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[SPEAKER_01]: M.S.W.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Media
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[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to that said, I am Michael Zeldin.
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[SPEAKER_00]: On this week's show, we reissue my extraordinary ninety-minute conversation with Max Weinberg, rock and roll Hall of Fame drummer for Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band.
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[SPEAKER_00]: As we discuss his musical career, his thoughts on music and drumming, including recollections of other great drummers.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Max, welcome to that said.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that said, it's a pleasure to be with you, Michael, on that said.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, thank you.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I read an interview once where you described yourself as the guy in the back out of focus.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But I'm happy to do today is bring you into focus, because you've had an extraordinary career as the long-term drummer for Bruce Springsteen in the history band.
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[SPEAKER_00]: the band leader for Conan O'Brien's late night TV shows and now performing live with your terrific new show Max Weinberg's jukebox.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So let's talk about it, okay?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I've been very fortunate throughout my life.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And when I referred to being out of focus, of course, my focus on what was happening in front and around me was always quite precise.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But invariably, someone would take a picture of Bruce Springsteen and I would be
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[SPEAKER_01]: back over his right shoulder slightly out of focus in the camera's lens and but it's been when I look back at the age of seven the I started playing drums when I was five
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[SPEAKER_01]: That feeling that I got from banging around wasn't even a drum set.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It was sticks on my bed.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That is still present when I play the drums when I sit down.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There's a story that musicians get basically paid for the twenty-two hours of traveling and everything else, and they do the two hours show for free.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Now, that's basically how I looked at my whole career.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's why they call it playing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I've been very fortunate to, of course, been with Bruce in the history band for now, was some forty-seven years.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I have a career in a parallel universe on TV, and you've seen that work for any years.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And being married to my lovely wife Becky since that for forty years, we just celebrated our
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[SPEAKER_01]: our fortieth anniversary, so as I look back, which I don't do very often, I do look back, but in a way that in some way from me, I did catch up to a part of my youthful dreams.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, I really hit the brass frame meeting Becky and producing two wonderful children who are so far along in their careers and their happiness that in the end, they'll see only thing that matters.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And Mazeltov, one forty years of marriage with Becky.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So you said that you started at age five.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So can you take us back to suburban Newark, New Jersey and perhaps the bar mitzvah circuit with herbie Zain and the Saints come marching in?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that was a long day beginnings, actually the beginnings of my interest in drums.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I would probably be
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[SPEAKER_01]: I almost certainly the diagnosed in the last twenty-five to thirty years with as a child back in the fifties with an extreme case of the ADHD.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I was nervous child ringing my hands.
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[SPEAKER_01]: My mother who was an educator noticed this early on and always directed me to the gym teacher.
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[SPEAKER_01]: to physical activity, and they used to be, and I'm taking you a little further back than my so-jerns with herbs saying,
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[SPEAKER_01]: There used to be a fifteen minute TV show and I believe nineteen fifty-three or fifty-four that was the Xavier Cougat show Xavier Cougat was originally a violinist from Cuba who managed to get a TV show with his wife at the time Abby Lane
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[SPEAKER_01]: And he famously later in life married Charo.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But in this band, don't consider that he had.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He was sort of the real life Rickie Ricardo from the I love Lucy show, Desi Arnez.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And everybody played a combat drum, including him, and he played violin as well.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And when my parents threw out my life, they told me we have one TV, which was in their bedroom, a little black and white, you know, about nine inches square.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And it was only TV we had for a long, long time.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And when Xavier Cougat came, a show came on, I was transfixed.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It calmed me down.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And my mother particularly theorized that it must have been the rhythmic thing that I was searching in my sort of physical, you know, anxiety and nervousness for some connection to rhythm.
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[SPEAKER_01]: My father went out and bought me
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[SPEAKER_01]: a miniature Congo drum with a white strap.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I still have that drum.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's actually served as a totem for me my entire life.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You know, back Psalm sixty-three, sixty-two, sixty-three years, because that was my initial sort of introduction in four-ray into drumming.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'd walk around the house, playing this thing, and pretending I was Xavier Cougat.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I can't say I could play it, but I definitely was one of those little kids who, you know, you put, you know, banging with a classic story as spoons on a plot.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But I had my little cungadron in it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I had a cast in head, still does the same head.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And that started my actual inches, like really grabbed me, however,
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[SPEAKER_01]: I was present was booked on the Dorsey Brothers, the famous Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey Brothers summer replacement show.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'd leave it was on CBS in the summer of the nineteen fifty.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I think it was fifty-five.
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[SPEAKER_01]: and later on in Fifty-Six he played on the Milton Burl Show and then of course broke wide all this Presley did in the fall of Fifty-Six on the Ed Sullivan Show.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But we watched this summer show and Elvis Presley was on and it was a it was a lot of shots so you didn't just see Elvis he saw the whole man and when DJ Fontana who was Elvis's original drummer from
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[SPEAKER_01]: I believe, in nineteen fifty four to nineteen sixty eight played on all those record dates, you know, jailhouse rock, hound dog don't be cruel.
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[SPEAKER_01]: When he went into that drum roll in hound dog.
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[SPEAKER_01]: going in out of the first chorus.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That was my call to arms that just completely grabbed me and swept away because suddenly all the attention was on him and I had been kind of, you know, moving my hands at arms and a drumming fashion on this little condodrome.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So it was a long time before I got a drumset but at the age of I was not yet five, just almost turning five.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I just focused in on that, and in the fifties, and we're approximately the same age, almost exactly the same age I would say.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In the fifties, you were sort of either an athlete where you didn't exist.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I wanted to play football, but my, and I was good at later on, kicking the football, and catching a football, but my friends didn't want me to get hurt.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm so glad now at the age of seventy that they didn't.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They were both phenomenal athletes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: My father played letters in many sports at the University of Pennsylvania, but they directed me towards music.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And it was a long time before I got a drum set.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And the Herb Zane story was, uh, I must have been about Seth and I was only boy in our family and I was named after my grandfather who died shortly before I was born.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I got his name.
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[SPEAKER_01]: His name was Max Minwen, and he had five daughters.
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[SPEAKER_01]: of which my mother was the youngest.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She was born in nineteen fifteen.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so I didn't have just one Jewish mother.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I had five Jewish mothers.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Her four older sisters.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And when I say that, I don't mean that in any disparaging way, but I had the interests of basically a very matriarchal family unit.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And we were at an event when I was a little kid.
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[SPEAKER_01]: My mother used to dress me, you know, this week I've been well, we've been talking a lot about Charlie Watts and my mother used to dress me in three piece suits and I was very
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[SPEAKER_01]: As a little kid, structurally turned out, her father dressed well.
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[SPEAKER_01]: My father was sort of a fantastic dresser.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's what their generation did.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So we were at this event and, you know, I was just there in my mother.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You know, they had the basic eight piece, nine piece.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Bar missed the van.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It could have been a wedding or a bar missed one of the local catering holes, which actually was called the Shanta Clare in Short Hill's New Jersey.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And my mother went up to the van leader who was the, I believe the Trump employer.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And he seemed to be the van leader and said, my son can play drums, can he play with you?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And there were friends with the people having the party.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And he looked at me, this little kid, he goes, are you kidding?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And my mother, who was ever the stage mother, gently said, oh, yeah, he can, you know, he can play.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So he said, well, young man, what
can you play?
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[SPEAKER_01]: He said, well, and I said, I can play when the scenes come March again.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I could do a little more of speed and ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I do that song.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I said, and I can kick it off.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Now, I don't know where I got that window kick it off.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But I did like a little sort of Jean Cooper, he wrapped that intro.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This is all very organic.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I haven't been taking drum lessons at this point.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And there's a wonderful video out at the moment of this young girl, I think a name is Nandra, who is a wonder kind on the drums.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I sort of was that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And this is back in nineteen fifty eight I believe I still didn't have a drum set and I was still playing on my sort of army cut bid and
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[SPEAKER_01]: But when I got on the drums, I kind of instinctively knew what to do.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I played it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And it went over like gangbusters as you can imagine this little kid going up there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I was fearless.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I was fearless behind the drums.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And if anything, that's been a whole mark of my, you know, career in drumming that
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[SPEAKER_01]: You know, whatever else is going on, when I'm behind the drums, I mean business.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And he got such a kick out of this herb saying that as somebody recently sent me, if you can believe it, a picture, I was much older, I was probably thirteen or fourteen playing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: at one of his dates with my real rock band.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But I played with him often on the film I was about fourteen.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And he got such a kicky said, well, I'll use Max.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He can learn a song or two.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I'll use him as a special added traction at my dates.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So he paid me fifty cents a dollar.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You know, so instead of, you know,
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[SPEAKER_01]: There are several things going together.
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[SPEAKER_01]: My family will be allowed me to focus on being a drummer for a higher.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Fifty cents, you could go along way in Fifty eight on Fifty cents.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But my father, who was ever the attorney, said, well, I'm that Fifty cents.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You have to take out at that time half of it for taxes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, well, I'm not paying taxes on, but in twenty five twenty five cents.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But the idea was if you're going to make money, you have to be responsible with it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So you take that out and then you take out some savings.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And there's a believe in a powerful story in my family that my first words were due diligence.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And that's how he was raised.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so I'm a bit of a different drummer that you always heard about.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But her name was our local S. County guy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: As a matter of fact, he's mentioned prominently in all of Harlan Cobins books.
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[SPEAKER_01]: his myron ballads or books he writes sort of you know thrillers and promise paperbacks and they want now heartbacks end of paperbacks but he grew up in Lincoln's New Jersey.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Heartland COVID did so we mentioned certain things.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So that was what was interesting about that was I didn't initially
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[SPEAKER_01]: I could play what they called the rock beat in those days was called later on, the twist beat.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But everything in the early days before the twist, which was, I guess, six-key, one or six-d-two, was pretty much swing-based or Latin.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I learned how to play.
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[SPEAKER_01]: A Chacha, a meringue, a tango, a ditzy lantern, a Broadway two-step.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And long before I ever learned how to play a rock beat,
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[SPEAKER_01]: And that served me well in the ensuing career because I was what they used to call a legitimate drummer, where, you know, you might not be buddy rich, but you can play a little bit of everything and keep it together for the band.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, eventually I played as the drummer with Herbsame, but then, you know, I was a rock generation guy, and there's a picture of me literally taken
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it was taken in October of six to three with my four piece band.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And we were based on basically elf Earth's band.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We were in Dixie Land Band and our trumpeter was the front guy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And it was still one of my best friends, Douglas Katz.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And then what happened today was, I was doing these gigs and playing and I was known as, you know, Max and drummer.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I had a clash in my home room.
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[SPEAKER_01]: a young girl whose family was going to, and this is kind of an important part of my background, she was going, her father was going to London on business Thanksgiving week, and we were friends, and they left on November, twentieth,
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[SPEAKER_01]: In November of twenty-second Friday, November of sixty-three, I was scheduled to play at the school dance with this band.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And of course we all know what happened on November of twenty-second nineteen sixty-three.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In any case, my friend came back to following week with a record called an album called With the Beatles.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Nobody, I didn't know who the Beatles were.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And we were at a party in our house.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You know, we're all thirteen years, twelve thirteen years old.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I remember hearing, please please me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: and I was a big Emily Brothers stand because I had two much older sisters and so we had a lot of forty-five in our house and they sounded like the Emily Brothers that was in the first week of December of sixty-three so in January you started seeing all this publicity the Beatles are coming so nobody knew who the Beatles were but I knew because this friend of mine brought this record back but
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[SPEAKER_01]: It was like, oh my generation, I'm sure you as well, at your age, that appearance on February ninth.
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[SPEAKER_01]: you know television was so different back then you didn't see you know you were lucky if you caught news on TV news on television was fifteen minutes at six o'clock so you know the whole pandemonium when the Beatles landed on February seven I wasn't what really aware of that I mean it was in a newspaper but I didn't really read the newspaper but then everybody watched of course always watched that solid and suddenly ladies and gentlemen the Beatles
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[SPEAKER_01]: and my life changed because I already been drumming and and I went immediately to Ringo Star as wow he's doing what I sort of can do I guess I can do that
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[SPEAKER_01]: And that just sent me off on this, someone called a dream in reality, it's kind of a fantasy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But you never know, if you work hard and put in the time, fantasies can become real and you can catch up to part of your dreams, which I did.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And Ringo was, you talked that DJ Fontana, but really Ringo was your aha moment, as much as anything else.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I really believed that he set the paradigm of an equal participant in a compositional band.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan, and I was looking at the old tapes of Milton Burrell and
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[SPEAKER_00]: Elvis and others, their drummer was always on the stage, flat behind the lead singer.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You couldn't even see G.J.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Fontana on many of these things.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was right behind Elvis.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When the Beatles appeared on it, Sullivan, he was on a really high riser.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was very evident.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's almost saying visually, this guy is an important part of our band too.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You need to see him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And I thought for you that must have been also instructive because the only other guy in our generation and you're right, you are twenty-nine days older than me.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You're a kid.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The only other we had the ventures and wipe out, but the other band that was important at this time was Dave Clark and the Dave Clark five.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And if you look at the early setups of him on television, they played with the drum upfront and the band members behind it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So all of this sort of
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[SPEAKER_01]: converging in an age thirteen and fourteen when you're sort of at your most impressionable I think had a matter a lot well you know I had been prior to the Beatles I was one of the guys that I knew was slightly older than me it was a big beach voice fan and he took me he was he took me to see the beach voice in September of sixty three and the beach voice of course
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[SPEAKER_01]: was interesting because they these sort of physically in their parents came off like the Kingston trio which wasn't an accident the strike shirts and the white pants and you know we had just passed through the hugehood manifold revival the Elvis was in the army a lot of Elvis one of these came up during that they filled the vacuum and then it made some great records but they weren't Elvis Presley
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[SPEAKER_01]: uh... so it was a bit of a wasteland and shudby checker had to hit with the twist and if you listen to those records
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[SPEAKER_01]: The rhythm sections were incredible.
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[SPEAKER_01]: These were jazz musicians who were playing rock sessions, rock and roll sessions during the day, playing their jazz shows at night.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So the Beach Boys, the focus of the Beach Boys, if you can believe it or not, was Dennis Wilson.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He was the best looking.
20:53.365 --> 20:57.609
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, there were the four of them across the front, but he was always on a
riser.
20:59.843 --> 21:02.546
[SPEAKER_01]: behind the rest of them because he was not beach boy.
