[SPEAKER_04]: Hello and welcome to Turned Out of Punk.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm your host, Dining and Abraham.
[SPEAKER_04]: And today on the show, Dennis Tech, from the Legends Radio Birdman, if you're not familiar with the great guitar sound of Dennis Tech, you have found an unopened Christmas present under the tree, because he is one of the greats of all time.
[SPEAKER_04]: and radio birdman are one of the greatest punk bands ever.
[SPEAKER_04]: And my god, do we dive into the history or on this episode?
[SPEAKER_04]: Before we do though, you should know that Dennis has a brand new record that he has put out called the beat, a really cool project where he has put together a bunch of songs around the drum tracks
[SPEAKER_04]: and as with everything Dennis has done in his career, this thing is fantastic and well worth your time.
[SPEAKER_04]: You can find out more information on DennisTech.com, a fantastic website for history and and just lore and my god dive into this
[SPEAKER_04]: thing and when you've got a lot of time to spare because there's pages and pages of stuff to go through and hear flyers and all sorts of stuff, photos, whatnot.
[SPEAKER_04]: You can also check out some of the great stuff that Dennis has done with Radio Birdman and of course the visitors and all the other projects by going on this website, going on streaming services, going on a record store would probably be best for finding a lot of stuff too.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I'm not going to ramble on anymore.
[SPEAKER_04]: Here's Dennis Tech on Turned Out, uh, punk.
[SPEAKER_04]: We have, I think we're right going to talk about Canada in some ways in a bit, but we are definitely going to be talking a lot more, I think, about two of my favorite places to talk about, which is the state of Michigan and Australia, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: But weirdly, you know, radio
[SPEAKER_04]: thing I'm excited to talk to you about today like you've lived so many different lives and I feel like you are the the trueest definition of a Renaissance man and so we are going to dive into all these different lives today hopefully not a problem well I got to start them off the way they all start off which is Dennis how'd you get in a punk to remove the first time you ever came across it first time I ever came across punk yeah even just the
[SPEAKER_01]: comes from like the 1950s and 60s, William Burrows, and you know, using it to refer to the receptive partner in a prison relationship, and that was the meaning that Wayne Cramer was familiar with when he got out of prison in Lexington.
[SPEAKER_01]: Kentucky, when he went to federal prison for drug trafficking, he was surprised to see the punk music revolution that had happened while he was in there, and he was kind of amused by the use of that term.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I guess the first time I heard it used for music would have been
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe John Holmström's mid-Eggzene, punk magazine that was out in New York in like 1974 or five.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then it was, you know, then we had the British ones.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I guess the first ones I ran into were, from the British side were the damned and the sex pistols.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then of course we had the remons,
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't really think of the Ramones as a punk band.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're more of a pop band.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, it's interesting like that's what I think is so intriguing about the work is obviously it has its original connotations, but then there's it starts showing up even in cream magazine like way prior to like punk magazine like lesser banks used punk to describe different bands I feel like the way it's interpreted is so key to the genre because it's never going to be the same definition between two people I find.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, that's right.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I had a long discussion with Danny Fields about this a few years ago.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he feels very strongly about his definition of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we had it, we had a back and forth about that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, you're right.
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, Danny
[SPEAKER_01]: He's very adamant that punk is not dead, and I was saying, well, I don't only lasted about two or three years.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's going, oh no, no, no, it's he came up with some evidence that it's still alive.
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, hopefully I can give you a little bit more evidence by the end of the day and about how your continual
[SPEAKER_04]: influence on it is something that still shapes it to this day.
[SPEAKER_04]: But going back to the beginning before this stuff, you were a big Rolling Stones fan, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: Like that's your, that was like the first band you truly fell in love with.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wouldn't say it was the first band I fell in love with, but it was, it was the band that I saw alive in 1969 that probably affected me the deepest.
[SPEAKER_01]: It had the most impact on me of any band that I'd seen live up to that point in time.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's interesting they're they're placed in American rock and roll history because obviously they're on an American band.
[SPEAKER_04]: Right.
[SPEAKER_04]: But they sort of are exactly like there's such a explanation of like African American rhythm and blues and American rock and roll early rock and roll influences, but like in a way,
[SPEAKER_04]: that it almost takes a foreigner to distillate into something?
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yes, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I didn't know anything about American, you know, deep American blues heritage until the storms.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then after we found out about it from them and from some other British bands too, then me and my friends backtracked and found out about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then it really brought it into the consciousness of white American youth who didn't have a clue before that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I grew up in Ann Arbor and then we started having an annual blues festival in Ann Arbor.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was where I got to actually see muddy waters
[SPEAKER_04]: And guys, like that, it's intriguing the cultural football that's kind of kicked back and forth between America and England in the way that after the Rolling Stones, it seems like it's in particular the Rolling Stones, maybe you've got a different opinion on this thing, but like that's what really kicks off the American garage band revolutions, like all these bands
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, the stones were cooler.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, they're rougher around the edges and more,
[SPEAKER_01]: more outsiders at first, you know, you're, our parents like the beetles.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we, that, that was a big, a big strike against them at first, but of course we love the beetles too.
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, everybody wanted to either play guitar or grums in 1964 and including me.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, and like you say, they cultural football back and forth.
[SPEAKER_04]: I draw direct line between Joey Ramon singing and Ray Davies Dave Davies is just on the podcast not too long ago and hearing his affection for punk music like you can see that through line right from them like the kinks to me more than the stones I think like are like like the the true punk band like the fact that they never really found that success to kind of plays into that
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's right.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, and they didn't spend a lot of time on Jimmy Reed and Chuck Berry and things like that that the stones did in the first couple of years.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were, they went right into their own thing and it was like you say it was, you could, you could say that was very punk.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, and we, we could play that stuff, guys that could, that
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've been playing guitar for a couple of months, could pick up a guitar and play some of that stuff.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, they're like the teen band.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like I said, Dave was like a teen, too, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: So it's very approaching the same way.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and then Ray, you know, Ray's vocal had that beautiful melodic pop element, too, that I think Joey Ramon captures as well.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, and I think with Ray's lyrics too, there's this sort of like honesty and self reflection, like it's not Mick Jagger singing through the eyes of an African-American person trying to bring that into like his context.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like it's very much like slices of life with Ray, which I think is in keeping with what punk Lyrically is trying to do.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, right.
