The Odd Interview 10: Evan Shore, of Muck and the Mires

Evan Shore (front and center), bringing it

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I can’t recall when I first became aware of the Boston-based rock musician Evan Shore, who for the past quarter-century has been the shades-wearing frontman known as “Muck” (or even the artist formerly known as “Joey Muccarino”) in the garage/punk band Muck and the Mires. I certainly knew of him back in my Boston days in the ’80s and ’90s, when I was an avid concertgoer and LP listener engaged in rock critic stuff — cough, music journalism, and Evan was engaged in singing, playing guitar and writing songs for a number of bands, notably the Voodoo Dolls.

Music in its various and diverse genres is certainly capable of imparting important and profound things, delving deeply into one’s soul, examining the human condition, and protesting injustice, but sometimes you just want to go out and have fun. Evan has always impressed me as someone who could knock out a classic ’60s inspired pop tune in his sleep and probably did, prolifically. He’s always known what he wants to do musically, is persistent and industrious, and has had proven success at doing his thing.

At last count per their website, Muck and the Mires have put out 19 recordings (counting CD/LPs, EPs and singles). They’re a busy crew; the band is usually either recording or touring. I hope they make time for the occasional vacation. Mr. Shore has been a mainstay of the Boston rock scene seemingly forever; I’ve known him casually for years, and we share four dozen mutual friends on Facebook. We’re both transplanted Long Islanders who came up to Boston to study at BU’s School of Public Communication and stuck around afterwards. But we’d never actually had a real conversation. I thought it was about time to change that.

Evan and I spoke over Zoom between Boston and Austin on the cold winter afternoon of January 26, 2026, with a follow-up by email. I’ve edited the convo for clarity, but I promise I didn’t make up any of the dialogue. (I didn’t need to!)

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Q: What was your first band, and did you have a band when you were in high school?

EVAN SHORE: I had a cover band when I was in high school. We were terrible (laughs). But I was fortunate that the guys in the band were going to let me in. After that band, the bass player and I formed the House Pets. We were around just at the tail end of the 1984 garage revival, playing with bands like the Vipers, the Mosquitos,  the Raunch Hands, that whole summer of fuzz band thing. But unfortunately the band only lasted a year. I went to school in Boston, and the singer came up and we became the Pets. And half of the Pets eventually morphed into the Voodoo Dolls.

How many bands have you been in? Besides Muck and the Voodoo Dolls, you were in the Queers for about a year, you were in the Pets, you were in the Nines –

EVAN SHORE: The House Pets were my first band. It’s interesting to note that in all of those bands there’s a rock ‘n’ roll family tree. Every band that I’ve been in, I’ve always taken one (bandmate) from one band to form my next band.

Would you say you were a little ahead of the times in the Voodoo Dolls as far as the garage rock revival? 

We broke up in 1994 and missed the 2004 garage rock revival by literally 10 years. I remember seeing the Hives in Boston and several people came up to me and said they sounded like the Voodoo Dolls, which was flattering. It’s too bad we never toured Europe. We had an album out on an Italian label and I think we would have done really well and made a lasting impression. 

Some past product from my collection. The Pets’ “Break ‘Em All Down/You’re Never Home” (Rock House Records, 1986) was Shore’s first appearance on vinyl — the equivalent of a rookie card, to use a baseball analogy.

With the Voodoo Dolls you were with Cam (Ackland) and Dave Harrison, playing a good deal of the same things that you’ve been doing now. You’ve been doing Muck for about 25 years now, is that right?

It’s unbelievable, yeah.

I’ve been listening to a bunch of your music in the last few days and I wanted to talk about one of your signature songs, “This Town Makes Me Feel So Lonely,” which you first did with the Voodoo Dolls and then with Muck. On the surface this is about a guy who’s feeling lousy because his girlfriend dumped him. I’ve always thought there was something more to it, specific to Boston maybe, that maybe it’s the TOWN that makes you feel lonely, and on that note you might say something like “It wasn’t you, it was the town that makes me feel lonely,” but that would be another song.

(Laughs) Yeah, that’s what differentiates Boston from New York or Philadelphia. Boston is a town. Boston’s not a city, it’s a town. And when you’re feeling alone, the whole town feels lonely.

It can be a cold or a hard town, but on the other hand it can also be a great place, especially in your younger years, to make lifelong friends, find your purpose, act as a crucible to refine your skills, and so forth. Would you agree with that?

Yeah, I went up to go to school and got involved in the local underground (music scene) and the party just went on for years.

You’re constantly busy. You’re either writing or recording or touring. You’ve played a good deal in Spain, like your friends in the Ugly Beats, and other foreign countries. There are some rock bands and solo acts who will make a name for themselves in their hometown. There are others who do better on tour. Part of it, I think, is if you play a lot in your hometown, audiences come to take you for granted – “Oh, I’ve seen them, they always play the same old shit,” and so on – but the farther away the bands come from to play in your city or town, the more impressed they are because they don’t see them every other week.  They might be more impressed with some choir from Bulgaria or throat singers from Mongolia than some band from Medford. Do you find that audiences in other countries appreciate what you do more than Americans?

It’s tough to say what the the most enthusiastic place is. In Japan, South America, it’s just, I don’t know what it is. Music is more important to their culture. There was a time when music was the soundtrack to our lives here in America. I’m not sure that’s the case anymore. We always have a great time playing. We don’t play Boston all the time, we keep it special.  

Some musicians say that audiences in Europe pay more attention to the music than (Americans) do in the clubs, where maybe they’re just trying to hit on someone or looking at their phones. They take it more seriously, maybe.

Definitely. It’s also interesting, too, to go to a place like Madrid. People there know more about the history of Boston rock ‘n’ roll. You have people asking about Barry and the Remains, the Barbarians, you know. How do they know about all of these bands? They’re all excited to talk about that.

You’ve talked about the Dave Clark Five as having been a big influence on you. You have an affinity for ’60 pop culture and cartoons, cartoon bands like the Beau Brummelstones on the Flintstones and the stuff that we grew up with. It’s fun pop culture. I love that you did a tribute song to Lesley Gore (“Lesley”), who I’ve always thought never got her due as a singer.

Yeah. I regret not sending her that song when she was alive so she could have heard it. It was a heartfelt tribute to Lesley Gore, I’m a huge fan. With the Dave Clark Five, I think it was Muck and the Mires’ fourth or fifth show when we opened for Mike Smith, the lead singer of the Dave Clark Five. Opening for him was like one of the highlights of my musical career. The voice of the Dave Clark Five!

How do you come up with songs? I’ve always considered you to be somebody who almost writes these great pop songs in your sleep. I don’t think you ever really get the credit you deserve for all of this.

Thank you!

Is it a situation where you just sit down somewhere and work on something with a guitar and a notepad, or does this stuff just come to you when you’re walking around shopping or doing dishes or something?

A title might pop in your head. You might think “hey, that’d be a great song title.” I love songwriting and write all the time. Maybe because I don’t have any other real hobby (laughs). I’ve heard so many professional songwriters say it, but you have to write a lot of songs to get to the good one. I’ll admit, I’ve written a lot of songs and a lot of really bad ones that I was wise enough to not release. But yeah, I’m pretty meticulous about my songs, I like to make sure that the lyrics are telling a story in two minutes. I won’t let it go until I think  it’s perfect. I’m a big fan of 1930s style “inside rhymes.”

Is it the music or the lyrics that come first, or is it just like they come together in a package?

When you get the title, you’re halfway home. “I can’t believe no one’s ever done a song called…” But most of the time I start with the melody. Unless I am trying to do a riff-oriented song in the style of the Sonics. We are typically bucketed into  the category of  garage rock,  but I believe what makes us a little different is that we draw on many other influences like ’70s power pop and punk. Our focus is always on catchy hooks and melodies. Without great material, we would be just another garage band. And while we proudly wave that garage rock banner, it’s great to have a little edge over the competition!

Do you ever want to do other kinds of music besides garage rock? Or was this always it for you?

Well, it’s a little of punk, a little of garage, it’s a combination of the two. It’s kind of like I was doing kind of ‘60s music and then I saw the Ramones, and my head exploded like everybody else. We had a lot of guitars and Marshall stacks, and our joke is you’re trying to imitate a band that had no commercial success (laughs). In the end, you know, they became legendary, and eventually bands that emulated them, like Green Day, they became successful. If the Voodoo Dolls had stuck together a little longer maybe we would have enjoyed some of the success that they had.

I think there’s a real optimism in your songs, even the pessimistic ones, which is maybe a weird thing to say, but there’s a certain energy that comes through in everything you play.

Well, thank you. What I will say to that is that a lot of us grew up in the time of grunge when everybody was being super serious to go see a band. Everybody was serious…I want to go out there and entertain. Let them get up off their seats. I think a lot of our songs, at least for the first four albums, are probably more optimistic and when they’re not optimistic, it’s just like what garage rock groups (do).

Can you talk a bit about the late Kim Fowley? I know he produced your Hypnotic album in 2009, you were his backup band a few years later (2013) per your bio. He’s a controversial figure, to say the least.

Yeah.

Going into his whole history would take far too long, but from what I’ve read about him, let’s just say he makes Phil Spector look like a Boy Scout. I’d like to know what your experience was with him, since you knew him and you worked with him.

Well, you know, to sum it up, it was a very good experience. But the thing is, he used to tell us “I’m a bad person who does good things” (laughs) and we caught him when he was doing good things. The first thing people ask is did he produce you guys, and the answer I tell them is yeah, he actually picked the songs for the album. I had sent a CD of demos of all the songs we intended to record, and we got to his house and found the package completely unopened. When we got to the studio, he said “forget that CD.” He then handed me an acoustic guitar and said “Now play me your 12 best songs.” And he was right…we ended up with a very different album than the one we set out to make.  But other than that, he was just agitated and his role was to cause rock and roll chaos and excitement so he could capture that energy on tape.

This one’s for the guitar geeks. You’re primarily a rhythm guitarist. Which guitars are your favorites, and which ones do you find most suitable for the kind of music you play?

Let me explain why I consider myself a rhythm guitar player. I’m capable of playing lead guitar, but I surround myself with musicians who are better than me. There’s nothing that I can play that Pedro Mire can’t play better, so there’s no point in me playing lead guitar. To that point, because I’m not playing a lot of lead guitar in Muck and the Mires, my favorite guitars are Rickenbacker 325s, which are the John Lennon model. It’s a 5/8 scale guitar, it’s tiny. If you’ve ever seen pictures of the early Beatles, you’ll know what I’m talking about. When I was a kid I would go to 48^th Street in New York City where all the guitar stores were, and I would stare at that guitar in the window saying “Someday I’m going to own one.” And it took a few years, but I always play a Rickenbacker 325 with Muck and the Mires onstage.

When you’re actually playing the guitar that your heroes played, do you feel a little more connected to them in that way? Like you’re carrying on the tradition?

Definitely. A lot of people will knock John Lennon’s playing, but he was a great rhythm guitar player. I think one of the things that aided his sound was the fact that he was playing a short scale guitar and a Rickenbacker. I always like to have a few elements of garage rock in Muck and the Mires, and I feel a Rickenbacker is kind of synonymous with many of the garage rock bands of the early ‘60s.

Can you talk a bit about Jessie Best, who’s been with Muck and the Mires since the beginning? Women drummers still don’t get their due. I’d put her up there with Linda Pitmon, of the Baseball Project and a lot of other bands. [Note: I know I could have namechecked so many more women drummers here, don’t whatabout me…]

Her name sums it up. She’s the Best! We first played together in the Nines,  which was the band after the Voodoo Dolls that eventually spawned Muck and the Mires. I had an ad out for a drummer and I was a little taken aback when I picked up the phone and found  a girl on the other end looking for the job. It’s pretty commonplace now, but this was 1994 and there were very few female drummers. She blew away all the male drummers we had auditioned…and she was also much prettier!

I almost hate to bring this up, but when you get to a certain age – let’s say 53 – most people need to pay more attention to their health and well-being. How do you stay healthy and compos mentis when living the lifestyle of a touring musician and always going from one place to the other, flying and driving and packing and unpacking and all the rest of it?

Yeah (laughs), it’s a young man’s game for sure. The trick is to get a lot of sleep, and I’ve learned how to sleep on planes and sleep in vans and sleep on trains and sleep in buses. It took a long time. One thing that Muck and the Mires love to do is sleep. It’s a very exciting lifestyle.

Are there any cities in the US or around the world that really stand out as really welcoming to the kind of music that you play?

We don’t tend to just get in a van and tour the US anymore. We go to where we feel wanted and appreciated and where we do well. We do really well in Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, New York. So we tend to do what the Ramones did, which was fly somewhere, play a bunch of shows and come home. I just don’t see the joy in playing on a Tuesday in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania because we’re on the way to somewhere else. We don’t have the support behind us to be able to go on a tour like that. We’re an underground band, we recognize that.

I guess garage rock, or ’60s inspired music, is kind of a niche thing, but the people who play it and the people who love to listen to it and go to the shows, they’re so passionate about it.

Oh, a hundred percent. We have all of our misfit friends all around the country and all around the world, whether it’s the Ugly Beats in Austin or the Woggles, the Fleshtones — we’re all doing essentially the same thing, you show up at a venue and you’ll see a poster for one of those guys who are coming the following week.

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Per their Instagram bio: “Boston’s MUCK & THE MIRES (crowned the Number 1 Garage Rock Band by Little Steven Van Zandt on MTV in 2004) have played the USA, UK, EU, Canada, South America & Japan.” They will play Austin’s Continental Club on February 21st, 2026, and embark on a tour of Spain on April 10. Follow them at muckandthemires.com.

Muck and the Mires are:

Evan “Muck” Shore – Rhythm guitar

Jessie Best – Drums

Pedro Mire – Lead guitar

John Quincy Mire – Bass guitar

Mucking around at Austin’s Continental Club, 2017 (photo by Michael Passman)

The Odd Interview 9: Brian Wilson

June 11, 2025: Brian Wilson has left us, and my thoughts turn to the time a decade ago when he was touring behind a new album called No Pier Pressure and doing some press. I got to do a brief phone interview with the legendary composer for the article below that I wrote for the Austin American-Statesman in advance of his show at Bass Concert Hall in Austin on June 23, 2015, which I also reviewed for the paper. In my version of Take Your Son to Work Day, I brought my then 10-year-old son Luka to the show; it was his first “adult” concert. Coincidentally, the first such “adult” rock concert I remember attending myself was a Beach Boys show, which to the best of my recollection happened at Boston Garden in my freshman year of college, when I was 17. There’s the circle game for you. He was so much a part of so many lives. This is my attempt to make sense of him and his legacy, which (if I flatter myself) amounts to one tiny piece of the puzzle.

Brian Wilson, in the present tense

As he turns 73, the former Beach Boy is still writing and performing, but is he being overshadowed by his own story?

Summer has come around again; so, for another season, has Brian Wilson. The legendary pop composer has long outlived his two younger brothers and fellow Beach Boys — Carl by 17 years, Dennis by more than 30. He’s survived the splintering of his old band, now led by his cousin/ex-collaborator/frenemy Mike Love; save for a well-received 50th anniversary reunion tour in 2012, the group’s endless summer has seen more endless bickering and lawsuits than harmony among the players. Last but certainly not least, Wilson has survived decades of crises due to mental illness, as documented in innumerable newspaper and magazine accounts and, compellingly, in the current biopic Love & Mercy, starring Paul Dano and John Cusack as his 1960s and ’80s selves.

What, then, should one make of the actual Brian Wilson in 2015? Seemingly against all odds, Wilson not only abides but appears to be thriving. Unlike most of us, the aging icon’s inner child gets to come out nearly constantly, on film, on record and in real life. Those close to him — family, friends, fellow musicians — have long learned to make allowances. Diagnosed with bipolar schizoaffective disorder, he’s endured auditory hallucinations since the ’60s yet now functions well enough in the place he feels most comfortable — the recording studio — and even in a place that long terrified him — the stage. On Tuesday, three days after his 73rd birthday, he’ll be with his band at Bass Concert Hall, not only basking in the Love & Mercy attention but touring behind a new album, No Pier Pressure. It’s Wilson’s 11th solo record, but rest assured: plenty of the set list consists of the songs fans expect to hear. Wilson is still crafting minisymphonies. They may not all be great art, but the common thread is a longing for a perfect love and a perfect world that never really existed. You listen to get your recommended dose of nostalgic, wistful optimism in spite of everything. And, of course, those harmonies.

Love & Mercy, though filled with compassion for Wilson’s troubles, inevitably rehashes them for the old fan and newbie alike: the breakdowns, the drugs, the years in bed, the years under the thumb of quack therapist Eugene Landy. To its credit, it delves deeply into the reason we’re interested in this story in the first place: Wilson’s singular talents as a composer, producer and arranger. The film lingers on the nuts and bolts of the recording process as young Brian directs the Wrecking Crew, a group of seasoned session musicians, in the forging of the Beach Boys’ influential ’60s masterpiece, Pet Sounds. From that time, in every possible way, Brian Wilson’s head would be a long way from surfin’ safaris and hamburger stands.

Has any pop or rock musician been as well known for mental struggles as Brian Wilson? (Kurt Cobain may come in at a distant second, with apologies to local candidates Roky Erickson and Daniel Johnston.) Admit it: The difference between the ethereal harmony Wilson pursues in his songs and the well-known discord and tumult in his personal life is captivating stuff. The story of the tortured artist who spends his life creating lasting works of great beauty but suffers greatly for it may have become a cliché, but sometimes it happens.

Most artists, when interviewed, are happy, or at least willing, to talk about themselves and their work; not this guy. For years, one reporter after another assigned to interview Wilson has suffered through awkward silences and minimalist responses. That’s much my experience too. Spending 10 minutes with Wilson on the phone recently, as he zooms down the road fresh from an outdoor daytime concert in Philadelphia to the next venue in north Jersey, he comes off as largely detached; not hostile, just not completely present. After a few minutes of this, the last thing you want to do is keep barking questions into his one good ear. You just want to leave him alone.

Brian in 2015 (credit: Brian Bowen Smith)

Q: “No Pier Pressure” is your 11th solo album, quite an accomplishment for any musician, never mind all your work with the Beach Boys. In your mind, have you finally put the Beach Boys behind you?

A: Yeah, because the Beach Boys wanted to go on tour, y’know, without me, but I’m going to go on tour in June.

Q: When you look back on your life, what were the times that you were happiest?

A: When I was in the studio with the Beach Boys.

The oft-told tale of Wilson’s personal travails, often framed within a California-dream-vs.-dark-reality context, has often overshadowed the actual music he was making, even when that music was by and large extraordinary, like the refabricated Smile, abandoned in 1967, then completed and triumphantly taken on the road in 2004. One shouldn’t have to pretend that No Pier Pressure ranks with Pet Sounds or Smile — it has its moments, but also too much sugary adult contemporary schmaltz and a few too many guest artists — but then, one doesn’t listen to Brian Wilson for edginess and acerbic putdowns. When asked what he wanted to express with the new album, he responds, “Mellowness and happiness.”

