holy shit dude, I'm a fan. Please make me not guilty.

• 1:10:37Speaker 02

  Don't convict me. I'm a fan, man.

• 1:10:41Speaker 02

  I didn't get selected because I was actually, uh, in a lawsuit at the time with this woman who claimed that I hit her, we called it butt gate. I'd hit her with my ass while I, cause I go in the audience sometimes. And she said I'd, I'd hit her with my butt and she'd fallen and like hurt her brain or something. So it was obviously bullshit, but. So I, they called me back twice to New Jersey to testify cause I wasn't gonna go down. You know, pay this woman money to go away. I was gonna fight it. And, um.

• 1:11:11Speaker 03

  How much did she want?

• 1:11:12Speaker 02

  Uh, she didn't have a figure cause it didn't get that far. We, it was still to find out if, if who would win the case first of all. And, uh, and so, um, yeah, it was like cra- what was I talking about now? I've to- totally lost. See, it's all this spaceship. Oh, butt gate.

• 1:11:33Speaker 03

  This room is distracting.

• 1:11:34Speaker 02

  It's very distracting. I love the whole UFO thing, man. Uh, anyway, I forget what I was. What I was talking about. And, um.

• 1:11:43Speaker 03

  You had to go back.

• 1:11:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had to go back and it was, it was, uh.

• 1:11:48Speaker 03

  So that's how you got out of jury duty?

• 1:11:50Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 1:11:50Speaker 03

  You were talking about jury duty.

• 1:11:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. And, uh, oh, that's right. I was called up for jury. See?

• 1:11:59Speaker 02

  Well, you're used to this room. I'm not.

• 1:12:01Speaker 03

  I'm used to this room too, yeah.

• 1:12:02Speaker 02

  And, um, and, and I was called up for jury duty. I said, and they said, was there any reason you wouldn't? You would be, you know, not eligible for this. And I said, oh, I just got called up. I mean, I just got in a lawsuit myself and I think it's all bullshit. And they said, you're out of here. So it was great. It was good timing.

• 1:12:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:23Speaker 02

  But no, that's not the reason I became a citizen. I make, that's a joke. I just, I mean, I, uh, it's actually because, um, if I go first or if my wife goes first, I'd get screwed by taxes.

• 1:12:36Speaker 03

  You mean die first? Is that what you mean?

• 1:12:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:38Speaker 03

  Oh, like you said.

• 1:12:39Speaker 02

  And we're always saying, you know, I'm gonna go first. I don't wanna be the one left.

• 1:12:44Speaker 03

  Oh, that's funny. Well, the last thing I'm worried about if I, she goes first or I go first is taxes.

• 1:12:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, I know. But I mean, no, that's not why we talk about, but that's why I became a citizen was for the tax thing. With, but yeah, no, it's.

• 1:12:59Speaker 03

  What year was that? When did you become a citizen?

• 1:13:03Speaker 02

  Ten years ago, fifteen years ago.

• 1:13:06Speaker 03

  And were you living over here the entire time?

• 1:13:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I've been here since seventy-two. I mean, except for the trips back, you know, to meet Elvis on the plane. It was, um, yeah, I've been here, you know, since seventy-two, basically, living here.

• 1:13:19Speaker 03

  Just for your career?

• 1:13:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I mean, this is my life. My family's here, my li- my friends are here, my life is here.

• 1:13:26Speaker 03

  Now, yeah.

• 1:13:28Speaker 02

  I used to go back to Australia until my mom died. My mom lived till she was ninety-six, so I'm hoping some of those genetics are in there.

• 1:13:37Speaker 03

  I am curious to see how long Mick can keep cracking. Cause how old is he now?

• 1:13:42Speaker 02

  See how long Keith can keep cracking.

• 1:13:44Speaker 03

  That's the funny one, right? Because Keith is not doing any of the things that Mick is doing. He's still shredding. He was shredding.

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  Beer and...

• 1:13:52Speaker 03

  Drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, doing acid.

• 1:13:55Speaker 02

  I, I did a movie with, uh, which we shall not name, but it was with, um, his girlfriend, who was Patty Hanson at the time. His girlfriend at the time is his wife now. And, uh, and we got along really well, right? And so Keith came down to the set to find out what was going on with this Springfield guy and his girlfriend. And he was, ah, he looked like fucking Dracula. It was, it was like eighty-three or something. And there's, I got, we took photos and he looked so bizarre.

• 1:14:27Speaker 03

  And yet here he is.

• 1:14:28Speaker 02

  Yep, here he's still cooking. You know, everyone's going, yeah, it's gotta be this year he'll be gone.

• 1:14:33Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:14:33Speaker 02

  And all these, you know, Bowie's gone. My God, that one hurt. Bowie gone.

• 1:14:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:38Speaker 02

  But he, you know, he was a lifelong smoker and, uh...

• 1:14:42Speaker 03

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• 1:16:58Speaker 02

  It was okay, you know?

• 1:17:00Speaker 03

  It's amazing. But I mean, it's gotta, something's gotta be said for the love of what you do and that energy keeping you alive. And the fact that there's still, like I said, the Circuit of the Americas show was over a hundred thousand people. I mean, they're still drawing giant crowds.

• 1:17:16Speaker 02

  Who is that now?

• 1:17:17Speaker 03

  The Stones.

• 1:17:18Speaker 02

  Stones, yeah.

• 1:17:18Speaker 03

  The Circuit of the Americas is the local racetrack.

• 1:17:21Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 1:17:21Speaker 03

  So Circuit of the Americas is where they do Formula Ones, this huge racetrack, and they also have a giant theater out there, amphitheater. And then they do concerts out there where they have this, a massive concert venue. Like for huge acts, like Post Malone was there, it was like a hundred thousand, Eminem was there. It's, it's just a giant performance theater. But seeing the Stones there and seeing Keith there, if he gets to do that all the time, like just the energy from that is probably what's sustaining that guy.

• 1:17:46Speaker 02

  Absolutely, yeah. I think it's really, really important for your longevity that you love what you do.

• 1:17:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:53Speaker 02

  Uh, I think that has been the big driver for me. And I've seen it in other people, certainly in someone like, you know, Mick Jagger. He admits, you know, he still loves that, the roar of the crowd.

• 1:18:04Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:05Speaker 02

  Um, and it's, and a lot of, so many people do, I, like, I have friends that, who did a job because the retirement was, was good.

• 1:18:18Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:18Speaker 02

  And I get that, but I, that they don't love the job, you know, it's just, uh, something that they do.

• 1:18:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:26Speaker 02

  You know, um, we're fortunate, you know, that we do something that we love.

• 1:18:31Speaker 03

  Insanely fortunate, yeah. And it's very rare.

• 1:18:34Speaker 02

  A lot of luck. It really is a lot of luck. And I don't, I don't deny that. It's luck with everybody when they, they, they're lucky enough to... Don't you see a shooting star up there?

• 1:18:43Speaker 03

  Yes, you did.

• 1:18:44Speaker 02

  Oh, that's freaky.

• 1:18:45Speaker 03

  Sorry.

• 1:18:45Speaker 02

  In a flashback.

• 1:18:46Speaker 03

  I should have told you. I should have told you that it does that. I've had a lot of people just go, what's going on? Yeah, we have shooting stars on our ceiling. Yeah.

• 1:18:55Speaker 02

  That's freaky. Yeah.

• 1:18:58Speaker 03

  Um, yeah, I think, um, it's a lot of luck, but it's also working really hard to make that luck. So that when, if luck does happen, you're ready for it.

• 1:19:08Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:19:09Speaker 03

  And being able to capitalize on that luck. So, so many people get so terrified of the unknown and the possibility of success that the anxiety of whatever it is, they can't handle it.

• 1:19:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:22Speaker 03

  And they'd rather just live a simple life and not have the pressure.

• 1:19:26Speaker 02

  Fear of success is a real thing?

• 1:19:28Speaker 03

  It's a real thing. It's a real thing. Fear of success and, and maybe even more fear of failing to succeed when you're attempting to succeed.

• 1:19:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:38Speaker 03

  You know, that cripples people.

• 1:19:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, I get that totally.

• 1:19:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:42Speaker 02

  Um, and it does hurt when, when things don't go your way, but, um, it, it still drives me, you know, it's still, I mean, there's still things I wanna do. And I think that's, you know, I mean, I love playing, but I do that. That's kind of my day job, you know, but the outside extracurricular stuff is...

• 1:20:03Speaker 03

  What do you do extracurricularly?

• 1:20:06Speaker 02

  Um, I write. I've had a couple of novels out. I wrote my own autobiography. I'm writing a book on, on just, you know,

• 1:20:15Speaker 02

  what I've done with my life to, you know, be where I am, you know, health-wise and everything.

• 1:20:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do, and, um, I just, you know, there's all kinds of things, uh, on the side that you can do that... And I just, I just love to write. I mean, I consider myself a writer really before anything. I only started performing because no one would do my songs.

• 1:20:42Speaker 03

  For real? That's crazy.

• 1:20:44Speaker 02

  I used to be in a band. Have you, if you go on YouTube and you look up Zoot, Z-O-O-T, and look up Eleanor Rigby. I was a guitar player in this band. It was like a three, a four-piece band. And I arranged this version of Eleanor Rigby that was, it's, to me now it sounds like Black Sabbath, although I'd never heard Black Sabbath back then. But it's, um, a lot of, like I did Billy Corgan's thing, and he was like focused on this, on this band because we were kind of like psychedelic before, as that was just starting, you know? Oh, there it is, yeah.

• 1:21:19Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:21:20Speaker 02

  And that Beeb, he became, uh, part of, uh, formed Little River Band, actually, the bass player.

• 1:21:27Speaker 03

  What year is this?

• 1:21:28Speaker 02

  And that was our singer. He passed away a few years ago. But, uh, it was a great band. It was, um, that's me.