[SPEAKER_04]: I got a video sent to me by Jay mask is when I told me you were coming on the show of the Rolling Stones playing in Australia that identifies you as the shooter.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, that's awesome.
[SPEAKER_04]: Did you follow them around on toward where you like just at the right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I followed them around on tour, but I only filmed one night.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I was.
[SPEAKER_01]: poor starving student.
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't have any money.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I, but I did manage to get tickets to all the shows or most of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I hitchhiked between cities to get to the shows and slept in outside and parks and stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I ran into a super eight movie camera from the
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was one of those ones that you wind up.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was actually spring driven.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I used that, I filmed the, at the first night, Sidney and Sidney, they played two shows at the very end of the tour.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the last two shows of the tour.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I arrived at the Sidney show, the first Sidney show, about eight hours early.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, and I was dressed in such a way that I looked like I could be a member of the crew.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I just walked in there and hung out until I talked to Ian Stewart and hung out.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I could be right in the very front row, in the middle of the front row, and with my little camera, and I filmed, because the footage is amazing that you guys.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's great.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was right there.
[SPEAKER_01]: And is it synced up?
[SPEAKER_01]: I could have put my elbows on the stage.
[SPEAKER_04]: Is it synced up to the track, too, right, from the show?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it is.
[SPEAKER_01]: It synced up to that, but that's not my sound recording.
[SPEAKER_01]: I found another source of the sound from that exact show.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I got a guy to help me sync it up.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, well, that's awesome.
[SPEAKER_04]: I guess going back to Michigan, you touched on it earlier, like Ann Arbor seems like an amazing place for music during that period.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think it's very well documented.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's an amazing place for music.
[SPEAKER_04]: But like not just the rock music, which is very story, but like there's a lot of stuff coming through there.
[SPEAKER_04]: It seems like blues, jazz music as well.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like it seems like there was a being a college town I guess a progressive hotbed for music.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And well, the thousand pound gorilla is Motown.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that was, I grew up under the influence of Motown that the gravity of that was beyond anything else in the region.
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, Ann Arbor being a university town, it's about an hour's drive west of the center of Detroit.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's very Ann Arbor's very academic and sort of Bohemian and artsy.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of cultural stuff in Ann Arbor and my friend Greg Henry says that the difference between Detroit and Ann Arbor is that in Detroit, child abuse is hitting your
[SPEAKER_01]: So, but fantastic place to grow up because, you know, you got all of this music all the time and then when the 60s came, there was a lot of bands.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's crazy.
[SPEAKER_04]: The bands that have come out of there like up at SRC, like Frost, the rationale.
[SPEAKER_01]: rock and roll band that I ever saw was the rationale because they played at my junior high school.
[SPEAKER_04]: Oh, that's awesome.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Scott Morgan was only three years older than me and he was going to the same schools.
[SPEAKER_01]: But you got they played and and and of course Bob Seger 2 and and and and the stages and the MC5 was really from down river Detroit, but they moved to Ann Arbor.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think in 1968 they moved to Ann Arbor.
[SPEAKER_04]: It comes up on the show all the time that punk to me, it's like almost that's like perfect intersection between headdy art school, idealism and street rock and roll.
[SPEAKER_04]: And when those two things converge, that's when punk is that is perfect point.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I feel like that's kind of what's going on with Detroit and Ann Arbor.
[SPEAKER_04]: industrial city and decline or starting the decline, I guess at that point.
[SPEAKER_04]: And then down the road you've got an arbor, which is sort of this intellectual hotbed, a lot of political activism, obviously happening at that time.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's right for these kind of bands to exist.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think that's right.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like, would you go and see bands like up?
[SPEAKER_04]: I know you're like incredibly young at this point, but would you see these bands playing?
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I saw that up a lot of times.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had, um, in the summer, they had free concerts every Sunday every Sunday afternoon.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had free concerts.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it started at this place in town called West Park.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then there was because of so many noise complaints, they moved it to this place down by the river, which wasn't near anybody's house.
[SPEAKER_01]: But there was a big field down by the river called Gallup Park and they moved it down there.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, every Sunday afternoon we saw there would always be three or four local bands and then usually maybe somebody big from out of town would play.
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, the up always SRC very often,
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, the Stooges and the MC5 and the Rationals.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we saw the Frost play many times.
[SPEAKER_01]: T-Garden and Van Winkle, the fruit.
[SPEAKER_01]: They who did a heavy version of House of the Rising Sun.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the unrelated segments was another one.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a ban called Time.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a whole bunch of them.
[SPEAKER_04]: There's a great bootleg compilation.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think that it's two volumes of it.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's just like super obscure, 45s from Michigan from this time period.
[SPEAKER_04]: And it's just like, it's amazing when it clusters like that.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I know there's a lot of great garage rock coming out during this period, but just rhyming off this list of bands and sort of these comps that come out with all these other bands from that time period.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Why do you think it was
[SPEAKER_04]: that way in Detroit.
[SPEAKER_04]: Why do you think that stuff took in that Michigan part of Michigan?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I don't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think you kind of answered it with the polarization of the heavy industrial thing in Detroit.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you can't get more industrial in Detroit in those days.
[SPEAKER_01]: 450 businesses got burned down.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it was, it made stuff that's happening today, look like nothing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it was heavy.