Love & Mercy was made with the cooperation of Wilson and his wife, Melinda, and Wilson calls the movie “very factual and very well-portrayed.” Asked if it bothers him to have his personal life and past troubles so publicly out there and whether it frustrates him when people focus on that rather than his music, he answers, “It does not bother me, because that movie spoke for itself. That movie is a good movie.”

Paul Von Mertens, Wilson’s longtime musical director on tour, does confess some frustration, though. “For me,” he says, “the real story is who he is as a person and as a musician, and the (focus on the) somewhat lurid history really has very little to do with the music and also with Brian’s own heart and soul. He’s a gentle spirit; he had some real painful times in his life, and it would be nice if he could just live in the present and make music and enjoy doing it, because that’s who I know him to be: a guy who’s really gentle, incapable of being mean or sarcastic. That’s the guy that I know and that I love. The other stuff, that’s old news to me.”

Von Mertens (who also plays with Poi Dog Pondering) says the friction reported in the press when the 50th reunion tour ended was misinterpreted. “The tour was always intended to be a finite thing. From the beginning, they said, ‘OK, we’re going to do 50 shows, and that’s it.’ They ended up extending it and doing 75 shows, so everybody went beyond their original commitment because it was going really well and everybody was having a good time. But the agreement was always that everybody would go back to doing what they were doing.”

Von Mertens says the Wilson and Love camps got along reasonably well in 2012. “It was like being at a Thanksgiving dinner with a slightly dysfunctional family every day for six months,” he says. “For some reason, people are fascinated by discord. Mike was kind and gracious to Brian, and I must say, some of the shows were epic, like the most stunning experiences I’ve had on stage. There’s an inherent friction in the Beach Boys’ music that makes it interesting, and this is just my point of view, but Mike is ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ and Brian is ‘In My Room.’ And you can’t separate the two. And the tension that’s built into that was part of the chemistry that has always made the band interesting, and it sparked a lot of vitality for the music.”

Even in our brief phone chat, Wilson struck me as someone who lives very much in the present; Von Mertens, who has worked with him for around 17 years, confirms the man doesn’t like to dwell on the past. “Absolutely. Or the future. It’s what’s happening now — what time do we eat, when is sound check, what time’s the show, when are we going back to the hotel — that is what’s usually on his mind.”

That’s been the case, Von Mertens adds, ever since he’s known Wilson. “Always, yeah. Not a whole lot of examination of the past and motivations and personalities and conflict. It’s just notsomething that he talks about. At all. Ever. It’s really, like, what’s happening right now. ‘How do you feel? How’s your wife? How’s your kids?’ Those are the kinds of things that he asks me. ‘What kind of music are you working on? Don’t waste your time learning to type, you should be working on music!’ I mean, that’s who Brian is to me.”

Who is the real Brian Wilson? And should it matter to anyone except the man himself, and those close to him? In the end, it might be reasonable to conclude that this survivor, as he ushers in yet another summer filled with his ethereal, eternal harmonies, has already given us more than enough of himself.

The Odd Interview 8: Judy Heumann

When Judith (Judy) Heumann died on March 4, 2023 at the age of 75, there was a huge outpouring of grief from people around the world: from her family and friends, of course, but also from scads of folks she’d never met, especially from her people in the disability rights movement, which Heumann had played an absolutely key role in nurturing and moving forward for half a century.

Judy Heumann (1947–2023)

If we are to believe the CDC, 61 million Americans (that’s 26 percent) have some kind of disability, whether it relates to mobility, cognition, vision, hearing, self-care, or independent living. And yet, until the last third of the 20th century the disabled were largely out of sight, out of mind, with scarce consideration paid to them in public policy or in public, period.

This was certainly the case when Heumann, the child of German Jewish immigrants to Brooklyn, was born in 1947, and when she contracted polio a year and a half later, leaving her unable to walk for the rest of her life. I won’t retell her entire life story here (I recommend reading her compelling autobiography Being Heumann for that), but suffice it to say she was never afraid to put herself on the line, to the point of putting herself in physical danger or getting arrested, to fight for the right to accessibility and for the right to live a life as full as anyone else’s.

I spoke with Heumann over the phone on August 19, 2021, after securing an assignment from the Zenger online news service in May, and scheduling the interview via her assistant (it was June by then, and given Judy’s typically crazy schedule it would be August before she was free). Even so, when I phoned Judy at the appointed hour she was apparently unaware that an interview had been scheduled, and I had to explain who I was.

This was not an especially high hurdle, as Judy Heumann loved to talk. After some introductory chatting about our shared German Jewish heritage (my paternal grandmother’s maiden name was actually Heumann, which was pronounced HOY-mann in Deutschland, although Judy and I weren’t related) and my autistic son, whose schooling she asked about. Judy, in her matter-of-fact way, also helpfully recommended a couple of people I should speak with for my article (which you can read here). And we were off. (The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.)

The Odd Interview: The latest news is that Sian Heder (the director of CODA) is going to adapt your memoir and direct a movie based on it, perhaps starring Ali Stroker. That’s exciting. How important is it to you to be played by an actress who actually uses a wheelchair in real life?

Judy Heumann: Oh, it’s essential. We’re hoping that the (film) will have significant representation of disabled people, every aspect of it.

I have to tell you, I admire you very much for your lifelong activism and I know you’d be the first person to say that you didn’t do it alone and that there were so many others along on the journey with you, but you definitely seem to be a leader and someone other people in the movement look up to.

Thank you. Yeah, I mean I’ve been involved in the movement since I was a child, which I think is still true today. I was speaking with a young woman yesterday who is about 23, autistic and a non-speaking person, so they use an augmentative communication device. It’s very exciting to see the continuation of disabled people throughout the generations. I would say, not just continuing to fight for rights, but really to expand and increase the number of disabled people who want to be coming forth, being an active part of making changes here and around the world for the rights of disabled people.

Your framing of disability rights as a civil rights issue, part of human rights, was really revolutionary. Given the attention lately to Republican states attempting to limit voting rights, which puts many communities at a disadvantage, how does your community fit into this issue? How do you relate to that?

We relate very strongly to it, because a significant number of people who will be adversely affected if these laws are allowed to stand are disabled individuals, and then substantial numbers of people who will have disabilities and be poorer and Black and indigenous. So it has a profound effect on our community, and I think it’s an intentional attack (aimed at) keeping people away from the polls. There are many groups that are really fighting against it, and one of the other positives, if you can see anything positive in this, is that the disability community has, really since 1980 and forward, been working more closely with groups like the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, where there’s an understanding that disabled people come from all communities and that we face the same barriers as others, and really need to be working collaboratively to fight against state, local and federal legislation that can restrict people’s ability to vote; or, conversely, supporting legislation at the national level which would set national standards for voting.

Is there anything in the pipeline among the disability community to specifically fight this, any protests planned?

There’s a lot of work that’s going on. There’s an organization called the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD), you can go onto their website, they have a very active program. [She speaks about the AAPD’s REV UP program, which stands for Reach Every Voter.]

REV UP is a nonpartisan activity; it’s helping disabled individuals learn about their voting rights and the laws that exist within each state, and if they’re having problems, how to file a complaint, and getting people actively involved in getting out the vote, with a nonpartisan approach because it’s a nonprofit organization. But it is an issue of deep concern to the disability community.

I wanted to go back a little bit into the history of the movement. I think that for younger people who are just familiar with the way the Republican party is today, they’d be surprised to know that Section 504 was enacted in 1973 under Nixon; Joe Califano, who you had so many problems with, ending up with the 504 Sit-in, was Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of HEW, a Democrat; and George H.W. Bush signed the ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] in 1990. I say this as a lifelong Democrat, but this sort of contradicts the narrative of Democrats as the party of compassion, doesn’t it?

Well, I think it’s fair to say that discrimination against disabled people cuts across all communities. I think there are no illusions that one political party or the other completely gets it. I think the reality is Democrats understand many of the major issues that we deal with, and are learning and are willing to learn, as opposed to — like you, I am a Democrat, I’ve become more and more disillusioned by what’s been going on in the Republican party…especially around states like Texas and Florida. Your governor [Abbott] hates the vaccine, gets COVID and then gets medical treatment that 99 percent of the state can’t get, and doesn’t see himself (as) other people see him, as a hypocrite.

Not to mention that Governor Abbott is in a wheelchair but couldn’t have less compassion for people who are disadvantaged.

Have disabilities, yeah.

I remember when there was such a thing as a liberal Republican, but that seems to be an extinct species.

Kind of an oxymoron!

What still needs to be done in the disability rights field domestically? Have you had any contact from anyone in the Biden administration, which is staffing up at OSERS [Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services], your old place of business?

They are staffing up in the specifically disability/government areas, but they’re also bringing disabled people on beyond typical disability jobs. I think people are feeling very much like they’re a door which is definitely open, and the administration has been putting forth financing efforts to ensure that money will be put in to help ensure that more people are able to get personal assistant services or (be) eligible for Medicaid, and they’re working on voter rights issues in a way that we’re very comfortable with, and on and on.

When COVID came out last year, the current administration was not in place; one important aspect was (that) the disability rights community has become stronger over the years, and that laws like ADA and 504 are being enforced more. We were able to see HHS, for example, come out with a policy statement to ensure that disabled people who contracted or were at risk of contracting the virus would not be considered — you know, one of the things that was going on at that point was who should get treatment first. And there was work going on that would have had disabled people not being seen as equally valuable to non-disabled people, and I think we were happy with the fact that HHS came out with an interpretational policy in 2020 that really helped ensure that states were not able to implement policies that could more adversely affect disabled people. I think groups like the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund out in California, that was formed in 1980, has become a pretty strong organization that in California, for example, was able to fend off legislation and policy interpretation that could have more adversely affected disabled people.

I think what we see now is a stronger disability community, talking about what needs to be happening. One critical issue is, our community needs to continue to grow. Those people with invisible disabilities need to feel safe that they can talk about (them), talk about what is working and what is not working.

We represent, like, one in four (people) according to the CDC, and if we can get our voices out there and the voices of family and friends who understand what it is we’re needing — we’re talking about rights, and the ability to not only move about our communities but also to be able to get appropriate training, education and jobs, and to be able to feel comfortable in our communities where people don’t fear us or question our ability to appropriately contribute.

What is your experience of the pandemic as a disabled person? I was thinking maybe one of the small ‘blessings’ of COVID is that it’s given the non-disabled a taste of what it’s like to be shut in. But has it been isolating for you, or freeing, or what?

I wouldn’t say freeing! (laughs) No, I’m an extrovert by nature and so I think it’s been a mix of — because I use personal assistants it’s meant that I am always relying on other people, and in the beginning before there was the vaccine, being at greater risk because nobody was vaccinated and what could come into the house we didn’t have much control over. So I think feeling vulnerable, my husband and I both have disabilities so we definitely were cautious and still are…My thought is that I’m no different than many other people. You like to be out and about, be able to do what you want to do on a regular basis, then this is very restrictive, appropriately so. I guess because I had polio in 1949, I also feel very concerned about people who are unwilling to get the vaccine because we shouldn’t be divided over advancements in science that can prevent death.

I think recognizing what we’re calling long COVID and the long term impact that COVID will have on a certain percentage of people, which is very similar to polio, person by person things are different. I very much value my life as a disabled person, but, you know, you wear a seatbelt and you don’t allow people to drink and drive — all these things to prevent people from dying and causing disability. I think it’s both sad for the individual people and their families, but then (also) for our country overall. It’s deeply concerning to me how there’s been this distrust that’s been dealt about people’s views towards public health. In the end, it’s having a negative effect on our entire community from an economic perspective as well.

Did you ever hear from Joe Califano again after the sit-in? He never called to apologize or anything?

No, never. He didn’t have to apologize, but in my view it would have been very appropriate when they signed the regulations to invite some of the leaders in from an organization called the American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities, and say, “Glad this is happening, now we’re going to work together in implementing it.” It never happened, for many reasons. I just got a letter of apology from the ACLU like a week and a half ago. In the book I mention how I had spoken to the ACLU when I was in college, saying that I was concerned that I might be denied my (teaching) license because of my disability. And they told me, ‘Well, if anything happens, call us.’ So after I was officially denied my license, I contacted the ACLU in New York and said, ‘I’ve been denied my license; I was told to contact you if that happened and I’d like to come in and meet.’ And they called me back and said no, there was no need for a meeting because I hadn’t been discriminated against; I was denied my license because I couldn’t walk. Anyway, about 10 days ago I got a letter from the head of the ACLU apologizing. Which, 30 years later –

Better late than never, I guess.

Well, I very much appreciated it.

I know you have to go, so I just want to thank you very much, it was wonderful to talk to you. I would like to see you at the White House receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the not too distant future.

Thank you! Stay in touch.

The Odd Interview 7: Rabbi Rebecca Reice

Rabbi Rebecca Reice

For the latest installment in this occasional blog, I decided to interview my rabbi. I’ve known Rabbi Reice for several years and have always known her to have interesting, thought-provoking things to say both on and off the bimah (the Jewish pulpit), and I had a few things I wanted to ask, so hey, how about engaging her in a bit of focused conversation? And why not, like it would kill you to do this? Like you have something else better to do? After all, I might even learn a few things and so, gentle reader, might you.

By way of a brief bio: A native of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Rebecca Reice serves as the Senior Rabbi and Director of Education at the Reform Jewish Congregation Shir Ami in Cedar Park, Texas, a suburb of Austin. She originally came to Austin to study at the University of Texas as an undergraduate and later, during her rabbinical studies, served as a Chaplain Intern at Brackenridge and Dell Children’s hospitals there. After further studies in Israel and Los Angeles and performing various rabbinical and educational services at congregations in California, Montana, and Kansas, Rabbi Reice returned to Austin in June of 2015. In January of 2016 she began to serve at Shir Ami, where she was formally installed as the permanent rabbi in November of 2017.

Our conversation ranged from the efficacy of prayer and the factuality of the stories in the Hebrew Bible to the effects of the pandemic on her and her fellow rabbis, to the recent, much-covered incident at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, on January 15, 2022, when Reform Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker (a friend of Rabbi Reice’s) and three congregants were held hostage by an armed man for 11 hours before escaping.  

Rabbi Reice is a thoughtful person who chooses her words carefully — she is, after all, a rabbi — and I hope that my questions and her answers will provide some food for thought for you as well. The interview was conducted over Zoom on January 26, 2022 and has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

Q:  With the never-ending pandemic and the extreme political polarization on top of it, how stressful has it been for you and your fellow rabbis over the past couple of years, and how do you manage to stay sane?

Rabbi Reice:  Thank you. That’s a really important and very kind question. It has been profoundly stressful. I can speak as a former Membership and Outreach Vice President for the Women’s Rabbinic Network; I’m not on that board right now, but I was for a year and a half. I talked to a lot of people, and I know congregations across the country were seeing membership drop, whether people were dying or people were leaving, moving across the country. We literally saw that in our congregation; we went from 76 member families to 60 from December 2020 to this moment in January of ’22. But that was after January of ’21 (when) there were nine folks that died; one was a congregant and everyone else was someone precious to one of our congregants.

That was profound, that level of grief and trying to help everyone, and that sets aside all of the anxiety over presumably being disabled or killed by this virus, which had been high anxiety for a long time. If you remember, in January of ’21 someone in my age group, and even as an educator, was not yet eligible for a vaccine, so going to help out at a funeral of someone who died of COVID was anxiety producing. But I knew it was important to be there, not only for the deceased but for the mourners. So I went, and I wore a mask the whole time even though it was outside because I had no other protection to offer to other people and none other to offer to myself. 

But when the freeze came [the Texas freeze and power crisis of February 2021], I also recently learned to call it Snovid…that particular Sunday, I believe, where the power had gone out at my house at 2 a.m., that night was supposed to be a memorial minyan for the grandson of a congregant who had died of an opioid overdose. That would have been the youngest person for whom I would have led a memorial minyan since I had been Rabbi of the Congregation, over the course of five years. And also, a potential suicide and part of a larger, can we call it an epidemic of opioid death in America, is it fair to say?

It was a compounding level of stressors, a compounding level of grief, a compounding level of trauma. Because I had just been working with folks through nine different deaths; this was part of the grieving process of one of those nine, but at the same time I couldn’t gather with the family in person and actually offer the hug that I wanted to be able to offer, because when someone is crying I find it very difficult not to be able to, at the very least, lay a hand on their shoulder and offer them a tissue.

So only to be able to counsel over Zoom or over the phone is already an extra stressor on my human soul, not even just my rabbi role, and to layer on top the grief, which I have to say to you, Wes, as someone who has lost dear folks, Chanukah is always going to be hard for me because that’s my father’s yahrtzeit. So coming into January, my grief is already raw, and then to meet it with everyone else’s grief, and now in the middle of February – the deceased was finally released from the coroner to actually be able to be buried, so we were able to have rituals, and so this was Shiva following the burial, even though he had died in January, but now it’s COVID so I can’t hug the mourner. It’s a tragic opioid death, possible suicide, no one will ever truly know, so, complicated grief; and now there’s no power coming into my house, so my cellphone actually didn’t work for the first six or 12 hours of that day. I couldn’t even reach out to our administrator or to the mourners until late in the day to say there’s no power at my house, there’s no light that I could (use to) light my face if I could get my phone to run Zoom…and at that point I think my house was down already to 43 degrees.

So it was so much trauma on top of trauma on top of trauma that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget it. I won’t forget his name, I won’t forget the names of the mourners that I was working with, and I won’t forget the feeling of helplessness that I couldn’t help them, because I couldn’t even help myself. Horrifying.

Wow. 

So coming out of that, we had two board members resign in March and then another two resigned in the High Holiday season, but between that our administrator resigned and we transitioned to a new website without a project manager. So I also used to sit up in the middle of the summer trying to make the website everything you and I wanted it to be. [Side note: At that time I, your interviewer, was serving on the congregation’s board of trustees as VP of Marketing and was involved in transitioning Shir Ami over to a new website and website host.]

Because I had so much anxiety, I focused it on, well, we can’t get anyone into the building, so our website is our building right now and it needs to be beautiful and welcoming and legible. So even though it should never have been me who built the forward-facing part of our website, it was. And I know I’m not the only rabbi who did wildly out-of-our role jobs during the pandemic because our administrator really should have been doing that, but (she) was in the process of moving house and resigned the job, and never did that. Like, who was going to do that in our community if I didn’t step up? 

I had so much stress and trauma at that time I couldn’t even imagine. I defaulted into superwoman and just trying to do everything. I don’t believe that my struggles are unique, and I do know rabbis, even rabbis in Texas, who following these two pandemic years are quitting the rabbinate. Because we have not only been holding our grief and trauma, not just the grief and trauma of our families but (that) of our board members and our congregants and their loved ones, all of the people we could not visit in the hospital, all of the hands we could not hold in the retirement home, all of the limitations of pizza parties that would bring the teenagers together, are all gone. And it was initially so hard to spark joy online that we had members leave just because they didn’t like the screen anymore.

Yeah. Everybody’s tired of Zoom and screens and masks and everything. 