21:03.166 --> 21:09.472
[SPEAKER_01]: So, and if you look at Jean Cruppa with Benny Goodman, he was prominently displayed.
21:10.073 --> 21:19.682
[SPEAKER_01]: So, the history of the drummers in the back but featured actually goes back, you know, even, you know, my first became aware of it.
21:20.342 --> 21:33.249
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, much later, uh, chickweb in the nineteen thirties of chickweb orchestra who had this, you know, like a Keith Moon type drum set and it would wheel it on and he, uh, you know, he was buddy richest favorite drummer.
21:33.769 --> 21:38.692
[SPEAKER_01]: So the family there's knew that if you had a hot drummer, you wanted to showcase it.
21:39.793 --> 21:44.814
[SPEAKER_01]: Awesome, the Beatles, what's funny is when you look at, there are great books out now.
21:45.775 --> 21:49.836
[SPEAKER_01]: Most of the time when they were on tour, he wasn't on a drum riser.
21:49.876 --> 21:51.536
[SPEAKER_01]: He was on the stage with the rest of them.
21:52.296 --> 22:01.039
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, because it cost extra money to build a drum riser and to usually other bands on the show, there are other drum sets set up next to his.
22:01.979 --> 22:10.486
[SPEAKER_01]: So, but the, and then the excellent show, what was brilliant about that was the iconic stage set on that first appearance on February,
22:12.750 --> 22:28.355
[SPEAKER_01]: It had these arrows, very geometric, very, very solid baths, mid-century modern graphic design, and had these arrows pointing in from the sides, emphasizing the four guys.
22:28.575 --> 22:29.636
[SPEAKER_01]: They were dressed alike.
22:29.996 --> 22:31.216
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that was an unusual.
22:31.916 --> 22:34.077
[SPEAKER_01]: What was really unusual, of course, was their hair.
22:37.042 --> 22:42.844
[SPEAKER_01]: And Ringo was on this beautifully designed, specially designed drum riser.
22:44.925 --> 22:54.349
[SPEAKER_01]: Many, many years later, when I got on television on the late night programs, we had a, you know, we modeled our drum riser on Ringo's drum riser.
22:54.429 --> 22:57.590
[SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't a rectangular square, it was round.
22:58.900 --> 23:01.963
[SPEAKER_01]: mainly because he's a and I thought to bring up a joke up less space.
23:02.904 --> 23:08.130
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was visually arresting because the circles were a design element.
23:09.251 --> 23:20.182
[SPEAKER_01]: The saw bass was the great, you know, both industrial and theatrical designer of album covers and movies, psycho and and
23:21.103 --> 23:25.326
[SPEAKER_01]: and movies like that, and very influential, and I'm sure it came from that.
23:25.826 --> 23:28.388
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, they were a four-piece band.
23:28.828 --> 23:36.373
[SPEAKER_01]: The first time I saw it on Elvis, as I said, it was a lot to a single camera, and it was very grainy.
23:36.413 --> 23:39.455
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, the TV reception was nothing.
23:39.475 --> 23:42.817
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a my eyes, you could almost barely see them.
23:43.792 --> 23:46.754
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, they had one camera angle, so it was four guys up there.
23:46.935 --> 23:53.840
[SPEAKER_01]: Ringel, Elvis was the front, Scottie playing guitar, Bill playing bass, and DJ in the background on the floor.
23:54.841 --> 24:00.946
[SPEAKER_01]: I've actually had a picture of me playing that exact drum set at DJ Fontana's house.
24:01.587 --> 24:12.516
[SPEAKER_01]: That's another story, but Ringel, and I say this in the big beat book that I wrote in newspapers, one, Ringel did for drummers in the sixties, what Jean Cooper did for drummers in the thirties.
24:14.043 --> 24:35.029
[SPEAKER_01]: he basically made the drummer a high-priced guy and by that it wasn't just economically it was it put the focus as an equal member of the performing unit and you know I have a theory that the churn combos you know before rock and roll bands were
24:37.034 --> 24:40.180
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, the Beatles were so unique on somebody level, say, wrote their own material.
24:40.240 --> 24:41.041
[SPEAKER_01]: That was unusual.
24:41.061 --> 24:42.083
[SPEAKER_01]: They looked unusual.
24:42.444 --> 24:44.107
[SPEAKER_01]: They were incredibly polished.
24:44.547 --> 24:48.534
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you notice, they played the Ed Sullivan show and they're very cool.
24:49.553 --> 24:51.714
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, they're very laid back as they're playing.
24:52.235 --> 24:57.898
[SPEAKER_01]: Two nights later, they played at the Washington Coliseum, Alive Show, and they're going crazy.
24:58.438 --> 25:00.919
[SPEAKER_01]: So they instinctively knew they had done so much TV.
25:00.939 --> 25:05.282
[SPEAKER_01]: They instinctively knew that on TV it magnifies you.
25:05.322 --> 25:06.943
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't have to be histrionic.
25:07.483 --> 25:09.824
[SPEAKER_01]: And they're only twenty-one twenty-two years old.
25:10.004 --> 25:11.245
[SPEAKER_01]: It's incredible the maturity.
25:13.332 --> 25:29.398
[SPEAKER_01]: Immediately everybody, you know, who had these ventures, safaris, instrumental bands, the surf bands, you know, in sixty-two and sixty-three, immediately looked for singers, guitar players who could sing and it was literally overnight.
25:30.443 --> 25:40.730
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember one day February tenth, I told the guys in my little Dixieland band that I'm going in another direction.
25:41.430 --> 25:43.392
[SPEAKER_01]: And I went out looking for guitar players.
25:43.632 --> 25:46.034
[SPEAKER_01]: And I found a guy who was in, I was in seventh grade.
25:46.074 --> 25:46.954
[SPEAKER_01]: He was a ninth grade.
25:47.655 --> 25:48.535
[SPEAKER_01]: We had no base.
25:49.536 --> 25:56.440
[SPEAKER_01]: But two weeks later, I was at a, my friends are rabbis, sons of bar mitzler, February of sixth before.
25:57.001 --> 25:59.783
[SPEAKER_01]: And he had a
friend who lived on his block who was invited.
26:00.623 --> 26:01.483
[SPEAKER_01]: He played guitar.
26:02.604 --> 26:04.145
[SPEAKER_01]: So I, well, and he was my age.
26:04.945 --> 26:07.606
[SPEAKER_01]: He was, you know, a couple of months older than me.
26:08.247 --> 26:10.247
[SPEAKER_01]: And, okay, now I got two guitar players.
26:10.348 --> 26:11.148
[SPEAKER_01]: We didn't have a base.
26:11.668 --> 26:14.650
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, he had a friend who was quite a bit older.
26:15.210 --> 26:18.431
[SPEAKER_01]: And he was this other, you know, he was three years older than us.
26:18.992 --> 26:25.695
[SPEAKER_01]: And he had a magnetone guitar in a magnetone amp, which was made by Sears.
26:26.455 --> 26:27.996
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was probably twenty bucks.
26:28.656 --> 26:34.065
[SPEAKER_01]: But you could detail in the guitar to almost not quite, but almost an act of lower.
26:34.827 --> 26:37.271
[SPEAKER_01]: And you could get it to sort of sound like a bass.
26:38.112 --> 26:39.895
[SPEAKER_01]: So now we have two guitars.
26:41.032 --> 26:57.785
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, a jury-reg, jury-reg base and me, and immediately we started playing, actually there was a short live genre of do-up guys who picked up instruments, so you might have a song called I'd had it.
26:58.786 --> 27:04.250
[SPEAKER_01]: Or, you know, we did a probably a miserable version of Dion's The Wanderer.
27:05.518 --> 27:08.739
[SPEAKER_01]: That was, so, you know, you would never attempt a beetle song.
27:09.219 --> 27:23.961
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know any bands back then, who could actually figure out how to play a beetle song except their covers, like twist and shout, or money, my barrel of strong, which were staples of sort of, now they call him garage bands back then.
27:24.001 --> 27:26.162
[SPEAKER_01]: They, there was no adjective.
27:26.282 --> 27:27.722
[SPEAKER_01]: It was just, you're in a band.
27:28.422 --> 27:32.383
[SPEAKER_01]: And man, as I said earlier, combo comes from combination.
27:33.129 --> 27:40.678
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've always loved that term because it was a combination of musicians and their instruments, but also the combination of personalities.
27:41.739 --> 27:50.228
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, a true band is always going to have power centers and the Beatles were a true band.
27:51.890 --> 28:06.913
[SPEAKER_01]: and like any band, any democracy struggling to produce, you know, you've got your more forceful leaders, and you've got your responders, but everybody has to say, and that was quite different in a lot of ways that had gone on before.
28:07.853 --> 28:15.935
[SPEAKER_01]: The ventures, who would the great hitmaker surf rock instrumental bands, they were a band, but they didn't sing.
28:16.335 --> 28:17.995
[SPEAKER_01]: It's incredible that you can have
28:19.012 --> 28:22.793
[SPEAKER_01]: worldwide success as an instrumental group.
28:23.353 --> 28:41.459
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was the sort of the slow up to February ninth transfer of the instrumental groups and the do up groups, which were Occupella Seniors Melding before the Beatles happened.
28:41.639 --> 28:48.241
[SPEAKER_01]: But then when the Beatles happened, suddenly everybody just lays a focus on the instrumental part of it.
28:49.160 --> 28:50.280
[SPEAKER_01]: and the vocal part of it.
28:50.941 --> 28:59.684
[SPEAKER_01]: I always said, when I was a kid, if I could find a group of musicians who could play their instruments like the ventures and sing like the Beatles, we would make it.
29:00.504 --> 29:17.590
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, in your thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old, you know, you think you can conquer the world and which is a good thing because it fuels your motivation, your willingness to spend, forget ten thousand hours, a hundred thousand hours learning your instrument, learning the business,
29:18.520 --> 29:28.363
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, recently I've been going through my archives and I have these contracts and publicity flyers that my father gave me the template for.
29:28.844 --> 29:34.505
[SPEAKER_01]: And I would sign them, you know, dear so-and-so, may I introduce myself?
29:34.866 --> 29:43.148
[SPEAKER_01]: I am the drummer and business manager for New Jersey's premiere, Youthful Rock and Roll combo, The Excellence.
29:43.849 --> 29:47.530
[SPEAKER_01]: We are, and I would describe them, and I would offer our services,
29:48.651 --> 29:51.353
[SPEAKER_01]: for your franny occasion.
29:52.454 --> 29:59.421
[SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps this week's routine or of our midst of them, please call on the undersigned, you know, my father's an attorney.
29:59.441 --> 30:05.767
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know, that copies of these letters that I had a little bit formal tape operator, and I would solicit people.
30:06.508 --> 30:07.628
[SPEAKER_01]: And you taught me marketing.
30:08.009 --> 30:11.650
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you're going to be serious about this, you've had a approach of like a professional.
30:12.410 --> 30:21.293
[SPEAKER_01]: And my mother's thing was, you know, as I started to mature, you know, when you show up in a show, this is way before I had any success.
30:21.334 --> 30:30.317
[SPEAKER_01]: You shave, you dress up, you're on time, you'd be professional, and you, you know, you do more than they expect.
30:31.785 --> 30:38.510
[SPEAKER_01]: And on the other side of that, and if it's from eight to eleven, my father showed me how to write in a bonus structure.
30:38.950 --> 30:53.820
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you wanted us to play the eleven, fifteen, I had a little codicell that said, overtime rates will be, you know, ten dollars per hour or any part of the same.
30:55.861 --> 30:57.222
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is the training I had.
30:57.242 --> 31:06.608
[SPEAKER_01]: The one at the time I met Bruce in the East Street band, I had been playing what I consider professionally for fifteen or sixteen years.
31:06.848 --> 31:12.331
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, in other words, getting paid
for it, trying to get better, the Beatles, of course.
31:13.752 --> 31:21.297
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, what was so cool about that and being that age, I'm sure your relate is that, you know, they made it so, looks so easy.
31:22.308 --> 31:24.390
[SPEAKER_01]: But when I can do that, I'm doing that.
31:24.770 --> 31:25.911
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm as good as that guy.
31:26.031 --> 31:32.156
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you know, in my, in my useful, you know, nice day.
31:32.556 --> 31:38.641
[SPEAKER_01]: But that, you know, before the real world sets in, you know, I had my beetle boots.
31:38.741 --> 31:40.823
[SPEAKER_01]: I had my wide wheel for a Roy pants.
31:40.903 --> 31:42.124
[SPEAKER_01]: I was skinny as a rail.
31:42.184 --> 31:43.705
[SPEAKER_01]: I probably weighed a hundred pounds.
31:44.266 --> 31:47.368
[SPEAKER_01]: I had my black turtle neck and my brown suede jacket.
31:47.989 --> 31:49.090
[SPEAKER_01]: And my beetle haircut.
31:50.888 --> 32:08.483
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, of course, I had the black horn-want buddy Holly type classes, but I was the first guy in my area at kind of, you know, in South Orange and Jersey, South Orange and Maplewood to kind of like pick up the English thing.
32:09.163 --> 32:09.444
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
32:09.684 --> 32:16.530
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, you just talk about yourself and describe your Natalie attired
32:18.482 --> 32:36.473
[SPEAKER_00]: persona and we've been talking about early influences on you and before we turn to the street band and that career I want we can't not stop for a moment and talk about influences and talk about Charlie Watts.
32:37.333 --> 32:47.005
[SPEAKER_00]: So can you tell us about him in an article that I read an interview you gave for the Guardian?
32:47.025 --> 32:53.474
[SPEAKER_00]: You said of Charlie that he is not just a drummer, he's a genre.
32:54.415 --> 32:54.635
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
32:55.076 --> 33:12.756
[SPEAKER_00]: And perhaps you can tell us about, well, you had a very close relationship, a family relationship with Charlie Watts and his family, but perhaps you can talk about Charlie and his drumming and the importance of him, because he was really a jazz drummer, drumming on the ones in the threes, and influenced you enormously, it seems, and stylistically.
33:13.687 --> 33:28.560
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, yes, it's a mindamentally sad time now, we're almost a week into the news and there's so much to say about Charlie Watts with respect to drumming.
33:29.400 --> 33:37.067
[SPEAKER_01]: Charlie was an interesting character, a seminal character in Rock and Roll music, because he did have
33:38.645 --> 33:44.627
[SPEAKER_01]: And admired, he had the Jasmine sense of ability, and admired the drummers of the thirties, forties, and early fifties.