[SPEAKER_01]: I had a friend who was a surgeon.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a surgical resident at the Detroit receiving hospital.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they couldn't leave the hospital for four days
[SPEAKER_01]: start taking rounds from snipers.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it was heavy, and that plays into it right there, I mean, that's a real revolutionary stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then in Ann Arbor, you had the, of course, the white kids playing revolutionary also, and which is fun up to a point, but then
[SPEAKER_01]: There, even in Ann Arbor, there was some stuff got blown up and there was some confrontation between National Guard and students and so yeah, it was a very volatile time, but you know, it was like that in a lot of other places.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know why we were so special and musically.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, we didn't know it at the time, by the way, we just thought, I thought it's like that everywhere.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I didn't find out it wasn't until I went to Australia.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, it's interesting you brought the politics because that's also such a part of punk music is is playing with big political ideas, sometimes that the bands don't always
[SPEAKER_04]: but it's so ingrained and that's why I feel like that's obviously that's the birth of punk is in this sort of protopunk thing that we're talking about and you all see it in Cleveland too with these Cleveland bands.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the dead boys.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah and like the Frankenstein before that rock from the tombs and the leckeeels, there's like it feels like a post or not post because I guess it's during the midst of but there's sort of this Vietnam trauma that's also playing
[SPEAKER_04]: been drafted, coming back from the war in some cases and avoiding it in other cases or just, it feels like that would have been a specter that would have been looming over everyone.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Were the, did you see a lot of that Johnson Clare white panther stuff?
[SPEAKER_04]: Was that integrated into the music other than the MC5, I guess, famously?
[SPEAKER_01]: I think, you know, it wasn't really integrated into the music per se, but it was presented alongside the music.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, at those free concerts that I was telling you about, you know, and when a, when a one band's tearing down on the next band's setting up to play, there'd be political discourse over the microphones.
[SPEAKER_01]: Did you know a band called the dogs that would have been forming around this time?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I, I wasn't aware of them then.
[SPEAKER_04]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I, I found out about them later.
[SPEAKER_04]: I find it so awesome how everyone's kind of,
[SPEAKER_04]: Dancing around each other around this time period and these bands are forming like the fact that you were in a band with a member of mission aburma blue mind
[SPEAKER_01]: that was in junior high like we were 13 13 years old that when we did that it's so awesome though that you guys record and we played we played kinks songs mostly but no we never recorded we just played in our our parents basements in Michigan you know they don't have garage rock it's basement rock because it's too cold to go out and to garage yeah
[SPEAKER_04]: It's interesting also how geography affects music in that way.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like, be a bands recording in the basement or the garages or then later when people are doing shows.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like, cities that had basements would always have basement shows and sort of this DIY basement scene.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's right.
[SPEAKER_04]: Just to go back for a second to the band with Roger, his brothers wind up playing and just throw out monsters, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: So wild like how it's all connected like that yeah, yeah, well Roger was a classmate of mine in school and we were the same age and went to the same school and and he was that they had a musical family you know, they were they were brought up those kids were brought up with music and and Roger was a very good guitar player even at age 13 and I was just I was just learning in just very basic
[SPEAKER_01]: But Roger was way ahead of the pack on that out.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we were all surprised that he moved to Boston.
[SPEAKER_01]: We'd write out a high school, he moved to Boston.
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, we had a fun little band, you know?
[SPEAKER_01]: We never actually played out anywhere.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was just getting together in basements and jamming and playing kinks songs.
[SPEAKER_01]: We called it the endoosers, because we said we we said we would induce people to vomit.
[SPEAKER_04]: So is that already kind of like, because I know that's a theme you hear with TV Jones and as well with Radio Burman, that it's almost like, in the early years, a confrontation with the audience.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like, you're not making this music for the approval of the crowd.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's right, not at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, disapproval is just as good if not better sometimes, but of course with the induces, it didn't matter because there was no audience, but philosophy is already ingrained.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the philosophy was there.
[SPEAKER_01]: We were ready.
[SPEAKER_01]: In case we did get an audience, we were ready to disregard their opinion of this.
[SPEAKER_01]: Did you grow up in a household with a lot of music?
[SPEAKER_01]: uh and she had a lot of records from her youth and I listened to those and um and my parents would buy by records you know you kind of wouldn't talk about the hard stuff you know they would buy like the Kingston trio and you know things like that or some of the front my dad really liked the French um pop singers
[SPEAKER_01]: Leo Ferrear and Charles Asnivore and things like that, and my mom liked the folk music and ragtime.
[SPEAKER_01]: And she was a good ragtime piano player.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, I grew listening to that stuff and but they never bought a ventures record or a link ray record.
[SPEAKER_04]: Did you learn to play piano before
[SPEAKER_04]: So it was right to guitar.
[SPEAKER_01]: Straight to guitar.
[SPEAKER_01]: And actually I played, I played Cornette in the school band, but I was, guitar was my instrument from the get-go.
[SPEAKER_01]: I took lessons for three months when I was 12 years old.
[SPEAKER_01]: And my teacher was this guy named Dan early wine.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was, he was the guitar player in a local band called the Prime Movers and Iggy was the drummer.
[SPEAKER_04]: that's crazy.
[SPEAKER_04]: I was going to ask you saw the prime movers.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, wild.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Dan was who's my guitar teacher was was in the him and his brother, both were in the prime movers.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, uh, and he worked at a local guitar, uh, music store called Herb Day of a Guitar Studio and would give lessons.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I took lessons from him for three months, but he insisted on me learning how to read classical
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, using your thumb as the bass and play finger picking spanner style classical music.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'd get a classical piece that I'd have to learn by the next week, and if I did the lesson well enough, he would show me a rock and roll lick, which is the whole reason I was there in the first place.
[SPEAKER_01]: and i just got fed up with it and and i didn't do my homework and he said he said you know you're he really ripped into me said you're wasting your parents money and if you want to learn how to play guitar you've got it you know you've got a buckled down and do this stuff and and i said okay i'm not interested in that i'm done and i i quit and from then on i just watched people play and listen to records and try to emulate what what i was hearing on the record
[SPEAKER_04]: This is a new interview.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think with Rob Younger Bruce talking about how some of those birdman early radio birdman songs you had written when you were like 14 or 15 years old.
[SPEAKER_01]: A couple of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: The first one was man with golden helmet.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's crazy.
[SPEAKER_04]: They wrote that.
[SPEAKER_04]: That young.
[SPEAKER_01]: I co-wrote that with this friend of mine Steve Campbell, that I used to hang out with and this is a neighbor.