Well, hang on, I didn’t answer your first question because you were asking how did we get through. We talked to each other a lot. For instance, when my friend Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker was being held hostage, I had rabbi friends calling me from around the country, and also family and friends, texting, texting, texting…I was counseling other people, they were counseling me. For me, it was the leaning on each other and the sharing [that got us through]. We had rabbis who were offering to give sermons over Zoom for rabbis who weren’t able to take sick leave for COVID or weren’t able to take maternity or paternity leave because everything was at home. So we had people in the pulpit (and) also people who were retired offering to help out. We also started in the Women’s Rabbinic Network having Koach [Hebrew for Strength] connection groups and having these small group meetings of just open sharing. Sometimes those conversations were really dark, because the thing that had happened to the chaplain with the COVID patient was horrifying, and then we just sat with each other’s horror. But sometimes also it was getting together for a trivia night and goofing off, and that stuff was really important, too.

Apropos of the situation with Rabbi Charlie in Colleyville, on the one hand you have people blaming Pakistani Muslim extremists and terrorists and on the other hand, on the Left you have progressive rabbis warning against having armed guards at the temple, lest Jews of color be turned away and/or be “triggered” by guns. Is there an internal debate going on among the rabbis and congregation presidents about the best ways to keep the synagogues and congregants safe? Shooter drills? Courses in self-defense? Should the rabbis be packing heat on the bimah? What are your thoughts on this whole very complicated situation?

I do not want to set anyone on fire by saying this, but I have to own my own trauma and I have to not adopt the trauma of others. So, for me, a marked police car often means safety and protection. However, for other people it means something very different. It just so happens that during the pandemic there are so few spare police left in our city that we can’t actually get police protection on our building anymore. So we have contracted with private security, and the people who come are sheriffs and sheriff’s deputies and so on, fully trained people, but their car isn’t a police car. I am dismayed that our local law enforcement is so depleted that they’re not able to offer that former resource that we paid for as in the past. I am also grateful that we established a registration process for in-person worship that is helpful for contact tracing with this disease, but I also believe it’s useful for contact tracing in other matters. (It’s) good to know who was where at what point.

We have worked hard over the years to make sure that there is light in the parking lot. The church [that Shir Ami shares its building with] has added security cameras outside the building during the pandemic, and that is only to the good as far as I can tell – of course, only to the good in retrospect, like the security cameras that helped capture the arsonist who set our sister congregation in Austin on fire on Halloween of 2021. 

Are the other congregations in the area having similar problems in terms of finding security?

I don’t know. A lot of the congregations I’m talking to are on the campus at the JCC [the Jewish Community Center in Austin], so they don’t have to do that because they have a Security Director on the campus. But with the church, yes, we are having similar issues and this is how we’re partnering with each other. We’re thinking also about tornadoes, not only active shooters. And shatterproof glass is good against both.

[I discuss people’s use and abuse of the words “grief” and “grieving” in regards to the pandemic and elsewhere, sparked by a Twitter user’s reaction to a couple of her favorite Austin restaurants closing due to fire and the owner’s retirement.]

I took exception to people using the word “grief” regarding a restaurant’s closing – you can’t compare it to the death of your father or wife or your best friend. When a restaurant closes, you don’t have a funeral for the restaurant.

Correct. But you do have a little pity party for all of the memories. We’ll use the Hebrew word l’havdil [to differentiate],acknowledging that there’s a profound difference between the loss of a person and the loss of a restaurant.

I think there needs to be a better word in English for (your feelings) when a restaurant closes, or your political candidate loses a race.

I would just say it’s a loss. Because there are things that happened in my life, parts of my story, that happened only between me and my father. We used to go backpacking and hiking and doing camping once a year following the divorce (of my parents); over the course of 10 years we did that for big stretches, profound experiences I had out in the woods with my father, and now that he’s dead I’m the only one who knows that part of my story.

No one will remember writing term papers with me at Magnolia Cafe [on Lake Austin Boulevard], because all of those servers are gone, all of those booths and those – you know what I’m talking about, they had contact paper under the Plexiglas of the table, all the funky booths, like the whole ethos of it, my early young adulthood is dead and the place I spent it is gone. So I grieve for myself, not for the restaurant.

After my first wife Donna died it occurred to me that I was the only one on Earth left who remembered our life together when it was just the two of us, and I was grieving the loss of her memories that I could have access to.

Yes, and for me, the smell, the sight, being in the place could bring back so much of that. I want to again say l’havdil, but there’s an incredible amount of energy in the Talmud around lost property, and if you can read between the lines, the rabbis are grieving the Temple. They are grieving the loss of a thing that the ones who are talking about it never actually even had, because there are so many generations after the year 70 CE that their teacher remembers something, and their teacher’s teacher remembers something, but they’ve lost it. And it’s forever changed them as a people.

There’s an old saying that whenever an old person dies it’s like a library burning down.

And there is such a thing as “Torah people…”

I’ve got three questions that have to do with Judaism; these are just things that I was wondering about. Here’s the first one: If Judaism is about our relationship with each other, where does God fit into the equation? And why do we have all this constant praising of God in the machzor [High Holy Day prayer book]? Is God so much of an insecure, sociopathic narcissist that he needs all this praise all the time, like a Donald Trump in the sky? 

I have two very different responses. It says in the Kaddish – and I know you have said Kaddish Yatom, the Mourner’s Kaddish – it says that God is above all of these things. [She puts the prayer on the screen] It says “above all blessings and song, praise the nechemata comfort…beyond all earthly words. So that’s how we describe God, as beyond all of that. My big revelation in my year of saying Kaddish for my father is that I was saying all of that as a reminder to myself that I need kol birchata v’shirata tuch b’chata v’nechemata. I need blessing in my life, I need song in my life, I enjoy praise, sharing it and receiving it in my life, and comfort means the world to me. It was about me, and I was learning something about myself when I was speaking about the Holy One, Melech mal’chey ha m’lachim [King of King of Kings, as God is called in Aleinu L’Shabeiach]. 

So the Kaddish is not a prayer about the deceased. The prayer is for the benefit of the mourner, which is why it’s called the Mourner’s Kaddish.

I think so. It definitely gave me something to do when I was grieving. So often in grief there’s nothing to do, so it was something to focus on, to show up for minyan in the morning and the evening, where they did afternoon/evening prayer services, where there were times to stand up and say, actually, Kaddish D’Rabbanan, the Rabbi’s Kaddish – that one gives me even more comfort than the other ones because it blesses all learners and teachers of Torah and wishes us health and wealth and good things, and it’s really beautiful – if you know Aramaic (laughs). 

But I actually don’t think that God needs any of this. I actually think that it is a full crafting in our tradition of a gratitude practice – that we can always find something to be grateful for, even if it’s just the traditional words written in the book, to say, “Wow. Morning happened. There is light. Thank you.” That, I think, is the structure. It’s not actually about God, it’s about gratitude. Now, going back to the first question, can you say it again?

If Judaism is about our relationship with each other, how do we relate to each other, treat each other while we’re here on Earth?

So there is a Chassidic master who said that God’s name is on the face of the other person that you’re looking at, because here’s a yud, and here’s a yud, and here’s a line [gestures to each of her eyes and draws a line down the middle of her nose]. And that makes an aleph – that’s how you write an aleph, a yud and a vav and a yud – that’s how a scribe writes an aleph, and it’s this whole thing signifying God’s name, that this power of 26, the yud being 10, the yud being 10 and the vav being 6, that’s equivalent to the value in gematria [the practice of assigning numerical values to names, words and phrases] of yud-hay-vav-hay, of 10 and 5 and 6 and 10 is 26, just like yud, yud and vav is 26. And so literally every person that you see that has some kind of dot-dot-line on their face is bearing this name right back at you in a hidden way. I like this a lot, because this is simply a reminder that there is something holy within the person with whom you speak.

And it’s just a reminder, just like tzitzit [the fringes on a prayer shawl] could be a reminder, that literally looking at each other, that’s not a beggar, that’s a person; that’s not a teacher, that’s a person; that’s not a pilot, that’s a person. And a person has infinite value.

On my wall I have a Hebrew calendar that I got from a cemetery in New Jersey last year; every month has a different Hebrew letter artistically rendered, and it goes into great detail about the meanings behind the letters.

You can go deep and spiritual just with the aleph-bet. A hundred percent true. 

I know we’ve had discussions before about how effective prayer is, and sometimes it’s not effective. When I get into certain moods, I just think it’s like a placebo to make people think that they’re doing something to help. I guess I’m asking you, what good is prayer beyond (being) a feel-good placebo? Do you think it actually has the power to heal the sick and to encourage good outcomes for what you want?

I do think that the core power in prayer is to serve as a reminder for what the Jewish tradition says we need to be doing with our time. There’s a good example of this – in our Amidah, the second blessing is called G’vurot, Power, right, like a gibur is a hero, this is the plural – so if we’re looking at the heroism of God or some such, God’s infinite power, this would be the thing you were asking about, right? – that we say b’rachamim rabim, in great compassion – sameach noflim, that you would support the fallen, that you are rofay cholim, that you heal the sick, that you are matir asurim, that you free the captive, and um kayaim emunato l’shanay afar, the most mysterious word in this prayer, keeping faith, literally, with those who sleep in the afar, in the topsoil, in the dust.

And there is just every part of that that is our human responsibility. We need to be compassionate to each other. We need to support the folks around us who are having trouble standing on their own – literally, catch you when you’re having a wobble, and perhaps metaphorically in some other way. We maybe don’t heal the sick as doctors, we’re not all of us Jewish doctors, but it does say in our tradition that when you visit someone who is sick, you take away one-sixtieth of their illness, their suffering. So we can still visit and send cards and make phone calls, like it’s a reminder we’ve gotta do that.

So theoretically if 60 people visit the sick person, they’ll get healed?

I love that you asked that, but you do know how math works and if you multiply one-sixtieth 60 times you do not reach, actually, that number 1. You get close, but you don’t get there. You will never fully cure an illness by (a) visit, but imagine how good an extrovert would feel having 60 people come over. Like, that would work for me. We also have introverts in our community for whom that would be like ‘whoa, no, but you can send me 60 letters, I’ll see if I want to give you a phone call.’ 

So prayer is not actually a wish-fulfillment thing, like a basketball player thanking God for helping him win the championship.

I think that sometimes it feels magically that way, like I sent out a call for prayer for Charlie and for his congregants and 15 minutes later they were out of the building. Did our combined prayers, with the prayers of everyone that Shabbat who prayed, affect his release?

Well, you really can never know, can you.

Right, I don’t know that, so I’m not willing to tell you, Wes, that prayer doesn’t work. I won’t say that. What I will say is, find how it does work. Does it just remind you of stuff that would be good that you should probably do? Does it make you feel better, like you said? Does it let you reach a place inside yourself that says, ooh, I’m actually sadder than I realized, maybe I need to talk to my therapist? Like, is it literally a time set aside for self-reflection that helps you to know yourself better? Then I’d say that prayer works.

Okay, last question. Is it generally accepted, and I believe it is at least among Reform Rabbis, that the Torah stories are basically fiction, and if so, why do Jewish scholars ascribe so much importance to understanding the Torah and the Talmud? Is it just considered to be like a framework or a scaffolding to hold the much more important Commentaries, and maybe it’s really beside the point whether there actually was a Moses who freed his people from Egypt, or a Noah who built an ark, or a Queen Esther?

I probably should teach a class about this, I have so much to say, but let me say:

Reform Jews believe that the entirety of the Hebrew Bible was divinely inspired but written by human beings. The Talmud is some totally other, absolutely rabbinic project, and when they tell me that they fought a demon or were in a graveyard listening to two ghosts talking about crop predictions for next year, and they know when the crops are going to fail and when the crops are going to succeed – that’s in Berachot, I can find the citation for you – do I believe that someone was in a (graveyard) getting his crop predictions from ghosts? I mean, maybe late at night on Shavuot, I don’t know, like when it’s chatzot and the heavens are supposed to open, like maybe I’m into that, but most of the time I am the daughter of a professor of biology for 38 years, and I think that when your body dies your soul goes back to God and you’re not going to hang around the world haunting and having crop prediction conversations. But Judaism also believes in bodily resurrection and the returning of the soul to the body, so this is why there is so much anxiety over organ donation, and why it is so important that I am a member of the halachic organ donation society. Because I do believe that we should be donating our organs, if we can, and making life better in this world for people who are still moving around and affecting action in it. 

Is the Bible a bunch of gobbledygook? Absolutely not. It has been changing the world since quill was first put to claf [the prepared skin of a kosher animal]. The story of the Exodus has not led us to find a single pottery shard from some presumably millions of people leaving Egypt in that time period and going a certain route that we sort of understand where they would have been walking. No pottery shards, that’s weird. You would find some pottery shards, wouldn’t you? So then I’m supposed to say to you, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. 

But what I want to say to you is: There were literally Jews in the Pale of Settlement in Europe who told each other this story at Passover and believed they would become free one day. And there were African slaves in America who learned this story and used it in a process of some of them freeing themselves, and others working to free each other. It has become true over the millennia. 

Did it happen then? I don’t know. Did it make me believe that any time I was in a situation of narrowness, because mitzrayim [the Hebrew word for Egypt] means narrowness, that there might be a wide expanse beyond this narrow time? Yeah! It made me believe that, and that belief has carried me through some really dark times, to actually be able to hold hope. And I think hope is real. So, the stories, they help us learn something about ourselves. That’s literally why we read them in a cycle every single year. 

I will never hear Parshat Yitro the same way as when my twin cousins read it at Beth Shalom last week. It’ll never come at me that way again. Because last year I heard two girls in our congregation read it, and it was totally different, and before that it was totally different again, and I know it’ll be different next year. Not just because the girls might read a different part of the portion, or the reader will change, but literally because I continue to change. And I think it is actually powerful that we have structures that give stability in our life. And I think our cycle of reading scripture and our cycle of daily prayer provides a structure on which to play, to grow – call it a jungle gym if you need it, call it a china shop if you need it, but this is something that has kept our people going over the course of (approximately) 2500 years of exile [since 586 BCE]. To revive our holy language and make it modern and real, so that now there isn’t just hashmal that Ezekiel saw coming off of a chariot but that’s electricity – like, there’s literally now a Biblical word that means electricity that didn’t used to, and there’s also a beautiful Hebrew word called glida that means ice cream, that I’m a big fan of. So we have become a people who understand the power of chidush, the power of renewal. We understand it so deeply that the name of any given month is a chodesh. Chodesh is a month. And deeply ingrained in that is the idea of renewal, chidush. And “we are an ever-dying people,” that’s a famous quotation – I will say we are an ever-renewing people.

Along with Broadway musical theater.

Amen!

The Odd Interview 6: David Byron Ragsdale

David Byron Ragsdale (at right) with friend and bandmate Kris Eckhardt, of the Portland, Maine rockabilly combo King Memphis, trying out the merchandise at a guitar shop.

THE UNAVOIDABLE DIGRESSIONARY PREFACE (WITH APOLOGIES IN ADVANCE)

To pick up where I left off, let’s get going again on this website I last posted to four and a half years ago. Should I apologize for the conspicuous gap? Maybe. But maybe not. Along with all of us I’ve been a bit distracted since the halcyon days of late 2015, true, but since the ‘rona hit, my livelihood as a freelance arts journo has also taken quite the hit. No tours, no concerts, no previews in the Living/Arts section. Sure, the kids keep me busy at home and I’m fortunate to have a loving wife, reasonably good health, a French press and coffee mill, and usually decent Wi-Fi. But let’s face it, I miss talking to people and telling their stories, especially if it’s someone who doesn’t get interviewed every week, or every year. For the teaser promo clip to this blog entry, picture me wandering alone in a vast field of parched yellow wheat extending as far as the flat horizon, with a blank, haunted look in my eyes, a worn leather bag containing my laptop and trusty little Olympus digital recorder slung over my right shoulder. The wind whooshes through the wheat as I stare ahead into the distance. What’s going through my mind? Now a voiceover comes in: “I really should be interviewing some musician…I like doing that…maybe that will show me the way home…wish I had some water. Graaaah.”

Yeah, it’s only a post for my blog, not a major metropolitan newspaper or national rag, but it’s something. Even if it’s just something to help me keep my sanity in an especially insane time, possibly a few people will find and enjoy it. One can always hope. To tell the truth, although I appreciate having the occasional opportunity to write for those places, there’s something indescribably satisfying in putting exactly what I want in a piece – director’s cut – and having it go as long as I think it needs to be, not trying to second-guess an editor or worrying about word count. (Not that I don’t think editors are useful. They definitely are, and I appreciate them. But sometimes you just want to take a solo flight.) I can be professional, but also be me. It’s the freaking Internet, after all. I guess this is my version of doing a Facebook Live concert from my living room (minus the iPhone and Venmo link).

Plenty of musicians who never top the charts have worthwhile stories to tell. Some of them are quite capable of telling those stories themselves, if they want. Others require a bit of seeking out, and I like to help them tell their stories when I can. Thus – and how’s that for a transition? – we come a bit closer, and about damn time too, to our current subject.

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In Here (Groove Disques, 2002)

This interview was conducted on June 2, 2020, during an especially awful time in the history of the US and wider world – our old friend the pandemic, widespread unemployment and inequality, mass protests over police violence and the nauseatingly repetitive murders of African Americans, physical as well as verbal assaults on the press, and the Would-Be Dictator Who Shall Not Be Named. I trust I don’t have to rehash more of the sorry details here. The only two bright spots in the day were phoning my dad in Florida early that morning to wish him a happy 90^th birthday, and a couple of hours later, also by phone, interviewing a fellow in Portland, Maine by the name of David Byron Ragsdale. 

At this point, if you’re not an obsessive fan of obscure indie-pop musicians or played in a band with him once, you’re probably asking, “Who the hell is David Byron Ragsdale, and why would you want to interview him?” Not to be confused with his somewhat more famous namesake musician the violinist for Kansas, this David Ragsdale is a singer-songwriter from Portland, Maine by way of his native Philadelphia (with a brief stop in NYC). Back in 2002 he released a CD called In Here on Groove Disques, which, despite being a solid and delightful slice of alt-pop with humor, attracted neither massive sales nor much attention. (The 13 songs were recorded over a span of 12 years, 1990 to 2002.) I don’t remember how I first heard of the CD or got hold of it, but get hold of it I did, and enjoyed playing it once in a while. In Here stuck with me. Ragsdale’s songs bear surfacey similarities to critic’s-darling retro-popsters like Marshall Crenshaw, to whom he’s sometimes been compared, but he’s his own guy. There’s an urgency to the vocals, a snap to the power-poppish melodies. The lyrics are witty and humane, with a healthy feeling for the absurd. It’s a living thing, as music should be.

Here are a few lines from one of my favorite songs on In Here, “Country Mile.” Bottom line, I wanted to know more about the guy who could write a lyric like this:

This piggy likes to dance

That piggy never will

This piggy throws a glance

The other one can’t sit still…

Ten chickens cross the road

That puts me at a loss

What’s on the other side

That makes chickens want to cross?