• 1:21:37Speaker 03

  Look at you, dude. What year is this?

• 1:21:39Speaker 02

  Sixty-nine, seventy.

• 1:21:41Speaker 03

  Wow. Wow.

• 1:21:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was uh, was kind of ve- very heavy, it was much heavier stuff than I'm doing now. Well, maybe not now, but it was for, they'd been a pop band and they dressed in pink and, and I'd been in a band and, and my band split up because I got to sing the single and the bass player was so pissed off they didn't pick him that he broke the band up. So I was a free agent and they said, well, you want to join us because our guitar player's leaving. So I said, okay. So I wore the pink thing for a while and I said, this has got to go.

• 1:22:13Speaker 03

  You couldn't deal with pink?

• 1:22:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. There's photos, it is horrible. But um, so I said, I've got this great idea. We'll, we'll get rid of the pink and we'll do a photo of us like looking over our shoulder totally naked, like in our original pink suits. And we dumped the pink thing. So, but we'll have a um, uh, high contrast so they won't really see anything. But they printed the photo like full on. Oh, there we are.

• 1:22:38Speaker 03

  So what was up with the pink thing? Why?

• 1:22:41Speaker 02

  They had a theme called Think Pink, Think Zoot. And it was good for the little girls. It was like, you know, yeah. Oh, I was so pissed at that album. That was the first album, the only album we did. And they cut out our heads to stick them. That was before Photoshop. And they miscut my hair and it-

• 1:22:59Speaker 03

  You got like a granny haircut.

• 1:23:02Speaker 02

  It was horrible. What a horrible album cover. One of the worst ever made, I think.

• 1:23:07Speaker 03

  Well, at least you weren't wearing pink. So, but that was such a weird choice that that was a part of the theme was pink.

• 1:23:13Speaker 02

  It was, yeah. It was, it was this guy in Australia that thought it would be a great- and it caught on for a while, but lasted about-

• 1:23:20Speaker 03

  I find it very strange.

• 1:23:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, six months. It was about a six month, life of six months. And then everyone got sick of it. So I told, said, we've got to lose that. So we had this photo taken and they printed it in full color of our bare asses. And my mom lost her shit when she saw it. She goes, "Oh, Richard, how could you do that?" I said, "No, mom, it's supposed to be like high contrast. You weren't supposed to see all the creases and stuff." And you can still see it. It's still online. The photo's still online.

• 1:23:46Speaker 03

  Oh, I got to see that.

• 1:23:47Speaker 02

  I signed it every now and then. I get to sign one. It's-

• 1:23:50Speaker 03

  Oh, that's funny. Hardcore fans bring you that? That's funny. They must know and it probably bugs you too. They want you to sign it.

• 1:23:57Speaker 02

  It's pretty bad. And so I pushed them more to, because Led Zeppelin was on the horizon. I pushed them more into the guitar, you know, I play guitar and I wanted the guitar to be the kind of the center of the thing. So I pushed them into a much heavier thing. And this Eleanor Rigby was, was our first really big hit that we had over there that I arranged, you know, it was like-

• 1:24:21Speaker 02

  like kind of thing. And we actually got a deal. We had a, EMI was interested in this over here. But our manager kind of screwed us by saying, no, you're still under contract here, which we weren't in Australia. Anyway, so we split up and I came over here and Beeb went on to form Little River Band. And this singer became a TV star in Australia.

• 1:24:42Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 1:24:43Speaker 02

  So it was a, we all went on to other things, you know. But it was uh-

• 1:24:48Speaker 03

  God, you've had such a great run, man. You've done so many different things.

• 1:24:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I look back and I guess I have. I've, I've uh, I always thought I'd be a band guy, you know. And I had this, when they split up, I uh, I said, I'll just join another band. But I had this writer, woman writer who was a big fan. And she said, no, you've got to go solo. I said, I don't want to go solo. And she's, no, you got to, you got to go solo.

• 1:25:16Speaker 03

  Why did she say that?

• 1:25:16Speaker 02

  I don't know. She just thought it was the next step for me, you know. She thought getting back in another band and being the guitar player was, she said, I, she thought I had more to offer, you know, more going for me and a better career if I, if I went solo. So I released this Speak to the Sky song that I wrote for my mommy. And it became a hit. And though that got me the deal over here and, you know, when they were signing everybody in the seventies, so.

• 1:25:43Speaker 03

  It was the weird time, the, when you're the zoot time. 1969 is such a strange time musically.

• 1:25:51Speaker 02

  It was changing pretty drastically.

• 1:25:53Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, I always point to the difference between 59 and 69 as being like one of the most radical changes in culture and music in, in all of human history. It's just such a strange, if you go like from Buddy Holly to Jimi Hendrix, I mean, is there a more radical transformation of rock and roll music than that time? Like, there was something amazing. A lot of it was the drugs, for sure. It was the, the whole psychedelic movement. It was the anti-war movement. It was-

• 1:26:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was definitely sociological. And I think music is always driven by what, what happens.

• 1:26:30Speaker 03

  And it drives what happens too. I mean, a lot of-

• 1:26:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I think, I know people think that it, I think it's, becomes a soundtrack of what's happening. I think more that the society drives what's happening in music. And then they adopt what the music is, you know, we got a tune, you know, and it shows what we, what we're, but it uh, um, this, you're talking about 59 and you're talking about 69 where the changes happened, right?

• 1:26:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, that 10-year period is just massive.

• 1:27:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:02Speaker 03

  It is just an incredible transformation between the 50s and the 60s.

• 1:27:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was, and it was considered kind of disposable, you know, well, that's the kids do that. And by 69, 70, it was, suddenly it had this more, more weight.

• 1:27:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:16Speaker 02

  You know, and, and people got older and they were now almost adults and they still liked it.

• 1:27:21Speaker 03

  Yes. Well, it's also that music has had a shelf life that is above and beyond anything that came after it. Like stuff from, like, there's a lot of rock and roll music from the eighties that just, you know, it doesn't have the same feeling as like Cashmere.

• 1:27:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:38Speaker 03

  You know what I mean? Like, if you go and listen to Whole Lot of Love, like, to this day, when Whole Lot of Love comes on, I'm like, oh, turn that up.

• 1:27:46Speaker 02

  They, they were the originators of that. I mean, they would really push that, that whole, his idea to get the, the kind of the bluesy singer and use the blues riffs and that was, it was all his idea. And, and it was so friggin' unique. And, and uh, like he wanted Terry Reid. Do you know Terry, familiar Terry Reid?

• 1:28:09Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:28:09Speaker 02

  He's a great English singer. I think he's passed now. I hope I'm not wrong in saying that because I hate it when they say, oh, Rick Springfield's dead. You know, you look up someone, the first thing, line that comes up on Google is, is so-and-so dead?

• 1:28:24Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 1:28:25Speaker 02

  Anybody.

• 1:28:26Speaker 03

  Especially when you get older.

• 1:28:27Speaker 02

  Yep, yep, yep. And um, uh, yeah, so it was amazing. Terry Reid had this great voice, but he was going to actually tour with the Stones. And Jimmy Page asked him if he'd be the singer in Led Zeppelin. He said, I can't. I've got this gig coming up with the Stones, but I know this guy, there's this guy down in this club. And it was friggin' Robert Plant and John Bonham in the same band.

• 1:28:48Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:28:49Speaker 02

  In a pub band. And Jimmy Page wa- Paige walks in and he goes, "They might be the right ones."

• 1:28:58Speaker 02

  How amazing. I mean, Bonham, one of the, you know, just a unique feel. He wasn't just a drummer. He was a, just an incredible, he had sonically, he was different. And the sound of his drums, what he did with them was, was unique. His feel was just so laid back, but so right on. And he's, it was just in the same band as Plant. And it was like, that's crazy.

• 1:29:21Speaker 03

  That is crazy.

• 1:29:21Speaker 02

  Like a little club band. And, and I, um, and you were saying, you know, music has more weight, had more, certain music has more weight. And I think England has always amazed me because this little tiny friggin' island, the Beatles, the Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Who.

• 1:29:41Speaker 03

  Clapton.

• 1:29:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, well, Clapton actually was Canadian.

• 1:29:45Speaker 03

  Was he really?

• 1:29:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's born in Canada.

• 1:29:47Speaker 03

  Oh, I thought he was from England.

• 1:29:48Speaker 02

  Or he had Canadian parents or something. But he, can you look that up?

• 1:29:51Speaker 03

  He wasn't from England?

• 1:29:52Speaker 02

  I bet he is, right? I like it when you-

• 1:29:55Speaker 00

  He was born there, yes.

• 1:29:56Speaker 02

  Where?

• 1:29:56Speaker 00

  He was born in the UK. He was born in the UK in 1945.

• 1:29:59Speaker 02

  Canadian parents, right?

• 1:30:00Speaker 00

  Let's see.

• 1:30:01Speaker 02

  Am I right on that?

• 1:30:02Speaker 00

  I'm right, yeah, I'll cut up on it.

• 1:30:05Speaker 02

  I'm right on that, aren't I? Eh?

• 1:30:06Speaker 03

  Eh.

• 1:30:07Speaker 02

  Eh?

• 1:30:10Speaker 00

  Uh, born to Canadian soldier from Montreal, Quebec.

• 1:30:15Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 1:30:15Speaker 02

  Anyway, but the little island that had all these amazing bands.

• 1:30:19Speaker 03

  Incredible.

• 1:30:20Speaker 02

  And I think it's because everyone wanted to conquer Britain. The Romans, the, the, they all, uh, uh, the Vikings, they all came in, you know, the Germans, they all came in and spread their seed. First thing they did was, you know, have sex when they came. And I think all that, all that came together. And I think that's a lot of reason there are so many great bands. Is it's a, a collection of all this genetic material from, you know, from Europe and all around. And the Romans, I mean, fuck, look what they did.