[SPEAKER_01]: And um,
[SPEAKER_01]: And he was learning how to play guitar, too.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we were into the same stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so his dad was a psychiatrist.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he had high end taper quarters in the house to record his patient encounters with.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we would hijack those tape machines and make our own recordings.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was one of the things that came out of it.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's so interesting that you kind of had your sound like I was in the TV Jones 7 inch and I know one of the songs is the braid of birdman song But yeah, even on that other song You kind of hear the DNA of what would be radio birdman already in that, but it seems like you have that already figured out even from the age of like 15 I guess pretty much yeah, I mean, I had I never really thought about it, but yeah, it would be in there
[SPEAKER_04]: It's interesting also that you're, you know, and when you guys link up in radio a bird man, all the places you guys are pulling from are the foundations of like what is punk, even like the bluestra cult stuff, that in reference to the bluestra cult because they're, of course, like protopunk in their own ways and their connections to imperial dogs and all that kind of stuff.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's amazing how,
[SPEAKER_04]: there's a group of people around the world seemingly that are all drawn to the same sort of amount of sonic manifesto in a way unconsciously like all these people yourself obviously included are all being like we got to look at rock and roll differently at this point seemingly almost independently too.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah independently it's it's not like that
[SPEAKER_01]: epicenter and spread out.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was just it popped up all over the place at the same time.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, that's what I think the the idea of like where to punk start.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like obviously Detroit and Cleveland, I think have strong arguments, but there's this sort of thing that's happening worldwide, it seems around the same time.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like this Dr. Field Good and England that's going and there's we'll talk on the second all this stuff in Australia that's going around the same time.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like there was like sort of this energy it seems that was going around the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and it was like in the air and you could stick your antenna up and beam it down to yourself.
[SPEAKER_04]: But when you first went to Australia, how old were you when you went for a year, right, I think?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, 14.
[SPEAKER_01]: Were you able to take in much music as a young person?
[SPEAKER_01]: At that time in Australia, they were trying to protect local music and they, um, so the radio stations had a, a rule that they had to play a certain percentage of Australian stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: It couldn't be just stuff from the UK and the US.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it had to be like half Australian.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I heard all those bands on the radio.
[SPEAKER_04]: There was a bootleg series that there's two volumes.
[SPEAKER_04]: before Bird Band flew.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think it's the name of the series if I remember correctly, and it's all 60s garage rock from Australia, and there's unbelievable stuff on that.
[SPEAKER_04]: And yeah, obviously that's for you guys.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had some great really great bands in the late 60s.
[SPEAKER_01]: When you get there, obviously the easy beats were great, and then of course the master's of
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, the, uh, purple hearts, um, Phil Jones and the unknown blues, you know, was being, they're fantastic.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, there's like a great garage rock scene.
[SPEAKER_04]: But then I've heard you talk about by the time you get there, again, it's kind of all gone.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was gone.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was nothing.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was just sort of electric blues, you know, like white bogey blues stuff or just donor or music and and nothing really exciting.
[SPEAKER_01]: I, you know, I went to see some bands when I got there when I got back there.
[SPEAKER_01]: I went to see, you know, Billy Thorpe in the Aztecs and and
[SPEAKER_01]: The Ladi does and company came and just after what I was I'd been seeing in Ann Arbor and Detroit.
[SPEAKER_01]: This wasn't cutting it and I guess the only band I saw over there at that time that I really did like was Daddy Cool because they weren't trying too hard and they had some humor in it.
[SPEAKER_01]: and and some they had some good hooks.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a good pop band.
[SPEAKER_01]: Daddy cool was.
[SPEAKER_01]: But um, but other than that, I wasn't impressed and and uh, while you know, I can play anything here and get away with it because there's nothing else going on.
[SPEAKER_04]: What about like, because I know it's, I think that's the thing that
[SPEAKER_04]: a lot of people forget much like Canada's out big Australia is as a country and how separated a lot of these cities are.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Was there any of that sort of like Melbourne glam rock stuff like lobby Lloyd and and Supernaught and that kind of era stuff coming over to Sydney or is a very regional?
[SPEAKER_01]: I guess lobby Lloyd.
[SPEAKER_01]: was known in Sydney, but he was big enough that, you know, he could, you know, go, go intercity, but most of them didn't.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, it's, I think, once again, this is an outside point of view, but it really does feel like punk unified the country in terms of music scene.
[SPEAKER_04]: Why is like it feels like there's a lot more interaction between
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, by about 1980.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, we didn't even know about the existence of the saints.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were doing much the same thing we were doing in their own way.
[SPEAKER_01]: In Brisbane, and we were doing it in Sydney.
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, 600 miles to the south.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, but there was no communication and hear anything about it until they came out with their record.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were single.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm stranded.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, wow, these guys are in Brisbane.
[SPEAKER_01]: Unbelievable.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, we just could not believe that that had been happening and we didn't know about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And because it was like the first other thing that was that we saw might be kind of like us.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then they, of course, they moved to Sydney, and we helped them out as much as we could when they got there.
[SPEAKER_01]: They, we, we kind of, pave the way for them, get Gotham gigs, give them practice room to rehearse in and help them with equipment and stuff like that.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like to go back to your thing about putting your finger up in the air and being able to feel the electricity in the air, it's like amazing like the saints you guys black chrome and Adelaide and then the cheap nasties and Perth all within a few months of each other are kind of starting independently too, but like the same sort of reference points that everyone's kind of pulling from in the, yeah, these bands, these protopunk bands, it's,
[SPEAKER_04]: It's wild because it's not like, in a world that's so driven, musically now by marketing or social media where it's very easy to trace how things start.
[SPEAKER_04]: Here it's like just, I don't know, out of thin air.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, were there an equivalent of Sharpies in Sydney?
[SPEAKER_04]: Sharpies, you know, those Sharpies, those the like Melbourne fans with the mullets and the were the Sharpies in Sydney too.
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely, but not in the inner city where we were playing.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're sort of out in the suburbs.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, you'd never see one of those in Darlinghurst.