Searching for other DBR product online, I came up empty. I wondered if Ragsdale was still at it or had given up music and gone to law school, become a realtor, or opened a crafting store in a strip mall.

I decided to find out. 

After getting in touch with him via his artist site on ReverbNation.com, I found that Ragsdale is indeed still at it, playing in local Portland bands and making original music under the name Ragsdale Or Current Resident. Although initially surprised that anyone would want to interview him, he readily agreed to a chat. 

The symmetry isn’t lost on me: both Ragsdale and me still punching away after all these years with our sometimes marginally celebrated creative efforts,  both of us bound by a common love of out-of-fashion pop music, persisting against all odds and sensible arguments, in the midst of a pandemic/economic and political crisis/frighteningly fascist governmental leanings and a 1968-level societal uproar this first Tuesday in June. World’s falling apart, move along, nothing to see here. People everywhere were justifiably desperate, frightened, crying out for help, as Dave Ragsdale and I did the artist-interview thing. Chickens crossing the road and coming home to roost, indeed.

Of what use is this interview, one might ask. And I’d reply that it makes sense to me, at least, to be doing this, so to me, it’s crucial. Also, it might perhaps mean something to you. It might also serve as a reminder, so needed in these times, that most of us out there are doing better things with our lives than killing and injuring people and spreading hate. Such as, oh I don’t know, creating and playing music. Painting pictures. Writing.

And so, David Byron Ragsdale, ladies and gents, with a few tales from his performing life, with nods to the music scenes of Philly and Portland, Maine and the Groove Disques record label. (The interview has been lightly edited for clarity, but I left in the good stuff.)

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Q: I noticed some rockabilly influences in your songs, along with pop. I guess you get compared to people like –  

David Byron Ragsdale:  I’ve got me Marshall Crenshaw, you know, which is great, I’ll take it (laughs).

On the other hand, I really don’t know anybody who sounds exactly like you or has that kind of sense of humor. 

Oh, thanks. Appreciate that. Yeah, the one thing I can’t stand is anybody who takes themselves too seriously. You can be a fantastic musician and a great songwriter, but if you don’t have a sense of humor about yourself I have a hard time staying with someone, you know what I mean?

Anybody who can write a song like “Country Mile” has to have an offbeat sense of humor. So, you grew up in Philadelphia; you moved to Maine to go to college and stuck around after that. 

Exactly, yeah. 

You worked at a radio station for a while.

Yeah, the local community radio here [WMPG]. 

Portland, Maine isn’t exactly a major center of the music business. Did you ever think of moving to a place like LA or Nashville?

Always! (laughs) But I might as well cut to the chase. The overarching theme of my musical trajectory has been a lack of self-confidence, really. When I was younger I did move to New York for a year. I was probably 21 at the time and I actually did play in a band – have you heard of Superchunk? Well, Mac McCaughan, the leader of that band, was actually in a band with me in the ‘80s; he moved back from New York to North Carolina and started Merge Records and everything after that. So, I don’t know, I just found my year in New York taught me that I had my limitations as a self-promoter and I just don’t seem to have that critical skill of pushing myself out there; not taking no for an answer, the classic stuff you really sort of need to be able to do. 

I think there’s a lot of people like you in the music business. You write really good songs but for one reason or another, never get heard as much as you deserve to be. What are you doing these days in Portland besides music?

I play music in a couple of different bands – drums, guitars, whatnot – but my day job, I’m actually a master plumber now. I got my BA in history at the University of Southern Maine in Portland, and while I was doing that, to earn money I was working with my brother-in-law, who’s a plumber, and I found that I actually really like it, so I ended up getting my master plumber certification. I like to tell people I’m a card-carrying member of the proletariat. 

Nothing wrong with that. 

And I’ll tell you what, this is gonna sound maybe a little pretentious, but I feel like having been in the arts community mostly in my 20s and even into my 30s, hanging around with musicians and artists, which is fantastic, great, I wouldn’t trade that for the world – but you get a kind of a skewed view of life. And if you work in the trades, and you work around people who are – this is going to sound a little bit snotty, but at least salt of the earth, you know. It does give you a different perspective on priorities. So after doing that for a while, I was kind of like, “Do I really want to become a professional musician, do I want to dedicate myself to promoting my show” and all that kind of stuff. But I’m not going to stop doing that, and then of course modern technology makes it possible for me to record in my basement at a level exceeding at least the smaller labels of the ‘60s (laughs). 

Four years ago you tried to crowdfund money to put out an album called Kiss Everyone Immediately, which unfortunately did not meet its goal. What happened to the songs on that project, are you repurposing them? 

Yes. So, my current grand master plan now, I’ve since gotten a little more savvy with what you can do online – there was a part of me that felt like maybe what I should just do was put out an album (and) just give them away, ‘cause I’m not interested in becoming a professional at this point. I kind of feel like that ship has sailed. So I thought if I just want people to hear my music, just put it out there and call it a day. On the other hand, I would like to recoup some of my not inconsiderable expenses for guitars and recording equipment and whatnot. So I felt the good middle road might be to do something with DistroKid, which is one of these online distribution platforms. They just do everything for you, you pay them a yearly fee. 

And I’m sitting on, now, in addition to that stuff you just mentioned (which I’ve retitled in the meantime), like five albums of my own stuff: an album’s worth of material that I’ve recorded that are all songs written by friends of mine from Philly – because I’ve been really lucky to know a lot of really great songwriters, Jim Slade from Nixon’s Head being one of them. But there were others in Philly, just a lot of really good songwriters down there. Then I’m also producing two other albums’ worth of material, by a local band that I’m playing drums with and an old compatriot of mine from Philly who’s now resurfaced after 20 years of not having written anything, and is writing these great songs, and so he’s been coming up from Massachusetts and recording with me. So I’ve been putting on the producer’s hat, and been getting some really good results, I have to say. My grand plan is to have a label with DistroKid, because I did finally launch that officially last year. It’s going to be called the Off Allen Recording Company, because I’m just off of Allen Avenue in Portland. As you can see, I like long titles. 

So what I’m thinking I’m going to do is just release all my own stuff as albums and let them distribute it, and that way I don’t have to give it away for free, I can promote it on Facebook or whatever, and whatever I get, I get. I’m not looking to make a ton of money, I’m just looking to get stuff out there. 

So you’re doing this under the name Ragsdale Or Current Resident? 

The stuff I’m putting out of my own material, yes.

Do you have a regular band you play with when you’re doing that?

I did. There were these youngsters, I call ‘em, they’re all in their 30s (laughs) that I worked with, that were eager to play music with me. I said well, look, y’know, I don’t want to be in a cover band and if I do put anything together I just want to do my own songs. I kind of expected them to say “OK, well, never mind then,” but to my surprise, it turns out they were all fans of Fountains of Wayne and bands like that, that I loved. So it actually worked out really well; here I am, y’know, gray beard, 56 years old, fronting a bunch of 30-year-olds that were rockin’ out. But that fell apart mostly due to my own lack of – in Portland it’s hard to get gigs, they’re aren’t a ton of clubs to begin with. And then there’s this weird, clique-y kind of scene here. I think Portland suffers from a kind of small town, big ambition kind of thing. I’ve often described Portland as being like a rock ‘n’ roll fantasy camp for local musicians. It’s weird: there’s these big clubs with great sound systems and lights, and local bands play there; they pretty much only do covers now. I’d gotten used to small clubs in Philly or New York; you get three bands a night playing original music, one set each, $3 cover charge. Granted, that’s a bygone era. But these folks are like, they’ll put a band together just to play this huge show, like an arena-style show. And it’s all cover music. They’ll dedicate a night to one artist. And it’s very popular here. People love it.

That band The Frotus Caper that you used to play with (in Portland), is that still going?

No. The guy who spearheaded that band who got me involved, Chad Walls, he was the bass player in that band, he has not stopped either. He’s like me, he writes prolifically, he’s actually more prolific than I am, and I do love his songs. 

You played drums in that band, is that correct?

I did. That was after I graduated from college. I was a good boy, I got my college degree, that’s why I moved there from Philly; I was afraid if I stayed in Philly and tried to finish my college degree I’d be too distracted (by) the music scene. That’s why I dropped out in the first place, when I was in college in Philly, because I was playing music. So I came to Maine, thought I won’t be distracted or tempted ‘cause I’ll go to Portland, Maine where there’s no musicians. Turns out I was wrong; there’s tons of musicians here, they just want to be in cover bands for the most part. But The Frotus Caper was different; they were looking to do original music and all four of us were actually writing songs, which is always a fun thing. Obviously, everyone’s going to be a little different and yet we can make it sound like a cohesive whole nonetheless. And talk about sense of humor, I think I probably laughed more when I played in that band – with one exception. The Frotus Caper was a fun group of guys, the kind of band I love, people you want to hang out with outside of the band itself, you know.  It’s kind of the whole reason I started doing it in the first place, really.

Can you tell me a little bit about what you were doing with Groove Disques, and what you were doing in that scene in those years?

Before I moved to Maine I was in a couple of bands in Philly, original music bands. The first one was called Sky Grits. Within that scene we were pretty well respected. Myself and the lead singer both were totally lacking ambition and the wherewithal. Grand ideas, but very little follow-through between the two of us. But other musicians tended to come to our shows and really liked our band a lot, loved our songwriting. The guy I mentioned earlier, whose new record I’m producing, he was the songwriter in that band, Chris Morris. And then I was in a band called Sir Dot, which was (along) similar lines…we styled ourselves a little bit more after NRBQ. So those bands, we shared bills with Nixon’s Head, Electric Love Muffin, Dead Milkmen, all those bands from that era, that scene at that time. We were just sharing bills all over the place in Philly. Afterwards, Jim Slade from Nixon’s Head started his own label, Groove Disques, and to kind of launch the whole thing he put out a sampler. They had the brilliant idea (that) instead of a sampler dedicated to an artist, they said let’s do a sampler dedicated to a label, and they chose Stiff Records, and they asked me to contribute to that [The Stiff Generation, Groove Disques, 2002].­ Matthew Sweet’s on that CD, Amy Rigby, there was a lot of great stuff on that CD. I­ got to contribute – I don’t know if you remember Lew Lewis Reformer, (he) did one single on Stiff called “Win Or Lose.” It’s a great song. 

That whole band, Nixon’s Head, they were so fun to hang out with. You were guaranteed to crack up if you were hanging out with those guys. I miss the humor thing in music. 

So Groove Disques is basically not in business anymore?

Well, I mean, I don’t know if they were ever, quote unquote, “in business” to begin with. It was a labor of love for those guys. They never expected to make any money. They put out that CD, a couple of their own Nixon’s Head (CDs), they put out my CD (and) a band called Trolleyvox, which was an outgrowth of another Philly band, the Wishniaks, that we used to play with a lot. 

To sum up, who or what inspires you musically, and also, what inspires you to keep going? I know those are really two different questions.

The who is – well, the Who! No, actually obviously the Beatles, that’s where it all started for a lot of us, but then moving on, I love, I keep going back to John Doe as an inspiration, not just musically but – talk about perseverance, he just keeps doing it, and consistently writing fantastic songs. Robyn Hitchcock is another one. It’s maybe not as evident, but I think my lyrics have improved immensely since I became a Robyn Hitchcock fan, because I realized that I was allowed to be goofy and have fun with words, and not necessarily always have to have a narrative going. Paint pictures with words, as my friend Chris Morris used to say. So people like that, indie folks who aren’t hugely famous but who manage to carve out a little niche and make a living, like Aimee Mann; those kinds of people. They’re not household names but that’s fine, because they’re making it work. I don’t know if they make as much money as a plumber (laughs), but they’re probably having more fun than a plumber.

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Let’s face it, folks: Dave Ragsdale is us. Still at it, slogging along, doing what we know is the best thing we’re able to do. And hoping someone, at some point, may start paying attention.

To check out some of his newer music, here’s his artist site on ReverbNation.com. There’s also this hilarious “introductory” video on YouTube, where you can also find all the tracks on In Here.

To quote another of my favorite Ragsdale songs, I’ll let Dave have the last word:

Don’t bother that waitress

She’s waiting on me

She’s bringing my breakfast, it’s a quarter to three

You’ll have to be patient, she’s working alone

She’s waiting for sunrise, so she can go home

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The Odd Interview 5: Norman Lear’s Victory Lap

The fifth installment of The Odd Interview features an expanded, lightly edited version of an interview that originally appeared in the Late Fall 2015 issue of Austin Way magazine. I’ll assume Norman Lear doesn’t need much of an introduction to you (otherwise, why would you be reading this?). I talked with the legendary writer/producer (who immediately told me, “Call me Norman”) over the phone on July 8, 2015, less than three weeks before his 93rd birthday.

But before we get to the Q&A itself, let’s jump ahead to October, when Lear came to Austin to receive an award for Outstanding Television Writer at the Austin Film Festival, which was the reason I got to talk with him in the first place.

From all accounts, because of thunderstorms in Texas, Lear and several family members traveling with him from the West Coast had to spend about 12 hours in the Chicago airport before getting in to town, but he wouldn’t hear of turning back. This is a determined guy. Instead of being deep in retirement, he published his autobiography, Even This I Get To Experience, last year (read it: you’ll be glad you did) and since then has been on a sort of victory-lap tour around the US, going from interview to interview, award to award, recounting his life, dispensing political advice, and regaling audience after audience with engaging anecdotes about everything from participating in over 50 bombing raids during World War II to discussing the first interracial marriage in sitcom land with Roxie Roker when casting “The Jeffersons.”

Sitting onstage in a director’s chair at the Austin Film Festival with the moderator, Phil Rosenthal, the ebullient creator of “Everybody Loves Raymond” and a pal of his, Norman (go ahead, call him Norman) comes across like a twinkly, elfin wise man, an elderly kid, casually dressed in jeans, a sweater and, of course, that hat. When he momentarily loses the thread of a story, Phil interjects, “This is 93 showing!”

If there’s an elephant that’s housed in this room, filled with appreciative people who grew up watching his shows, it’s that Lear hasn’t had a sitcom on the air in over 20 years (the short-lived “704 Hauser” in 2004) and it’s been 30 — a whole generation, plus some — since his last real hit, “The Jeffersons,” went off the air. Seven years short of a century, he still roams the land (Lear out on the blasted heath of film festivals?), pitching a pilot for a sitcom set in a retirement village, titled “Guess Who Died.” There will be a live staged version of it later that afternoon at a local theater. The script has made all the rounds; the lords of TV, network, cable and otherwise, still wedded to the 18-to-49 demographic, don’t want to touch it. Back in 1994, he tells the crowd, he did a TV pilot starring Peter O’Toole (who was in his early 60s at the time) and nobody was interested in picking it up.

Lear explains: “‘Well,’ they say, ‘we already have Betty White.’ I love Betty White, but she does not a demographic make. It must be that the people in charge don’t want to be seen as old.”

I can’t help thinking of Orson Welles, who couldn’t get a major movie deal greenlit for decades before he died — although unlike Welles, Lear not only has a much better sense of humor, including the oft-underrated virtue of laughing at oneself, but also a track record of much success and profitability. 

Of course, you might ask, isn’t having created “All in the Family”, “Maude”, “Sanford and Son”, “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman”, “One Day At A Time” and all the rest enough? Of course it is, but if even Norman Lear, for all the well-deserved accolades and awards he collects these days, as he goes from podium to podium, interview to interview, talking about how he changed the face of television forever, acknowledging his influence and keeping in contact with great numbers of entertainment-industry movers and shakers, can’t get a series on the air anymore, what does that say?

With that, on to our interview.

Norman Lear in Los Angeles, CA on Tuesday, May 15, 2012
(Alex J. Berliner/ABImages)

Q: The title of your book, ‘Even This I Get To Experience,’ I take to mean that even when you go through experiences that most people think of as bad, like business failures or political defeats, you find some value in them in that you at least get to have firsthand knowledge of something you hadn’t previously. Or in other words, everything is raw material – which to me is a way of thinking that seems to be specific to writers.

Norman Lear: That’s interesting. I’ve always felt that way. Even if, you know, the surprise of the amount of…the surprise of the amount of surprises (laughs). I didn’t expect this. But, even this I get to experience. This phone call is a good example, y’know. Even this; I’m talking to Austin, I’m going to be in Austin, I’m looking forward to Austin.

You’re being honored with the Outstanding Television Writer Award at the Austin Film Festival –

Yeah, I love that! Even this I get to experience.

Back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, as you know, television was generally considered an inferior art form compared to movies – now, not so much. I know you’ve produced and/or written over a dozen movies, but do you have any regrets about not making more of them, and focusing on television?

You know, that’s a subject in itself, regret. I don’t do too well with regrets. This is the moment, and I have no regrets, no. The way I feel, I remember saying – we [Lear and his wife Lyn] have our anniversary, 27 years, coming up – no, 28 years, and I remember saying at that anniversary, we had three daughters sitting there from an earlier marriage.

I bless everything that led to this moment. Every split second, every brawl and every boo-hoo, because it took them all to get me here. Then I look at my daughters, who are thinking, ‘Wait a minute, he’s marrying somebody…about the same age as my oldest daughter, and we had never met before,’ they were thinking, because it was all new. But that’s exactly the way I felt: that I had to go through everything I went through to get to that moment, and so, bless ‘em all, every one of them, for those moments.

It seems to be an attitude that celebrates diversity.

Well, yeah.

I have to connect that with your TV shows, which really focused on diversity before it was cool – blue-collar working-class families, African-Americans, single mothers, gay people – why was it important to you, at a time when that was not really done, to portray characters who were something other than the typical white suburban Brady Bunch and Cleaver-type families you saw on TV in the ‘50s and ‘60s?

Well, my experience growing up suggested that everything we ever did on television, all of those topics, whether arguing politics, or the Vietnam War, or menopause, or – there wasn’t anything that I didn’t hear growing up, so, y’know, I thought we were reflecting what everybody lives through.

Right. Although it wasn’t on television until you set about changing that.

Yeah, I can’t truly say I knew that at the time. It wasn’t like – I was working in television, it was very new, and – I’m talking about 1950, it was very new. By 1970 it was still new, but it was out of its infancy.

If there’s a thread that runs through all those shows, ‘All in the Family,’ ‘Good Times,’ ‘The Jeffersons,’ ‘One Day At a Time,’ it’s that they all tried to address various social issues while also being entertaining. I’m guessing you don’t subscribe to that old quote, “If you want to send a message, try Western Union.”

God knows, I had my share of that.

 What do you think is the right balance of comedy to seriousness in a sitcom, or, to put it another way, how do you wrap messages in a candy shell for easier viewer digestion?

 I didn’t think we were sending messages. I realized some years in, when I heard for the umpteenth time ‘There’s Western Union,’ that, wait a minute, I’m fifty-whatever I was years old I was at that time; I have a point of view; we are dealing with social problems, I am expressing a point of view about it, I’m trying to express all the points of view, because that’s where the comedy comes from, the conflict. But I’m favoring what I think is the way things want to be, so I finally accepted, ‘Well, wait a minute, isn’t that what they were doing before me, when the largest problem a family (on a sitcom) might have faced is the roast is ruined and the boss is coming to dinner.’ Twenty-four, wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling of that would suggest well, no problems in America, no Vietnam, no menopause, no abortion, no economic problems, life is just sweet.