• 1:30:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. But it is interesting how Europe, if you look at it, the UK uniquely contributed to music.

• 1:31:04Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 1:31:05Speaker 03

  As opposed to all those other countries. Obviously, they're English-speaking, which helps how it spreads the word. But it's kind of amazing how much of an impact they had on America. I mean-

• 1:31:15Speaker 02

  And how much, how long it didn't have an impact, you know? I mean, it was, it was, and it was because it was bottled up for so long, I think that it exploded so much with the Beatles. It was never, it never crossed the Atlantic. It was always Amer- same with Australia. It was always America to, to England. There was, America to Australia. There was one Australian guy that had a hit when I was a kid in England in school named Rolf Harris called Tommy Kangaroo Down Sport.

• 1:31:44Speaker 02

  Tommy kangaroo down sport. Tommy kangaroo down. It was a horrible song, but it was a huge hit in England. And it was the only one that ever came over from Australia. And the same with England. There was really nothing that crossed over. And then suddenly Kennedy, Kennedy was killed and America was looking away from America. They didn't want to look, I think, was a big part of the, with the Beatles. They didn't want to look at America right then, at that point. Suddenly here were these four mop tops. And they came and smiled and sang great music and took attention away from, you know, darkness.

• 1:32:21Speaker 03

  Well, they were the, probably the first real super band, right?

• 1:32:25Speaker 02

  The Beatles?

• 1:32:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. That was just so huge that people would faint when they saw them and just scream when they saw them.

• 1:32:33Speaker 02

  Well, they used to faint for Frank Sinatra.

• 1:32:35Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 1:32:36Speaker 02

  They used to faint for, for Mozart. I mean, they were, you know, they were, they had groupies that would pass out. They were, that they thought they were so hot.

• 1:32:44Speaker 03

  Really?

• 1:32:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they were pop stars, you know, they were pop stars back then. And um-

• 1:32:51Speaker 03

  But it wasn't on television, it wasn't on the radio.

• 1:32:55Speaker 02

  The internet's done now. You have a friggin' opinion. And now you can put it out there and-

• 1:32:59Speaker 03

  Welcome to this show.

• 1:33:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:04Speaker 03

  That's what it is.

• 1:33:05Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:33:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's just, um, it must have been very strange to be the first global super group like that.

• 1:33:14Speaker 02

  I think, yeah.

• 1:33:15Speaker 03

  I don't think there was that. I think Elvis was probably the first super famous individual. Where, I mean, he got to a point, first of all, I think that level of fame is almost unsustainable for a human being. I think it's just too crazy. I don't, I don't think it's manageable. And especially when there was no roadmap.

• 1:33:35Speaker 02

  And he was the first, yeah.

• 1:33:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, he was the first.

• 1:33:37Speaker 02

  He died for our sins.

• 1:33:38Speaker 03

  Was like, hold my beer. I'll, I'll show you the next level of this shit.

• 1:33:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:42Speaker 03

  Michael Jackson took it to a place that was just like-

• 1:33:45Speaker 02

  Totally, totally agree.

• 1:33:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:46Speaker 02

  Totally agree. Unbelievable.

• 1:33:47Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm just young, but the Jackson Five and Beatles both starting off in sixty-four is crazy.

• 1:33:52Speaker 02

  Sixty, yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:53Speaker 03

  Wow. McCartney was twenty-two and Harrison was twenty-one.

• 1:33:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:58Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:33:59Speaker 02

  That's crazy. You think about what you were doing at twenty-one.

• 1:34:02Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:34:03Speaker 00

  And Jackson Five is same time.

• 1:34:06Speaker 03

  Wow. Sixty-four, the Jackson Five. Wow.

• 1:34:12Speaker 00

  I guess they were, I mean, it took a year or two, I guess, before they got famous, but still, same time.

• 1:34:17Speaker 03

  Amazing.

• 1:34:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just saw, uh, This Is It, is it? This Is It?

• 1:34:22Speaker 03

  Oh, the Michael Jackson documentary?

• 1:34:24Speaker 02

  Where he's preparing for the show.

• 1:34:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:26Speaker 02

  It's pretty wild. It's just amazing. I mean, you see him just kinda going through it like, you know, like it's nothing. I mean, he's cutting back, but he's still doing, you know, he knows what he's doing and just, he did seem kinda weak to me, uh, and didn't know if he could sustain all of that by that, that point, but god, he was amazing.

• 1:34:47Speaker 03

  Well, I think the pressure and the stress was probably just so overwhelming for him.

• 1:34:51Speaker 02

  Unbelievable.

• 1:34:52Speaker 03

  That guy couldn't go anywhere. He would get swarmed, like, like no one ever. Is, people loved him in a way. He was so big that, um, I don't know if you're familiar with Boston Radio, but, um, they had a WC, I think it was WCOZ, Rock of Boston. It was like the big Boston rock and roll station. And when, uh, Thriller came out, it was such a big album. They go, look, I know, the, the DJ goes, I know this isn't rock and roll, but this is so awesome, I'm gonna play it anyway. And, uh, I, I think it was Billie Jean they played.

• 1:35:32Speaker 03

  And, uh, I remember like thinking, this is crazy. They're playing this on the Rock of Boston? Like, this is nuts. But it was that big.

• 1:35:40Speaker 02

  Big.

• 1:35:40Speaker 03

  It was that big. It transcended everything.

• 1:35:43Speaker 02

  Well, they wouldn't let him on MTV, right? They, uh, they wouldn't play it. They said, we don't play, we can't, you know, they were saying, come on, this is huge. You gotta play it.

• 1:35:53Speaker 03

  Why wouldn't they play it? What do you mean?

• 1:35:54Speaker 02

  They don't play black artists.

• 1:35:55Speaker 03

  Really?

• 1:35:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, initially. And, uh, I forget who it was, one of the, the Atlantic, someone, Atlantic or Amadou, you know, somebody called up and said, if you don't play this song and Billy Jean on the next, in the next ten minutes, we're pulling all our artists. And they played it and that was, that was it. It was just-

• 1:36:15Speaker 03

  That's crazy.

• 1:36:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:17Speaker 03

  Because Thriller was obviously the biggest music video of all time. It was a film. I mean, he got Rick Baker, the guy who did The American Werewolf in London, the, you know, I know you're a horror fan. Um, that wolf outside, by the way, we have two of those.

• 1:36:32Speaker 02

  Yes, I just posted a photo of me with my arm in that, in that guy.

• 1:36:36Speaker 03

  The reason why we have two of those is because, uh, Rick Baker saw the original one that Pat McGee did that we had back here, and he said the proportions were wrong. So Pat McGee, the guy who made that for me, said, I'm gonna make another one that has the right proportions.

• 1:36:51Speaker 02

  So Rick Baker saw that one?

• 1:36:53Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:36:53Speaker 02

  Oh, that's crazy.

• 1:36:54Speaker 03

  So Rick Baker came to my studio, did my podcast and said, that's great, but the legs are too long, the body's too long. This is the wrong proportions. And Pat McGee went crazy. He's like, fuck! And so he made another one. And then the, the new one that he made though is even better because it's all animal hair.

• 1:37:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's incredible.

• 1:37:11Speaker 03

  I'll show you the other one. The other one's in the other room.

• 1:37:13Speaker 02

  The one not, the not so good one.

• 1:37:15Speaker 03

  Right. It's in the other room. I bought, I still have both of them. Um, but he saw-

• 1:37:19Speaker 02

  Of course, you don't get rid of werewolves.

• 1:37:20Speaker 03

  No. I mean, I would give it to someone cool, but the, uh, he did the special effects for Thriller. When he turns into that cat monster thing, like, ah, and he turns and the girl screams, ah. I mean, then he's a zombie. Like, that fucking video was crazy. I remember everybody waiting for the premiere. All my friends in high school, like, waiting around the TV for the premiere. It was incredible. There was like nothing like it.

• 1:37:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:45Speaker 03

  And, you know, I mean, he was a superstar in a way that like, I don't think anybody's ever even come close. Maybe Taylor Swift? Like, maybe she's in that sort of realm now? This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. It may be hard to believe, but identity theft is the number one crime in America. Right now, millions of people are dealing with stolen accounts, fraudulent loans, and the exhausting process of proving who they are to banks, creditors, and credit bureaus. LifeLock helps you fight back. They monitor your personal and financial information, alerting you when something looks suspicious. And if identity theft does happen,

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• 1:39:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I, I mean, I think it's Elvis, the Beatles, and Michael Jackson were the three that absolutely transcend.

• 1:40:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:03Speaker 02

  I mean, every, you know, there've been people as famous, but, uh,

• 1:40:09Speaker 02

  they did something so different. You know, first of all, Elvis was Elvis.

• 1:40:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:13Speaker 02

  And the Beatles, they wrote the best songs. They, you know, there's not many songs left to write now because the Beatles wrote them all.

• 1:40:18Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:40:19Speaker 02

  And, uh, and Michael Jackson did the-

• 1:40:22Speaker 03

  A different range of music. You know, you go from Love, Love Me Do to the more psychedelic-

• 1:40:28Speaker 02

  How fast they grew.

• 1:40:29Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:40:30Speaker 02

  How, that's just, uh, I mean, I don't even know if that's possible anymore because, uh, the audience is so fragmented now. Back then, it was, you know, your parents or you and your friends. There was nothing, you know, in between. There was not, no, uh, uh, now it's like, well, if you're thirteen years old, you like, you know, uh, K-pop. If you're, you know, fifteen, sixteen, you're like this. If you like heavy stuff, then there's this. And everyone's, it's so fragmented. There's not like us against them anymore.

• 1:41:02Speaker 03

  Right, right, right.