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, well, well aware of them, and that was one of the reasons we didn't really want to play out there in the far-western suburbs of Sydney, which is what kind of what you have to do if you want to quote, you know, make it on quote in music in the mid 70s in Australia.
[SPEAKER_01]: You've got to go play all those pubs out in the middle of nowhere.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know,
[SPEAKER_01]: five or six nights a week and play to Sharpies.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we were an interest at, we didn't have time anyway.
[SPEAKER_01]: And to do that and we didn't want to do it, but we had, we liked being an inner city band and quite happy to just to not, of course we never wanted to be commercially successful, we never thought that was even a possibility.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that didn't come into the equation,
[SPEAKER_01]: Pickle would say, now, why didn't you do that?
[SPEAKER_01]: Why didn't you do the, you know, the Miller's pub circuit and wherever you could have, you know, you could have become, you know, big in Australia.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, we're an interested.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Us if we ever played in the Miller's pub, they just pulled the power on us and kick us out anyway.
[SPEAKER_04]: It also seems like that was a really violent subculture too, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: Leave there was like a sharp part of the thing.
[SPEAKER_04]: This, the combs and stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was violent.
[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of fight.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a very alcohol-fueled culture and definitely homophobic racist and violent.
[SPEAKER_01]: I would say.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, like I guess it's most comfortable to like kind of the skinhead thing in England and where that evolved to.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, very, it's the same.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: like now in retrospect like sonically i'm like oh it's it's all the same thing but like there was a real divide between that world and the punk world yes and like there wasn't a lot of mixing between the two worlds it seems like that's right there wasn't you know by the time punk really
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, we left at the end of 77 to move to the UK, and then after the band broke up, I was I stayed and I came back to Australia for another year, but then by by 1981, I was I was back in America and and the that whole explosion of universe of punk bands.
[SPEAKER_01]: came like right about at that same time.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I wasn't really part of that culture that happened in the early 80s there.
[SPEAKER_04]: But like you guys would have been, I guess with the Oxford Hotel Funhouse, would you guys have these local bands that would have been starting up would have probably been playing with you guys and there, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: I imagine.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, so them did.
[SPEAKER_01]: But that was right at the very beginning of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: There weren't very many of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, and most of those bands were people that we knew that were our friends that said, well, you know, Dennis and Rob can do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: We can do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm just sure you can do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, we gave them gigs at the funhouse, like the Hellcats with Ron Pino that he was later in died pretty.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's how he got started and the psycho surgeons and the lipstick killers, there were
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, like very much like what happened to Michigan, like once it starts going in Australia, it starts going, like there's so many good bands.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and the other thing that allowed it to expand into a universe of music was independent record label starting.
[SPEAKER_01]: ours was the first, but then others followed.
[SPEAKER_01]: discovery that you could take Australian music to Europe and do really, really well.
[SPEAKER_01]: So guys, all these bands like the celibate rifles and, you know, the dispersion cast and the wet taxis and I'll start doing European tours.
[SPEAKER_01]: and doing really well and then coming back and then at the same time label independent record labels were sparing up and putting the music out.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, all those elements combined to create the big bang of Australian music in 1981.
[SPEAKER_04]: Did you see X, like Australian X ever, were they going by the time, were you still there?
[SPEAKER_01]: I think I saw them in 70, might have seen them in 79, yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Because they seem to be a band that, you know, has the rose tattoo connection, like a band that was kind of maybe in both worlds a little bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's right.
[SPEAKER_04]: Was was that a sign to you that things had changed when all of some of the people that you wouldn't have wanted to play to are now starting to play this kind of music or was that something you welcome?
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't care who's doing it, but you know, the other band that comes to my mind that when you mention X, well, of course, the epitome of the band that did the that hard slog through the pub circuit was ACDC.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, when they started off in 1974, 75, they were like on the same level as us.
[SPEAKER_01]: serious advantages because of their brother, being in the easy beats, but yeah, they did that and went to the stratosphere.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when Radio Birdman broke up, Chris started to
[SPEAKER_01]: and they did that.
[SPEAKER_01]: They went out there and did that hard slog, but it didn't for some reason it didn't really work for them.
[SPEAKER_01]: It did to an extent, but they never broke sort of broke through to the next level.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's interesting with ACD.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were sort of like in the same position as X.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think with ACDC, when I was there, I guess when I was in Melbourne last time, I went to vicious sloth.
[SPEAKER_04]: I don't know if you ever been that record store in Melbourne, incredible record store.
[SPEAKER_04]: And they showed me a poster for an ACDC tour.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think it was around 77, but it was ACDC 100% punk rock and was like a green, sex pistols kind of green, pink motif.
[SPEAKER_04]: very much feeling like it was kind of marketing to that explosion.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, it's funny too with with ACGC because they go to America and I feel like that American tour really made them like playing CBGVs, playing out in LA and doing those sorts of like shows out there.
[SPEAKER_04]: And you guys wind up in England where it doesn't go that well.
[SPEAKER_04]: I've always thought, maybe, if radio bermen had gone to American instead of England, what would have happened?
[SPEAKER_01]: I know, we were supposed to.
[SPEAKER_01]: We, after the British and European tour in the first half of 78, we were scheduled and booked to tour with the Ramon, North America with the Ramons.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that would have been great.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it would have been perfect for us.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it got canceled because Sire had bankruptcy issues and lost their distribution deal with Philips phonogram and they
[SPEAKER_01]: They, uh, they dropped, I don't know, at least it doesn't maybe more bands from the roster, including us, you know, they dropped us in the flaming group of easing the resilience and the dead boys and all these bands just got cut from sire.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, and, uh, you know, and so that's where never happened.
[SPEAKER_01]: It could have changed the trip trajectory of our band quite a bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, like Seymour Stein, it's at put together quite the murderous row of international punk artists around that time.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and it's nothing against Seymour, I think Seymour's a great guy.
[SPEAKER_01]: I always got along well with him, and he, uh, he's just over enthusiastic.
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, he just gets so excited about music and you know, he's a person who has a true rock and roll heart.