33:45.047 --> 33:50.409
[SPEAKER_01]: Check out Hamilton was his big main influence, but he knew all that he knew the drumming of all these people.
33:50.809 --> 33:59.071
[SPEAKER_01]: And he was two years older than Mac and Keith
approximately, and the Wyman was yet another year or two older than Charlie.
34:00.952 --> 34:03.553
[SPEAKER_01]: And he was a wonderful graphic designer and he was working.
34:03.593 --> 34:09.655
[SPEAKER_01]: He was working steady as a commercial artist and love jazz.
34:09.895 --> 34:16.437
[SPEAKER_01]: So he often said that he was sort of, you know, he had to solve the jazz drama trapped in a rock and roll band.
34:16.737 --> 34:18.458
[SPEAKER_01]: Be a well, yes, it happened to be the
34:18.578 --> 34:35.032
[SPEAKER_01]: greatest rock and roll band for a number of reasons not just because the music, you know, but for their longevity and for their impact, Charlie understood organically the role of the drummer, no matter what else.
34:36.141 --> 34:40.365
[SPEAKER_01]: No one ever got hired, except buddy Rich, to do a drum solo.
34:40.485 --> 34:42.246
[SPEAKER_01]: You're there to support the band.
34:42.687 --> 34:45.469
[SPEAKER_01]: You're there to smooth over the rough edges.
34:46.010 --> 34:58.600
[SPEAKER_01]: The drummers that Chico Hamilton had, sorry that Charlie Watson hired like Chico, Philly Joe Jones, Joe Jones, Sunny Grid, the list goes on and on and on, did that for their bands.
34:58.640 --> 35:00.102
[SPEAKER_01]: When it was that time to shine,
35:03.354 --> 35:13.903
[SPEAKER_01]: They pulled it off, but they were, you know, most people don't know, Charlie's main model was drummer who tragically died not long after he was thirty.
35:14.223 --> 35:15.464
[SPEAKER_01]: His name is David Tuff.
35:16.165 --> 35:25.192
[SPEAKER_01]: David Tuff was one of the, one of the basins he did was he was the original drummer from Woody Herman in the forties, and David Tuff
35:25.973 --> 35:39.697
[SPEAKER_01]: When you talk to an I have in the past, so many of these drummers are gone now, but I've talked to everybody about David Tuff, John Morello, from the David Rubeck court, Ted, Mount Lewis, and some of Charlie's heroes, right?
35:39.897 --> 35:46.419
[SPEAKER_01]: David Tuff was everybody's favorite drummer for his style and the sound of his drums.
35:47.550 --> 35:51.651
[SPEAKER_01]: He made them sound like the wind and whatever it was lower high.
35:51.751 --> 35:55.532
[SPEAKER_01]: So he wasn't a technician, but he had such an impact.
35:55.892 --> 36:06.335
[SPEAKER_01]: And he's definitely not a name that, you know, I think, you know, most people of the certain age would know what he reached from being on the Johnny Carson show and, you know, some of these.
36:06.415 --> 36:11.236
[SPEAKER_01]: But known to drummers, David Tauff was the cream of the creme.
36:12.096 --> 36:14.838
[SPEAKER_01]: And Charlie, he was Charlie, so he had a drama, one of them.
36:15.638 --> 36:19.280
[SPEAKER_01]: But he was sartorously, splendid, fiercely dressed.
36:20.620 --> 36:27.404
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you look at Charlie Watts, and then look at Dave Chaff, there was a physical resemblance.
36:28.945 --> 36:35.268
[SPEAKER_01]: Charlie was an outlier, because he was very open about his sort of sardonic
36:36.288 --> 36:40.731
[SPEAKER_01]: kind of half teasing, you know, this pain of rock and roll in general.
36:40.851 --> 36:52.900
[SPEAKER_01]: And I remember we were playing in London in the eighties, and I invited he and his wife Shirley and some friends to our show.
36:53.000 --> 36:58.203
[SPEAKER_01]: I think we were playing Wembley, Reiner, Wembley Stadium, and he demuaged.
36:59.324 --> 36:59.925
[SPEAKER_01]: But he said,
37:00.942 --> 37:06.145
[SPEAKER_01]: It would be lovely if I could get his daughter was a teenager, I guess, a teenager at the time.
37:06.705 --> 37:08.526
[SPEAKER_01]: And her friends, they take it.
37:08.566 --> 37:10.387
[SPEAKER_01]: So he had no interest in seeing us.
37:11.348 --> 37:18.071
[SPEAKER_01]: And he'd rather be with Arabian horses or reading a book, picking out clothes.
37:18.491 --> 37:21.493
[SPEAKER_01]: And he was so charming that I wasn't offended.
37:22.073 --> 37:23.934
[SPEAKER_01]: And I said, I totally get it.
37:26.996 --> 37:38.521
[SPEAKER_01]: rock and roll wasn't his thing although he appreciated and absorbed and internalized the in total vocabulary of rhythm and blues blues and rock and roll.
37:39.101 --> 37:40.962
[SPEAKER_01]: So Charlie when I said he was a genre
37:42.077 --> 37:48.421
[SPEAKER_01]: When I was a kid, you'd look at, for people to have village voice was a, it was called an underground paper at the time.
37:48.441 --> 37:51.143
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a, published in giant financial religion.
37:51.523 --> 37:56.306
[SPEAKER_01]: I guess you could call it kind of a subversive at times a newspaper.
37:56.326 --> 37:57.527
[SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't a handout.
37:58.548 --> 37:59.248
[SPEAKER_01]: You pay for it.
37:59.288 --> 38:01.570
[SPEAKER_01]: Jules Fife was their political cartoonist.
38:02.110 --> 38:04.512
[SPEAKER_01]: They had an incredible section in the back.
38:05.192 --> 38:26.304
[SPEAKER_01]: which by the way is the way I met Bruce Springsteen years later, but when I was a kid all the musicians read it for the public noticed music and it was about three or four pages long of ads and invariably every other issue you would come along more than one ad that said wanted Charlie Watts type drummer.
38:27.623 --> 38:35.225
[SPEAKER_01]: So when I say it became a genre, he was, everybody, every drummer knew exactly what that meant, what that meant.
38:35.946 --> 38:39.367
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, simple, but not easy to do.
38:40.407 --> 38:46.069
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, Charlie O'Goat from a song like the perfect example is jumping Jack Flash.
38:47.383 --> 38:57.471
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, we've all heard that at the advances, weddings for Nixon's corporate events for the last fifty something years, and invariably the drummers play it wrong.
38:59.152 --> 39:01.414
[SPEAKER_01]: There are no drum fills in that song.
39:01.574 --> 39:06.338
[SPEAKER_01]: It's strictly groove and beat in the very
specific kind of
39:07.606 --> 39:23.982
[SPEAKER_01]: behind the beat way, which is where the one and the three really dictate the time, the down beat, and the back beat is slightly delayed, which when people talk about Charlie's growth, the great onwards, whether it's
39:25.426 --> 39:31.328
[SPEAKER_01]: Charlie Al Jackson, who was the great mentor's soul drummer from Stacks.
39:31.948 --> 39:37.010
[SPEAKER_01]: And drummers of that ill, Roger Hawkins, Ziggy Model S.D.
39:37.110 --> 39:41.471
[SPEAKER_01]: from New Orleans, Earl Palmer, how blame?
39:41.511 --> 39:42.171
[SPEAKER_01]: What they did?
39:42.872 --> 39:47.413
[SPEAKER_01]: Was they delaying the, what they used to call the afterbeat just a millisecond?
39:47.573 --> 39:49.954
[SPEAKER_01]: And it made the music sit up.
39:50.294 --> 39:52.915
[SPEAKER_01]: I say it made it sort of France.
39:53.815 --> 40:03.998
[SPEAKER_01]: It's something that I noticed in my analysis when I was a teenager and in my twenties of what made certain records pop and certain records not.
40:04.718 --> 40:13.301
[SPEAKER_01]: And very often it was this feeling certainly you listen to James Brown records that that funk that came from the placements.
40:14.416 --> 40:19.902
[SPEAKER_01]: of the downbeat, the number one B and three, and the back beat, number two and four.
40:20.863 --> 40:37.880
[SPEAKER_01]: And what it turned me on to was the drumming, the beauty of the drumming, and the real part of the drumming was the space between that one and that two, and how the drummer arcsily, whether knowingly or just organically,
40:39.871 --> 40:41.152
[SPEAKER_01]: deals with that space.
40:41.332 --> 40:45.097
[SPEAKER_01]: There are dramas you play very on the beat and it can be very exciting.
40:45.958 --> 40:49.081
[SPEAKER_01]: But you want that tension between the other instruments.
40:49.141 --> 40:50.643
[SPEAKER_01]: We do this in the East Street Band.
40:51.184 --> 40:55.649
[SPEAKER_01]: Bruce, for example, loves to feel like I'm pulling back.
40:57.167 --> 41:26.434
[SPEAKER_01]: not dragging it's not you're not funny slow what you're doing is you're creating this this natural musical tension and that's where the excitement lays that's why in my view in my humble opinion the classic records had lasted it's a big element of those classic wrestling records that and of course you know there were a lot of drummers on you know in the garage man's as we call them the frapp rock the Kingsman and the you know the the party songs Louis Louis
41:27.074 --> 41:30.737
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that wasn't necessarily an objective, but Charlie did this naturally.
41:30.757 --> 41:41.023
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's all about understanding the role of the drummer, which he did, and him, Ringo, particularly did better than almost anybody else.
41:41.444 --> 41:44.346
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and Ringo in part, because he was left handed.
41:44.506 --> 41:45.867
[SPEAKER_00]: So he had a little bit of delay.
41:45.887 --> 41:54.952
[SPEAKER_00]: He was playing a right handed kit, and he was left handed drummer playing with his hands in a matched position as opposed to an unmatched position.
41:56.555 --> 41:58.356
[SPEAKER_00]: funny sort of delay in his style.
41:59.337 --> 42:12.124
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, the interesting imagine a match grip, which classical people call the Tempity style, the most well-known jazz drummer in England when they were teenagers was a guy named Phil Seaman.
42:13.290 --> 42:15.391
[SPEAKER_01]: And he was Ginger Baker's hero.
42:15.692 --> 42:20.735
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, Ginger Baker was an accolade, almost a disciple of Phil Seaman.
42:21.615 --> 42:27.299
[SPEAKER_01]: And he was a bit of a tragic character and a bit of an unhealthy, habitative character.
42:27.439 --> 42:37.345
[SPEAKER_01]: But he, you see him on TV occasionally, or if you were into jazz, a trend they called it, in some cases, he played match grip.
42:38.666 --> 42:41.908
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's interesting, and Ringle didn't take drum lessons.
42:43.552 --> 42:50.376
[SPEAKER_01]: Jazz players typically play with what they call military style, which is, you know, people call it palm up with a hands are different.
42:50.396 --> 42:55.318
[SPEAKER_01]: And that came out of marching band where the snare drums, the marching snare drums were tilted.
42:55.719 --> 42:58.480
[SPEAKER_01]: So you couldn't play with the same grip in both hands.
42:59.621 --> 43:04.043
[SPEAKER_01]: You've had to figure out how to get your hand over this tilted rim.
43:06.264 --> 43:07.285
[SPEAKER_01]: Ring of the self-taught.
43:07.325 --> 43:12.528
[SPEAKER_01]: If you give a child a pair of drumsticks, they will hold it match grip.
43:13.539 --> 43:16.900
[SPEAKER_01]: That is the most natural way to address a drum.
43:17.940 --> 43:18.921
[SPEAKER_01]: The whole is the same way.
43:19.481 --> 43:24.142
[SPEAKER_01]: And you have to be taught the other way, the military way.
43:24.602 --> 43:26.583
[SPEAKER_01]: And drumming came out of the military.
43:27.163 --> 43:29.944
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was really used as, you know, called arms.
43:30.344 --> 43:39.787
[SPEAKER_01]: And there are twenty-six rudiments that make up all of drumming that if you study it, I have, you know, there were different
43:40.427 --> 43:44.750
[SPEAKER_01]: what they call counteroffs for different military maneuvers.
43:45.430 --> 43:47.351
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is going back to the sixteen hundreds.
43:47.372 --> 43:52.055
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course the drama is the oldest instrument, whether it was a law played with a branch.
43:53.455 --> 44:01.040
[SPEAKER_01]: Symbols originally were used to alert both military sides of impending something.
44:01.641 --> 44:04.442
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's incredible to me how the history was morphed.
44:05.103 --> 44:06.164
[SPEAKER_01]: Wringle of course, you know,
44:07.328 --> 44:09.029
[SPEAKER_01]: particularly in the early days, for so much heat.
44:09.129 -->
44:17.793
[SPEAKER_01]: Ringo is one of the most astounding drummers on record that you'll ever find because he was the best song drummer.
44:18.633 --> 44:21.755
[SPEAKER_01]: He just figured out the perfect stuff to play all the time.
44:22.315 --> 44:27.898
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've often said that drummers, you know, there's a certain amount, there's definitely a lot of skill.
44:29.439 --> 44:33.601
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure there was a bit of destiny, but you know, in my own personal case,
44:34.593 --> 44:44.057
[SPEAKER_01]: you know how many lifetimes can you go through before you bump up against a Bruce Springsteen who's an originator, a creator, a songwriter.
44:44.277 --> 44:46.378
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's a lot of great drummers out there.
44:46.578 --> 44:59.943
[SPEAKER_01]: I've had a wonderful platform to use my ideas, my abilities, through the years, coming on forty-seven years, I guess it is to advance his agenda by what I can do.
45:01.043 --> 45:13.050
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, what we do, me Charlie Ringo, you know, the rock drummers, as they said, some people have observed, it's simple, but it ain't easy.
45:14.271 --> 45:16.292
[SPEAKER_01]: And Charlie Watts was the master of that.
45:17.581 --> 45:18.802
[SPEAKER_01]: There's only one Charlie was.
45:20.783 --> 45:21.883
[SPEAKER_01]: He'll never be replaced.
45:22.043 --> 45:23.424
[SPEAKER_01]: Our good friend Steve Jordan.
45:24.324 --> 45:31.228
[SPEAKER_01]: When I heard the news that Charlie was before he passed that he was ill, that what do they do?
45:31.328 --> 45:34.890
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, Steve Jordan and unbelievable drummer, the perfect.