• 1:41:04Speaker 02

  And so it, uh, I don't know if it allows for, I think Taylor Swift is actually the first one to really get that amount of gigantic following. And I, I, it seems to be a lot of like young girls still.

• 1:41:19Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:41:19Speaker 02

  Um, uh, but I mean, I like, I like a lot of the songs. I think she's a great writer lyrically. Um, I think the girls are killing it in pop right now. I mean, you know, I miss rock and roll on the radio for sure.

• 1:41:32Speaker 03

  It's weird that rock and roll's kind of faded.

• 1:41:35Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 1:41:35Speaker 03

  It's weird that rock and roll has kinda faded.

• 1:41:38Speaker 02

  I never thought the guitar would kind of become uncool. I thought, once we got through disco, where it was just, in the background, and suddenly there was ACDC and you're going, oh, thank god, the guitar's back. You know, now it'll never leave. It's left again, unfortunately, but hopefully it'll, you know, I don't know if it'll come back. I think-

• 1:41:56Speaker 03

  The window's open.

• 1:41:57Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 1:41:57Speaker 03

  The window is open. Cause people still love the old music.

• 1:42:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, but there's, I mean, I hear great stuff, uh, from rock bands still, you know, but you don't hear it unless someone sends it to you, really. Or there's a specific old, you know, rock, you'd, you know, like, I don't know where you hear, you know, new Foo Fighters, other than, uh, you certainly don't hear it on, you know, any of the AM stations anymore, do you?

• 1:42:22Speaker 03

  Are there even AM stations?

• 1:42:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know. I mean, I don't know what even plays.

• 1:42:26Speaker 03

  FM is what played real, played big music in this country, but I mean, there's no real radio presence anymore. As far, like, I don't know of any, my mechanic still listens to FM music. I know that because, uh, when he fixes my car, when I get it back, the radio's on, the local FM rock station. But it's all, like, there's no DJs anymore. And if there is a DJ, they don't have control of the music anymore.

• 1:42:50Speaker 02

  Exactly right. And, and Jessie's Girl was a, was a product of the DJs. It wasn't released as a single.

• 1:42:57Speaker 03

  Really?

• 1:42:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was, uh, back when the DJs, if they liked a song, they'd, they'd play it. They'd say, oh, I like this song, let's put this on. And they started doing that with Jessie's Girl and they started getting a lot of phones. And they called up the record, the record company and said, you probably should put this out as a single. It's getting a lot of phones. And the record company goes, oh, okay. So they put it out. But it wasn't their choice. I mean, it was, it was actually on then, back then, it was RCA was me and Elvis. So it was pretty much it.

• 1:43:26Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:43:26Speaker 02

  It was all, all Elvis and, you know.

• 1:43:29Speaker 03

  What year was Jessie's Girl?

• 1:43:31Speaker 02

  Uh, eighty-one, eighty, eighty, eighty-one?

• 1:43:36Speaker 03

  Eighty-one.

• 1:43:36Speaker 02

  I throw it over to our, uh,

• 1:43:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:43:39Speaker 02

  Um, maestro at the, uh, controls over there.

• 1:43:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was a freshman in high school.

• 1:43:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:43:45Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:43:46Speaker 03

  I was fourteen years old when that song came out.

• 1:43:48Speaker 02

  Oh, my god, really?

• 1:43:48Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:43:49Speaker 02

  That's wild.

• 1:43:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. What was that like for you? That had to be insane, because that song was so giant. Every girl in my high school was in love with you. It must have been nuts.

• 1:43:58Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, it was, it was, um, I mean, I'd, I, I was twenty-nine, thirty by the time that happened. Thirty-one, and I, and I was, I'd imagined it for so long, because I'm very, uh, one of the things I really believe in is, you know, as I'm sure you do, to manifestation, believing, you know, visualization, seeing, seeing what you want and, and committing to it. And, um, and I'd seen it so much, so many times in my head that when it happened, I went, "Yeah, that's how it, that's how it is, okay."

• 1:44:29Speaker 03

  Really? So you expected it?

• 1:44:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. I always expected something. I knew something would happen, and I had faith. You know, I would, there was, there was times when I was, uh, because of the teen magazines, I'd get letters sometimes, "I can't wait to come over and meet you and, and visit you in your mansion." And at the time, I was living in a, a hundred and eighty-dollar-a-month apartment in a seedy area of Hollywood, eating TV man dinners and fishing, you know, quarters out of my goofy piggy bank so I could go down and, you know, buy milk. Um, so, uh, yeah, it was, um, it was quite a dichotomy, you might say.

• 1:45:10Speaker 03

  So, when it first started happening, it started happening because of DJs? And that, like, how long was that before it became like a massive hit?

• 1:45:19Speaker 02

  It wa, it was quite a, quite a haul. It was actually a long time on the charts, crawling up. And it was, uh, I thought, "Oh, she's never gonna make it." You know, "It's going so slow." Usually they go boom, boom, boom.

• 1:45:30Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:45:30Speaker 02

  And it crawled and crawled and crawled and crawled. And I remember Joe, um, uh, Gottfried, who owned Sound City, which is why, one of the reasons I happened to be in the, in the Dave Grohl, uh, Sound City documentary, was because I used to hang out there all the time. And, um, and he came in with this cheap bottle of champagne and said, "We just made number one."

• 1:45:54Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:45:54Speaker 02

  And it was, uh, yeah, it was a long time, uh, that it climbed. And they weren't gonna release it. I had actually, uh, I took General Hospital because I didn't think they were gonna release the album.

• 1:46:08Speaker 03

  That's right, I forgot you were on General Hospital. You were on a fucking soap opera.

• 1:46:12Speaker 02

  Fucking soap opera. And, and it was-

• 1:46:14Speaker 03

  By the way, the biggest soap opera.

• 1:46:16Speaker 02

  Well, it happened to be-

• 1:46:17Speaker 03

  The whole Luke and Laura thing was crazy.

• 1:46:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was the biggest soap opera it's ever got, and I just happened to be on it that summer. And it was, um, but I, I got, I, this guy called me up, and I just, I hadn't worked as an actor in like nine months. And this guy called me up, and he'd seen me for, they were trying to do a male Charlie's Angels. Thankfully, thankfully, I didn't get that, and that didn't work out. But I'd gone up and auditioned for it, right? And, and it didn't work out, but this guy obviously remembered me, and he, he called up my agent, who hadn't done a fucking thing for me in twelve months, and said, "Uh, I remember this guy, Springfield, we'd like to see him for this part on General Hospital." And I said, "General fucking soap opera, I don't wanna do that." And he said, "Go in, just go in."

• 1:47:03Speaker 02

  And I, and I'm thinking, "Well, it's mostly old ladies ironing in the afternoon, that still can have any effect on my music career." I guess because they totally, you know, it's apples and oranges. So I went up, and I wasn't interested, that interested in it. And I did the reading, and then he calls up and says, "You got the part." And Keith Olson, who was a big producer at the time, and who'd produced Jessie's Girl, he'd done me a favor because he was, uh, because of the Sound City connection. He'd done, uh, Fleetwood Mac, and, and Pat Benatar, and, um, um, Foreigner, and a lot of big hits. And so I said, "I'll do a favor for, for Joe, and I'll..." And he'd actually cut together my very first album. He'd been a guy that cut all the cliques out of my first album, where they punched me in, the vocals in.

• 1:47:49Speaker 02

  And, uh, and so he did that, and he said, "You don't need to do this, this is a great record, you don't need to do this soap opera." And I said, "Oh, I didn't know, man, I've had four albums and they've done nothing, so I'm, I don't know what this one's gonna do, so I'm gonna..." I had no money. I said, "I'm gonna take it for the money," because it was five hundred bucks an episode, which was like mind-blowing money to me back then.

• 1:48:10Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:48:11Speaker 02

  I'd never seen regular money, and I'd never seen that much regu, that was a hell of a lot of money to me back in nineteen, nineteen eighty. So I said, "I'm gonna take this show." So I took it. And, uh, and the record company was not releasing the album, I'm going, "Oh, god, it's gonna happen again." And, you know, it's gonna hit a hundred in the top one hundred and go away. Because there was disco, and there were ballads on the, on the radio. They didn't know what to do with a guitar-based pop record. So they finally released it. And, uh, and that, the whole DJ thing happened, and then, uh, you know-

• 1:48:44Speaker 03

  What was the single that they released?

• 1:48:46Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 1:48:46Speaker 03

  What were the singles that they released from that album?

• 1:48:48Speaker 02

  They released "I've Done Everything For You," actually. Because, uh, Sammy was a known quantity, and I wasn't, you know, and they, and, um, it, uh, it didn't do-

• 1:49:01Speaker 03

  Is that Sammy Hagar?

• 1:49:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, Sammy, yeah.

• 1:49:04Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:49:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, he wrote it, uh, and Keith would, had worked with, Keith Olson had worked with Sammy on a bunch of his solo albums. And he really liked the song, and he brought, and he said, "I'll do two songs with Springfield." So he picked one of mine, Jessie's Girl, and I had my, my demos that I'd done on my little four-track, you know? And I, I was pissed that he didn't pick a second one. He said, "I wanna bring an outside song in." And I went, "Oh, fuck." Because, you know, I'm a writer, I wanted to do my songs.

• 1:49:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:49:29Speaker 02

  And he brought this song in, and I went, "Okay." I, you know, he must know what he's talking about. He's a, got a lot of hits and everything. So I did it, and it was, happened to be the right second song. It was absolutely the right second song. But, but that was the first one, and, and then I thought, "Oh, it's..." You know, and then they picked Jessie's Girl. So fortunately, it was a DJ's call, and I'm forever thankful for, for that. And I don't know what would have happened if, you know, if they hadn't picked it, or if they were still, like now, they're on, you know, you play these ten songs, and that's it, you don't deviate.

• 1:50:04Speaker 03

  Well, it seems like now it's all sort of pre-programmed by executives. They just decide what is gonna be pushed and what's gonna be famous.