I’ve looked at a few right-wing blogs to get their opinion of you, and their main criticism seems to be that you set up characters like Archie Bunker, and Conrad Bain’s character, Arthur on ‘Maude,’ as straw men to be knocked down by the liberal arguments of Mike Stivic, or Maude, or whoever. Their point being that in real life, they think that those characters would have had more compelling arguments for their point of view.

 Well, I’d like to know what they are! I’m not hearing them now (laughs). I don’t hear strong points of view. I hear strong points of view against; I don’t hear strong points of view pro: ‘This is what I’m going to do, this is the map.’ I just hear ‘Everything is wrong on the other side.’

Of course, it’s been an interesting couple of months in America. You’re credited with introducing the first sympathetic gay character on TV, Archie Bunker’s friend Steve, early on in the show’s run, and only 44 years later, here we are with nationwide marriage equality. Barack Obama is president, Hillary Clinton might be next, Bernie Sanders is drawing crowds, there’s more of an appreciation for diversity and women’s rights – these are all triumphs for liberal values –

 While there are triumphs, as you put it, for liberal values, I think they were significantly aided by the mistakes George (W.) Bush made. We’ve only recently come to terms [that] it was not only a serious mistake to go into Iraq, it followed a series of other lies. We don’t accept that, we Americans, easily; we don’t swallow that and say ‘he lied.’ But we’re getting the idea that we were lied into this. We’re accepting it without spelling it out, like swallowing a bitter pill, you know. So while it’s a triumph of liberal values, it’s as a result of serious mistakes in the other direction.

And of course we’re also still dealing with massive amounts of racial tension, riots, gun violence, a totally polarized political system – with all the change you’ve seen in your lifetime, what do you make of what’s going on now, and do you get discouraged by all the one-step-forward, two-steps-back craziness? Is it better or worse than it was in the ‘70s?

 Because it’s now, and we’re living in the moment, it seems worse. I can’t be certain that I’m correct about that, but we’re living with it now. We’re not reading about it historically, we’re living it, and it’s worse.

Because we don’t have the benefit of rose-colored glasses, of looking back through a filter at the past.

Right. I’m not the least (bit) apocalyptic, by the way. I don’t want to wake up in the morning without hope. We’re going to save our asses somehow, but it’s going to require saving our asses.

I wanted to talk about “Mary Hartman” a bit because I was in high school when it premiered and I remember vividly how much it affected me; I watched it every night –

Oh, I love that…

I guess I was a good age to start watching it, because it immediately seemed to me that something had shifted in the cultural wind, and that it was a new animal. It was the first instance I know of postmodern satire in the mass media; it was kind of a view of the world that I later saw in David Letterman, Jon Stewart, “Saturday Night Live,” God knows how many later sitcoms. Would you agree with that, or do you think I’m totally off-base?

 No, I don’t think you’re totally off-base at all. The single idea behind Mary Hartman was, what is this amount of media doing to an average American woman? In those years there was a lot of talk about women saw more television because it was on during the day and they were home during the day, it was before feminism, y’know, and women were more or less content to be at home. It began in those years. And so, from the very first show, when she was looking at some waxy yellow buildup on the floor and Loretta came running in to talk about “around the corner from them, a family of five and their eight goats and several chickens were slaughtered.” And Mary, “Who would want to kill goats and chickens,’ she said, as her mind is on the can she has that guarantees there will be no waxy yellow buildup. She was already a product of the media: ‘Wait a minute, it can’t be, the can says…” She believed it. She believed the advertising. Well, in the last episode, or near to the last episode, she went crazy on the David Susskind Show, literally. Lost her mind on the David Susskind Show under the questioning of a handful (of) talking heads, who were psychologists, and they drove her out of her fuckin’ mind. And it was one of the best pieces of acting I can remember.

I remember that to this day; I thought it was one of the greatest single episodes of television I’ve ever seen.

Yeah, I thought so too, by the way, and it was one take. That whole thing was a single take.

I know there’s been some noise about doing a reboot or remake of “All in the Family.” I wonder how a remake of “Mary Hartman” would do today in the age of social media and political correctness.

 It’s funny, you don’t have to remake it, you can rerun it (laughs). I don’t know why it hasn’t been rerun. It looks great. It seems to me the problems we dealt with are the problems we have today. I guess, well, and the timing is altogether the same. She was unusual then, she’d be unusual today.

It must be very gratifying to know you’ve had a lot to do with nurturing along the maturity of television as a medium. What do you think of the state of TV today, in the age of Netflix and cable, “Mad Men,” “Breaking Bad,” and “Orange is the New Black,” the last of which (which I’m a big fan of) seems close, in some ways, to your vision of TV as a little engine for social commentary and showing diversity and minority cultures that don’t often get represented. What current shows are you watching?

I think it’s the Golden Age. I can’t keep up with the amount of shows that people tell me (to watch): “Norman, you’re not watching — you must watch…” and then I watch it and it’s everything they said it was, but I don’t know where everybody is finding the time to see it all. Streaming, the way Netflix and Amazon and so forth are doing it, I’ll take it – let me have 13 – because they believe in the idea and in the creative individual they’re dealing with. It’s the golden age. I just can’t see enough. I watched all the early episodes of “Transparent,” for example. And “Orange is the New Black,” I saw the first season. By the time the second season came around, a dozen friends had said, “What, you’re not watching ‘Empire’? You’re not watching ‘Boardwalk’? You’re not watching..” Titles I can’t even think of, that I never got to see any of, but I respect so much the people who said ‘Are you kidding, you gotta be watching.’ It’s just, here’s what – think about this. I think our most important product is excess. We export excess in everything we’re doing, whether it’s the pharmaceutical industry promising everything in the world, product after product, or lying ourselves into Iraq, or lying to ourselves with flag pins about how well we care for our men and women in the service and then treat them so badly when they come home; so poorly, I should say. We are a nation of glorious excess.

It’s like, going back to “Mary Hartman,” it’s the public relations, promotions vs. the reality or the dream vs. the reality, I guess, that produces all the conflict.

Right. I realized as you just said that, I made a film a lot of years ago called “Cold Turkey.” And that was also about the same thing, what happens when a town is threatening to catch all the attention in the country because the smokers have stopped smoking for 30 days, and the media, winding up with Nixon coming at the very end, and winding up the movie with the little town is so saved that it’s got smokestacks that are choking it to death.

Right. And that’s what they wind up with as the prize.

Yeah, they wind up being a real city with real companies (laughs). Emitting foul…

That’s satire. That’s one of your lesser-known movies, but I’d like to watch it again now.

I watched it about four or five months ago. “American Masters” is doing a documentary about me, and I looked at it so that I could talk about it, and I couldn’t believe how prescient it was in that sense.

To switch gears, you’re a card-carrying member of what Tom Brokaw called “the greatest generation,” along with millions of people, but you don’t worship the military and you don’t view everything with rose-colored glasses. How did serving in the Army Air Corps, quite actively, change your view of the military and soldiers in general?

One of my great heroes is Dwight David Eisenhower. He was the general that won, led the troops, led us, I was among the troops, led the direction we took that won the war. Then he became a two-term president, from whom we begot the National Highway System. And he did not listen to a lot of his military advice that would have put us into a half dozen foreign situations, sending troops and so forth. Then he leaves the presidency and in his farewell address, warns us about what is choking us to death right now, which was the military-industrial complex. In his first draft – he cut the word before he went on the air, but in his first draft it was the “military-industrial-Congressional complex.” And as I view the country today, that complex has got us by the throat right now, the military-industrial complex.

Some people might be surprised, who call you a Hollywood liberal, to hear that Eisenhower is a hero of yours, but of course he’s never referred to at all by today’s Republicans, is he?

He’s not referred to, period. You do not hear his name ever mentioned. And by the way, I’m the “Hollywood liberal” who did a show called “I Love Liberty” that was co-chaired by Gerald Ford and Lady Bird Johnson. On the air you saw Barry Goldwater and Jane Fonda in that show, and John Wayne. You know, I had a relationship, I had a long correspondence with President Reagan; the Wall Street Journal printed pieces of a dozen letters we exchanged. I don’t know if I was the only liberal, but Mrs. Reagan invited me to the funeral, I flew up there with her; so, that’s my America.

It’s sort of a civility that’s gone missing from a lot of political discourse these days.

Oh, totally, totally, totally.

I read your remarks at the Take Back America conference in 2008 about being a “born again American” and refusing to cede talk about God and religion to the religious right, which was very eloquent. Do you think that things have gotten better or worse in that department since then?

Well, I think, in a subtle but important way, worse, because the Tea Party reflects a great deal of that. They don’t talk about it as openly as they used to, and money pours into those places, y’know, and money in politics is just one of the great problems of our time, as a result of Citizens United.

But, as you said, you’re not apocalyptic and there is some hope.

Oh, yes. I think when we save the world, then we will. The door will have been kicked open by the arts, by all the things, music and theater and laughter. All the arts that bring us together. And the politicians and the politics and so forth will follow.

As a kid, I remember watching “All in the Family” with my family in my living room and my father – he was not Archie Bunker, but identified with him to some extent, they were working men in Queens – he was sort of confused by why Archie always seemed to get the short end of the stick and ended up getting ridiculed for his beliefs. I was just fascinated. It seemed to me like a TV show as a social studies class, designed to provoke arguments among the viewers at home. I’m certainly not the first guy to note that TV viewers like to root for an antihero, whether it’s Archie Bunker or Tony Soprano. Did the widespread sympathy for Archie surprise you at the time?

 Did it surprise me at the time? I don’t remember – I don’t think so. I mean, what was interesting about that was that all the letters that came, after a while I really watched it to see if this would be true – every letter that ever said “right on, Archie,” and there were a ton of those, never failed to say something about “but you’re making a fool of a good (man)” – that was Nixon who said we were “making a fool of a good man.” The White House tapes revealed him talking about “All in the Family” – he didn’t know the title, but he knew that guy, and he knew the one you referred to, when the gay guy makes his point when they’re arm wrestling, and he (Nixon) talks about that to Haldeman. That tape is a true badge of honor (laughs).

Along with being named to his enemies list, I imagine.

Yes. That might have been what got me there.

I admire you for sticking with the concept of “All in the Family” for several years and making a couple of pilots first, until everything seemed to gel. I think it’s that way in any kind of new thing that’s really never been done before; I guess it has to be actually done before people realize that this could be a success, and watch it.

Always. So true, so true.

_________________________________________________________________________

After the panel, Norman graciously sticks around for photos and handshakes with the fans even as the festival staff do their best to shoo everyone out of the room so the next event can get underway. Up close he looks his age, and his eyes are milky blue, and you sense he’s probably tired from the hour and a quarter conversational performance. Accompanied by family members, he descends to the hotel lobby. Wherever he goes, it seems, he is accompanied by a great deal of hugs and affection.

“You made my life better, Norman Lear!” Phil Rosenthal exclaimed at the end of the interview, and the crowd rose as one to applaud him. Even this, he gets to experience.

The Odd Interview 4: Chris Butler

Chris Butler’s Still Waiting

 For the fourth installment of The Odd Interview, I’ve gone deep into the archives. This post is based on an article published in Boston Rock #84, July 1987. I’ve edited the Web version significantly for clarity, readability, and relevance, because if I don’t know how to do a better job on this story now than I did 27 years ago, I’m really in trouble. I’ve also interpolated material from a somewhat different version published in The Old Colony Memorial, the weekly newspaper of Plymouth, Mass., on May 21, 1987. Obsessively interested parties can click on the original texts at the bottom to enlarge them, but trust me, you don’t really need to.

Chris Butler, circa 2008

Note from the Present Day, 2014: Looking back, there was no great pressing reason to interview Chris Butler in the summer of 1985. Although his band, the Waitresses, had made some noise earlier in the decade, he had left it a couple of years earlier, and the group was no longer together in any case. Although Butler wasn’t a recluse, and was busy with several projects under the radar of anyone not in the music business, he wasn’t with a major label, didn’t have a publicist, and, in those pre-social media, hard-copy days, wasn’t that easy to find.

However, I can be persistent to the point of irritation when I latch onto a cause that interests me. I found the Waitresses and their unusually literate lyrics highly intriguing; they struck a chord with me, and I wanted to talk to one of my songwriting heroes of the day and get the “story behind the songs,” as they say. This was a guy worth getting to know, and he likely had a few worthwhile stories to tell and opinions to impart. I didn’t have an assignment from any publication to pursue the interview, but didn’t let that stop me.

I had only been in Boston (as a non-student) for about a year at that point after definitively leaving Long Island for good, but during that time I’d made some contacts in the local music scene (Boston back then being East Coast garage-rock central) and, through a friend of a friend of a friend, as I recall, succeeded in getting a message to the man, who phoned me out of the blue one day and left a message saying, “I understand you’ve been trying to get in touch with me.”

I called him back, of course, and made arrangements to meet, and so one day in late July I drove out to the tony suburb of Weston, some 15 miles west of Boston, where his then-girlfriend’s parents lived. I found him out back in a lounge chair by the pool, and conducted an interview. Butler was honest, forthcoming, and generous, if probably somewhat bemused by his visitor, and I greatly appreciated his kindness. I’m probably guilty of romanticizing the memory a bit, but I still think of it as the journalistic equivalent of a D.I.Y. indie project. Nothing wrong with that.

For one reason or another, the interview didn’t see print for nearly two years, when I placed two different versions in two outlets I was writing for at the time: Boston Rock, the city’s preeminent music zine, and the Old Colony Memorial, the daily newspaper of Plymouth, Mass., where I wrote a weekly column (see this post for greater detail on that period in my life). Coincidentally, around the time those pieces finally came out Butler had been spending a bit of time in the Bay State on musical matters, producing the debut full-length album for a rising, self-described “roots-pop-cowpunk band” called Scruffy the Cat. 

___________________________________________________________________________

Present Day: 1987 

“Why me? I’m yesterday’s news!” – Chris Butler*

*This was Butler’s reaction when I first told him I wanted to interview him back in ’85.

Well, he was in the late ‘70s local-legend Akron band Tin Huey and was the songwriting brains behind the Waitresses and produced the dB’s Like This LP and most recently Scruffy the Cat’s debut LP Tiny Days, and he plays drums and guitar and writes columns for semi-obscure magazines and is interested in what most people might consider to be a few too many things. This working-class Renaissance man may have suffered at times from the effects of such overwhelming curiosity, but his intentions are good, and he’s on our side.

Chris Butler may be one of the key missing connections in pop music. Hell, for one thing he knows so many people in it. Also, he happens to have written some of the greatest rock lyrics of all time. Not be-bop-a-lula, not Anthems of a Generation, just an inner voice expressing itself. The voice of a brain only a bit too clever for its own good. Indulge me for just a couple of short snippets from the Waitresses catalog:

My goals?

My goals are to find a cure for irony

And make a fool out of God

– “Jimmy Tomorrow”

Getting married? Making babies?

But you haven’t been to Paris

The object of the game is to leave town

Want false hopes, expect magic

Put your life on the line again and again

Make a country that’s fat and smart

That doesn’t love to screw its own

And gives, instead of sucks the world dry

– “They’re All Out of Liquor, Let’s Find Another Party”

“I was just up in your neck of the woods producing Scruffy the Cat,” he says on the phone, during our initial conversation, from his Brooklyn apartment. He met Scruffy “through a friend of Peter Holsapple [the dB’s]. Peter knew a woman named Naomi, and Naomi knew a woman named Lilli Dennison [Scruffy’s manager]. Scruffy spoiled me. They’re the proverbial Righteous Bunch of Folks. I had the most fun with them, they’re the eagerest to please. The grunge [of the previous EP, High Octane Revival] carried through for six songs, but there’s country, there’s ballads – I don’t know if the world is ready for a sensitive Scruffy.”

Asked what he looks for in a prospective band to produce, he says, “Everything I can’t do! Ideas, a good sound. I don’t think the Waitresses ever sounded ‘good’ as a band…if they’re smart, if they read books, if I can get along with them. It also helps if they have enough financial backing so we can do the record we want to make.”

If there’s a constant in his many careers as musician, producer, composer, and columnist, it’s that he’s never cared too much for the spotlight. Give Butler some power behind the scenes and a chance to express himself through back channels, and he’ll likely be a happy camper.

Summer 1985

It’s a perfect day in late July, 1985. The man sits under the patio umbrella at poolside, out back on the handsomely landscaped grounds of his girlfriend’s parents’ house in Weston, Massachusetts, an upscale suburb of Boston (“I’m very suburban,” he joshes). Chris Butler, in red T-shirt, tortoiseshell shades, black clogs and blue swim trunks, is humoring a visitor claiming to be a journalist and wanting to hear his story.

“I never wanted to be a fucking star,” he tells me. “I never wanted to be Leif Garrett. Who’s Leif Garrett?…I’ve been on ‘Solid Gold,’ and I don’t want to be on it again.”

The Waitresses broke up in late 1984. Butler had left the band over a year before that, in May of  1983, after personal differences with singer Patty Donahue [who died of lung cancer in 1996]. “The best thing that ever happened was when the Waitresses broke up,” he says. “When it was falling apart, I thought the best thing to do was to keep it together. I was into being responsible. I forgot that record companies, most of the time, are used to being shit on. I finally said, ‘I’m not having any fun anymore – it’s time to chicken out!’”

Butler is 36 this summer of ’85. “I’m having a great time now,” he says. He has forsaken the guitar for his first instrument, drums, pounding the skins for the New York art band Artless, in summer rehearsals before playing out.

“It’s just a pickup band, a bunch of avant-garde or experimental musicians who wanted to be in a hardcore, burnin’ unit,” he says. “Most of us are older, quote, jaded pros.” The quintet is led by underground cult figure Mykel Board, and also includes Mark Kramer from Eugene Chadbourne’s group Shockabilly.

“Instead of drum solos, I’m going to do poetry breaks,” he adds. “Screaming stream-of-consciousness.”

Butler is also, this summer of ‘85, a co-editor and columnist for a New York magazine called This, which he calls “MAD magazine for adults, with an artistic bent.” There have been three issues of This to date. He also writes a column on pop culture for a music magazine called Music, Computers and Software (although, he said, “I don’t play keyboards, and I’ve only had a Macintosh for six months”).

Butler describes his writing, of both songs and columns, as “too weird for straight people and too straight for weird people.

“I’m not 18, English, and blond. I’m not interested in writing for kids,” he says. “I want to write for people my own age, past 30.

“I never thought of myself as a musician,” he adds, “I always thought of myself as a writer. Pop lyrics haven’t changed in 75, 80 years. I have sheet music from 1910; the lyrics are the same as ‘Let’s Hear It For The Boy.’ There are only so many things you can do with E-A-D chords.”