[SPEAKER_01]: He just wants to sign everything that's great and he overextended himself and the overextended the business and they had to file for bankruptcy and sell the waters.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we were collateral damage in that.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I think nothing speaks to that more than the fact that he, the only major label overture ever made to my band was through Seymour Stein, which is definitely a commercial failure in the making right there.
[SPEAKER_04]: So there you go.
[SPEAKER_04]: Rustin piece, but yeah, never lost the enthusiasm for that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, what was your band?
[SPEAKER_04]: We're called fucked up.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, that's right there.
[SPEAKER_01]: It might, uh, wait a minute, it might be a limiting factor right there with the name.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yep, I don't know, a 300 pound bald lead singer that yells.
[SPEAKER_04]: We've got songs that are an hour and a half long.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's nothing.
[SPEAKER_04]: This would have sunk sire, even at his most commercial with Madonna, it would have sunk sire.
[SPEAKER_04]: Right, right, right.
[SPEAKER_04]: Going back to when you guys do go to England, what was the reception like from your point of view from?
[SPEAKER_04]: from the press.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, it was, the press completely misrepresented it.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had the, the, the, the, the, the, the music press had a very anti-Australian bias.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we, we played, the second time we played at the Hope and Anchor.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was packed to the girls.
[SPEAKER_01]: People hanging off the ceiling.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we got callback for three on course.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we had never done three on course in our whole life in the whole life of the band.
[SPEAKER_01]: But we were made to come back for a third on court at because people wouldn't let us go.
[SPEAKER_01]: They loved it so much.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then the next week, the review of that gig comes out and sounds and the guy says,
[SPEAKER_01]: radio aburment does another boring gig that nobody attended at the open anchor and if they had any any sense they would pack their quannus kid bags and go back to kangaroo land.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was about what it said, you know, maybe not the exact words, but it was it was that was pretty much what the guy said, and so we just read that and go, I don't know how we can ever ever make any headway here, but we played the marquee twice, and we loved playing the marquee because the who and the stunts had played there, and the second time we played there, it was packed and there were people wearing our symbol.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, in Australia, it took three years to go from nothing to, you know, playing a 2000 people and having a very loyal and enthusiastic following.
[SPEAKER_01]: In England, early there for like four months, and it was already starting to happen, but you can't expect
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, so I was trying to tell the guys, you know, book, how long it took us in Sydney, can't expect to be famous overnight in London with all these other great bands playing all the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, there's just give us some time.
[SPEAKER_01]: Don't worry about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But actually, the audience response was not as bad as what you read.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I mentioned the audience would have gotten it because it's undeniable live.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I feel like there's, I think some of them, again, some of them didn't get it because we weren't fashionable punks.
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, that's what I was going to say.
[SPEAKER_04]: Mark Mother's Valley, I think talks about it in maybe the time-life history of punk thing about how England was so much more fashion centered than like America is.
[SPEAKER_04]: completely out of line with a new romantic kind of era of for a music press.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and you know, the British punks had a uniform and you had to sort of look like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: You had to, you had to, if you didn't have the look, like our singer had long hair for crying out loud, you can't have long, you're not allowed to have long hair.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we didn't fit, and some of the really hardcore clubs in London did not like us, and we didn't go over well at the vortex.
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, it ended up that night ended in a big fight, like a bra, and there were some injured people, and they closed the place.
[SPEAKER_01]: We closed the vortex.
[SPEAKER_04]: It was the
[SPEAKER_01]: The other bands?
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Look at the other good bridge bands at that point.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like we're, yeah, there were no problem.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think especially the vibrators, we felt a kinship with those guys because they were sort of doing more or less what we were doing.
[SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't straight punk and it wasn't fashionable, but it was high energy rock and roll, which is kind of what we thought we were doing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we got it along good with those guys
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, you know, whenever we ran into another band, we, we always got along with people.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's funny because 78 punks debt to the music press at that point, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: They're all like, you know, to crying in and there's all these new things that are kind of jumping up in its wake and these new, like, as mutations of this thing.
[SPEAKER_04]: And so to be like a straight-up rock and
[SPEAKER_04]: like pretence of edifice of something else, like must have been a tough slog at that point.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's also funny, Australian, too, a lot of the Australian bands go there, where I imagine it's slightly closer than going North America, but I feel like the reception would always be better in North America for Australian bands, in particular at that time.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's probably some logistical issues.
[SPEAKER_01]: You got, you know, to America required a visa.
[SPEAKER_01]: The UK does now too.
[SPEAKER_01]: Australians can't go work in the UK without a visa now, but in those days you could.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, it was part of the, you know, it's part of the commonwealth.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, and just seems more culturally close to Australia.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think people and, and bands would be wanting to go to Europe because Europe loved Australian bands, France, Germany, Spain, absolutely, and they still do.
[SPEAKER_01]: At this point, you guys come back from England, was morale just at like an all-time low, was this sort of like pretty clear that this is, when we finished in England, yeah, morale, the last gig in England was at Oxford University and it was, we knew that was going to be the last gig with that lineup.
[SPEAKER_01]: We knew some guys were leaving, you know, and, and so we, and, and by that time, there was a group of followers from Australia that were following the band around the UK.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we, we planted as a special night for them, where we, we did material from all the.
[SPEAKER_01]: areas of the band.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's from the very first, you know, like things like we used to cover cold turkey and things like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: We threw that stuff in that we had not done in years just for those people as a gift.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then the band finished and me and Rob went to America, went to New York
[SPEAKER_01]: and we spent about three months in Ann Arbor, Rob and I, together, and the rest of the guys went back to Sydney and, you know, no money, I think our manager had to dig into his own pockets to get us all back.
[SPEAKER_01]: out of the UK.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we knew we'd have to get another base player and another drummer.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was those guys have left the band.
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, Warwick said told us, he said, well, I was going to quit anyway even before coming to the UK, but I just wanted to get the free ticket over there to
[SPEAKER_01]: uh... while we were at rock field recording the living eyes album and he said i'm putting in my notice at the end of this tour i'm done so yeah morale was terrible so robin i get back to Sydney and the pip has moved to new castle and so we said well we got to find Chris so we found Chris and
[SPEAKER_01]: So Chris, we got to get the band back together, you know, we got to get hire a new rhythm section, we got to find guys, what do you think, you know, and Chris us, I got my own band down, I'm not interested.