• 1:50:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I mean, I don't really understand it, and I don't know if anybody does, why some are, are pushed and others aren't, but-

• 1:50:21Speaker 03

  Well, there's no tastemakers anymore. That's the thing. Without DJs, without Wolfman Jack and these big DJ guys-

• 1:50:27Speaker 02

  Oh, I loved Wolfman Jack.

• 1:50:28Speaker 03

  He was awesome.

• 1:50:29Speaker 02

  He was so good. I did, I did an interview with him, uh, with my first album. "I don't know, Rick, I don't..." I said, "This is a song about, uh, a woman, a, a guy that commits suicide." "Oh, I don't, I don't think so, not in my radio station." And he puts it on, and, and he listens to it, and he ended up playing it. It was really great. We actually got along really well, and he would introduce me occasionally at shows and things. He was a lovely guy. Funny as hell, man.

• 1:50:55Speaker 03

  Well, there were tastemakers back then. There were people that you believed in, that were DJs, that were cool.

• 1:51:01Speaker 02

  And could call it.

• 1:51:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they were kind of cool guys who liked cool things.

• 1:51:07Speaker 02

  And they had personalities and people, you know, yeah.

• 1:51:10Speaker 03

  They had personalities, and they were interesting to listen to, and they would tell you why, like, you're gonna dig this, and they would play it, and you're like, "Ooh, what is this?"

• 1:51:18Speaker 02

  And they'd know shit about the songs.

• 1:51:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. They were real music aficionados, and they were, you know, sort of like the Siskel and Ebert of, of music. Like, they would tell you what was cool.

• 1:51:29Speaker 02

  What was cool, yeah.

• 1:51:30Speaker 03

  And slowly but surely, that all just completely went away. I can't name a DJ currently, and I think that's nuts. When I was a kid, that you knew everybody, Mark Parento and all these different people, and Charles Lockwood era, those are the guys in Boston.

• 1:51:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:51:44Speaker 03

  Everybody knew who they were. And, and it was, it was a national thing, in every city, every city, they had your morning DJ guy.

• 1:51:51Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:51:51Speaker 03

  You know, and these morning-

• 1:51:52Speaker 02

  Shout Shannon and all that.

• 1:51:53Speaker 03

  Yes. And all these guys would play, Kevin and Bean in L.A. And all these guys would play cool music, and they knew cool stuff. And it was like, you know, you learned about culture from these people, pre-internet. They were the tastemakers.

• 1:52:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's trippy. I, I, I mean, I don't know how you fall in love with an artist anymore, you know? Because, uh, I, you know, it's the old story. You get the record, you open it up, and, and you could, as it's playing, you read who's, who's playing what, who wrote what, and you read about them, and-

• 1:52:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:22Speaker 02

  And I remember, years ago, I had a copy of a record, like a No Doubt CD or something, anyway, and, and this young girl, uh, daughter, friend of mine, I said, "Oh, I've got the No Doubt CD, the new CD, if you wanna..." She said, "Oh, no, it's okay, I, I download it." Well, she's got the album cover and everything. He said, "No, it's okay, I, I just download it." And now it's weird.

• 1:52:45Speaker 03

  It's weird.

• 1:52:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:52:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I used to buy albums based on the cover.

• 1:52:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:52:50Speaker 03

  I'd go to the record store and I'm like, wow.

• 1:52:52Speaker 02

  This is fucking big.

• 1:52:53Speaker 03

  I know, it's impossible. But you would go and see an album, like, wow, this looks cool. Cool artwork, you'd open it up.

• 1:53:01Speaker 02

  Hypnosis, hypnosis, whatever, however they've spelled it. Oh, they were brilliant. And look at the, you know, I mean, the Pink Floyd one is still an epic.

• 1:53:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:53:11Speaker 02

  Image.

• 1:53:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:53:13Speaker 02

  Still, you see it everywhere, you know.

• 1:53:14Speaker 03

  Well, when I was a kid, my Uncle Vinny was, he was an artist and he worked for Howard Marks Advertising, which was a company that did all of the album covers for Kiss. And so when I was a kid, uh, well, I was really young. I was like seven or something like that. I got to see, I got to go to his office with him and he would take me around and, you know.

• 1:53:39Speaker 02

  You seen him before anybody did.

• 1:53:40Speaker 03

  I met Ace Frehley with no makeup on. Back, it was the craziest thing I'd ever seen in my life. He has no makeup on, this is nuts. This is back before Kiss had taken the makeup off. It was, it was so insane. Like, he came into the office and everyone was like, what's up, Ace? I was like, what? That's him? Cause I was, God, I don't remember how old I was. I couldn't have been more than ten. It was so strange to me. I was like, this is crazy. I can't believe he's right there. This is nuts.

• 1:54:07Speaker 02

  Isn't it wild, yeah?

• 1:54:08Speaker 03

  Actually, I might have been a little older. I might have been eleven or twelve. But either way, I was like blown away by it. I couldn't, I couldn't believe I was actually meeting Ace Frehley with no makeup on. But their advertisement, uh, company would do all the album covers. And the album covers were a work of art. There was so much going on inside of them. You would open up the albums, artwork inside. It was like, even like when they had their solo albums, the albums themselves had an image of each individual band member printed on the album.

• 1:54:37Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 1:54:38Speaker 03

  Yes, like the album itself. Like, when you look at the record, you saw the image of their faces on the record. It was crazy.

• 1:54:45Speaker 02

  I remember when they came out, I think this has gotta be huge. I've had the photo, Ace Frehley actually came back to see us at a gig we were doing and I had a photo taken with him and my drummer was a, you know, Kiss were his Beatles. So I had, I was selling guitars at the time, like these, uh, just these red Fernandez that we had a bunch of. So he had Ace sign it and he did, you know, the Ace card and everything.

• 1:55:10Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:55:11Speaker 02

  To Roger Rock on whatever, Ace Frehley. I copied it exactly onto another one, exactly like the guitar. And in the middle of the show, a guy, the guitar tech brought it out to me and I smashed the shit out of it.

• 1:55:25Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 1:55:26Speaker 02

  And Roger lost his shit. He got, oh my, he thought it was a real one.

• 1:55:31Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 1:55:32Speaker 02

  And it was, it was, he played so many terrible pranks on us that it was fucking worth it.

• 1:55:39Speaker 03

  That's hilarious. That's hilarious. So you kind of knew that eventually it was gonna hit. But when it did hit, what was the feeling like to go from being someone, you know, you'd been in pop magazines, but then all of a sudden, you are the guy. Like, for a year or two, whatever it was, in, in the early eighties, you were so huge, man. I mean, it was, it was crazy. What was that feeling like?

• 1:56:08Speaker 02

  Um, it was, I was, it was exciting. It drove me to write more and more, you know? I mean, I directed it into performing and writing. I really don't know what else, you know? I didn't, uh, party a lot, you know? I mean, we did a little bit on the road, but it wasn't, I, I directed it into what I was doing. And, um, it was exciting, you know? I remember, uh, getting on the phone with DJs and saying, oh yeah, the record's gonna be, it's going up and up. And, you know, it was all real exciting stuff. But it was kind of, like I said, I expected it, you know? And, uh, it wasn't like, oh my God, this is so weird. It was like, yeah, about fucking time, you know? I've been here for ten years.

• 1:56:53Speaker 03

  That's crazy that you like totally were comfortable with it and expected it.

• 1:56:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was, it was, uh, you know, there were, you know, like four thousand fans around a police car trying to tip it over. And I was like, okay, this is what it feels like.

• 1:57:11Speaker 03

  God, it's so wild.

• 1:57:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:57:14Speaker 03

  It's so wild that you were like, okay, this is, this is happening.

• 1:57:17Speaker 02

  It was exciting, you know? I mean, I didn't lessen the excitement, but, but it was, uh, I prepared myself for it, you know?

• 1:57:25Speaker 03

  Do you remember what it was like the first time you started playing the first few chords of Jessie's Girl? And the whole crowd knew what it was?

• 1:57:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do, actually. Cause I'd, I'd seen, uh, we saw all these English bands in Australia, cause they all came to Australia. I saw the Stones twice in sixty-five and sixty-six. I saw the Beatles in sixty-four. And I saw the Kinks in like sixty-five. I saw the Who in sixty-five. And, um, they started out with You Really Got, Kinks started out, da-da-da-da-dum, da-da-da-da. And the audience went, oh, shit. I said, oh man, that is so fucking cool. I wanna feel what that's like.

• 1:58:07Speaker 03

  Do you remember the first time you felt it?

• 1:58:09Speaker 02

  And, what's that?

• 1:58:09Speaker 03

  Do you remember the first time you felt that?

• 1:58:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I, we would do, we, uh, we did the Beach Boys, uh, Fourth of July show from the Queen Mary. And I was like the new artist.

• 1:58:22Speaker 03

  In Long Beach?

• 1:58:23Speaker 02

  On the bill, yeah, on Long Beach. It was, uh, the Beach Boys, Three Dog Night, um, and had Brian Wilson was still with the Beach, was, had come back with the Beach Boys, right? And, uh, and I, we started, we were on there, I start playing, duh-duh-duh-duh-duh. And the audience went nuts. I went, that's it!

• 1:58:41Speaker 03

  That's the feeling.

• 1:58:43Speaker 02

  And it was so weird, cause we came on after, after the show, we, after the Beach, the Beach was finished, we walked on stage, right? And Brian Wilson's like a god, right? And I'm, I'm walking on stage, he's at the piano and he goes, he follows me like this. I'm going, is it broken? What's he following me for? He was a giant soap opera fan. Him and his wife used to sit all and watch fucking General Hospital.

• 1:59:12Speaker 03

  That's crazy.