45:35.690 --> 45:40.671
[SPEAKER_01]: The perfect individual to sit in that drum stool.
45:41.091 --> 45:45.612
[SPEAKER_01]: He's not replacing, but he's sitting in that drum stool and he'll do a phenomenal job.
45:46.433 --> 45:48.033
[SPEAKER_01]: So the music can continue.
45:57.917 --> 46:17.234
[SPEAKER_00]: I heard you say once in talking about Charlie Watts influence on you that if you listen to street fighting man and one of the USA you see sort of like homage in your drumming on that song to street fighting man very similar.
46:17.255 --> 46:22.719
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't go so far as to say you might find theft
46:24.912 --> 46:26.313
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I prefer homage.
46:26.934 --> 46:37.484
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, certainly homage, and I had been listening to my own sort of content of stone's greatest stuff, you know, to really, and I did, I did that, you know, I do that generally.
46:37.584 --> 46:45.853
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I have taken from all the great dramas, as all the great dramas have taken from preceding generations of them.
46:46.413 --> 46:48.774
[SPEAKER_01]: And I take from all from, as I see, I see it.
46:49.154 --> 46:54.697
[SPEAKER_01]: I saw a kid playing literally on pots and pans and ash cans in Kingston, Jamaica.
46:54.717 --> 46:57.398
[SPEAKER_01]: And he was about the funkiest thing I've ever
seen.
46:58.318 --> 47:00.639
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, it was all, it was amazing.
47:00.699 --> 47:01.700
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've learned from that.
47:01.820 --> 47:03.700
[SPEAKER_01]: So, it's me fighting, man.
47:03.720 --> 47:05.401
[SPEAKER_01]: It was something I was listening to a lot.
47:06.041 --> 47:12.084
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was one of those throw-off songs, Keith, throw-away songs really, where I'm in sure these were real drum set.
47:12.624 --> 47:13.605
[SPEAKER_01]: But it was so tough.
47:14.630 --> 47:18.472
[SPEAKER_01]: And when you're in the studio recording, at least me, I don't know.
47:18.853 --> 47:22.295
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm looking to do what needs to be done for Bruce's songs.
47:23.315 --> 47:26.137
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think we're all greatest simulators.
47:26.457 --> 47:32.401
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'll hear a song like, for example, there's a song girls in their summer clothes.
47:32.841 --> 47:35.122
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I heard that, and I said, well, that's a beach voice song.
47:35.142 --> 47:35.903
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's how blame.
47:36.783 --> 47:46.309
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, you know, this is a telemetry and the sixth sense that drummers in bands, you know, like a pitcher in a catcher.
47:46.709 --> 47:47.650
[SPEAKER_01]: So while reference,
47:48.669 --> 47:52.331
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, well, that sounds like it sounds a little rhythmically like this song.
47:52.411 --> 47:53.972
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I'm born in USA.
47:54.373 --> 47:58.675
[SPEAKER_01]: We had been doing it in a variety of different iterations and arrangements.
47:59.256 --> 48:08.081
[SPEAKER_01]: And in this one particular night about fear of clock in the morning, we recorded from usually about six o'clock to about four or five in the morning.
48:09.042 --> 48:12.785
[SPEAKER_01]: In those days we made it more reasonable as we got older.
48:13.686 --> 48:22.192
[SPEAKER_01]: Bruce went out into the main room and started playing this kind of chugging rhythm and he got into a groove and I was in the same room.
48:22.212 --> 48:25.254
[SPEAKER_01]: It was just two of us and then everyone else was in isolation booth.
48:25.775 --> 48:34.762
[SPEAKER_01]: And I went in and I just started playing the drums and it reminded me, yes, I sat down and I was suddenly like, okay, I'm gonna be Charlie Watson this.
48:35.568 --> 48:37.610
[SPEAKER_01]: This is inspired me to play like that.
48:37.670 --> 48:40.834
[SPEAKER_01]: And he did this one particularly thing, just three eighth notes.
48:41.274 --> 48:46.500
[SPEAKER_01]: Pompompompon before a change in a verse of chorus.
48:46.960 --> 48:47.761
[SPEAKER_01]: And Charlie would do odd.
48:50.558 --> 48:58.682
[SPEAKER_01]: He would do this still sometimes in odd places and a lot of times he told me this and sometimes because he didn't know where they were going.
48:59.422 --> 49:05.685
[SPEAKER_01]: So he might have thought they were going for example from an A section to a B section and maybe he went early.
49:05.705 --> 49:10.427
[SPEAKER_01]: So those kinds of you know brilliant mistakes.
49:11.627 --> 49:12.828
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what you hope for.
49:12.948 --> 49:17.310
[SPEAKER_01]: You hope for that spontaneity where, you know, you're not quite sure where it's going.
49:17.510 --> 49:19.732
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was what it was on morning.
49:19.752 --> 49:20.772
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's saved for me.
49:20.892 --> 49:34.000
[SPEAKER_01]: So I said, you know, I'm going to do my best, homage, impression of how what would Charlie do, I guess myself sometimes, what would Ringo do?
49:34.720 --> 49:38.165
[SPEAKER_01]: What would my dear departed friend Hal Blaine do?
49:38.185 --> 49:49.418
[SPEAKER_01]: Hal Blaine was the phenomenally successful ubiquitous studio drummer from Los Angeles, who when I was about thirty
49:50.926 --> 50:01.715
[SPEAKER_01]: And I made him, uh, turned out to be fifty of my favorite drummers on on records where it was the birth of Beach Boys, the moms and poppers.
50:02.035 --> 50:03.896
[SPEAKER_01]: The fifth dimension, Johnny Rivers.
50:04.497 --> 50:05.017
[SPEAKER_01]: You name it.
50:05.057 --> 50:06.979
[SPEAKER_01]: He played on everything out of the LA.
50:07.459 --> 50:17.267
[SPEAKER_01]: He and Earl Palmer, the Great New Orleans drummer, who moved to Los Angeles, uh, and, uh, in the mid-fifties and became, uh, the, you know, phenomenal.
50:18.167 --> 50:37.020
[SPEAKER_01]: uh... phenomenal job session drama i think one of his first songs was the right to spread his you love that love you lost that love and feeling and uh... so i would make these references i've done it before you know we have a song called darlings and county well you know you're hearing it here
50:38.063 --> 50:57.592
[SPEAKER_01]: That's why I keep talking to him and for me on the drums anyway, you know the riff reminded me the riff is the generally repeating usually guitar motif that sets the tone for the song or the rip you know the melodic thrust I guess in our case most famously the born and
51:00.146 --> 51:24.314
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a that's a riff and you build off of that and when we played Darlington County and recorded it, it's a generally one, two, three, two, eights made me then you pick the best one and you know, I want to have that tough, tough Charlie Watson and I can tell you I am related it by a man if they don't launch to it, but I have never equaled it.
51:26.169 --> 51:30.974
[SPEAKER_00]: For me, my favorite of his was, I don't know why either, but was get off of my cloud.
51:31.014 --> 51:39.143
[SPEAKER_00]: There was that one, that one, it's the kind of part of get off my cloud that I always like listening to of Charlie Watches.
51:39.663 --> 51:40.664
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, get off my cloud.
51:41.145 --> 51:43.648
[SPEAKER_01]: The first time I saw the stones was on November, December,
51:46.050 --> 51:48.032
[SPEAKER_01]: at the mosque theater, it was called.
51:48.092 --> 51:50.455
[SPEAKER_01]: It's now called Symphony Hall in Newark, New Jersey.
51:50.875 --> 52:01.065
[SPEAKER_01]: My friend and I took the bus down there and get off my cloud was at the moment was the number two song on the top forty radio stations.
52:01.706 --> 52:06.911
[SPEAKER_01]: And what was interesting about that was the first song they did where the drums start the song.
52:08.238 --> 52:16.300
[SPEAKER_01]: And he played that kind of, you know, very interesting beat.
52:16.380 --> 52:21.282
[SPEAKER_01]: And that became a rhythmic motif in that song.
52:21.902 --> 52:23.342
[SPEAKER_01]: He doesn't over and over again.
52:23.362 --> 52:28.284
[SPEAKER_01]: And Charlie was a very, very knowledgeable musician.
52:29.504 --> 52:35.866
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you listen to say, Ruby Tuesday, there's this single stroke, Brody does every time it goes into the chorus.
52:36.802 --> 52:40.445
[SPEAKER_01]: So he was a, he produced his drum parts.
52:40.906 --> 52:50.835
[SPEAKER_01]: He composed, as he, as there were either rehearsing or figuring it out, he was very adept at coming up with things that would be recognizable.
52:51.235 --> 52:52.556
[SPEAKER_01]: Listen to satisfaction.
52:52.897 --> 52:56.480
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no, there's no drum fills in the entirety of satisfaction.
52:56.960 --> 53:02.465
[SPEAKER_01]: It's simply him keeping a quarter-note time on the snare high-hat and bass drum.
53:03.025 --> 53:06.688
[SPEAKER_01]: The syncopation comes from the tambourine port.
53:07.849 --> 53:14.855
[SPEAKER_01]: And I am a fanatic when I play that song with my jute box fan, which is all audience requests and asked for that.
53:15.215 --> 53:22.021
[SPEAKER_01]: That I get someone out of the audience and I teach them to tambourine port because the drummer doesn't go bomb bomb bomb.
53:22.601 --> 53:24.483
[SPEAKER_01]: The tambourine does the bomb bomb bomb.
53:25.517 --> 53:30.501
[SPEAKER_01]: Charlie's just as they say in the trade, chopping wood, and it gives it that drive.
53:31.402 --> 53:37.186
[SPEAKER_01]: And absolutely, absolutely brilliant to do that.
53:37.306 --> 53:49.937
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, that he had, it's understandable, but he had the restraint that has, you know, that's one of the hallmarks of great records is, you know, you can certainly have Keith Mohn who was a complete opposite.
53:51.303 --> 53:59.447
[SPEAKER_01]: who was just completely spontaneous and propulsive and bombastic and explosive.
53:59.907 --> 54:14.113
[SPEAKER_01]: All the time, Keith Moon was actually the lead instrument in the loop, where Pete Townsend was more of the E anchored it down, he and John Emerson anchored it, where Keith was the guy who, quote unquote, went crazy.
54:14.693 --> 54:19.075
[SPEAKER_01]: I always found the interesting that Charlie Watts, Keith Moon, and Ginger Baker,
54:20.214 --> 54:24.498
[SPEAKER_01]: All were born and grew up in essentially the same area of London.
54:26.259 --> 54:30.443
[SPEAKER_01]: And Charlie was born near Wendley, where Wendley's stadium is.
54:30.603 --> 54:32.344
[SPEAKER_01]: And they were also from that area.
54:32.805 --> 54:34.286
[SPEAKER_01]: And it must have been something in the water.
54:34.786 --> 54:35.207
[SPEAKER_00]: I guess.
54:35.407 --> 54:43.434
[SPEAKER_00]: So talking of ginger baker, can you take us back to April, when you're auditioned with Bruce Springsteen?
54:44.047 --> 54:47.872
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, actually, I had been at the time playing at a variety of bands.
54:47.952 --> 54:48.893
[SPEAKER_01]: I had been playing in...
54:51.135 --> 54:54.637
[SPEAKER_01]: the Broadway show God spell as the Pit Band drummer.
54:55.698 --> 55:01.421
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was actually kind of fun because I thought it would be an entry into Broadway as a musician.
55:01.801 --> 55:04.143
[SPEAKER_01]: Plus also there was just a big hit record day by day.
55:04.903 --> 55:11.127
[SPEAKER_01]: And when you play that in the show, it was the one sort of number that got that, you know, a media applause.
55:11.547 --> 55:16.210
[SPEAKER_01]: And I actually never quite experienced that before playing on a hit record.
55:16.390 --> 55:19.692
[SPEAKER_01]: I wasn't a drummer on that, but I played a hit record.
55:20.592 --> 55:44.577
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was in a band that was going to college and during July of nineteen seventy four in April of nineteen seventy four in my college seen Holy University in South Orange and New Jersey I was living home in my parents house Bruce Springstein was playing a concert in the cafeteria and I had a friend
55:45.377 --> 55:50.759
[SPEAKER_01]: who had a local sort of college band, and he was kind of a James Taylorish singer-songwriter.
55:50.779 --> 55:55.741
[SPEAKER_01]: And he asked me to, he wanted to put a band together to, he got the gig to open from Bruce Springsteen.
55:55.761 --> 56:11.908
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't know who Bruce Springsteen was, but, and there was not money at it, but, you know, he had some original songs, and we opened, it was just before my birthday in April, and we opened to Bruce.
56:12.880 --> 56:13.781
[SPEAKER_01]: in the cafeteria.
56:14.521 --> 56:17.804
[SPEAKER_01]: And what was interesting was I started to feel ill during our set.
56:17.864 --> 56:19.506
[SPEAKER_01]: We played about a cast hour.
56:19.526 --> 56:22.729
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was going to leave right after our set.
56:22.809 --> 56:28.393
[SPEAKER_01]: And Jim, the leader of the van that was put together, said to me, you got to see this guy spring scene.
56:28.954 --> 56:30.395
[SPEAKER_01]: And he would never see anything like it.
56:30.555 --> 56:31.896
[SPEAKER_01]: This was April a set before.
56:32.637 --> 56:33.278
[SPEAKER_01]: He's amazing.
56:33.598 --> 56:36.320
[SPEAKER_01]: I said, I really feel I feel horrible.
56:36.360 --> 56:37.561
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to go home a bit.
56:38.201 --> 56:43.425
[SPEAKER_01]: As it turned out, the next day I had emergency time selects me.
56:44.065 --> 56:48.748
[SPEAKER_01]: So I really was sick, but he said, don't miss this opportunity.
56:48.768 --> 56:49.669
[SPEAKER_01]: You've got to see this guy.
56:49.689 --> 56:50.650
[SPEAKER_01]: This guy's going to be big.
56:52.097 --> 56:55.160
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was not paying attention, but okay, I watched it for a song.
56:55.800 --> 57:10.471
[SPEAKER_01]: So this guy comes out of this African American guy comes out, sits down at the piano, and places this long, extended salivately this, you know, improv, what I thought was an improvisation, and went on for about twelve minutes.
57:12.053 --> 57:14.715
[SPEAKER_01]: And like after four minutes, I said,
57:16.432 --> 57:17.433
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that's interesting.