Present Day: 1987

As it turned out, Butler left Artless on the eve of their European tour. “I love Mykel Board,” he explains, “but his idea of a good tour is $5 at the end of the night and sleeping on the floor! As it turned out, I would have had a great time and probably should have gone.”

Besides Scruffy, he recently produced a band called Cargo Cult, an African/Brazilian group utilizing computer-generated sounds. “Mr. Microchip is atomizing all these cultures and reassembling them,” he says, “which I think is kinda neat.”

Back in the day; Butler is top left, Patty Donahue front and center (click to enlarge).

 The Inevitable, Yet Gripping, Backstory

Butler is from Cleveland, as was Patty Donahue (they met while she was dating the drummer in one of his earlier bands). He took up guitar while a student at Kent State, he says, “because you couldn’t bring in drums.” During 1969/70 he lived in the same dorm as Chrissie Hynde and Devo’s Jerry Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh. He also witnessed the shooting deaths of four students there at the hands of the Ohio National Guard on May 4, 1970. Butler soon got involved in the fermenting Akron rock scene.

“It was a lot of smart suburban or working-class kids who didn’t want to become 9-to-5’ers,” he says, and in that time and place it was possible to afford what he called the “introspection and quiet rage” that apparently was mandatory in the life of an Akron musician in the ’70s. He hung with bands like the James Gang, Pere Ubu, Rubber City Rebels. “After the Kent State shootings,” he adds, “the town slid right down.”

Butler invented the concept of the Waitresses in 1975 in Kent, over a cup of coffee with fellow musician Liam Sternberg. Both were looking to get into new bands. “The solution,” he recalled, “was to invent two hypothetical groups.” The first of these was called Jane Aire & the Belvederes, which Sternberg formed with a singer named – what else – Jane Aire (Jane Ashley). Sternberg later discovered Rachel Sweet and wrote “Walk Like an Egyptian,” a number-one hit for the Bangles in 1986. As for Jane Aire & the Belvederes, they recorded for Stiff and Virgin Records with mixed success; interested parties can refer to this biography.

The second band, the Waitresses, didn’t become reality until 1981, about a year after Butler’s previous band Tin Huey had ran its course and Butler had moved to New York. (He had previously recorded a couple of cuts as the Waitresses for Stiff Records’ Akron Compilation LP, using studio musicians and sounding completely different from the later band.)

The Waitresses’ creation was as calculated as any corporate heavy metal band’s, but toward a diametrically different end. Cerebral at its core, deconstructionist-pop in rhythm, with a lead singer essaying white rapping/spoken monologues rather than conventional warbling, and based in constant self-examination, the group appealed to those sharing Butler’s consuming interest in what he terms “the sociology and psychology of pop culture.” In other words, smart, if not neurotic, young moderns of the ‘80s.

Patty Donahue’s single career-woman persona is the most obvious example of Butler’s songwriting modus operandi of speaking from behind a mask. At the time, he explains, “I had been relating better to women.

“That character was popular earlier in the ‘80s, the struggling woman trying to make it on her own,” he adds. “Now it’s Madonna and Cyndi Lauper, perhaps doing less moralizing and just going out to get what they need without lying on the psychiatrist’s couch. An on-the-surface, simplistic image.

“The idea behind the Waitresses was to get away with as much weirdness as we could, leave the pop stuff to someone else, and still get airplay.”

It nearly worked. The single “I Know What Boys Like” was a minor hit, initially released as a single in 1980 but not peaking in popularity until two years later, when it was included on the band’s debut LP, “Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful?” That LP sold 350,000 copies, not close to Michael Jackson territory but nothing to sneeze at, either. “Christmas Wrapping” became a holiday standard that can still be heard here and there come December. And oh, yes, the band even created and performed the theme song for the 1982-83 TV series “Square Pegs” (starring the teenaged Sarah Jessica Parker, originally from southern Ohio and later to play another version of the “struggling woman trying to make it on her own”), crafting the hyperactive number, Butler recalls, “in a five-hour inspiration session.”

 Check, Please

The Waitresses’ follow-up album, “Bruiseology,” however, “went into the toilet,” as Butler put it, with a good amount of regret. “That was a bloody masterpiece, to bring risk-taking back into pop culture. I thought the world was going to start expanding; the world was in contraction, not expansion. It was a conservative time, and (the record was) propagandizing, not the rock ‘n’ roll life, but just (through having) a character who takes a lot of risks in her life, and if it’s not right, she splits.

“I wanted smart people to buy our records,” he says. “I wanted to get people over 25 back into the stores. In that, I think I was ahead of my time.”

In the end, the band broke even. And on that warm sunny day in 1985, Butler was more or less happy to be on the sidelines. “I’m doing glassblowing again,” he says. “I haven’t done glassblowing since college. I’m learning about investing and real estate. I’m reading all the great books I did Cliff’s Notes for in college.”

Does he want to be in a band again? “I’m writing songs, I play drums every day, but the idea of being in a band I have mixed emotions about,” he says. “There are other things I want out of my life. It’s a part of me and always will be, but right now I’m in turmoil about it.

“I want my life to be expanding. I don’t want to live in the rock ‘n’ roll life and dry ice and limos, and do drugs and fuck 14-year-olds. I don’t want to make a lot of money being stupid.”

Butler probably couldn’t if he tried, which is good news for listeners on his wavelength everywhere.

********

Postscript: In the ensuing years, Chris continued his mainly behind-the-scenes career as a subversive exponent in pop music, playing in various bands like Half Cleveland and Purple Knit, writing and producing. In 1996 he wrote and produced a 69-minute single, “The Devil Glitch,” which was certified by the Guinness Book of World Records the following year as the world’s longest pop song.

In 2014 Butler released a record “Easy Life,” on his own label, an autobiographical concept album centered on his college years at Kent State and the May 4 student massacre. If that doesn’t make you want to buy the record, this piece, well worth reading, should do the trick. I suppose I could try for a new interview with Chris, but it wouldn’t come close to this definitive, spectacular effort by his latter-day Boswell, Dave Cantrell, so why bother?

If you want to catch up on other things Chris is doing these days, and I highly recommend you do, check out his website.

The Odd Interview 3: Mary Battiata

Mary performing with Little  Pink South at notSXSW, Austin, 3/15/14

Poster by Mark Gerking (from a photo by Charles Steck)

In the third installment of The Odd Interview we chat with Mary Battiata, a musician whose normally low-key demeanor (even onstage) belies a fascinating past. In the ’80s and ’90s, Mary was an intrepid reporter covering famine in East Africa, revolutions in Eastern Europe and the war in Bosnia as a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post. These days she’s an independent singer-songwriter based in Arlington, Virginia, fronting an alt-country band she put together in the late ’90s, Little Pink (the name being an obvious allusion to The Band’s Music From Big Pink, though she does tell an amusing story from the stage about the lawyers for Pink, the singer, sending her a cease-and-desist letter). Though her primary stomping grounds are Maryland, Virginia and DC, she plays Austin about twice a year with her Texas-specific pickup band, which she dubs “Little Pink South.” Little Pink has issued three CDs: Cul-de-sac Cowgirl (2001); a four-song EP, 12 Birds (2003); and Gladly Would We Anchor (2008). Mary plans to issue another Little Pink CD in the not too distant future.

Despite our shared interest in the former Yugoslavia (I lived in Slovenia for five years and traveled in Croatia and Bosnia), I first became aware of Mary via her music, not her journalistic endeavors. Over a nearly hour-long interview, she spoke about the impacts both of these very different creative paths have had on her life. Here’s a midlife career-changer par excellence, then, with more than a few stories to tell. Although she was a capable and successful journalist, Mary was ultimately dissatisfied with the restrictions that journalism (at least the old-fashioned variety) places on a writer. Still, she retains a justified pride in her efforts on both the page and the stage.

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It surprises me to realize that I’ve known Mary Battiata for nearly a decade. Along with many year-round Austinites, I certainly have issues with SXSW and what it does to my adopted city every year (it’s been a long time since the official fest has had much to do with keeping things weird, or even alternative, if it ever did at all). But if you can brave the crowds, good music can be found, much of it unofficial and wristband-free. When I first encountered Mary at a 2005 concert, I was immediately struck by her distinctive voice — at once earthbound and soaring, mature and knowing, yearning and sad at times but not defeated, as if possessed of some ancient wisdom. (The closest vocal analogue I’ve found is Christy McWilson.) Her offbeat, imagery-filled lyrics were a perfect match for that voice. Who can say why one artist moves you and another, quite similar one leaves you cold? The best way I can explain it is that some performers just resonate on your private inner frequencies (or, as McWilson once put it, you hear the dog whistle that most others don’t).

I tried to see Mary and “Little Pink South” each time when she came down for her annual SXSW visit and sometimes at another time of year, as when she played the Mean-Eyed Cat  back in October 2007, which inspired me at that point to wax on about the place of music and its performers in one’s life as you age, how experience and time deepens and changes the way you perceive a concert, and  my appreciation for what I like to call “Music for the Real World.”

Eventually, I introduced myself to Mary after one of her shows and gave her some clips of articles I’d written about Slovenia (Mary had covered the war in Bosnia and elsewhere in ex-Yugoslavia for the Washington Post during the first half of the ’90s, so we had that territory in common even though I arrived later on the scene). Over the years, from one show to the next, we got to know each other a little bit. This interview was conducted by phone on May 30, 2014, with Mary adding a bit more information later on by email, which I’ve interpolated into the main (more or less seamlessly, I hope). Before we dive in, to give you a better idea of why I wanted to interview her, have a look at Mary’s lyrics to “Ceiling Rain,” one of my favorite Little Pink songs, from their debut album Cul-de-Sac Cowgirl:

Rain, coming down tonight. 

I parked the moon

Under the ceiling light.

And I wonder where you are and if you’ll come back.

And if I prayed how would, how would it feel? If you held me tight?

[Chorus] We’re wandering out beyond the blackness

All the ships have crashed and dented

And they’re drifting down like faded furies

And broken bits of galaxy trash

That we won’t even see someday…

And the sound

Of your car at night

I heard Ulysses took a long long time,

To appease the sirens and come back home

And his dog pricked up his ears

And now he waits, on the porch side…

[Chorus]

In the rain

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The Odd Interview: Tell me a bit about your early life: Where you grew up, what you wanted to be when you grew up.

Mary Battiata: I grew up in the Washington, DC area. My grandparents, except for one, were Italian immigrants; they started out in New York City, in Little Italy, in fact. But my parents came down to DC and my dad went to medical school here, and so they were here in, I guess, the late ‘50s. I grew up all around DC and I have five brothers and sisters, so we kind of moved around. My dad was in the Air Force, out of Andrews Air Force Base for a while. He was a pediatrician, and so he was in the Air Force for a couple of years. They lived in Georgetown for a while and then they moved to Maryland, kind of all over the DC area, mostly on the Maryland side. It’s very compact. Five minutes one way you’re out of DC and in Virginia, which is where I live now, and 20 minutes the other way and you’re in Maryland. There are two big rivers that meet here, the Potomac and the Anacostia. The terrain is really interesting, too. Part of it is the Piedmont and part of it is the coastal plains. My grandparents emigrated from Italy at the turn of the 20^th century.

Do you know what part of Italy?  

Yeah, they were on one side from outside of Rome in the mountains, this very poor, beautiful but very mountainous area called Abruzzo. An intense earthquake region. The little town that my grandmother was from, the last big earthquake they had in Italy, that town and her little house fell to ruins, around 1910. And then the other side, my father’s side, it’s a little complicated; they were from Sicily originally but they lived in Trieste, in the northeast. But essentially Sicilian, and the name Battiata is Sicilian.

In a way, my paternal grandfather Josef Battiata was an immigrant twice over. His family moved to Trieste before he was born and ran an osteria (translation: humble wine pub) there in the last decade of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He was born in Trieste and grew up there, hence the spelling of his first name. (He told us that the osteria was a meeting place for Italian nationalists and was frequented by undercover A-H police posing as same.) Some time around the time of the first World War, his family moved back to Sicily (a fishing village near Palermo) and in 1918, at age 16, he emigrated to America.

With my parents’ move to DC in the 1950s and my younger brothers’ eventual moves to points west (California) and south (Richmond and South Carolina), many of my little nieces and nephews are growing up with southern accents and for the first time since before 1900, there are no more Battiatas in NYC at all. So we are all still migrating, I guess. Maybe that never stops. And that’s really what the songs (and the title) of my next record are all about. That kind of moving and also the migrating –  physical and mental –  I did as a correspondent.

When did you become interested in journalism and writing, and were you always interested in music as well or is that something that developed later?

I can remember writing little short stories in the third grade and having them read aloud at school, but I was always interested in, for lack of a better way to put it, just going into new worlds and scoping out what was going on. That was my sort of journalistic impulse; it’s very much a part of my personality and my brain, because I still have that. I just like to move and strike out (to) new places. I was kind of operating as a journalist even in college – I was an American Studies major – all my papers were really about going into some unfamiliar world and reporting, basically, finding ways.

How did you get into working for the Washington Post?

I actually got into working for the Post two years (after college). I worked for the National Gallery of Art for a while, selling books, because I had lived in Italy for a year. My senior year of college I graduated early and I went to Italy; my great-aunt was living in Rome and I studied art history in Bologna, and I learned Italian and then I came back, and I kind of didn’t know – I really liked art history but I didn’t want to stay in school and so I worked at the National Gallery of Art for a while selling books, which was fantastic, and then I started working at night – I heard that the Post was looking for copy editors. So I started working there at night, in the arts section, and then I started freelancing for them doing odd assignments here and there, and then I became a Metro reporter because I was good at writing features, and they needed that. And then it just kind of went on from there.

It was a very lucky thing; the paper was expanding in the ‘80s post-Watergate and newspapers were doing really well, and it was kind of the last era – I kind of feel like by the late ‘80s it just became tougher and more professionalized. I don’t think without clips and probably a journalism degree, in the ‘90s you really kind of had to have that, I think, to get hired at a major daily. So I feel I was extremely lucky. I did a lot of different jobs there; I liked it a lot. I went first to East Africa and then to Eastern Europe in the very late ‘80s, so it wasn’t until I came back in the mid-‘90s that I started writing songs. I think I wrote my first song in ’96.

I had been really interested in music in high school; I played guitar and I listened obsessively to music, but it didn’t really occur to me to write songs until much later. And that was at a point where it came out of a feeling of exhaustion with long-form journalism, really. I felt like I needed to mess around with a much shorter form, more compact.

What was your frustration with writing longer features?

I felt that I needed to write in a more personal voice. You could do that in a limited fashion in journalism, but unless you were an essayist you could only do that up to a point and I needed to do more than that.

You realize there’s a built-in joke in there: I assume you didn’t leave journalism because you realized the business model was collapsing and you wanted more security by becoming an independent musician.

Yeah, really, I know. No, I mean, I didn’t give up journalism for another – around the mid ‘90s I returned to the United States from Eastern Europe, I began working for the Post Magazine and I talked my way into a part-time writing gig. I worked for the magazine for another 10 years, but it was as a part-timer, I was rarely in the building and I was gradually leaving.

How did you get the gig as a foreign correspondent, covering Bosnia?  

I had a friend who was posted for the Post in East Africa, and I was working for the Post Style section. The paper was so flush at that time that I proposed pieces and amazingly, they would go for it. The first piece, I think, I went to Kenya to cover the UN Women’s Conference. That might have been in ’85, and while I was there I did some pieces on elephant conservation and other stuff. And then I went back, and (American zoologist) Dian Fossey was murdered in Rwanda (December 1985) and I asked if they would send me to Rwanda to cover that, and they did.  Then I went there to join this friend who became my partner at that time…I left the paper, I went there as a super stringer – it was a very common arrangement with British papers, not so common then with American papers but it’s more so now – I had a contract, but that was it. I wrote a lot of pieces about conservation, but also it was the time of the famine in Ethiopia and the beginning of the conflict in Southern Sudan. So I spent much of my time in Ethiopia and Eritrea and then in Khartoum and in South Sudan, in Juba and places like that; it was very rough reporting. And then when it came time to go to Eastern Europe, the foreign editor at the time was a very smart man who’d been the Post’s Berlin correspondent; he recognized that basically Eastern Europe was going to probably blow and crumble, however you want to put it, and so they hired me back as a full-time correspondent. So I moved to Warsaw, that was in June in ’89, and then by September it was just dominoes, it was one (country) after the other.

To watch everything, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Romania, Hungary…

Oh, yeah, it was crazy. I have very visceral and visual memories of being in Prague during the revolution, right before – I feel really fortunate, because I went to each of these places right before things changed, so I saw Romania under Ceausescu, I made two trips there while he was still in power; I went to Prague before the revolution (in Czechoslovakia) and interviewed (Vaclav) Havel and some of these other people. When I look back on it, I can hardly – it seems like a dream, honestly, but it was amazing. Long time ago, now.

When did you leave journalism altogether? I assume you don’t do it anymore.

No, I don’t. I decided to leave and, you know, they were buying people out but I did not qualify because you had to be a certain age and you had to also be full-time. I’d been there a really long time by then, and I loved the place and they liked me, but I just kind of felt – I’d been playing music since ’98-‘99, I’d been playing out and put a band together, I’d been writing (since) ’97. I felt like I needed to focus more on music and it just seemed like this was the time to go; if I was going to do it I really had to do it. It kind of made it easier in some ways because some things were changing. I left in 2007 and you know, the economy sort of collapsed in 2008 and that’s when print really started to reel because advertising went away.

So you were like the last lifeboat off the Titanic.

I just had lunch with an old editor of mine, David Rowell, an amazing guy, one of the best editors and writers I’ve ever worked with; he was at the magazine, he’s still there. It was really hard to leave, actually, but I felt I had to do it. But what’s interesting is you find out, I thought, “I’m a reporter because I’m working for a newspaper,” but actually, I’m a reporter because I’m a reporter. You’re born that way, you know?

It was very hard to leave journalism. At the time, it felt like walking off a cliff. But I felt it was necessary in order to give songwriting its due. Maybe today I could do both, but then, I really felt I had to separate myself completely. So I did. And I’m not sorry. The wrench was made slightly easier by the fact that what I did best – long form magazine journalism – was going the way of the dodo, at least at (the) Sunday papers. But I do miss journalism sometimes – the freedom and the clarity of it. The purity. (I know there are plenty of people who would snort derisively at the idea of journalism as being pure, but that’s what I think.)

Do you consider yourself more of a journalist, or more of a musician at this point?  

I consider myself to be both. I’m not working as a journalist; I’ve been teaching essay writing. I taught essay writing to journalism graduate students; I’ve been doing that in DC for two years at this art college called the Corcoran. I guess I have to say musician, because I’m producing songs and I’m performing as a musician and I’m not writing prose journalism right now.

The genesis of Little Pink was, as you said, in ’97-’98…

I put the band together in the late ‘90s, and the genesis was I had been writing songs and I wanted to record and play out. I was working with a very cool songwriter up here in DC named Karl Straub, who played some shows with me and kind of lent me his rhythm section from a band called the Graverobbers, and then he co-produced half of the first Little Pink CD. Around this time I also met and began hanging out with another of my big influences, the songwriter and producer Philip Stevenson. He was the co-producer on Gladly Would We Anchor (nightworldrecords.com).