• 1:59:14Speaker 02

  Brian Wilson with his mouth open, following me across the stage.

• 1:59:19Speaker 03

  That's crazy.

• 1:59:20Speaker 02

  When I'm doing the same thing going, that's Brian Wilson, holy fuck.

• 1:59:24Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:59:25Speaker 02

  It was pretty, and, and same thing with Sammy Davis Jr. We did, I was on the first Night of a Hundred Stars and, and I'm walking, we're walking along the, the red carpet and I feel someone tugging on my jacket. I'm going, what the fuck? I look around at Sammy Davis Jr. Hey, man, love you on this show. And I'm going, what the fuck? That was the stuff that was weird for me, was, was that kind of thing. And, and, and like I met Paul McCartney later, like, I don't know, maybe twenty, fifteen years ago, at a thing. And I went to see him, cause I'm, I was a giant fan. And he said, oh, what are you here for? Meaning, you know, he obviously knew who I was and what was I coming to the event for, cause everyone was announcing new projects. I just said, I'm here to see you.

• 2:00:10Speaker 02

  He goes, oh. And I know no one was taking photos and I didn't realize at the time. He said, I wanna get a photo. So I said, that'll be ten quid.

• 2:00:19Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 2:00:20Speaker 02

  So I go like, they said, no, I'm only joking, I'm only joking. So we had a photo, it was one of my, I keep that photo, that's a pretty cool photo.

• 2:00:27Speaker 03

  Wow, that's awesome.

• 2:00:28Speaker 02

  And speaking of album, album covers, the Sergeant Pepper's cover was, was, you know.

• 2:00:33Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:00:34Speaker 02

  I have the, uh, cause, um, War of the Worlds, Time Machine. H.G. Wells, one of my favorite writers, right? I love, loves sci-fi. Always loved H.G. Wells, they're very political too. And he wrote some great, great, great, um, novels and, and articles about the war and the possibility of atomic war. And I mean, he was really deep guy. And he was one of the cutouts, right? It was H.G. Wells on the Sergeant Pepper's figure, thing, you know, all the cutouts, the heads on the front. You know what I mean?

• 2:01:10Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm, sure, yeah.

• 2:01:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, and he, and so I got that actual H.G. Wells, I got that actual cutout and Paul had signed it. So I got one of my favorite writers and my favorite artists and it's a really cool thing. I have that in my studio.

• 2:01:24Speaker 03

  Wow. The, the, the people don't understand today, the General Hospital thing. General Hospital was a soap opera, but it was a soap opera that transcended regular television shows somehow.

• 2:01:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was the most popular show in the summer.

• 2:01:42Speaker 03

  Very strange. It was very strange and it was a completely, it was a organic viral moment. For whatever reason.

• 2:01:51Speaker 02

  I, no idea still.

• 2:01:53Speaker 03

  Never happened again.

• 2:01:54Speaker 02

  No, never happened.

• 2:01:54Speaker 03

  Only happened once.

• 2:01:55Speaker 02

  The most popular soap now has about a third of the viewership that General Hospital had at the time. And it was, you know, like I was on it, I'm, this one, you're talking about, you know, new fame and all that kind of stuff. And I was, um, I was, had a little house that I bought on BMI Advances, cause I had a record deal. Which they don't do anymore, but, um, in Montrose, in, in La Cremona. And I'm walking down the street one day and, you know, nobody's looking at me. I'm going, yeah, I'm just walking down. And then two weeks later, after being on the show for two weeks, I'm walking down the same street. People are going, isn't that? You know, and it was like so sudden that that was like, you know, it was before MTV,

• 2:02:38Speaker 02

  so you had to have at least three albums out before a musician was recognized. So to get it that fast was, that was kind of odd. And I wasn't ready for that, for that amount of recognition.

• 2:02:50Speaker 03

  Well, it was just so strange. My whole family was watching General Hospital. I was watching it, my sister was watching it. It was like, it was a television show, but it was a soap opera. And soap operas were like, Housewives were watching.

• 2:03:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was, it was, you know, your, your cousin in the, where they invented the toothbrush.

• 2:03:11Speaker 03

  It was like low production value, shitty writing, bad acting.

• 2:03:16Speaker 02

  Horrible writing, terrible acting.

• 2:03:18Speaker 03

  Something about that Luke and Laura storyline, for whatever reason, caught the nation.

• 2:03:25Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:03:25Speaker 03

  And held it captive.

• 2:03:27Speaker 02

  And I believe he raped her and then they became boyfriend and girlfriend.

• 2:03:31Speaker 03

  Is that really what the storyline was? That's nuts.

• 2:03:34Speaker 02

  And Elizabeth Taylor was on the show too, and I got to do a scene, a couple of scenes with her. And that was weird. I'm walking, uh, down the stairs as she's walking up, you go, Noah! And like I'm going, hey, stop, Elizabeth Taylor! And, and we walk, we would do a scene and we're walking away together, you know, off to a blank alleyway till they say cut. And she goes, isn't acting stupid?

• 2:04:01Speaker 02

  And Tony Geary actually did the best thing. He's doing a scene with her in rehearsal. And he goes, "Oh, my God, it's Elizabeth Taylor." And everyone's like, "Yeah, which one?" We all wanted to say, right? But it's amazing, the people who were fans of the show, it's, you know, crazy.

• 2:04:20Speaker 03

  It was literally the biggest show in the country.

• 2:04:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:04:23Speaker 03

  And it was a soap opera. And it was on during the day. It made no sense.

• 2:04:26Speaker 02

  And the acting sucked, and the writing sucked, and the writing sucked, and it was... If you got through the scene, they printed it.

• 2:04:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:04:33Speaker 02

  You know, I mean, I got really good, because they handed us a three-page scene once, me and a character I was working with. They said, "We're shooting this in 20 minutes." So I got really good. They'd have the camera here, and they'd have the words right, you know, coming down the...

• 2:04:53Speaker 03

  Teleprompter?

• 2:04:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, the teleprompter down the screen, and a red light. And I got good at looking at them while I was talking. And soon as they went, as soon as I saw the light go off, I'd look at the screen and memorize the words for the next line, and look back at them and go, "Yeah." It wasn't about acting for me then, it was about line memorization. But there were good people on it. Like, my best friend, actually, Doug Davidson, was on Young and the Restless, as Paul... God, what's his last name? Sorry, Dougie. But anyway, Paul Drake. No, wait. Oh, there's me and Liz.

• 2:05:33Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:05:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, babe. Yeah, hey, let me invite you to... You wanna come? Oh, that was it. Isn't acting stupid? That's the scene.

• 2:05:42Speaker 03

  Wow. That's nuts. Isn't acting stupid? That's so crazy. How weird is it?

• 2:05:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, so he was really good. Doug Davidson played Paul Drake? I think that was his name. Sorry, I forgot it. But he was great on it. He would cry and get angry, and he was really, very, very good. And there are some great people that can do it. Not everybody can. And they picked, you know, they picked young, pretty people who aren't necessarily the best actors, but they have a presence, you know. And I remember walking by the phones when Demi Moore was on the show. And they would take calls from everybody and listen to everything. And I walked by, and the woman's going, "Oh, doesn't like Demi Moore's voice."

• 2:06:29Speaker 03

  They would take calls from the audience to find out what they thought about it?

• 2:06:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, people would call in and say, "Oh, we really like this guy," or "We don't like this guy," or "Hate this storyline." They'd listen. And Gloria Monty was... She was the... Oh, Tristan just passed away.

• 2:06:43Speaker 00

  And Bryan Cranston together.

• 2:06:44Speaker 02

  That's Tristan. He just passed away. He's a good, a cool guy. He's another Rossy.

• 2:06:49Speaker 03

  Bryan Cranston, that's crazy. Wow.

• 2:06:54Speaker 02

  Lovely, lovely guy, funny guy. Is that Demi?

• 2:06:59Speaker 00

  So strange. Yeah, sorry, it's, uh...

• 2:07:01Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:07:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:07:02Speaker 03

  1982. Wow.

• 2:07:07Speaker 02

  Trippy. Trippy, yeah.

• 2:07:09Speaker 03

  That's amazing. I can't believe Elizabeth Taylor was doing a soap opera. That's so strange.

• 2:07:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, but they were fans. And it was a big show. And it was like, it was like, um, kinda like Baywatch, how Baywatch became this big cultural thing. And I remember reading Paul McCartney saying, "Yeah, my daughters love Baywatch." I'm going, "Fuck that, man."

• 2:07:31Speaker 03

  It's just so strange that it never happened again. That General Hospital moment is like a strange anomaly in culture.

• 2:07:38Speaker 02

  It totally was, yeah. And it was a combination, probably, of the characters, you know? I mean, it was kind of the best of the worst storylines, you know? And, um, and, uh, there was, you know, a lot of characters, good characters on it. Plus, you know, they were aware by, at that point, that I had a recording career, you know? And they wanted me to sing on the show, and I...

• 2:08:03Speaker 03

  There it is.

• 2:08:04Speaker 02

  There it is.

• 2:08:05Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:08:06Speaker 02

  And Tony took us around, and we were answering them...

• 2:08:08Speaker 03

  30 million viewers.

• 2:08:11Speaker 02

  That's insane.

• 2:08:11Speaker 03

  For Luke and Laura's wedding on General Hospital. I mean, what has even come close to that?

• 2:08:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:08:17Speaker 03

  What has even come close to that in terms of soap operas? Is there anything even close?

• 2:08:23Speaker 02

  No, no. That was a golden age.

• 2:08:25Speaker 03

  Fucking bananas.

• 2:08:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:08:27Speaker 03

  It's kind of insane.

• 2:08:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:08:28Speaker 00

  Isn't it during the middle of the day, too?

• 2:08:30Speaker 03

  Yeah!

• 2:08:30Speaker 02

  Still have no real explanation, you know?