[SPEAKER_01]: So he walks out of the pub.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Robin, I just looked at each other and said, well, this is how we started.
[SPEAKER_01]: Was you and me having the idea of getting a band together?
[SPEAKER_01]: And now it's just you and me again.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's not enough.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, that's not enough critical mess to continue on.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I guess that's it.
[SPEAKER_01]: We'll call it a day.
[SPEAKER_04]: And the visitors is after new race that you guys do the visitors?
[SPEAKER_01]: No, before.
[SPEAKER_04]: Before.
[SPEAKER_04]: So that's it.
[SPEAKER_01]: like that's with Mark Sisto who I think was your manager listed as your manager earlier on no he wasn't he wasn't a manager he was sort of a sort of a sort of did security for the band he was we called him the minister of defense because the MC5 had a minister of defense we thought it was kind of funny but but he would just sort of hang around and be a helper
[SPEAKER_04]: a literal manager.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he was from Detroit.
[SPEAKER_01]: Mark was from Detroit, he's a Detroiter.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we knew he could sing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, he had a great voice.
[SPEAKER_01]: He could sing like Jim Morrison.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we, he could even, he even had the range.
[SPEAKER_01]: He could sing Roy Orbison songs and hit the high notes.
[SPEAKER_01]: So after Burman broke up, you know, Rob's Chris's start of the hitman,
[SPEAKER_01]: He's taken more work with him to do that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I, uh, Rob has a band called the other side.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so me and Pip decided to form a band called the visitors.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we, we recruited Ron and Ron said, well, I'll play drums for you guys.
[SPEAKER_01]: But,
[SPEAKER_01]: only on the, with the understanding that this is not permanent, we'll just do a few things and then, you know, but don't count me as permanent member and we've got Mark on vocals.
[SPEAKER_01]: Steve Harris played bass.
[SPEAKER_01]: Steve Harris was playing bass at the same time, without us at the same time he was playing keyboards in the passengers.
[SPEAKER_01]: And sometimes he would do a passenger's gig and then get in a taxi and go across town
[SPEAKER_01]: That guy was a genius.
[SPEAKER_04]: That record's amazing.
[SPEAKER_04]: I love that record.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think it had just been maybe bootleg to the time that I was really buying CDs or records for the first time.
[SPEAKER_04]: So it's one of the first things I heard by you.
[SPEAKER_04]: Even before I heard Birdman's stuff, I think weirdly, because it was hard to get that stuff pretty that sub-operative issue.
[SPEAKER_01]: We recorded that album in one day.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's awesome.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: So, and Rob's on the last track, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: on visitors.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, on on disperse.
[SPEAKER_04]: There's someone yelling like disperse disperse.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's instrumental.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah, right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I guess Rob is in there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: But you both just at this point, you decided you were going to do a band with Rob or he was working on some Rob was in the other side.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, his own band and we were still pals, you know, still hung out together and
[SPEAKER_04]: Were you focused on school during this period or were you kind of like before I was out of school?
[SPEAKER_01]: I think I finished medical school before we even went to England.
[SPEAKER_01]: So are you working at this point or are you doing rotations and trying to get into medicine or yeah when I came back from the from the UK and then when via America and we came back I
[SPEAKER_01]: in Newcastle.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you couldn't, because we were off, because Pip and I had had all this time off after we finished medical school, there weren't any jobs in Sydney.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, the nearest place we could get a job working was in Newcastle.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, that's why he was there.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I went up there and us two both being up there, that was when we decided to put the
[SPEAKER_04]: Did it give you a different perspective on the music once you start working in the hospital and working in emergency rooms?
[SPEAKER_04]: Like maybe just maybe the board of the band politics then the music itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not really.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I don't think so.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think that changed anything about the music, because the music predated the medicine by so much.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was already fully in the DNA by that, I don't think anything.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think as far as other jobs and careers and things changing the music, the only thing
[SPEAKER_01]: uh... i had i got a lot better idea on how to work in a team you know i i realized that a lot of things about what a team effort should be and i always thought that if i knew those things back in nineteen seventy seven or seventy eight maybe the band wouldn't have split up
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, the reason I ask is because, you know, as we're talking about before, everything you're doing, you know, and stuff you read about TV Jones, like everything's so combustible and everything, there's like this sort of like danger and obviously radio birdman has this very fraught relationship internally amongst certain members, fights on stage, in some cases, and then you're kind of like doing the complete opposite in medicine, seemingly to me from the outside
[SPEAKER_04]: It's all about, it's no longer about the self and creating art from the self.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's about helping the person across from you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_04]: And it feels like it's diametrically opposed to the philosophy in these earlier projects.
[SPEAKER_04]: Going back to that first ban with Roger.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's right.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's completely different.
[SPEAKER_04]: Is it,
[SPEAKER_04]: a weird shift when you were going from playing music back to doing medicine and then going back to playing music, let you find there's an ego wind down.
[SPEAKER_04]: I've done I have to do an ego wind down when I come into my kids after a tour.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was always sad to leave a tour and go back to medicine,
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, after a couple hours, it's completely back in that mindset.
[SPEAKER_01]: It didn't take me very long to it's like almost like driving on the other side of the road, you know, as soon as you start doing it, it seems normal.
[SPEAKER_04]: One thing I'm really intrigued by is in 81, 100 full single comes out.
[SPEAKER_04]: Um, you recorded that in Houston with members of really read.
[SPEAKER_04]: How did you end up doing that in Houston?
[SPEAKER_01]: I had a friend in Houston that, um, well, for one thing, when I recorded that, I was living in Pensacola, Florida, which is where the Navy flight school is.
[SPEAKER_04]: Also, you already, you've already enrolled in the Navy at this point.
[SPEAKER_01]: And again, yeah, I was, I was in, at Pensacola, going to flight school.
[SPEAKER_01]: I had a friend who was an engineer in Houston.