What inspires your songwriting? There’s definitely a downbeat or depressive streak that shows itself sometimes, but there’s also optimism and a sense of the beauty of nature, and poetry, maybe especially birds. I want to know how you think your songwriting has evolved over the past decade or so.

Well, I’m still trying to evolve it, so I’m definitely a work in progress. I actually work part time as a naturalist here, outside of DC in northern Virginia. I love being outdoors, and so I’m very much inspired by nature and I think I’m also pretty alarmed about the state of the environment. When I’m out I’m often pierced by this feeling of loss, but that is also just part of one’s DNA as well. You can’t be awake and not be alarmed by everything that’s going on in nature right now, in the environment, and changes. I think that life is full of wonders, but at the same time it’s always about change and loss, you know? I don’t think of it as being depressed at all, but I know – I’ve heard that before, so I don’t think I’m the only person – I don’t think my perception or idea of what I write about is the only legitimate perception at all.

I think it deals a lot with what I might call wisdom born of maturity or perspective, and having lived a certain amount, and maybe that you see things clearly and some things break your heart, but I think there’s some hope down deep within, if that makes any sense.  

Yeah, I mean, I like the way you put that. I think that from when I first moved to Africa in late 1987, to when I came back from Bosnia  in early 1994, that reporting, that was a lot of really dire – I mean, it was war reporting. I was reporting on catastrophe, like famine. And when I think back on it, I’m amazed that I kept on enough of an even keel to be a good reporter. I think I was a decent reporter and I think that when I came back, things kind of fell apart for me a little bit. I had a year and a half of extreme physical disability. I had very bad, disabling carpal tunnel, cubital tunnel and thoracic outlet syndrome. I was supposed to be there another year, covering Yugoslavia, and I wanted to be, but basically, my hands stopped working. I was on a medical leave for a year and a half. I could not drive, and in the early months of it I could barely lift a plate or a bag, and I had a lot of physical therapy. I think it was a physical malady definitely exacerbated by stress. I don’t have any doubt about it.

So you were reporting from battles and sieges when they were going on.

Yes, almost never intentionally. But you would go to some place and think it was all over, you would hear that things had calmed down and you needed to go there to find out what had happened, and then you’d get there and lo and behold, the streets are deserted and there are shells flying around, and snipers, and you know – and that was really, that will fry your nerve endings, let me tell ya.  

Were you traveling with anybody, an interpreter or someone else from the paper, like a photographer?

Never with a photographer, because that wasn’t the way they staffed that, but I was usually traveling with a colleague, sometimes from another paper, sometimes from radio; sometimes it was an American news outlet, sometimes it was British folks that I knew. And yes, usually an interpreter that we shared. It was very interesting, it’s fascinating on many levels, but it is stressful and it’s very upsetting. I always remember, there was a man –  in the early days in Bosnia, I did some reporting in the aftermath of the siege of a town, and really vicious things had been carried out against the local populace by certain militias. This man was telling me, he was very shaken up, he was an old man and he said, “I’ve seen things that no human being should ever see,” that had been sort of burned into his brain and he would never be able to get rid of them. That really stuck with me and I was very struck by it.

What also ties into this: I did some reporting in a small town with people who had survived a siege by Bosnian Serb militias. A lot of civilians had been killed and their bodies left in the open, between houses and on streets to rot. No one could get to the corpses to bury them, because of the snipers. This was deliberate, on the part of the militias. It was part of the terror strategy. It was horribly traumatic, especially for the children, who had no way to process what they’d seen, and some of them were struck mute by the experience. Later, in Zagreb, in Croatia, I met a team of Norwegian child psychologists who’d gone to the same place to help some of these children, and interviewed some of them for research.

The people in these towns had been assaulted by Serb militias, so the victims were these Croat and Bosnian Muslim populations. These researchers said, and it’s since been reported (every few years another study comes out supporting it), this idea that emotional trauma not only affects people emotionally but it also actually – and I think they say this about depression as well – that it carves different pathways in the brain, so the brain is physically altered by these experiences. And this is kind of what they talk about now with PTSD for returning troops. So even very early on this was therapeutic treatment they were giving these children, but they were also taking note for their own research. I think that comes right around to art, because I think songs and art are ways of exploring and processing all of life, including this kind of experience, which is horrible.

So would you say that your experiences as a journalist, witnessing these kinds of horrors, has influenced you as a songwriter and a musician?  

Probably more as a songwriter – those two things are inextricably intertwined but yeah, I think so. Anybody who’s writing songs is writing about a personal experience. I’ve  definitely written some songs that are directly out of that, I would say.

Journalism and poetry are maybe two different ways of finding or seeking the truth.  

Yeah, that’s right, I think that’s well said. Yeah. For a long time I’ve never really talked about that too much, because I always felt, and I still do, that as a journalist you are there as a neutral observer and your job is to relay back what you’ve seen, and not to inject yourself into it at all. Unless you’re George Orwell and you’re writing an essay, and then that’s what’s called for in that form.

I would agree with that, very much.

I always tried to keep them separate, but of course those experiences are a part of who I am and they’re a part of my writing. It’s just a fact. These days I’ve been doing some painting and I’m sure that will creep into my songwriting; I hope it will, you know. Good songs have to come out of your experiences, I think. They don’t have to be confessional, but you do need to write from who you are.

Even though it comes out of a very different place in your brain than just communicating stories for the Washington Post. I get the sense that you don’t miss it too much, though, these days.

Well, I do. But you can’t do both, I don’t think. You can’t be a poet. I thought that I had to choose, I really did.  Part of it was, journalism is like, even no matter where you’re doing it as a reporter, which is what I wanted to do, you’re carrying it with you all the time. Whatever you’re working on – I could never just set it aside and at the end of the day I always carried it with me. And I couldn’t do that. It felt harder and harder to carry both worlds in my head.

Does songwriting come easy to you?

Sometimes the best ones come really fast. I write a lot of songs that get to a certain place, and I’ll sometimes even play ‘em for the band I work with, the rhythm section I’ve been working with for a long time and they’ll say, “Well, that’s finished.” But I won’t think it’s finished, and I’ll pull it apart and a lot of times it won’t come back together. So I guess it’s like having a garage full of car parts you pull off of many cars and they’re in boxes laying around, and maybe I’ll use ‘em again someday.  

Would you call what you do alt-country or Americana, or do you just not like to be labeled?

I don’t mind being labeled. I think alt-country is right. Increasingly I would say I’m a singer-songwriter. Americana seems a reasonable label, too. I love country music a lot, traditional country music, I love it. When I was growing up in Maryland, the street that I really grew up on had a bunch of people – they worked for the federal government or the University of Maryland or whatever – many of those people had come up from North Carolina or West Virginia and settled in DC in the postwar era. And there was a huge bluegrass scene in Baltimore and even in DC, all through the ‘40s, ‘50s, into the ‘60s. There were great players. The public radio station the whole time I was growing up had several hours of bluegrass programming every day, Monday through Friday, and I learned years later that there was apparently a big supporter of the station, a financial supporter, who loved bluegrass music and had underwritten many hours of it each day, to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars a year! So there was a lot of it and I honestly thought, growing up, that bluegrass was country music, you know. But I loved the way that stuff sounded. That was a big influence on me. Well, there were a lot of other influences, too. I don’t know what other people would call me. I guess it depends on who’s doing the calling.

You’ve built yourself a good following in DC, and maybe in Texas also.

Yeah, decent. And a little bit in New York. But I would love to tour more. This is the perpetual issue for a very wide swath of songwriters and performing musicians: is it better to spend your time and energy and money trying to tour, or do you spend it on recording and just hope that you’re going to get everything out over the Internet. The answer is all of the above, of course. I’ve never played in Philadelphia, which is not very far away. I’ve played once or twice in North Carolina. I want to do more on the East Coast. I have a musician friend in Colorado, Boulder, who wants to put a little tour there. So, yeah, I’d like to expand the base and I’ll try to do it. I’m putting together songs for a new record and trying to figure out where to record it.

That was my next question, because the last album, Gladly Would We Anchor, came out seven years ago.

I actually went back to school to get certified as an art teacher, and it was also an excuse because I really wanted to study painting and composition and art, but I wanted something that would be more conducive to playing music on several different levels. I haven’t done as much recording, and I feel a little behind schedule making a record, so that’s what I’m working on this year. You know, it’s funny how the questions are all slightly different now than they were seven years ago. Many people say, “Well, you’re not going to make a physical CD, are you?” And the answer’s yeah, of course I am, because I like them, I like having them. I like the physical object. Yeah, there are a lot of questions about what physically to make. How do you feel about it?

I like the object, but I also like the convenience of having it all on an iPod, to call it up whenever you like without the whole business of getting the record out and putting it on. It has its charms, though. But that’s another thing, now that journalism is sort of collapsing and the music business is collapsing –  

I know! I mean, my old friend my editor was just talking about, this is the waning of the print age, and in book publishing, too, so much has changed. And basically, everyone’s attention spans have changed. I’m much more distracted than I was and I have to work much harder to settle my brain and kind of physically turn off all these inputs, but also just kind of mentally and psychologically turn them off, so I can think.

Twitter and Facebook are always running in the background and in the Internet age everybody is a writer, which doesn’t mean everything is worth reading, but there you go.

Right, right.

The Odd Interview 2: Gus McIntyre, of Gus & Fin

Gus (L) and Fin

In the second installment of The Odd Interview I venture back to my roots in the swamps of rock journalism to interview Angus “Gus” McIntyre, of the ukulele duo Gus & Fin. You probably know these guys–if you know them at all–as the two wacky Scotsmen who have become YouTube stars of sorts over the past (nearly) eight years for their covers of punk classics performed on ukes.

If you’re not familiar with Gus & Fin, you could do worse than start with this sparkling cover of the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop” from 2007, and go from there (warning: like certain types of snack food, it’s nearly impossible to consume just one of their videos). Fin is the one with the goatee and glasses; Gus is the one without.  Here’s a link to their YouTube channel, GUGUG. Although their hilariously spot-on covers of the Ramones, Buzzcocks and the like are their calling card, they regularly branch out into other genres, including the best version of “Georgy Girl” I’ve ever heard and even Blue Oyster Cult, all, of course, featuring the uke (cheap plastic ones welcome).

According to this blogger, Gus & Fin are the UK’s leading purveyors/acolytes of ukulele punk, a genre they may have invented (Gus himself isn’t sure). There aren’t too many interviews with Gus & Fin out there (here’s one with Gus from back in 2008), so I figured it was time for another one.

Although Gus and Fin sometimes use the nom de YouTube of Raucous as their surname, I wasn’t sure whether the two lifelong Glaswegians were cool with being referred to by their proper names. However, says Gus, “Refer to us any way you like.” Gus answered my questions via email.

The Odd Interview: How long have you known Fin? 

Gus McIntyre: I have known Fin since we were both 12. We were in the same class at school, which was in the West End of Glasgow.

According to this article, you (Gus) taught Fin the uke in school and you started by performing Ramones covers. When did this come about, why did you decide to make videos, and what & when was your first video? 

Gus: Ha ha, no – me and Fin went to the same school but we didn’t know anything about ukuleles till many years later, except perhaps a vague awareness of a ukulele being the thing that George Formby played in the musical numbers in his films. Ukuleles appeared in our consciousnesses many years later. Also I didn’t teach Fin the ukulele – I just showed him one and he took it from there.

I think the first GUGUG video was a rather obscure ukulele version of the music (by Burt Bacharach) in an obscure film called After the Fox. The first Gus & Fin tune was probably a doo-wop version of the Ramones’ “Sheena Is A Punk Rocker” (in 2006).

Have you been in other bands and if so, which and where? 

Many, many bands. Generally rock ‘n’ roll and ska, and generally playing the drums.

What does GUGUG stand for?

Nothing.

Were you the first people to perform covers of punk songs on the ukulele, an instrument previously regarded (at least in the USA) as largely the province of Hawaiian musicians, vaudeville performers and Tiny Tim, perhaps the least ‘cool’ instrument this side of the tuba? Why punk + ukulele, and how did you realize they would go together well?

I’m not entirely sure if we were the first. We may have been. When I started playing ukulele I checked YouTube (which was relatively young at the time) to see if I could pick up some tips on the ukulele, but there were very few people on there playing the uke. I copied the idea for a “ukulele channel” from a guy called Randy Greer who is a professional jazz/swing singer who was playing uke on YouTube, and I thought, “I could do something like that except not jazz, obviously.” There was never a question of whether they would go together musically. We didn’t even consider it — we just did it!

Along with the ukulele, you and Fin have played the likes of the tea-chest bass, wobble board and suchlike. What is your attraction to these kinds of obscure instruments?

Fin and I have always liked the idea of playing music on cheap, home-made instruments. Kind of punk innit? I have an aversion to musical instruments that cost a lot of money — takes all the fun out of it!

You have over 11,000 subscribers on YouTube at the moment and (I think) 126 videos on GUGUG. You’ve branched out beyond punk to classic ‘60s pop and other standards, and have covered “Georgy Girl” with Duglas Stewart (BMX Bandits) and “Destination Venus” with Fay Fife (Rezillos/Revillos). Do you seek out guest performers, or do they seek you out?

Duglas is my pal, so I’m not sure who asked who? Fay Fife and Gus & Fin were playing at the same gig (Norton Records Benefit) and so I think we may have asked her if she wanted to perform a Rezillos song with us onstage (which she was right up for).

Do you do much live performing, and have you only performed in the UK? Any plans for touring in other countries?

We don’t tend to play much in the UK — we prefer to play in exotic far-off lands. We like playing  all over the world. All we ask is travel, accommodation and beer money.

Which foreign countries have Gus & Fin played? Ever played the USA, or have any plans to?

We always have plans to play in the USA but we haven’t got it together yet. The UWC (Ukulele World Congress) have asked us every year since it started. Maybe one day. We have played in Ireland, France, Belgium, Germany and we almost played in Holland, but there was too much snow in Amsterdam for aeroplanes to land. Bummer!

What is it about Scotland that makes it such fertile ground for a particular sound – not just punk rock but a punked-up, almost cartoonish version of power pop with fun in mind (like the Rezillos/Revillos), which sits side by side with a love for classic ‘60s pop of the kind purveyed by the likes of BMX Bandits? What kind of camaraderie exists in the Scottish alternative rock scene in general?

Well that’s a big question. I’m not the best person to answer that one. Better to ask a music journalist. Must be something about the miserable weather keeps everyone indoors practising.

Are you satisfied with just having a YouTube presence, or will there be actual records for sale, videos, concerts, a website, T-shirts, signature “Gus & Fin” ukes, etc. in the future?

We’re very disorganised.

What do you guys do when you’re not playing music and making videos? 

Ride motorbikes (generally not at the same time), Fin likes to go camping and climb mountains. I like snowboarding and drinking coffee.

Last question: Do you have a favorite Gus & Fin video? 

Fin’s is “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” Mine is “Get It On.”

The Odd Interview 1: Neil deGrasse Tyson

Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson at the Hayden Planetarium, with the tools of his trade. (Photo by David Gamble, 2008)

Something you take away from interviews with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, the noted astrophysicist and great popular explainer of the properties of the known universe to the United States and beyond, is that one should never accept things at face value, never take received knowledge on faith, never go along with the conventional wisdom just because it’s conventional to do so, and always test suppositions and hypotheses to see if they hold water. After reading his books (OK, a few of them) and speaking with him at length, I believe this applies to the way Tyson views all things in life. It’s got something to do with a little thing the guys and gals down at the lab like to call “the scientific method.”

What follows is the source interview for my profile of Tyson that ran in the Austin American-Statesman newspaper on Dec. 15, 2013, prior to a lecture he gave at the Paramount Theatre in downtown Austin (you can read this article, with additional notes, on my other blog, Pogoer 2.0). A few hours away from the general televised premiere of the rebooted Cosmos series (Sunday, March 9), and with media interest in the good doctor reaching a fevered pitch, there could hardly be a better subject to launch this modest website devoted to the art of the interview.

This is a minimally edited transcript of my full, 38-minute-long, wide-ranging phone interview with Tyson, over the phone from his office at the Hayden Planetarium, on  November 22, 2013. In general I’ve taken out nothing except redundancies, vocal tics and what basically amounted to extraneous small talk. Most people I’ve interviewed have benefited greatly from editing; Neil Tyson is one of the few individuals I’ve encountered whose extemporaneous speaking is generally worth the read. A born educator, Tyson took pains throughout the interview to clarify his thought processes and points of view, including gently correcting me when he felt I was proceeding from the wrong assumptions. (He didn’t just single me out for this; I love his explanation of why a well-known poll stating that a large percentage of the public thinks the sun revolves around the earth was incorrect because it was asking that question in the wrong way.)

The Odd Interview:  I know this is a very busy season for you, especially, so I appreciate your taking a little time for us to speak together. How far along are you in filming the Cosmos series?

Neil deGrasse Tyson:  All the filming is done, so we’re in post-production now. We finished maybe a month ago. I was exhausted at the end. I don’t know how movie stars can make movies continuously, because I was just ready to go to the Bahamas. (laughs)

What are you, making 13 or 14 episodes?

Yes, there’s 13 episodes.  It’s longer than what a movie would be, so the total effort was larger. Still, it was a lifestyle that I was so unaccustomed to. But I enjoyed it—I enjoyed watching how creative people make video.

I know that Carl Sagan was a mentor and a friend to you—

He wasn’t a mentor; both of those words are overstated. I met him only four times in my life, or five times, and so we never worked together, and I don’t know that I could have ever called him a close friend. But he knew I existed in the later years, when I got my Ph.D. and started doing visible things like writing books. But he was influential on me, by just how he treated me in my first encounter. And normally, one wouldn’t call that a mentor, right? So if someone did something influential and you remember that the rest of your life, that’s not your mentor; that’s just a role model, or somebody who behaved in a way that you wanted to emulate.

I know you’re not trying to be Sagan in the Cosmos series, you’re doing your own thing, but did some of what he did in that series carry over to your presentation of the show?

 Well, the spirit of the series is there. I think that’s the way to think of this. It is unmistakably Cosmos, and given that, I am now folded into that frame. That’s how you think of it. Not folded, but blended. I’m on that landscape. I knew that if I tried to be Carl then I would just fail, but I knew I could be a really good version of myself. Or a really full-up version (laughs). So if I fail at that, then I fail, sort of a legitimate failure.

I wanted to talk a little bit about teaching astronomy and astrophysics to kids. Like you, I grew up in the New York area, in Queens and Long Island. Like you, I first went to the Hayden Planetarium when I was a kid, about eight or nine. The lights went down, and ALL the stars came out. It was a revelation to me and millions of city kids—

Yeah, yeah. It’s a singular psychoemotional experience when you first see that.

I know you’ve done major revisions to the planetarium—

It’s completely rebuilt, so revision wouldn’t even be the right word.