• 2:08:33Speaker 03

  I don't know what time it was on, but I remember it was like right after high school.

• 2:08:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, they used to cancel, rearrange, uh, classes in universities, because they knew people wouldn't show up.

• 2:08:46Speaker 03

  That's nuts!

• 2:08:47Speaker 02

  And I had no idea that these people, you know, they were the same people that come into concerts.

• 2:08:52Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:08:52Speaker 02

  And I had no idea that there would be any kind of crossover, you know?

• 2:08:56Speaker 03

  How crazy is it that the guy from General Hospital all of a sudden has the number-one song in the country?

• 2:09:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. And they had no idea. I was on the show for like six weeks, and Gloria, the producer, who was really responsible for the success of it, she was so smart. Her and Tony used to get together and go over the scripts at night, and, you know, that had something to do with it. And she came up and said, "I hear you're also a singer." I went, "Yeah, but it's not happening on this show. I've already got enough shit that I'm on the show, so..."

• 2:09:27Speaker 03

  Oh, they wanted you to sing on the show? Oh, God.

• 2:09:30Speaker 02

  Which I did, I did as kind of a callback later, way later on, you know, after I'd left the show. And then I came back for like the 50th anniversary or something, and did... But, uh, yeah, when it was, you know, she wanted me to like go up there and sing "Jesse's Girl," as this doctor suddenly, you know, that... We'll make it work, you know?

• 2:09:50Speaker 03

  How weird must it have been for those Luke and Laura actors? Because like, no one had ever done that before. No soap opera had ever gotten that huge before. And then after it was over, nothing.

• 2:10:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, the girl who played Laura was 21 and still lived at home.

• 2:10:05Speaker 03

  Wow. That's... She was 21 and still lived at home at the time?

• 2:10:10Speaker 00

  Wasn't allowed to drink.

• 2:10:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:10:11Speaker 03

  Wow. Wasn't allowed to drink the bubbly because she was underage. How was she underage?

• 2:10:16Speaker 00

  Oh, not even 21, it says. Not yet 21.

• 2:10:19Speaker 03

  Oh, not yet 21. Wow. Wow.

• 2:10:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, that didn't stop them from getting drunk. And we got so drunk on the set one... We had a party. There was supposed to be this party. And the professor from Gilligan's Island played my father. I'm going, "Wow, that's friggin' cool." And we're sitting around this, and we're supposed to be drinking, and we all drank. And it got, it was so bad, they had to reshoot it the next day.

• 2:10:45Speaker 03

  Because you're all drunk.

• 2:10:46Speaker 02

  But, you know, everyone kind of, "Let's cut loose. It's the end of the day," you know?

• 2:10:51Speaker 03

  Wow. Well, that's nuts, man. Tell me about your writing, like, like the novels. Like, what have you written novels about?

• 2:10:59Speaker 02

  Um, they're very bizarre. Uh, they're, the ones, uh, they're both about, um, a plague that comes to the world and takes out, uh, like, two-thirds of the people.

• 2:11:16Speaker 03

  Both of them are about that?

• 2:11:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're, one, the other's a continuation of it. One's called "Magnificent Vibration", the other one's called "World on Fire." And it, uh, um, it's, uh, it's dark humor, very dark humor.

• 2:11:33Speaker 03

  Had you written before that, like, short stories?

• 2:11:36Speaker 02

  I wrote my autobiography by myself.

• 2:11:37Speaker 03

  But you, had you written any fiction?

• 2:11:39Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, as a kid, that was the only thing I was any good at at school, was I got great marks in my essays. Nothing else was any... I was terrible at everything else. Math, geography, history, all that shit. And, um, so, you know, I was already doing what I was planning on doing anyway, so, um, yeah, I started writing poems, and then, you know, and I... Songwriting, to me, the lyrics are something I really take time... You know, music just comes through. It either is there or it isn't there. But the lyrics, you have time to sit back and go, "Does that work? Does that not work?" Whereas with music,

• 2:12:18Speaker 02

  it's kind of instantaneous, or it doesn't happen. Um, so, yeah, I've always kind of written.

• 2:12:27Speaker 03

  And when did you write these novels?

• 2:12:29Speaker 02

  Um, I don't know. Can you tell me that, my friend?

• 2:12:36Speaker 03

  You don't remember?

• 2:12:38Speaker 02

  I don't know, it could have been the 90s, could have been the 2000s. It was probably 2000.

• 2:12:43Speaker 00

  2014 and 2021.

• 2:12:44Speaker 02

  What is it?

• 2:12:45Speaker 00

  2014 was the first one, follow up 2021.

• 2:12:48Speaker 03

  Oh, so 2021 is recent.

• 2:12:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was, yeah, fairly recent.

• 2:12:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:12:54Speaker 02

  The first one was on the New York Times Bestseller.

• 2:12:57Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:12:58Speaker 02

  I sign them all the time, you know, fans bring them and that, but.

• 2:13:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I like writing, I like, I'm writing something now, but it's.

• 2:13:09Speaker 02

  Just something that I do when I'm not writing songs, you know, I kind of gravitate towards that. I've got to be doing something and it was, like I take a guitar to the beach, we go to. Bora Bora and I take a little guitar when I sit on the beach, because I can't just sit on the beach. Feels like a kind of wasted time.

• 2:13:30Speaker 03

  That's wild.

• 2:13:31Speaker 02

  I do relax, but I gotta have a guitar, I gotta be doing something, either writing or, you know, whatever.

• 2:13:36Speaker 03

  And when do you write, do you write longhand, do you write with a?

• 2:13:39Speaker 02

  No, I write on computer, yeah.

• 2:13:41Speaker 03

  You write on a computer, yeah.

• 2:13:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's the thing, like I have, I have a bunch of Beatle lyrics, handwritten Beatle lyrics, right? And they don't exist anymore because everyone writes on the computer. I write, like I have Jessie's Girl, I have the original paper that I wrote Jessie's Girl on and.

• 2:14:00Speaker 03

  What are you doing with that, is it framed?

• 2:14:02Speaker 02

  No, I got it, I know, in a closet somewhere or something.

• 2:14:04Speaker 03

  Really?

• 2:14:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:14:05Speaker 03

  Oh, God, you should frame that.

• 2:14:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I probably should, I, you know, I have all this, all my songs, really, the ones that, some of the, the ones that made it and the ones that didn't, I have them all. So I got interested in that and I started collecting Beatle lyrics because I loved that moment of creation.

• 2:14:21Speaker 03

  How did you get those?

• 2:14:23Speaker 02

  To friend, I have a friend who.

• 2:14:27Speaker 02

  Trades, he's the guy that validates them all for Christie's and for.

• 2:14:35Speaker 02

  You know, Sotheby's and all the big auction houses.

• 2:14:39Speaker 02

  And he, you know, he knows where all the bodies are buried, so I collect stuff like you obviously do, you know, I.

• 2:14:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:14:44Speaker 02

  Have the Titanic number two lifeboat plaque, this plaque that says SS Titanic on it and it's. In a, in a show now on Branson or somewhere, we rented it out.

• 2:14:57Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:14:58Speaker 02

  I loved collecting stuff, I have robots and old 50s robots and.

• 2:15:03Speaker 03

  Well, there's something about collecting something like Beatles lyrics that you know were written by the Beatles. Their hand touched that paper and wrote that down.

• 2:15:12Speaker 02

  No, as a, as a huge fan, it's, it's very powerful stuff, the coolest one I have is Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

• 2:15:18Speaker 03

  Whoa.

• 2:15:19Speaker 02

  They both have had written on it, which it didn't happen much, you know, towards, they, mostly they wrote their own songs, you know. But they both got their hand in this and there's even Wednesday morning at nine o'clock written at the bottom too, the first line from. She's Leaving Home, but Paul did a drawing of the. The Sergeant Pepper cover when he still pictured it as them in Victorian, you know, with, with curtains, that was his original idea. And there's a drawing of that and there's a drawing of Rock and Horse People, which is really good. Because they were, they were really good artists, him and John. And, and that's really cool, it's got a lot of mojo, you know, that looks like there's time been spent on it.

• 2:16:01Speaker 03

  What was the origin of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, wasn't that supposedly about LSD?

• 2:16:06Speaker 02

  No, no, everyone thought it was, but it was a painting that actually. Dave Gilmore owns, David Gilmore owns the painting that Julian Lennon.

• 2:16:18Speaker 02

  Did of a painting that a girl, of Lucy, his friend at school who recently passed away, but. He brought it home and his dad said, what's that, and he said, and Julian said, there's Lucy in the sky with diamonds. And John took that and it just happened to be almost, you know, an anagram for LSD, which is crazy, but it's one of the millions of things that. Happened in the Beatles' lives that you went, that didn't really happen, they had to manufacture that. But no, it really friggin' happened and that's part of what made them, you know, almost like angels, that it was just so supposed to be. And that was one of the things and it was, but everyone thought it was LSD because Lucy in the sky with diamonds.

• 2:16:59Speaker 03

  Right, right, right.

• 2:17:00Speaker 02

  But it was really about the painting that Julian did and.

• 2:17:05Speaker 02

  John just took it and, you know, he was doing drugs at the time and, but he really, he loved Lewis Carroll and it's really what it is, is Lewis Carroll is, is. The lyrics are Lewis Carroll.

• 2:17:16Speaker 03

  Wow, wow, that's crazy, but Lewis Carroll, who wrote Alice in Wonderland. And Alice in Wonderland was also about LSD.

• 2:17:26Speaker 02

  I don't know, I mean.

• 2:17:27Speaker 03

  I think there was a lot of influence.

• 2:17:29Speaker 02

  The Caterpillar was probably high, you know, and I don't know how much, how aware that they all were then, but I know that the Beatle, John loved. Him and loved his writing and he would, I mean, I'm sure he had a wink in there somewhere about it being dope, you know, but. Or.