57:17.693 --> 57:21.815
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, Bruce Springsteen, you know, I didn't know he was a black guy.
57:21.835 --> 57:28.999
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I saw the band set up, but David Sanchez, his pianist, came out first and played piano.
57:29.759 --> 57:34.422
[SPEAKER_01]: And then when he got done with his big overture, Bruce came out and the band felt it out.
57:34.502 --> 57:35.462
[SPEAKER_01]: So I didn't see that.
57:35.623 --> 57:41.666
[SPEAKER_01]: I left halfway through that David Sanchez brilliant opening to New York City, Sarah Nade.
57:41.686 --> 57:43.267
[SPEAKER_01]: I have my tongue says out.
57:45.648 --> 58:00.598
[SPEAKER_01]: I was in a band called High Point, which was, we played, we played sort of traffic, music, and Jeff wrote to all, and little more progressive rock, and Jeff Beck wrote, and we were rehearsing.
58:01.199 --> 58:11.266
[SPEAKER_01]: We had two keyboard players, and one of our guys, the singer, went to the bottom line in July at seventy-four, and said, I just saw this guy, Bruce Springsteen,
58:12.271 --> 58:15.073
[SPEAKER_01]: And the Eastery band, now they were calling it Christmas and Eastery band.
58:15.113 --> 58:17.714
[SPEAKER_01]: And this, this was the most amazing show I ever saw.
58:17.774 --> 58:20.836
[SPEAKER_01]: And I said to myself, frankly, that's got to be the same guy.
58:20.856 --> 58:22.777
[SPEAKER_01]: I hadn't heard any of the music.
58:24.198 --> 58:26.059
[SPEAKER_01]: But then he was going on and on about this.
58:26.079 --> 58:27.160
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a new direction.
58:27.720 --> 58:35.965
[SPEAKER_01]: So it turns out that he made his first two records in the town next to the where, the basement we were practicing in was located.
58:36.645 --> 58:41.008
[SPEAKER_01]: And they knew the engineer, this gentleman from Israel named Louis Lehov.
58:42.413 --> 58:46.534
[SPEAKER_01]: So they know who Bruce Franchney was, and I didn't.
58:47.534 --> 58:55.876
[SPEAKER_01]: And at the time, I was very into sort of, you know, my traditional orchestra, Billy Cobb, Tony Williams, with his lifetime band.
58:56.236 --> 59:01.037
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, more a little bit more jazzy, a little more, you know, progressive than the rock.
59:01.537 --> 59:08.218
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was naturally good at, but what seemed to be happening was, you know, chops players and people who really could, you know,
59:09.478 --> 59:29.233
[SPEAKER_01]: more like jazz but we out rock jazz jazz rock we started to come in so I didn't really pay much attention and then we had two keyboard players one of them auditions audition I said what do you mean he's a whether piano player left of those strings names he's street bad
59:30.075 --> 59:30.695
[SPEAKER_01]: He didn't get it.
59:31.475 --> 59:43.438
[SPEAKER_01]: The other one went in, and he was very close to Louis, and the guy who won, and then Scott Brooks Arthur, who was a very famous engineer in the sixties in New York, did all the girl group records.
59:43.478 --> 59:47.119
[SPEAKER_01]: He became a record producer and he owned the studio up there, a nine one four.
59:48.639 --> 59:51.900
[SPEAKER_01]: He auditioned about three weeks later.
59:53.274 --> 01:00:00.945
[SPEAKER_01]: and found anybody who came to rehearsal and he said, well, I audition I didn't get it and it's not really my thing anyway.
01:00:01.625 --> 01:00:04.610
[SPEAKER_01]: But he said, match, you know, they're looking for a genre too.
01:00:06.366 --> 01:00:10.829
[SPEAKER_01]: I said, you know, I'm playing in the world, we shall go into college.
01:00:11.889 --> 01:00:16.012
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm in this band and we're, you know, we're fine clubs and wherever we can, I could do both.
01:00:17.012 --> 01:00:18.373
[SPEAKER_01]: And everybody seems to audition.
01:00:18.413 --> 01:00:19.674
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, why the hell not?
01:00:19.874 --> 01:00:21.755
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, you know, you gave me the ad.
01:00:22.136 --> 01:00:26.398
[SPEAKER_01]: He literally took the piece of paper out of the village voice and gave me the ad.
01:00:27.059 --> 01:00:28.920
[SPEAKER_01]: So I called up and made him the appointment.
01:00:30.603 --> 01:00:32.565
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I'm a drummer, Senator, etc.
01:00:32.585 --> 01:00:42.554
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was living in this one particular keyboard player's father-in-law's basement in the corner of the basement on an army cot, which I was used to.
01:00:43.495 --> 01:00:46.358
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was driving a yellow gram one.
01:00:47.562 --> 01:00:51.123
[SPEAKER_01]: which is a sort of new car I ever had because it was a cheapest car and get it but fine.
01:00:51.143 --> 01:00:53.784
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember the payments were eighteen dollars a month.
01:00:54.925 --> 01:00:59.647
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, it just gives you an idea of what was going on back in nineteen seventy-four.
01:00:59.807 --> 01:01:01.507
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm playing in God's Bill so I don't.
01:01:01.887 --> 01:01:04.428
[SPEAKER_01]: So I come home one night from playing those stand.
01:01:04.849 --> 01:01:11.071
[SPEAKER_01]: And on my bed is a piece of yellow legal paper with some calculations on the top.
01:01:11.511 --> 01:01:13.132
[SPEAKER_01]: But father-in-law was a scientist
01:01:13.852 --> 01:01:24.200
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a piece of scratch paper, and now the bottom, it said Max called Springstein as the EIM, then had the guy's name, something about an audition.
01:01:25.341 --> 01:01:35.268
[SPEAKER_01]: So I arranged this audition on a Monday night when the show God Spell was dark, and this was now the second week of August,
01:01:38.252 --> 01:01:45.214
[SPEAKER_01]: And I didn't want to bring all my drums, so I just brought a bass drum, a hi-hat, and the snare drum.
01:01:46.954 --> 01:01:58.616
[SPEAKER_01]: And I wasn't trying to make any statement, but as I turned out, the band in Bruce was very impressed because, you know, it was the time of the eight compounds and the seven symbols, you know, the drum soloist.
01:01:58.816 --> 01:02:05.318
[SPEAKER_01]: And the ad said famously, wanted drummer, no junior ginger bakers.
01:02:06.114 --> 01:02:10.416
[SPEAKER_01]: which was kind of a snarky way of saying, you know, check your ego at the door.
01:02:10.436 --> 01:02:15.678
[SPEAKER_01]: And I got that because I had been a working drummer for leaders for sixteen years at that point.
01:02:16.058 --> 01:02:17.819
[SPEAKER_01]: So I had a lot of practical experience.
01:02:18.239 --> 01:02:20.740
[SPEAKER_01]: And when I said no junior ginger bakers, that spoke to me.
01:02:22.480 --> 01:02:47.202
[SPEAKER_01]: and I knew that the guy wanted an accompanist and it said Chuck Berry generally Lewis and if you look at a lot of the old footage of those guys the drummer basically had a Tom Tom the snare drum of bass drum in a symbol and I had so you know I didn't bring the Tom Tom figured off you playing Chuck Berry music I can do everything on a bass drum the snare I can do everything on a snare drum and it made a
01:02:48.636 --> 01:02:52.481
[SPEAKER_01]: as it turns out, and it's extraordinarily minimalist statement.
01:02:53.002 --> 01:02:54.664
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, wow, this guy must think he's really good.
01:02:54.684 --> 01:02:56.366
[SPEAKER_01]: He doesn't even bring a whole bunch of it.
01:02:57.187 --> 01:03:01.132
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was a very, very good improviser, very good at taking direction.
01:03:01.693 --> 01:03:03.315
[SPEAKER_01]: And that first night we played for three hours.
01:03:06.892 --> 01:03:13.335
[SPEAKER_01]: And for me, it's a wonderful story because you just never know when a connection is around the corner.
01:03:13.735 --> 01:03:18.817
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't know Bruce, I didn't know any of the songs, I left before I got to see him play.
01:03:19.977 --> 01:03:22.378
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't remember that we were wearing the similar clothes.
01:03:22.398 --> 01:03:28.380
[SPEAKER_01]: We both had James on and James shirts, cut off shirts, you know, with snaps.
01:03:30.581 --> 01:03:55.900
[SPEAKER_01]: and I had a flumantium mustache and he had a scraggly beard and he asked me where I was from and I said New Jersey and at the time it was very popular if you were a metropolitan area musician to say he were from New York even if you were from New York Connecticut or New Jersey but I said New Jersey and he smiled and he goes oh that's good from New Jersey I had no idea what that meant because I knew you were North Jersey he was central Jersey right
01:03:57.133 --> 01:04:07.778
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, north and central, but in the ways geographically north and central, but philosophically north and south.
01:04:09.278 --> 01:04:20.283
[SPEAKER_01]: And particularly, musically, and the northiers' events played top forty by the southiers' events, Central Jersey, right over the railroad and bridge, which is that sort of elliptical shaped bridge.
01:04:20.303 --> 01:04:22.004
[SPEAKER_01]: That's where the dividing line is.
01:04:22.084 --> 01:04:24.845
[SPEAKER_01]: They play blues and some original stuff.
01:04:25.485 --> 01:04:28.190
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, more heavy on music, they have a little more freedom than we did.
01:04:28.751 --> 01:04:34.801
[SPEAKER_01]: Up in North Jersey in the New York in Pensea, in Hudson County, you know, those areas.
01:04:36.360 --> 01:04:46.931
[SPEAKER_01]: So we played, and one of the things he did, he did with everybody, he was, I had the song by Fat Sdomino called, let the four wins blow, which was a very fast uptempo, the way he did it.
01:04:48.212 --> 01:04:58.462
[SPEAKER_01]: Shuffle, with a lot of accents, very similar in format to Rosalita, the way it plays Rosalita, and it was a big show stopper.
01:04:59.898 --> 01:05:01.579
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was all along pretty good.
01:05:01.619 --> 01:05:06.802
[SPEAKER_01]: But at one point, he did this signal when our empire would go, you know, safe, right?
01:05:07.282 --> 01:05:09.584
[SPEAKER_01]: At first, they safe signal.
01:05:10.524 --> 01:05:12.305
[SPEAKER_01]: And he wanted everybody to stop.
01:05:12.826 --> 01:05:14.947
[SPEAKER_01]: And he made it really obvious, like, cut, stop.
01:05:16.108 --> 01:05:18.389
[SPEAKER_01]: And he said, well, I have to guys got it.
01:05:18.629 --> 01:05:20.030
[SPEAKER_01]: If you didn't get it, he did it again.
01:05:20.050 --> 01:05:23.172
[SPEAKER_01]: If you didn't get it that time, you didn't pass the audition.
01:05:23.412 --> 01:05:26.414
[SPEAKER_01]: And everybody, good or bad got exactly a half hour.
01:05:27.576 --> 01:05:30.440
[SPEAKER_01]: I knew all this, you know, twenty years later.
01:05:31.982 --> 01:05:32.462
[SPEAKER_01]: I never knew.
01:05:32.482 --> 01:05:37.630
[SPEAKER_01]: The twenty years later after the band had broken up, I asked him, well, what made you choose me?
01:05:38.131 --> 01:05:40.834
[SPEAKER_01]: And he tells me the story of the little trick in the audition.
01:05:41.635 --> 01:05:43.037
[SPEAKER_01]: And then there was a long pause.
01:05:44.762 --> 01:05:52.624
[SPEAKER_01]: And suddenly, he threw his arm out in a forty-five degree angle like a James Brown kind of hit me thing.
01:05:53.324 -->
01:06:00.906
[SPEAKER_01]: Not had a lot of experience, he didn't know this, but had a lot of experience playing with dancers and singers and using the drums to accent stage business.
01:06:01.386 --> 01:06:04.907
[SPEAKER_01]: And this goes back to my training as a so-called legitimate drummer.
01:06:06.747 --> 01:06:08.908
[SPEAKER_01]: And when he did that, I hit a snare shot.
01:06:09.884 --> 01:06:14.468
[SPEAKER_01]: And out of the six years of dramas that auditioned, I was the only guy who hit that snare shot.
01:06:15.449 --> 01:06:19.552
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's what got me in the history band, that one single snare shot.
01:06:19.952 --> 01:06:21.013
[SPEAKER_01]: Because I've had tension.
01:06:21.674 --> 01:06:31.261
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, he's very complimentary of you in born to run in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the,
01:06:32.222 --> 01:06:33.243
[SPEAKER_00]: all about to take a breath.
01:06:33.784 --> 01:06:34.905
[SPEAKER_00]: We're moving into the kill.
01:06:35.145 --> 01:06:38.048
[SPEAKER_00]: The band all steal on an iron track.
01:06:38.388 --> 01:06:39.590
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's snare shot.
01:06:39.770 --> 01:06:49.079
[SPEAKER_00]: The one I'm thinking about, but haven't told or singled anybody outside the on fire little corner of my mind is about to be the one I want and there it is.
01:06:49.900 --> 01:06:54.185
[SPEAKER_00]: With max at my back, the questions are answered before their asked.
01:06:55.609 --> 01:06:56.570
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that was a little popular.
01:06:57.130 --> 01:06:59.293
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that was a lovely passage when I read it.
01:06:59.553 --> 01:07:02.856
[SPEAKER_01]: And that really distills the relationship.
01:07:02.956 --> 01:07:05.859
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's not, you know, it's not unusual.
01:07:07.701 --> 01:07:18.551
[SPEAKER_01]: Frank Sinatra had it with her, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh
01:07:19.873 --> 01:07:21.355
[SPEAKER_01]: He was also done a shortage drummer.
01:07:22.016 --> 01:07:25.761
[SPEAKER_01]: The drummer and the singer have to have this impotted over.
01:07:25.781 --> 01:07:27.704
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like a picture and a catcher.
01:07:28.225 --> 01:07:32.912
[SPEAKER_01]: And my job on stage with Bruce is to make his job easier.
01:07:33.813 --> 01:07:40.300
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, the best rumbers and the ones that I've always admired are able to drive the bus, lead the van.
01:07:40.401 --> 01:07:41.722
[SPEAKER_01]: They really do lead the van.
01:07:42.403 --> 01:07:47.388
[SPEAKER_01]: By the interstitial things they do, by the sort of, you know, you have to feel it.