How do you engage the interest of today’s kids in space and astrophysics, as opposed to our generation, in the age of the Internet and iPads and having the entire storehouse of world knowledge at your fingertips? Are these kids more jaded than we were, or are kids, you know, just kids?

My professional focus has always been adults, not kids. But the way I bring science to the public, it tends to also attract kids, high school down to maybe middle school. If you’re a curious middle-schooler you can follow almost anything I do, but the target is adults. We have problems in the world because of science illiteracy in the adult population, not because of science illiteracy in the children’s population. So I focus on adults almost entirely. I have some opinions about kids, but it’s not because that’s what I actually do professionally. All the books I write are for adults. My Pluto book (The Pluto Files), that was really for adults, although it featured angry mail from children in it, third-graders who were genuinely pissed off that in our new facility we reclassified Pluto from its planet status. That angered a lot of elementary school children. So I reported on these letters in The Pluto Files, but the book itself is not a kids’ book. So I don’t have a special magic wand to invoke here with kids.

What I do know about kids is that they are born curious about their environment. Every kid I’ve ever met is turning over rocks, plucking petals off of flowers, or reaching for things just out of their reach because it’s something that they don’t know what it is and they want to find out. And parents generally squash this activity, because almost every expression of this activity breaks something (laughs)! It’s, “Oh, don’t touch that egg on the table, you might break it. Oh, don’t pull on the tablecloth, you’ll pull the dishes off. Oh, don’t crawl over, don’t touch that, don’t, that’ll tip”—and it’s all about don’ts. So the real issue here is not how do you get kids interested in science, it’s how to get out of their way as they express this curiosity that perhaps is inherent in our DNA.

I’ve read a couple of your books, not all of them;  in your books and in your lectures you take an almost journalistic approach to your subject matter, by which I mean that you’re able to take a disparate collection of data, make connections between them, and illustrate scientific and somewhat arcane subjects in a vivid way so that the layperson will not only understand, but be entertained as they receive the information.

I think at its best it will succeed at that; that’s the target. I don’t know that I hit that in every paragraph, but you perceptively identified exactly what a perfect paragraph accomplishes.

I think of you sort of as the ambassador of the known universe to the United States. When did you discover that you had a gift for delivering information, and that you really wanted to devote a significant portion of your career to educating the public?

I’ve never been happy with the word “gift,” because it implies that someone actually didn’t have to work at it. People tend to use the word “gift” when they see someone who is hugely talented at something and they’re not as good at that, and so they just say it’s a gift. Take, for example, Michael Jordan, who’s arguably the best basketball player ever. Many people say he had a gift of (playing) basketball. But then you realize he didn’t make the first string in his college (team) and he wasn’t the first-round draft choice in the NBA. He was a very good player, but nothing remotely approximating what he is remembered to be. And he basically worked at it. And not enough credit goes to people who actually work at being good. And so, I worked at what it is people notice that I exhibit when I’m interacting with the public, or with Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, or anyone where the public is eavesdropping on a discourse about the universe that I’m having.

And so, what I noticed was in eighth grade there was a particular moment when we were learning matrices in our math class. And I finally understood what matrices do, and the pathway that I took to understand it was different from what was being taught by the teacher. And I thought the pathway that I took was clearer than what the teacher was doing. And so when other people were having problems with what he was saying, I said, “I’d like to try,” and then I went up to the chalkboard and described my understanding of matrices. And the whole class (said), “Oh, now I understand!” (laughs)

I don’t know the mind of the teacher; was he embarrassed or was he happy for me or was he frustrated, I don’t know. But at that point it occurred to me that maybe my efforts to understand things come closer to being sensitive to whatever might be the tangled mental roadways in others who are also grappling to try to understand something, so that I’d share these pathways that I took, and they tend to be successful in ways that textbooks are not presenting information, or really erudite people are not considering presenting it this way. So all I’m really doing is sharing how I came to learn and understand what I know.

 Can you give us a little preview or blurb of what you’ll be speaking about at the Paramount in Austin?

The talks that I give are constructed in the weeks and days that precede the talk, because I  fold in things that were cosmic current events. I’d have to check what title I’d given them. Do you have the title in front of you? Do they actually give a title? [No, I respond.]

If there’s no title, then I know what I’ll be talking about. What I will do is highlight for the audience the urgency of not only science literacy in modern times as a fundamental driver of tomorrow’s economies, but also the importance and the value of having a cosmic perspective on who and what we are on Earth and in the universe.  And I might highlight a few current events, just to round out the talk. And in that way you get to see some current cosmic events, you learn about how we’ve been failing at trying to compete internationally, so it might be a call to arms for you, and you’ll also have a fresh view on who and what we are in this universe, and why that matters. Because I like leaving people with some sort of philosophical outlook that they can debate when they’re at home, or at a bar. I love it when people have bar fights over the meaning of the universe (laughs).

I believe the event is sold out already.

Yeah, that’s what I heard. Good for the theater. It’s a great—if I remember, is this the theater on Sixth Street, is that right? When I was in Austin, I don’t know that it was used for much. It may have been one of these old grande dame theaters that no longer worked for movies, because I don’t remember having a relationship with that theater back in my years there, in the early ‘80s [Tyson came to Austin to pursue a master’s degree in astronomy at the University of Texas].

I read your book [The Sky is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist, his autobiography]. I know your time at UT was, let’s say, less than ideal in some ways. I know you did have kind words for Frank Bash.

He was chairman [of UT’s Astronomy Department] at the time I had arrived. I think he may be emeritus now [Bash has been, since 2003]. But I learned a lot of teaching skills from him; I was his teaching assistant. He had a way of interacting with the class that helped to inform how I interact with a big group of people in front of me. There is just a kind of, it’s a respect for the intelligence of who’s in the room and fearless once you do that as to where you’re going to take them next. And that way, the audience lands in a place that is beyond where they thought they could have reached.

Have you heard from anyone at UT wanting to mend fences, and do you plan to revisit any old places in Austin while you’re there?

 I have some friends, and my wife, the maid of honor at her wedding lives in Austin. So I’ll be meeting up with a couple of friends while I’m there, and I have some overtures from the university but I haven’t figured out what my schedule will look like. I got a call from the president’s office. So I still need to see if there’s time. Normally, on these kinds of trips I’m highly choreographed by the sponsor. For example, the evening before I’m at a fundraiser for the Paramount Theatre and I’m sort of the featured person at that dinner. So my time is not really my own on these sort of lecture-circuit trips. Once that’s all in place, I can then see if there’s time left over and then revisit some of these overtures.

 Your posts on Twitter about the inaccuracies in the movie Gravity got a lot of attention. You’ve not been shy about pointing out the serious flaws in some other sci-fi movies. So: Which movies have gotten space right, or at least not too badly off?

2001 probably leads the universe in this effort (laughs). The couple of errors that slipped in, it’s not because they were on purpose to try to tell a story, they were just slipped in, it’s an oversight. There’s a small scene, for example, where they’re in zero-G and the guy’s sipping liquid through a pouch, as astronauts do, and then when he turned his head away from the straw, the liquid fell back down the straw. Little things like that.

You’re the guy who sits in the movie theater maybe scribbling all this down, or just remembering it, but at the same time, it doesn’t interfere with your enjoyment of these movies as movies.

Well, to clarify, I don’t do that for all movies. I didn’t keep the list of bad physics for Star Wars. I didn’t keep a list of bad zoology when watching The Lion King. But I could have! I could have said, “Lions don’t talk and if they did, it wouldn’t be English,” and Simba would’ve eaten Pumbaa the first day they met, right? But there’s certain movies you just don’t do that with, because they have no pretense of being correct. And if a movie has no pretense of being accurate, I will not invest time trying to say why it’s not accurate. That’s a waste of everybody’s effort.

You don’t criticize when in Mary Poppins they jumped into the painting on the sidewalk.

Exactly! I’m not criticizing that. So you pick a movie that has some premise of portraying precision and accuracy, and then I find out what they got wrong. By the way, conversely, I’ll take a movie where nothing is accurate, where there’s no pretense of being accurate, and highlight things that they got right. For example, in the movie Monsters, Inc., the factory manufactures doors. And the monsters take the door home, and they go through that door, and there’s an entry to the closet of the kid they’re going to scare. That is a wormhole through the fabric of space-time. It’s brilliant. It’s all about the door. I think I tweeted about that a couple of years ago. Celebrating the fact that this movie has a deep and accurate sense of what would happen if you had access to wormholes. You go through one door and show up in another part in space and time, just by going through that one door.

So, that’s what I do. Most movies, I don’t say anything at all. Just let the movie be a movie. By the way, I’d like to defend my right to criticize movies that attempted to be accurate, because it’s no different from any other specialty community that would log criticisms on the film that they just observed. My sister, for example, is a fan of 19^th century period movies like Jane Austen novels. And if there is a costume that did not arrive on the scene until 10 years after the date of the scene, you hear about it. They’re going to blog about it. And if I give an exaggerated example, if someone walked into a Jane Austen dinner party wearing bell-bottoms and a tie-dyed shirt, you would cry foul. You would say this costume designer was clueless. Why did you choose such a person? And so, I’m just holding the science to the same standards that so many other professions hold movies to. And I seek the right to do that, and I want to be embraced for that.

I would think that at this point, the next time someone makes a major movie about space travel or astronauts, they might want to hire you as a consultant for a couple of days.

(Laughs loudly) Well, fortunately, my expertise is not unique in this regard, so they can get a graduate student or somebody who just knows the physics. But yeah, it kind of put ‘em on notice, hasn’t it? I had Seth MacFarlane call me up and say, “What was the sky on Christmas Eve over Boston in 1988,” or whatever was the year, “and the moment when Ted came to life, when a shooting star crossed the sky?” So I gave him the correct sky. Because he didn’t want me coming later commenting on his sky the way I did with Jim Cameron and the Titanic. I don’t want to call it ironic, but it’s fun to recognize that here’s the movie Ted, a talking, walking, foul-mouthed teddy bear, that has the correct night sky, and Titanic did not.

Seth MacFarlane is, I guess, the major underwriter behind Cosmos?

Well, he’s a major fan of the project and it’s his effort and interest that brought it to Fox in the first place.

By the way, I was completely surprised that the tweets went viral. They were on the Today show the next morning and on Brian Williams that afternoon. It was like the great NBC trifecta. It was also on Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live on the Saturday that followed. And it was in the blogosphere for weeks to come. And people accused me of not liking the movie, when in fact, I never said I didn’t like the movie.

 If you could travel to witness up close any astronomical phenomenon in the universe, where would you choose to go?

 Can I go back in time?

 Sure.

 I would go back and see the formation of the Moon, which would just be awesome! All ideas regarding the formation of the Moon tell us that a Mars-sized protoplanet sideswiped Earth, rendering most of Earth molten in this process, scraping off huge chunks of our crust that coalesced in a ring around Earth and then became the Moon. That would be quite a spectacle.

Fascinating. That would not have been what I would have–

 Yeah, it takes a couple of months to coalesce and shape up, so you could even watch that happen. Sell tickets to it.

 Now that the launching of the James Webb Space Telescope is back on track, thankfully, what kinds of discoveries do you think might be made after it’s put into orbit [planned for 2018]?

 Well, we know in advance what it’s supposed to discover. The real fun stuff is what it discovers that no one thought it would find. All good telescopes, all good scientific instruments, serve you in both ways. So we expect it to see galaxies being born in the early universe; that’s what it’s tuned to do. It’s a piece of the universe that no previous telescope has had access to, and it’ll sort of patch up that hole in our awareness of what’s going on in the great unfolding cosmic void.

A well-known Gallup poll in July of 1999, that I’m sure you know of, stated that 18 percent of Americans thought the Sun revolves around the Earth.  Sixteen percent of Germans believed the same thing, and 19 percent of the British, so this is what people are up against in educating the public.  Do you think the general public’s knowledge of space has increased or decreased in the past 15 years, with the religious right and creationism and so forth? [Note: A more recent and widely reported study by the National Science Foundation, released in February 2014, said much the same thing, with about 25 percent of Americans supposedly believing the sun revolves around the Earth.]

I’m not convinced that the people who said the Earth goes around the sun, that they fully understood the question as posed. I’ll give you an example—I was told this, I didn’t re-verify it, but it’s intriguing nonetheless—that in one of the U.S. Census forms,  it might have been 1990, it asked, in terms of where you’re from, what is your ancestry, is it from Europe, is it from Africa, Asia, Central America, South America. And there was a huge number of people who checked Central America who lived in Kansas, because that’s the center of America, right? (laughs) So the way you word something can influence whether someone understands what your intent is in asking that question, or not. And just because you get an answer that’s one way, doesn’t mean you asked the right question to probe what it is you need to know about your audience.

So if you sit here, we still say “The sun rises, the sun sets.” It’s in our vocabulary. And so, to say “Does the sun go around the earth?,” yeah—it rises, and it sets. But if you said ‘In space, what would you see?’, I don’t think any of them would say that the sun went around the earth. It depends on how you ask the question. And so, I don’t believe those statistics. I saw them; I just don’t believe them. I think there’s a flaw in the connection between the intent of the question and the wiring of the mind of the person who answered it.

That’s a very scientific way to look at it.

 No! If you say, “Draw the solar system,” I don’t think they’re going to draw the sun going around the earth. They’re going to put the sun in the middle. You know they’re going to do this, right? And so, I don’t believe that.

But your greater question is still an important one. The science illiteracy that is rampant is real; I just wouldn’t cite the sun going around the earth as the best example of it. It’s real, and it’s a problem. But I think there’s more access to science than ever before. At the time the original Cosmos came out [1980], you could go months before you would channel-surf, though no one called it that at the time, and land on a science program. And you’re old enough to remember the two science programs that were on the air, and technically they were more sort of descriptive—you know, you’d watch Marlin Perkins in Wild Kingdom and you learned what a lion did. You wouldn’t learn about the DNA of the lion, or the pre-embryotic stages of the—you know, it was a descriptive account of what animals did. And there was Jacques Cousteau: once again, a descriptive account of what marine life did. But today you can find shows on black holes, and the Big Bang, and on the search for life. Morgan Freeman is hosting a show on the Science Network [Through the Wormhole on the Science Channel] and it’s all about the philosophy of knowing about how the world works.

There is no end of science programming. So access to it is greater than ever before, and I think we are experiencing a shift in the public’s appetite and interest in the frontier of science. And I measure that by a few things. First, how else could I possibly have one and a half million Twitter followers? How else could The Big Bang Theory be the number one sitcom on television? How else could CSI be one of the most fertile franchises on television there ever was, in three incarnations in different cities, when it features scientists solving problems using their expertise in biology, in medicine, in chemistry, physics, geology, and forensics? And how is it that the movie Gravity could be a number one film, and people could be blogging about the physics errors a month later, long after Sandra Bullock and George Clooney did the couch circuit with the talk shows?

So you’re saying we’re not a nation that’s just glued to the couch watching Duck Dynasty and the Real Housewives of wherever.

 Well, there’s a lot of that, but we now have access to alternatives. And it’s that access that I celebrate. I think people ought to be able to watch Kim Kardashian if they want; it’s a free country. But if they don’t have an alternative to learn about what happens when you fall into a black hole, then you don’t really have choice.

I know you’re a fan of Star Trek–

 I like its messaging, but I don’t don Spock ears and go to conventions.

 To what extent do you think Star Trek’s particular science-fiction vision is driving today’s scientific goals? We keep hearing about real scientists experimenting with teleportation and warp drive and things like that, and we seem to be pretty much there with hand-held communicators and computers already.

Yeah, well, the hand-held devices, that’s engineering, not science. So science-fiction and art, and the visions of creative people about a future that has not yet arrived has had profound influence on the creativity of engineers, who typically, in a storyline, the item that has been invented for the story is a commercial product, right? The wristwatch with a TV on it, as Dick Tracy used. And so, a clever engineer can find a way to capitalize (on) that and thus create the flip-phone, though that was only in style for two years or less. But nonetheless, you look at the creators of that and they were thinking of the communicator on Star Trek, no doubt about it.

In terms of science, I don’t think we needed science fiction to ask ourselves how do we teleport something. I think we would be thinking about that anyway. But so often, science-fiction science is so remote that it’s not realistic to connect one as the cause for the other. In fact, I don’t know of any advance in science that derives from the vision of a science-fiction person. But plenty of engineering things do. Countless, actually.

You’ve written extensively about how the space program was nourished by the Cold War, and how NASA’s funding was to a large part spurred on by perceived military applications.

 No, no, no, no, no. NASA is a civilian agency and it did not make weaponry. The point was that Russia was going to get the new high ground, and so we wanted to race them there. And we did it with a civilian agency, although all the lead astronauts at the time were military pilots. Just to clarify that bit of history, there.

 Thanks for the clarification. My question is, do you think that the first space-based conflict, an actual “star war,” is inevitable, or is there—

Yes.

 —or is there anything about space travel that inherently promotes cooperation rather than conflict?

 If we can be friends with each other in space, if we can have world peace in space, then why can’t we have world peace on Earth?

 Good question.

And the fact that we have failed miserably to sustain world peace on Earth gives me no confidence that we can sustain world peace in space. If we have the power to be peaceful in space, then presumably we have the power to be peaceful on Earth. And I haven’t seen that exhibited. So I’m cynical about the future of our species in that regard.

You’re optimistic about the interest of people in space exploration and science, demonstrably so. But human nature doesn’t change, as we know.

 Right. I mean, I think it can change. For example, slavery is not a condoned activity by any major national power, whereas there was a day when they all participated in it. There was a day when women were considered second-class citizens in the more advanced nations, and that’s pretty much on the way out. And those are deeply held and deeply felt sentiments. So I think it is possible to change, for people to—I think it is possible that you can have a change that it would be inconceivable to think that it would ever reverse itself. But we’re still killing one another, and I don’t have a solution for that.  [Pause]

Well, yes, there is a solution. It’s the cosmic perspective. It’s the view that there you are, killing someone because they exist across some line that you’ve drawn in the sand, and they pray to a different god, or they have a different political, cultural, sociological, economic ideology, and that justifies killing them.

How important to the future of space exploration is a manned mission to Mars, and are you hopeful to see that in your lifetime?

 I want to see manned missions everywhere; I’m not just singling out Mars. Put people back on the Moon. Send them to asteroids, to LaGrangian points where all the forces of gravity balance, and to go to one place or another, you’d have different motives. We’re still doing good science on Mars, so send scientists there. The near side of the Moon and the far side of the Moon might be an interesting tourist junket, so tourists would go see the Moon. You might have mining interests to go to asteroids, so you send the folks up who do that. There might be—we have tourism, we have mining, we have science, what else might there be? So once you do all of this, then the entire solar system becomes your backyard.

 Right. But governments will still have to take the lead.

 By my reading of history, it tells me that is a necessity. That’s correct. It’s not otherwise happening.

 It’s just a matter of scale and cost.

 Right.

 Well, thank you very much, Dr. Tyson. I so appreciate your fascinating conversation with me, and I really look forward to seeing you in Austin.

Thanks for your interest. And yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve been down there, so I’ll sure I’ll enjoy my trip. What’s the best barbecue joint, by the way?

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