• 2:17:46Speaker 03

  Well, there was all these substances.

• 2:17:48Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 2:17:48Speaker 03

  There was all these substances.

• 2:17:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, sure.

• 2:17:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:17:52Speaker 02

  Oh, he was, yeah, they were definitely, you know, high at the time and, and high a lot of the time.

• 2:17:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:17:58Speaker 02

  But they had that talent and, you know, a lot of, I. A lot of people think that, you know, all the drugs, but it wasn't, it was, they had the talent, but the drugs. Just maybe took that talent somewhere that they maybe wouldn't have gone if they hadn't have done the drugs, but it, it wasn't drugs that make people creative.

• 2:18:16Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:18:17Speaker 02

  It's what they have inside them that the drug, you know, free, frees whatever resistance there is.

• 2:18:24Speaker 03

  It was the talent and it was also the volume, have you ever read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers?

• 2:18:31Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:18:32Speaker 03

  Well, one of the things it talks about is, it just talks about, it's a great book and one of the things in the book, it talks about why. Something became extraordinary and they talk, he talks about the Beatles and what the Beatles did. They were in Hamburg and they got a gig, I think it was at a strip club. And so they were like playing every night, like five, six hours a night, six days a week, and they were constantly playing. And so they did this for a couple of years and they went back to Liverpool and everyone was like, what the fuck happened to you guys? They were just tight, they were just so locked in and so good that that's when they really became the Beatles and it's just volume.

• 2:19:13Speaker 03

  It's where he came up with the concept of 10,000 hours to achieve mastery in something.

• 2:19:18Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:19:18Speaker 03

  You know, but.

• 2:19:19Speaker 02

  I've heard that, yeah.

• 2:19:20Speaker 03

  I mean, they're a great example of that, it's just an incredible amount of volume of work.

• 2:19:24Speaker 02

  It's like Robert Johnson too, he was an OK guitar player. And he went away like for a year or something, came back and suddenly he was this amazing slide player, you know, crossroads.

• 2:19:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that's why everybody thought he sold his soul to the devil.

• 2:19:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it just happened, you know, but, but they, I don't realize, I don't know if they realized they were woodshedding for the great moment, but that's absolutely what they were doing.

• 2:19:50Speaker 03

  I think they were just doing it to stay alive, it was just, it wasn't paying much, it was just, I mean, they're working at a strip club.

• 2:19:57Speaker 02

  Paul, one of the greatest bass players of all time, he said, I got lumbered with the bass. Because he was a guitar player and Stuart Sutcliffe was the bass player, right? And he fell in love with Astrid, what's her name, who gave them the haircuts? And he said, I'm leaving the band and they said, and, and John said, I'm not playing bass. And George said, I'm not playing bass, so Paul said, I guess I'll play it. So he got the Beatle, found the Beatle bass in Germany and there's a photo where you can see it. And it's still on his case up against the wall in the, where they're playing and, and he's playing the piano in the, in the strip club and. And what he became, you know, with that is just friggin' unbelievable.

• 2:20:38Speaker 03

  Incredible, yeah, it's just a. Wow, it's just so strange how after the fact, you go back and look back on all the different events that had to take place in order for them to become the Beatles. And in many bands would become what they became, it's so, it's just so fascinating to me to see that.

• 2:20:56Speaker 02

  I think everyone's life has that, you know, you can look back, like I look at my marriage, I've been married for 40, 42 years now. And, you know, I was in Australia and my wife was over here in Beloit, Wisconsin. And I went to England and she moved to California and I went back to Australia and she moved back to Beloit and I came over here. And I happened to hook up with a manager at Sound City and at the same time she happened to meet this woman. Who she liked her accent, she was an English woman and she became friends and she was, worked at Sound City, so Barbara came in to work at Sound City and I met her there and. You know, there's all these, I mean, it happened in everybody's life and it's just amazing that we. Have successful lives.

• 2:21:40Speaker 03

  It, it all seems like it's meant to be, but I always wonder if that's like, just, you're looking back. And you're looking for a pattern why it makes sense.

• 2:21:50Speaker 02

  You're just tracing what, what happened by happenstance, you know.

• 2:21:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:21:55Speaker 02

  But that ended up in a good way, you know?

• 2:21:59Speaker 03

  Well, when, it seems like whenever anyone has had an extraordinary life, there's always this fortuitous series of events. That take place that enable this to just become what it became.

• 2:22:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think, you know, you said a lot of it's luck, but, but the luck happens when you stay in the game and I think that. Is the core of it is staying in the game so that, you know, when the moments happen.

• 2:22:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:22:29Speaker 02

  That you are ready.

• 2:22:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's certainly not just luck, there's certainly a lot of other elements involved.

• 2:22:35Speaker 02

  I mean, you gotta woodshed, you gotta have your craft down.

• 2:22:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:22:38Speaker 02

  You gotta be competent.

• 2:22:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:22:41Speaker 02

  You gotta have something to offer.

• 2:22:42Speaker 03

  And you gotta be able to believe in yourself enough to perform when the moment is there. And that's, that's just daunting for a lot of people, the anxiety of it all is just very.

• 2:22:53Speaker 02

  I played with my Back to the Audience for the first three months of being in the first band I was ever in.

• 2:22:59Speaker 03

  Really?

• 2:22:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:23:00Speaker 03

  Why?

• 2:23:00Speaker 02

  I guess I was nervous, you know, I was, I was a blues band, I mean, I was, I kind of was raised. My guitar playing was based on, you know, because of Clapton and all those guys, was based on a lot of the blues players, B.B. King and, you know. All, all the, the early players and, and I was in a blues band and I was like 15 and they were, they were like 25 and. One of them had been in, it was a really rough group, one of them had been in prison and there was one guy that had been in prison a couple of times and it all. The kind of guys that would go to pubs in the weekend and go out and fight. And, which is an Australian tradition, it's the only place I've ever been where you, you go into the men's restroom and there's a sign that says. This is what you do if your buddy gets into a fight.

• 2:23:45Speaker 02

  Like in every bathroom, so I played, and I was, you know, I was shy, they were all like, seemed like adults to me. And they went to my mom and they said, why, why does Richard play with these Back to the Audience? My mom goes, oh, he's probably shy.

• 2:24:02Speaker 02

  And they accepted that and eventually I turned around.

• 2:24:07Speaker 03

  Do you remember the first day you turned around?

• 2:24:09Speaker 02

  No, I wish I did, but it must have been a girl or something. I'm sure it was.

• 2:24:15Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:24:16Speaker 02

  I was the last virgin in the band to be in the youngest.

• 2:24:20Speaker 02

  And believe me, did they give me shit because of that?

• 2:24:24Speaker 03

  I'm sure. Listen, man, you've had a hell of a life. And it's just awesome to see you out there kicking ass, it really is. Like, that video of you that went viral with your shirt off singing Jessie's Girl, like, that pumped me up.

• 2:24:38Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:24:39Speaker 03

  I watched it, I was like, fuck yeah, good for him. Look how good he looks, like, this is kinda crazy. I just love, I love, first of all, that the passion that you had for singing that song was really like it was a new song. And the fact that you've been, I mean, you've been singing that song for how many fucking years, man? Forty, what, forty-six years?

• 2:25:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's closer to the, when that was released, it was, or written, it was closer to the end of World War II than it is now.

• 2:25:08Speaker 03

  That's crazy. That's crazy.

• 2:25:13Speaker 02

  And she is probably in her early, late sixties now.

• 2:25:19Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:25:20Speaker 02

  The girl I wrote it about.

• 2:25:21Speaker 03

  Who is the girl that you wrote it about?

• 2:25:23Speaker 02

  Well, I never learned her name, she was at a stained glass class. It was one of those moments where I was between record deals. And I always wanted to do things with my hand, I would make things out of clay, I was making mirrors out of clay, like sci-fi things, and selling them at the local, you know, swap meet. And I started thinking about stained glass, and I thought,

• 2:25:48Speaker 02

  I could support my family doing stained glass, which was bullshit, but... So I went to this, I went to this class, and there was this girl, and she was hot, you know, it was just another girl that I found hot. And she had a boyfriend there, and I would try and chat with her, I never really had chat with girls. One of the reasons that the guitar really helped there, I was, never could go up and go, hey babe, you know, I was not that, never that guy. So, um, and I tried to talk to her, and she had nothing, didn't want anything to do with me because she had a boyfriend. So I went home and wrote about her in this song, his name is Gary. But, and I tried Gary and didn't sing, so I tried Randy. And that didn't sing right either.

• 2:26:33Speaker 02

  So I ended up with Jessie, and then that seemed to work, so...

• 2:26:36Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:26:37Speaker 02

  But, yeah, she, Oprah went looking for her, actually, she was looking for the women behind the songs. And they found this stained glass guy, and he died two years before, and they'd thrown all the paperwork out a year after that, so...

• 2:26:54Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:26:54Speaker 02

  But they could have found her, they missed her, but I'd be, it'd be wild to me, I'd prob, I don't know if I'd recognize her now, I remember her, what she looked like, but, um...

• 2:27:03Speaker 03

  I wonder if she loved that song.

• 2:27:05Speaker 02

  No, yeah, I mean, she had no idea, she has no idea it was about her, no one's ever come up and said, that was me, right?

• 2:27:11Speaker 03

  That's crazy. Wow. Well, listen, man, it's been awesome meeting you.

• 2:27:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's been really fun, I had a great time.

• 2:27:20Speaker 03

  Thank you very much, and thanks for everything, and congratulations.

• 2:27:23Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 2:27:23Speaker 03

  And you're a bad motherfucker. All right. Go see Rick Springfield in concert, ladies and gentlemen, he's still out there kicking ass. I love it, all right, thank you very much.

• 2:27:34Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 2:27:35Speaker 03

  Bye, everybody.