01:07:47.629 --> 01:07:52.594
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, I've been playing with Bruce, you know, often I'm for forty-seven some odd years.
01:07:54.376 --> 01:07:55.597
[SPEAKER_01]: is a six sense.
01:07:56.217 --> 01:08:07.845
[SPEAKER_01]: As a matter of fact, when he's down to a wet t-shirt, he has a muscle under his left scalpula muscle that when he's about to do something, both tense.
01:08:09.347 --> 01:08:30.203
[SPEAKER_01]: and it's a little tell that I don't know what he's doing and you can't anticipate what he's doing because if you're anticipating you don't make the wrong move you have to absolutely just be in the moment and one of the books that helped me when I was a young drummer to be able to do that was a book called Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance
01:08:32.184 --> 01:08:35.167
[SPEAKER_01]: and there was another book called the Inner Game of Tennis.
01:08:35.887 --> 01:08:45.815
[SPEAKER_01]: How the idea is to slow down the time, thereby speeding up, and I don't mean the tempo, but slowing down the time is based on which things happen.
01:08:46.336 --> 01:08:49.638
[SPEAKER_01]: So you're able to increase your reaction time.
01:08:50.039 --> 01:08:51.580
[SPEAKER_01]: So it becomes almost instantaneous.
01:08:52.161 --> 01:08:53.922
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's my job in the Easter band.
01:08:53.982 --> 01:08:59.747
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't have to remember chords, but I have to be one hundred and ten percent
01:09:01.456 --> 01:09:08.622
[SPEAKER_01]: hooked into and supportive of what Bruce might do, not just what he is doing.
01:09:09.123 --> 01:09:19.311
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, you said, I think once I heard you say that during the show and I watched, you know, in preparation for our conversation, I watched a lot of video.
01:09:19.932 --> 01:09:27.298
[SPEAKER_00]: And it seemed to me that throughout these shows, you never take your eyes off of Springsteen.
01:09:27.918 --> 01:09:29.300
[SPEAKER_00]: You're always watching
01:09:30.419 --> 01:09:43.808
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, maybe for this muscle, um, twitch or this, the safe signal or the pointing in the fortified area, but you're, singularly focused, uh, your eyes are singularly focused on springsteen throughout.
01:09:45.329 --> 01:09:45.649
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
01:09:45.909 --> 01:09:56.416
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, he's got a line, you know, and one of his songs, a blinded by the way, Mama was told me like not to look into the sights of the sun, but Mama, that's where the fun is.
01:09:56.996 --> 01:09:57.877
[SPEAKER_01]: But Bruce's son,
01:09:59.035 --> 01:10:04.900
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't take my, I did take my OS often once in nineteen seventy five at the bottom line.
01:10:06.442 --> 01:10:09.104
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the ten shows we did there over five nights I did.
01:10:09.124 --> 01:10:10.305
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought I was distracted.
01:10:10.345 --> 01:10:11.426
[SPEAKER_01]: I took my eyes off them.
01:10:11.806 --> 01:10:16.810
[SPEAKER_01]: And I made a, what would have, what could have been a life and career changing mistake.
01:10:18.512 --> 01:10:21.654
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, a lot of eyes were honest, me hadn't really broken through.
01:10:22.314 --> 01:10:27.557
[SPEAKER_01]: All the biggest rock journalists were there at the time, critics and the record company, people.
01:10:27.837 --> 01:10:31.780
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, if the drummer makes a mistake, the train stops.
01:10:32.320 --> 01:10:35.962
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you blow a chord, you play the wrong melody or the wrong key.
01:10:36.342 --> 01:10:38.984
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you can kind of fix it, it gets lost in the mix a little bit.
01:10:39.484 --> 01:10:44.007
[SPEAKER_01]: But then there's a picture of me that I have of the very moment where
01:10:45.968 --> 01:10:47.449
[SPEAKER_01]: It's taken from the audience.
01:10:48.069 --> 01:11:02.817
[SPEAKER_01]: A Bruce obviously said, me looking like the famous clown Emmett Kelly, the sad clown, and Steve Evans' answer on the side, you know, stifling a laugh, which is perfect.
01:11:03.538 --> 01:11:13.163
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, it was a long time ago, but I went into Bruce's dressing room afterwards, you know, which was about the size of a room closet.
01:11:14.113 --> 01:11:16.134
[SPEAKER_01]: And we were talking about it and he was very cool.
01:11:16.154 --> 01:11:18.615
[SPEAKER_01]: And he said, you know, I've been in the van nine months.
01:11:20.296 --> 01:11:21.156
[SPEAKER_01]: It's wild up there.
01:11:21.216 --> 01:11:22.757
[SPEAKER_01]: You've got to watch out for the curves.
01:11:24.197 --> 01:11:24.958
[SPEAKER_01]: And I got it.
01:11:25.578 --> 01:11:27.399
[SPEAKER_01]: And I didn't need to be twice told twice.
01:11:27.459 --> 01:11:29.660
[SPEAKER_01]: So that was in nineteen seventy five.
01:11:29.720 --> 01:11:32.000
[SPEAKER_01]: Here we are in twenty twenty one.
01:11:32.020 --> 01:11:37.663
[SPEAKER_01]: I have never ever taken my eyes off of Bruce again except one other time.
01:11:39.031 --> 01:11:43.793
[SPEAKER_01]: in twenty-twelfth at Hyde Park for about three hundred thousand people were playing.
01:11:43.813 --> 01:11:54.697
[SPEAKER_01]: And I look over the corner over by the monitor station and I see standing behind the monitor man, Paul McCartney and his wife Nancy.
01:11:55.517 --> 01:12:14.325
[SPEAKER_01]: Speed vans had invited him to the show and you know they're moments where you know I can look you get a signal to somebody who's supporting me, but you know actively playing I don't look I focus on Bruce you know it's like a basketball player watch their hips they can't go anywhere without their hips and you see these little telegraph things everybody does it
01:12:15.116 --> 01:12:17.697
[SPEAKER_01]: little hitches in a batter's, batter's position.
01:12:18.458 --> 01:12:21.459
[SPEAKER_01]: So, one of the carnities over
there, unbelievable.
01:12:21.639 --> 01:12:24.141
[SPEAKER_01]: Long story short, drew some fights in Montes today.
01:12:24.201 --> 01:12:28.603
[SPEAKER_01]: John Montmai, you know, a four foot tall drum riser about ten feet behind him.
01:12:29.704 --> 01:12:33.926
[SPEAKER_01]: And we go into, by storm, her standing there.
01:12:35.214 --> 01:12:37.695
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm looking at the back of Paul's head.
01:12:37.735 --> 01:12:39.716
[SPEAKER_01]: He's got the long hair, beautiful hair.
01:12:40.296 --> 01:12:48.499
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you ever saw the back cover of the album on the hard days night, the fun cover of the four faces, the back cover is the four of them from the back.
01:12:49.160 --> 01:12:58.744
[SPEAKER_01]: And it looks exactly like that back cover, you know, in those days you buy an album, you pour over everything, liner notes, the pictures and you little detail.
01:12:59.584 --> 01:12:59.784
[SPEAKER_01]: And so
01:13:02.596 --> 01:13:04.397
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, Bruce is playing with him, Paul singing.
01:13:05.217 --> 01:13:09.318
[SPEAKER_01]: And even when people have sat in with me, I don't take my eyes off Bruce, sat in with the band.
01:13:09.658 --> 01:13:10.338
[SPEAKER_01]: I watched Bruce.
01:13:10.678 --> 01:13:14.079
[SPEAKER_01]: I could not take my eyes off the back of Paul McCartney.
01:13:14.119 --> 01:13:16.780
[SPEAKER_01]: He said, he's only ten feet in front of me.
01:13:17.240 --> 01:13:18.541
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm on the strung riser.
01:13:18.581 --> 01:13:20.341
[SPEAKER_01]: We're playing, I saw her standing there.
01:13:20.761 --> 01:13:21.942
[SPEAKER_01]: And for that two minutes.
01:13:22.902 --> 01:13:26.544
[SPEAKER_01]: I am Ringo Star on the Ed Sullivan Show.
01:13:27.425 --> 01:13:30.627
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a fantasy and literally a fantasy come true.
01:13:31.588 --> 01:13:37.532
[SPEAKER_01]: And I can believe you know, I just lived out every young from a fantasy of a moment.
01:13:38.232 --> 01:13:48.362
[SPEAKER_01]: playing with the Beatles, and that was, you know, I played with, I played, and I was very fortunate to have played with Ringo with George once or twice, you know, several times with Paul.
01:13:48.702 --> 01:13:53.607
[SPEAKER_01]: Never got to play with John unfortunately, but, you know, in my own way, I've had that beat of experience.
01:13:53.667 --> 01:13:56.710
[SPEAKER_01]: It was the only other time I took my eyes off a boost.
01:13:57.760 --> 01:14:00.741
[SPEAKER_00]: So I have this question written down in my notes.
01:14:01.241 --> 01:14:02.001
[SPEAKER_00]: I take notes.
01:14:02.681 --> 01:14:04.461
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the lawyer training in me.
01:14:05.421 --> 01:14:19.404
[SPEAKER_00]: And the question I've written down was just how cool was it to play in the East Street Band and all these venues and have eighty thousand people at MetLife Stadium singing back to your three hundred thousand people at Wemley.
01:14:20.024 --> 01:14:26.805
[SPEAKER_00]:
Can you talk about sort of, from the audience you see the band, but can you talk about it from the band
01:14:29.604 --> 01:14:31.453
[SPEAKER_00]: because it must be something to behold.
01:14:32.796 --> 01:14:34.397
[SPEAKER_01]: It well, it's a dream come true.
01:14:34.657 --> 01:14:37.838
[SPEAKER_01]: It's an awesome meal to best see in the house, playing the drums up there.
01:14:38.118 --> 01:14:40.619
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, it's interesting about playing stadiums.
01:14:40.679 --> 01:14:54.004
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a much bigger jump, emotionally and mentally, from playing sort of five thousand seat theaters, and warm, moral, or atoriums to playing arenas, you know, like a basketball arena.
01:14:55.805 --> 01:15:00.666
[SPEAKER_01]: Then going from arenas to stadiums, because they essentially look the same.
01:15:00.726 --> 01:15:02.127
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just multitudes of people.
01:15:03.603 --> 01:15:04.724
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm afraid to do a job.
01:15:05.645 --> 01:15:08.248
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't take my eyes off the Bruce.
01:15:08.668 --> 01:15:20.219
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, so the audience to me, you do see individual faces for sure, particularly if you start in Europe, if you start in the daytime or anywhere if you start in the daytime and then it gets dark.
01:15:21.781 --> 01:15:25.384
[SPEAKER_01]: You will, you know, at some point you'll be obviously looking beyond person.
01:15:25.404 --> 01:15:27.626
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll see people as an entity.
01:15:29.047 --> 01:15:35.053
[SPEAKER_01]: I do allow myself the luxury of during the song, Ramrod.
01:15:36.628 --> 01:15:40.391
[SPEAKER_01]: to which is one of my favorite songs to play, of looking around.
01:15:41.592 --> 01:15:43.334
[SPEAKER_01]: And it is an awesome site.
01:15:43.714 --> 01:15:45.876
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a sea of humanity.
01:15:45.896 --> 01:15:47.297
[SPEAKER_01]: I miss it.
01:15:47.977 --> 01:15:52.801
[SPEAKER_01]: I hope we can get back to it in some fashion, not just the history band, but everybody.
01:15:53.522 --> 01:15:55.023
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a communal experience.
01:15:55.063 --> 01:15:58.946
[SPEAKER_01]: And one of my favorite moments is when, particularly when we're playing in its dark,
01:16:00.247 --> 01:16:22.437
[SPEAKER_01]: Bruce turns every light on the house lights during the song born to run and I want to ask him why he did that he said because I just want to be the guy with the guitar in the middle of these hundred thousand people and so it's not that is the ultimate community and then you know he wanted to meet you it was think about the work concert I said
01:16:23.428 --> 01:16:33.336
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, yeah, you're playing a concert because, well true, but actually, you're in concert, you're in each other's lives at the moment.
01:16:33.556 --> 01:16:35.157
[SPEAKER_01]: You're in concert, you're in sync.
01:16:35.718 --> 01:16:37.879
[SPEAKER_01]: The best shows are where you're in sync.
01:16:38.740 --> 01:16:40.962
[SPEAKER_01]: And it ceases to be a show.
01:16:41.142 --> 01:16:44.785
[SPEAKER_01]: Although there is, it is show business and it is entertainment.
01:16:45.185 --> 01:16:49.809
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a third element that comes out of it that is a magical experience.
01:16:50.529 --> 01:16:52.531
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the things with the E Street Band and
01:16:53.111 --> 01:16:55.734
[SPEAKER_01]: is that you will never see a bad show.
01:16:56.294 --> 01:17:06.103
[SPEAKER_01]: You may see shows where your favorite song wasn't played, you may see shows where you were tired and we were tired but you never noticed it.
01:17:06.183 --> 01:17:10.568
[SPEAKER_01]: You will never, you will always have an exceptional experience because we take each show
01:17:11.268 --> 01:17:17.709
[SPEAKER_01]: Literally, one show at a time, one said at a time, one song at a time, and make it the best we can.
01:17:18.209 --> 01:17:22.010
[SPEAKER_01]: If that sounds polyanish, it's not, it's an ethos.
01:17:22.610 --> 01:17:30.372
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was directed by Bruce, by leadership, not by any kind of dictum.
01:17:31.612 --> 01:17:36.653
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, the one dictomy had was our mission and is to give people more than their money's worth.
01:17:37.762 --> 01:17:44.646
[SPEAKER_01]: and they should walk out of this concert transformed in some way because we are in concert.
01:17:45.167 --> 01:17:47.248
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, I have been to be the guys on their drums.
01:17:47.368 --> 01:17:57.134
[SPEAKER_01]: Some reason I use the same, by the way, the reason I use the same drums that I have for years and years and years is the same reason Charlie Watts uses the same drums.
01:17:58.074 --> 01:17:58.875
[SPEAKER_01]: They're totems.
01:17:59.675 --> 01:18:03.418
[SPEAKER_01]: When people come early and they see the drums set, that's part of the show.
01:18:04.267 --> 01:18:10.133
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, if you change drums every tour, so I want people to, to, there they are.
01:18:10.553 --> 01:18:11.474
[SPEAKER_01]: There's the drums.
01:18:11.554 --> 01:18:13.876
[SPEAKER_01]: Like when I went to see this, I found my full of the stones.
01:18:15.104 --> 01:18:17.905
[SPEAKER_01]: And I mean, Charlie and I were talking about this backstage.
01:18:17.925 --> 01:18:19.586
[SPEAKER_01]: I was in Newark about three years ago.
01:18:19.886 --> 01:18:22.187
[SPEAKER_01]: The night before Bruce played tumbling dice with them.
01:18:23.188 --> 01:18:25.129
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was just a two of us in the hallway.
01:18:26.129 --> 01:18:36.074
[SPEAKER_01]: And I said, you'd probably don't recognize this, but, you know, we're about half a mile from where I first saw you in nineteen sixty-five.
01:18:36.834 --> 01:18:40.936
[SPEAKER_01]: He goes, well, actually, I did know that because my sister,
01:18:44.371 --> 01:18:49.735
[SPEAKER_01]: is married and has lived for forty years in Tom's River New Jersey.
01:18:50.976 --> 01:18:55.820
[SPEAKER_01]: So I said, you've been to Tom's River New Jersey because one of the time.
01:18:56.841 --> 01:19:01.484
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, and when I think it was his sister, certainly when I said, I can't believe it.
01:19:01.504 --> 01:19:03.326
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, drive down the garden state parkway.
01:19:04.362 --> 01:19:08.624
[SPEAKER_01]: Get off that he knew the exit, which is kind of a funny jersey thing, what exit you from.
01:19:08.644 --> 01:19:12.525
[SPEAKER_01]: He knew it was like exit eighty or eighty two, Tom's River exit.
01:19:13.445 --> 01:19:26.450
[SPEAKER_01]: And they, you know, Roman stones are a potential center when, you know, some fifty years before, or I saw them play at, you know, with Brian Jones, original band, and five other bands, they play for a half an hour.
01:19:27.351 --> 01:19:29.131
[SPEAKER_01]: And they happen to be great that night.
01:19:29.412 --> 01:19:32.873
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was a transforming experience again, because, you know,
01:19:35.237 --> 01:19:42.380
[SPEAKER_01]: They're the greatest rock and roll band for a number of reasons, not the least of which is through the ups and downs.
01:19:43.060 --> 01:19:48.102
[SPEAKER_01]: The incredible highs and lows, they manage the rolling stones to work it all out.
01:19:48.242 --> 01:19:54.185
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you talk to each of them, a lot of the credit goes to Charlie Watts.
01:19:55.818 --> 01:19:59.501
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, we celebrate this life.
01:20:02.262 --> 01:20:15.391
[SPEAKER_01]: I believe all of us will close to them are, you know, for a second, but we're also rather than that be the last thing legacy, we're just so delighted that it happened at all and for so long.
01:20:16.185 --> 01:20:16.425
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
01:20:16.766 --> 01:20:22.053
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it absolutely right that he is the heart of the band.
01:20:22.073 --> 01:20:30.706
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think Springsteen, again, I'll read you from want to run, recognizes the same about you.
01:20:31.146 --> 01:20:31.827
[SPEAKER_00]: And he says,
01:20:33.169 --> 01:20:34.950
[SPEAKER_00]: The soul of dedication and commitment.
01:20:35.631 --> 01:20:40.895
[SPEAKER_00]: Each night in the midst of the continuous hurricane of our sets are designed to be.
01:20:41.436 --> 01:20:51.804
[SPEAKER_00]: The sheer physical pressure of three hours of non-stop, steam rolling, rock music lies upon the shoulders more heavily than anybody else than on-max.
01:20:53.762 --> 01:20:55.183
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that was great to read, too.
01:20:55.243 --> 01:20:58.625
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a, you know, Bruce's a wordsmith for sure.
01:20:59.025 --> 01:21:02.446
[SPEAKER_01]: And well, that's the job, you know, so whether it's me or anybody else.
01:21:02.967 --> 01:21:05.188
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the job you must embrace to do it well.
01:21:05.488 --> 01:21:09.930
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, it's an interesting thing to be seventy.
01:21:09.950 --> 01:21:11.411
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's how we played.
01:21:11.451 --> 01:21:12.932
[SPEAKER_01]: I was, what, sixty-five.
01:21:13.532 --> 01:21:14.613
[SPEAKER_01]: To be sixty-five.
01:21:14.993 --> 01:21:16.133
[SPEAKER_01]: And to be on the drums.
01:21:16.273 --> 01:21:17.574
[SPEAKER_01]: And both feel that pressure.
01:21:17.594 --> 01:21:18.915
[SPEAKER_01]: To be excellent.
01:21:19.855 --> 01:21:21.116
[SPEAKER_01]: To strive for excellence.
01:21:22.523 --> 01:21:24.908
[SPEAKER_01]: and to also feel like your twelve years old.
01:21:25.810 --> 01:21:27.233
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's a funny combination.
01:21:27.934 --> 01:21:29.157
[SPEAKER_01]: And athletes
01:21:30.202 --> 01:21:57.645
[SPEAKER_01]: don't feel it generally because they don't they don't have the length of careers that performers do if you're lucky enough to have it they do certainly feel it when they're playing that you know it's all that pressure but it's also something you did as a kid and uh... yeah you know uh... i'm built for it i guess uh... i've you know brews and ski pants and am john land though
01:21:58.741 --> 01:22:04.215
[SPEAKER_01]: very much so invested a lot of time energy and wisdom and
01:22:06.740 --> 01:22:12.885
[SPEAKER_01]: education in me to help me become the drummer that I had the potential to be.
01:22:13.645 --> 01:22:15.647
[SPEAKER_01]: This was a learned experience for me.
01:22:16.187 --> 01:22:22.192
[SPEAKER_01]: Also playing on television for sixteen years was a tremendously educational experience.
01:22:23.213 --> 01:22:26.936
[SPEAKER_01]: In many ways, we don't have enough time to talk about that, perhaps we'll do this again.
01:22:26.956 --> 01:22:28.077
[SPEAKER_00]: I would love to.
01:22:28.717 --> 01:22:40.144
[SPEAKER_01]: But you know, that was also extremely pressurized and you never know when you walk in in the morning what the, you know, what music you're gonna have to play was all charted out.
01:22:40.584 --> 01:22:47.128
[SPEAKER_01]: So to me, it's about it reminds me of Liam Neeson and Taken where he says, you know, I have certain skills.
01:22:48.268 --> 01:22:55.733
[SPEAKER_01]: I have certain skills that I developed and they've served me well to be able to serve the leaders, whether it's Bruce
01:22:56.910 --> 01:23:04.193
[SPEAKER_01]: Conan O'Brien, to be in service of helping them proposs themselves forward.
01:23:05.273 --> 01:23:06.094
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the idea.
01:23:06.674 --> 01:23:23.921
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, one or two last things, and then we will come back for part two, because I would like to talk about the Conan O'Brien show, because he once famously said that, Ed Shonasi, who was Doc Severnson's, the drummer in Doc Severnson's tonight show band, you said,
01:23:24.895 --> 01:23:27.756
[SPEAKER_00]: that he had like the greatest job going.
01:23:27.836 --> 01:23:29.617
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you got to send a job.
01:23:29.637 --> 01:23:43.723
[SPEAKER_00]: But the one thing I wanted to talk
to, if we can, before we close out, is, and you talk about in-service of the community in concert with the musicians in the audience.
01:23:43.743 --> 01:23:53.107
[SPEAKER_00]: But the one thing I think that is the greatest tribute to that concept and to your musicality is
01:23:53.968 --> 01:24:05.674
[SPEAKER_00]: then a two thousand fourteen award for musical excellence category, which was that which got the eastward band inducted into the rock and roll hall of fame.
01:24:05.974 --> 01:24:06.955
[SPEAKER_00]: So that must have been something.
01:24:08.407 --> 01:24:11.049
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that was a thrill of course, that's quite an honor.
01:24:11.449 --> 01:24:21.156
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm a big fan as a wrong word, but I guess I'm sort of an amateur student of John F. Kennedy, President Kennedy.
01:24:21.556 --> 01:24:29.602
[SPEAKER_01]: And I can remember a line that went something about using all your abilities along lines of excellence.
01:24:34.885 --> 01:24:49.636
[SPEAKER_01]: because he was so well read, he had a lot of what they would call sound bites now, but that and, you know, grace under pressure, courage is grace under pressure, and I internalize those as a young kid, as a ten-year-old, and eleven-year-old, twelve-year-old.
01:24:54.524 --> 01:25:10.392
[SPEAKER_01]: It was, of course, literally, because Clarence Climans and Dan Federer recently weren't up on that stage with us to receive that recognition, although they are with us on stage every single night, we play, and most definitely they are.
01:25:11.572 --> 01:25:13.833
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that was nice.
01:25:14.614 --> 01:25:18.676
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I must say that one of the greatest things in my career
01:25:19.558 --> 01:25:34.577
[SPEAKER_01]: There was completely a validation in another area, completely parallel way, to being in a rock band, was having my name in the same sentence as Doc Severnstein.
01:25:35.463 --> 01:25:41.529
[SPEAKER_01]: as one of the seven only seven damn leaders of NBC's Canite Show.
01:25:42.009 --> 01:25:49.897
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, for a while, it was called Jack Parts a program, but it was the Canite Show and there have been seven damn leaders from the beginning.
01:25:50.337 --> 01:26:00.207
[SPEAKER_01]: And I used to be able to name them all, but I know, you know, of course, you know, when America granted excuse me and Kevin Newbanks,
01:26:02.087 --> 01:26:27.045
[SPEAKER_01]: And myself like a seven array that we've and I was a big drill because he was my hero when I was a kid with my friend Douglas Katz who's who we used to sit in his father's two eams shares in their den He was the trumpeter in my first band and When we were in junior high school in high school, we'd you know I'd go over there in a Friday night stay up late watch the tonight show and I used to say wow that would be
01:26:27.225 --> 01:26:28.486
[SPEAKER_01]: be greatest job.
01:26:28.926 --> 01:26:36.711
[SPEAKER_01]: You're on TV, which of course,
you know, the TV, as it did that, and as you know, doesn't exist anymore.
01:26:38.232 --> 01:26:39.693
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you have four channels.
01:26:40.234 --> 01:26:47.639
[SPEAKER_01]: You're on television, eighty million people are watching you, and are some, some such number, and you do it every night.
01:26:48.768 --> 01:26:52.691
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, I didn't know, of course, what I went in to doing that.
01:26:53.232 --> 01:27:12.048
[SPEAKER_01]: So to end up as the bandleader, music director of the Tonight Show, that's something I never, ever, I never had the skills until I accidentally bumped into the Conan O'Brien on the street in New York and somebody had given him a late night television show.
01:27:12.628 --> 01:27:15.230
[SPEAKER_01]: And I realized now it wasn't an accident, it was destiny.
01:27:15.991 --> 01:27:17.252
[SPEAKER_01]: And he needed somebody like me.
01:27:17.413 --> 01:27:19.014
[SPEAKER_01]: He certainly didn't need a rock film or so.
01:27:19.094 --> 01:27:20.216
[SPEAKER_01]: I had to invent myself.
01:27:20.276 --> 01:27:22.598
[SPEAKER_01]: I had to reinvent my persona.
01:27:23.299 --> 01:27:29.706
[SPEAKER_01]: So the only thing I knew basically about television drumming was Ricky Ricardo.
01:27:31.708 --> 01:27:33.950
[SPEAKER_01]: The swinging bands you occasionally see.
01:27:34.270 --> 01:27:35.672
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, my hero.
01:27:36.353 --> 01:27:37.894
[SPEAKER_01]: But he rich on the tonight show.
01:27:38.935 --> 01:27:42.077
[SPEAKER_01]: So I said, okay, I'm gonna buy not, and I could never be.
01:27:42.917 --> 01:27:44.378
[SPEAKER_01]: Buddy Rich, it was only one.
01:27:44.918 --> 01:27:50.701
[SPEAKER_01]: But the sort of, you know, swinging, smiling, grooving, you know, hip guy.
01:27:51.822 --> 01:27:54.683
[SPEAKER_01]: And with the wife, I'm saying, I'm gonna be that guy.
01:27:54.763 --> 01:28:03.888
[SPEAKER_01]: So I, you know, I'm an amalgamation of all my favorite entertainers and the people who I've integrated.
01:28:04.488 --> 01:28:08.050
[SPEAKER_01]: As Bruce said in his book, one of the great things he said was I found a place where,
01:28:08.810 --> 01:28:14.476
[SPEAKER_01]: And musically, we're buddy-rich or an art-perty and keeps moan intersected, and I made it my own.
01:28:15.777 --> 01:28:17.839
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's a great place to be.
01:28:18.319 --> 01:28:20.422
[SPEAKER_00]: So tell us what's coming up next.
01:28:21.242 --> 01:28:26.528
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you going on tour with Max Weinberg's youth box as scheduled in September?
01:28:26.548 --> 01:28:29.270
[SPEAKER_00]: I think you opened up in Atlanta in mid-September.
01:28:29.290 --> 01:28:30.652
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you going forward with that?
01:28:31.472 --> 01:28:33.634
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I wouldn't characterize it as a tour.
01:28:33.754 --> 01:28:34.915
[SPEAKER_01]: We go out for a few days.
01:28:34.995 --> 01:28:35.635
[SPEAKER_01]: I come home.
01:28:36.156 --> 01:28:38.037
[SPEAKER_01]: I play about four to five times a month.
01:28:38.898 --> 01:28:44.542
[SPEAKER_01]: They're all very as COVID protocol awareness as you can.
01:28:45.042 --> 01:28:46.243
[SPEAKER_01]: Everyone wears masks.
01:28:47.364 --> 01:28:51.347
[SPEAKER_01]: Generally, if these venues all these stage crew were vaccinated, now I'm going to have people
01:28:51.367 --> 01:28:52.227
[SPEAKER_01]: opponent of that.
01:28:52.748 --> 01:28:59.111
[SPEAKER_01]: I just got my third shot, my booster shot recently, because I qualify, and I think everybody should.
01:28:59.131 --> 01:29:02.633
[SPEAKER_01]: I think they should just do very strongly about that.
01:29:02.793 --> 01:29:07.575
[SPEAKER_01]: But we've invented it, it got created, because my show was a little audience request.
01:29:08.015 --> 01:29:09.956
[SPEAKER_01]: And generally, people would just call them out.
01:29:10.317 --> 01:29:11.557
[SPEAKER_01]: Or I'd go out in the audience.
01:29:11.597 --> 01:29:13.558
[SPEAKER_01]: You were, I think, at one, and you saw that.
01:29:13.978 --> 01:29:16.220
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that was the last one where I'm going to use Williams.
01:29:17.300 --> 01:29:23.801
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, we're working on a QR code that people who buy tickets, we have very emails.
01:29:24.281 --> 01:29:30.382
[SPEAKER_01]: They get a QR code that they can use during the show that shows up on an iPad for me.
01:29:31.143 --> 01:29:32.723
[SPEAKER_01]: And they give their name with their phone.
01:29:32.743 --> 01:29:33.863
[SPEAKER_01]: And the phone they want to hear.
01:29:34.063 --> 01:29:37.824
[SPEAKER_01]: So we figured out how to limit physical contact.
01:29:38.724 --> 01:29:40.644
[SPEAKER_01]: And I believe very strongly in that.
01:29:40.684 --> 01:29:44.665
[SPEAKER_01]: So all the venues, promoters, and facility management going forward.
01:29:45.345 --> 01:29:46.446
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, we must play.
01:29:46.466 --> 01:29:51.190
[SPEAKER_01]: After all, if you don't play, you lose the ability.
01:29:51.970 --> 01:29:53.892
[SPEAKER_01]: And what happens is you lose it slowly.
01:29:53.912 --> 01:29:56.794
[SPEAKER_01]: And then all of a sudden, you can't play anymore.
01:29:56.894 --> 01:29:58.335
[SPEAKER_01]: And that has happened to a lot of people.
01:29:59.016 --> 01:30:02.859
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's not going to happen to me.
01:30:03.319 --> 01:30:06.141
[SPEAKER_01]: I will be playing in some place until I physically
01:30:07.145 --> 01:30:08.927
[SPEAKER_01]: can't get up on the drums.
01:30:09.247 --> 01:30:17.234
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, even if I'm not working as a drummer, I just don't want to lose the synapses that make drumming instantaneous for me.
01:30:18.515 --> 01:30:20.697
[SPEAKER_01]: Because that's what show band drumming is all about.
01:30:20.897 --> 01:30:22.839
[SPEAKER_01]: You have to be prepared for the unexpected.
01:30:23.299 --> 01:30:33.288
[SPEAKER_01]: And the one thing that you can always be sure of, for example,
when you're on stage of Bruce Springsteen, you can always be certain that you can never be sure of what he's going to do.
01:30:35.234 --> 01:30:45.061
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, Bob Dylan was asked once, why is he perpetually on tour, which he took great offense at, and he said, I'm on tour because of a musician.
01:30:45.401 --> 01:30:47.383
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what musicians do.
01:30:47.583 --> 01:30:53.648
[SPEAKER_00]: Why don't you go ask the people who aren't playing, why aren't they playing until I think, apropos to your point?
01:30:53.968 --> 01:30:55.049
[SPEAKER_01]: That's exactly the point.
01:30:55.569 --> 01:30:57.651
[SPEAKER_01]: And it is absolutely right.
01:30:58.191 --> 01:31:00.093
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, he, he turned from
01:31:00.913 --> 01:31:04.518
[SPEAKER_01]: folks singer to Uber star to chew a door.
01:31:05.719 --> 01:31:17.454
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you blow into someone's town, you change their life, to whatever degree you can in two, three, four hours, whatever it is, and then you blow out, and you leave a party yourself behind.
01:31:18.678 --> 01:31:19.719
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
01:31:19.819 --> 01:31:21.801
[SPEAKER_00]: The one nice thing about the Dupac.
01:31:21.901 --> 01:31:23.662
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I loved the Dupac show.
01:31:23.682 --> 01:31:26.265
[SPEAKER_00]: I loved you taking requests.
01:31:26.465 --> 01:31:29.767
[SPEAKER_00]: And as I said, I requested a Dave Clark five songs.
01:31:29.808 --> 01:31:37.074
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought that's the best drummer, although for you, I guess you had Dino Dinelli who was a digerasy kid who played
01:31:38.855 --> 01:31:40.036
[SPEAKER_00]: in the rascals, right?
01:31:40.296 --> 01:31:46.339
[SPEAKER_00]: And for me growing up in Great Nick, we had Joe Butler, who was a local kid who made, who made a good.
01:31:46.379 --> 01:31:59.025
[SPEAKER_00]: But going to the Jipbox show, what was such a lift for you, I could see it in your eyes as when, Ali, your daughter, you called up on stage and she sang with you.
01:31:59.045 --> 01:32:01.466
[SPEAKER_00]: And I've seen you play also with Jay, your son.
01:32:02.427 --> 01:32:07.770
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's got to be incredibly compelling moment.
01:32:08.690 --> 01:32:10.571
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, we've added that, not just forever.
01:32:11.831 --> 01:32:13.812
[SPEAKER_01]: Alley and Jay are both wonderful musicians.
01:32:13.932 --> 01:32:28.859
[SPEAKER_01]: Alley, of course, is a journalist and never wanted to be a professional musician, but really, you know, she studied, she went to a high school where she, high school majored in piano, and she can't play as much as she used to, but she keeps her hand in.
01:32:29.439 --> 01:32:33.020
[SPEAKER_01]: She's been able to have perfect pitch and sing since the day she was born.
01:32:33.040 --> 01:32:35.542
[SPEAKER_01]: That first scream she was, you know,
01:32:36.782 --> 01:32:44.726
[SPEAKER_01]: that I often tell people at least for a spring was Jazz Joplin in peace of my heart at the end of that song.
01:32:45.187 --> 01:32:46.668
[SPEAKER_01]: And she sang it with us that night.
01:32:46.988 --> 01:32:55.493
[SPEAKER_01]: And so yeah, that's a thrill for me to have my children be on stage with me.
01:32:57.133 --> 01:33:03.237
[SPEAKER_01]: They actually have played with Bruce together at the same time when Jay, my son, substituted for me with the history band.
01:33:03.277 --> 01:33:04.858
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I ali got up and played accordion.
01:33:05.478 --> 01:33:07.999
[SPEAKER_01]: So, yeah, it's a family thing and it's wonderful.
01:33:08.159 --> 01:33:20.083
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, my wife Becky and I are just so delighted that they have found things in their lives that turn them on as much as what turned us on.
01:33:21.043 --> 01:33:23.484
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, we never took a vacation without them.
01:33:23.984 --> 01:33:27.505
[SPEAKER_01]: And when we went on tour to Europe or wherever we went, we took them with us.
01:33:28.186 --> 01:33:31.407
[SPEAKER_01]: So, at young ages, nine, twelve through, you know,
01:33:32.027 --> 01:33:32.748
[SPEAKER_01]: teenage years.
01:33:33.228 --> 01:33:35.010
[SPEAKER_01]: And still even today, we've done that.
01:33:35.050 --> 01:33:38.893
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, they'll come out individually, generally, because they're busy when they can.
01:33:38.913 --> 01:33:42.596
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, they have that experience.
01:33:42.616 --> 01:33:50.542
[SPEAKER_01]: They're the great museums of the world and meeting people of different cultures and languages for the time they were children.
01:33:51.083 --> 01:33:58.829
[SPEAKER_01]: And that has presented an opportunity and created the opportunity for them to become world citizens.
01:33:59.410 --> 01:34:00.130
[SPEAKER_01]: And in their work,
01:34:01.511 --> 01:34:09.976
[SPEAKER_01]: particularly Ali, that has given her an empathy with the world scene that is quite unusual, I believe, because she traveled.
01:34:09.996 --> 01:34:29.947
[SPEAKER_01]: We're mostly, mostly through Europe, but on her own throughout Asia and, you know, Australia, you know, and been Africa with me, but, you know, as something that has children, they were exposed to that now is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is,
01:34:31.951 --> 01:34:39.932
[SPEAKER_00]: Matt Kleinberg here in American Treasure and I'm very very grateful for you spending all of this time with me on that said today.
01:34:40.638 --> 01:34:41.719
[SPEAKER_01]: I've had a pleasure, Michael.
01:34:41.799 --> 01:34:42.299
[SPEAKER_01]: It's great.
01:34:42.499 --> 01:34:43.520
[SPEAKER_01]: You got a great show.
01:34:43.560 --> 01:34:44.501
[SPEAKER_01]: Interesting questions.
01:34:45.001 --> 01:34:53.206
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, as Ruth often says, one of the reasons he likes to go to therapy is because he gets talked at length about his favorite subject himself.
01:34:53.807 --> 01:35:00.591
[SPEAKER_01]: So I've enjoyed talking with you and reminiscing, I don't think of these subjects on a daily basis.
01:35:01.212 --> 01:35:04.814
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's fun to kind of revisit the
01:35:06.652 --> 01:35:13.557
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, the sort of arc of my life and career and, you know, being married for forty years and having stability.
01:35:13.917 --> 01:35:18.460
[SPEAKER_01]: So another thing that Charlie Watson I related to was he got married in nineteen six and four.
01:35:19.161 --> 01:35:28.027
[SPEAKER_01]: So he was married for fifty six years and that was the most important thing to him is his family, his daughter, his to grandchildren.
01:35:28.880 --> 01:35:47.621
[SPEAKER_01]: It really was, and of course, his editorial splendor, there's an incredible picture online of him at, and in Shirley, his wife, at the mascot races, and only Charlie Watts could wear what he's wearing that day, and he looks
01:35:50.254 --> 01:36:02.003
[SPEAKER_01]: They should really put a portrait of him in Windsor Castle because he looks, you know, on the last fifteen or twenty years of his life, he looked like he was descended from royalty.
01:36:02.323 --> 01:36:06.346
[SPEAKER_01]: And in a very true way, he is the epitome of rock royalty.
01:36:07.127 --> 01:36:15.473
[SPEAKER_01]: We're in classic, classy, gentle, kind, study, serious, and unbelievably talented.
01:36:16.365 --> 01:36:22.950
[SPEAKER_00]: in the New York Times of August twenty ninth which is today on the second page of the style section.
01:36:22.990 --> 01:36:26.273
[SPEAKER_00]: There's an article about Charlie Watson's style.
01:36:26.533 --> 01:36:32.417
[SPEAKER_00]: His clothing is looks and everything you're talking about described nicely.
01:36:33.298 --> 01:36:36.200
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, yes, and I'll leave you with this.
01:36:36.561 --> 01:36:43.266
[SPEAKER_01]: Charlie, as I mentioned earlier about his wardrobe in the dressing room, I mean, in his hotel room.
01:36:44.450 --> 01:36:48.071
[SPEAKER_01]: Charlie typically before a show you'd see him in sort of a track suit.
01:36:49.052 --> 01:36:52.333
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was always with this Rolling Stones tongue logo.
01:36:52.373 --> 01:36:55.714
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was kind of like a warm-up breaker, you know, windbreaker.
01:36:55.754 --> 01:36:58.135
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, he used to have him a deedist.
01:36:58.235 --> 01:36:59.055
[SPEAKER_01]: And it wasn't a brand.
01:36:59.115 --> 01:37:00.435
[SPEAKER_01]: It was custom made, of course.
01:37:01.036 --> 01:37:03.637
[SPEAKER_01]: And something like almost like ballet shoes.
01:37:04.577 --> 01:37:07.258
[SPEAKER_01]: And I can remember the last time I saw him play, it was a Newark.
01:37:08.119 --> 01:37:13.942
[SPEAKER_01]: He was wearing that when he walked on stage with a yellow t-shirt underneath it.
01:37:14.962 --> 01:37:21.985
[SPEAKER_01]: And does he never very, really, a second or the early days wore a tie and jacket playing with the stones later on in life?
01:37:22.765 --> 01:37:24.906
[SPEAKER_01]: But he was the first one on stage, guys.
01:37:24.946 --> 01:37:25.787
[SPEAKER_01]: Huge innovation.
01:37:26.267 --> 01:37:27.507
[SPEAKER_01]: He was standing at the drums.
01:37:27.527 --> 01:37:32.890
[SPEAKER_01]: He took off the windbreaker and he very carefully folded it.
01:37:33.857 --> 01:37:34.718
[SPEAKER_01]: It didn't just process it.
01:37:34.938 --> 01:37:38.219
[SPEAKER_01]: He carefully folded it and handed it to his assistant.
01:37:39.060 --> 01:37:40.781
[SPEAKER_01]: And then he sat down and played the drums.
01:37:41.101 --> 01:37:42.642
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was so cool.
01:37:42.682 --> 01:37:44.123
[SPEAKER_01]: It was classic Charlie Watts.
01:37:44.795 --> 01:37:45.816
[SPEAKER_00]: you tell a story.
01:37:46.316 --> 01:37:49.799
[SPEAKER_00]: I keep saying, thank you and time to go, but there's so many stories.
01:37:49.819 --> 01:38:00.446
[SPEAKER_00]: You tell a wonderful story of being in his hotel room, watching him unpack his clothing and then put it into the dresser, all neatly folded.
01:38:00.486 --> 01:38:07.872
[SPEAKER_00]: I think you responded to that by saying, in all the years ours on tour, I don't remember ever folding any of my clothes ever.
01:38:08.949 --> 01:38:16.454
[SPEAKER_01]: never took him out of a suitcase because you're going on to another another city, you know, so take out what you need and travel light.
01:38:17.355 --> 01:38:25.521
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was one of the most remarkable things I've ever seen and I've actually, you know, never seen anybody do that.
01:38:26.061 --> 01:38:30.224
[SPEAKER_01]: Use the actual bureau in a suite.
01:38:31.305 --> 01:38:33.707
[SPEAKER_01]: So, yeah, that was really something.
01:38:35.150 --> 01:38:37.491
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, Max, I'm going to say it again here in American Treasure.
01:38:37.671 --> 01:38:39.832
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for taking all this time with us.
01:38:40.433 --> 01:38:41.373
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that was my pleasure.
01:38:41.994 --> 01:38:48.017
[SPEAKER_00]: That said is produced by Compro in the Museum of Public Relations, theme music by Sam Post.
01:38:48.117 --> 01:38:53.780
[SPEAKER_00]: Please address any comments or questions to us at that said, Zeldin at gmail.com.
01:38:54.020 --> 01:38:56.161
[SPEAKER_00]: For that said, I am Michael Zeldin.