[SPEAKER_01]: His name is Andy Bradley.
[SPEAKER_01]: We call him Mort, his middle name is Mortimer.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we call, he was known as Mort.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he was Radio Birdman's front-of-house sound guy in 77.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he did the front-of-house sound on like that private patting and town hall.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was the sound guy.
[SPEAKER_01]: After that, he went to sound engineer school and got a job at a recording studio and he used it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was ACA Gold Star.
[SPEAKER_01]: And later on, Mort became the Chief Engineer at Sugar Hill, which is the oldest continually operating recording studio in America.
[SPEAKER_01]: But this was at ACA.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was in Pensacola, and it's only a five hour drive to Houston.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I said, Angie, let's get in the car and go see Mort.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, we had a weekend off.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, we drove to Houston, and Mort goes, why don't you come in to the studio and put something together, I'll get some local musicians to play with you.
[SPEAKER_01]: I said, okay, so that's what we did.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's awesome.
[SPEAKER_01]: So were you familiar with really read it all or just these are the guys I met them in that when they showed up at the studio to play the session, I met them at that point.
[SPEAKER_04]: I love going through the idea.
[SPEAKER_04]: They were I love going through your discography and seeing all these like legendary figures in this kind of music that you wind up working with like Jeff doll or the guys from really read way back then like it just feels like.
[SPEAKER_04]: In addition to all these other major careers that you're having, you're still finding a way to kind of lead this incredibly fascinating life in music.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it seems like, yeah, it's like music in me is like water running down hill.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it finds the path, it always does.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even when I was on a ship on a big, like a native,
[SPEAKER_01]: I still had a guitar in there with me and I'm still right in songs.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, the one way or the other, I'm always going to be playing music.
[SPEAKER_01]: So given that you've graduated medical school and are working as a doctor, what made you want to enlist, I wanted to fly airplanes, simple as that, and that was the, if you
[SPEAKER_01]: the military is the way to go because they pay you to do it and you get the best training and you fly the coolest planes.
[SPEAKER_04]: Was your brother already flying at this point?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, he was and that was part of it too.
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought, gosh, if Kurt can do it, I should be able to do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, my band's not together anymore.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't have any obligations to anybody.
[SPEAKER_01]: I can do it
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, Kurt's Kurt's in the air force, and he's flying jets.
[SPEAKER_01]: I, I, I was like one year shy of the limit of how old you can be to go to flight school.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was 28 and 29 was the, was the limit maximum age.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can be.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I said, if I don't do it now, I'm never going to do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I did.
[SPEAKER_04]: most of what I know about that level of being a pilot, I know post-top kind of coming out.
[SPEAKER_04]: So it's all to be taken with a grain of salt.
[SPEAKER_04]: I guess, but like, I remember people being like, oh, Tom Cruise couldn't be a fighter pilot at that level because he's not tall enough.
[SPEAKER_04]: And there were all sorts of requirements.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like, what you're doing is that such an elite level, seemingly once again, this is an outsider.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's just so amazing that you're like in this high level of medicine and emergency room medicine is most seemingly stressful part of medicine and then you're jumping to this thing that's like the most elite level of doing the thing.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like had you flown it all before?
[SPEAKER_01]: No.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, and the Navy actually prefers that you didn't.
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't want you because their theory is that guys that are already pilots come with bad habits that wouldn't need to be broken, and they wouldn't do it the Navy way.
[SPEAKER_01]: So no, I hadn't flown it at all, and although after the Navy, I did fly civilian aviation
[SPEAKER_01]: emergency department you know it's I love that kind of medicine because you never know what's coming through the door next and you're always challenged and it's like you say it's edgy it's pretty edgy work and or it can be often is and and then at the end of your shift you go home and you don't
[SPEAKER_01]: or any of that crap.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you want to go take six weeks off to tour, you can, because you don't have an office practice that you're abandoning.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you want to go to Houston and make a record for a month, you can.
[SPEAKER_01]: You just got to let the hospital
[SPEAKER_01]: in medicine to be able to have another life in parallel with it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, because it shift work.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, but that's not the case with the military at all.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like I've got friends who joined the military later in like, you know, their 30s.
[SPEAKER_04]: And it completely changed everything in their life.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, I'm just talking about the emergency medicine now.
[SPEAKER_01]: The military was completely different, like you say.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that, I mean, you might get on that boat and not get off the boat for six months.
[SPEAKER_01]: Very, very tough on a family, in which is why I eventually quit doing it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was just too hard the separations.
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, it's all encompassing.
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, and that's just that motivation because like what you're saying about the medicine I can completely see that and completely see how that weirdly jives with the music side of your life.
[SPEAKER_04]: You're going to let up until that point.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Feels like going other than wine to fly these planes, which is of course the main draw, but like it feels like it's such a turn in every way you lived up until that point.
[SPEAKER_03]: Total turn.
[SPEAKER_04]: Was that an adjustment?
[SPEAKER_04]: for you as like did you or was that something you lent yourself to naturally these sorts of big turns and shifts?
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a huge adjustment and it was it was challenging to adapt to it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But you know if you want to do something you got to you know you got to pay the
[SPEAKER_01]: got to pay the price if you want to do something and that's that was the price I paid was having to adapt to that completely alien environment in lifestyle.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah because like you're not the first person who's come on this podcast that has been in the military but you're the first person who's been on this podcast that has been successful in their military career like Billy Bragg
[SPEAKER_04]: It was a tank pilot, I think he said for like a week, like a lot of people left after basic because it is so hard, especially coming from a band, which is the most selfish thing you can kind of do as a person to be this other world.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's right.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think Jeff Dowell was more or less successful.
[SPEAKER_04]: Oh, he was in military too.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Oh, crazy.
[SPEAKER_04]: Power trip and the military.
[SPEAKER_04]: career.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, he lives on our island.
[SPEAKER_01]: I see him fairly regularly.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's awesome.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's, there's, and the other guy lives up this way as James Williams.
[SPEAKER_04]: Holy, she's what an island.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and we get together too quite a bit.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's so amazing.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's
[SPEAKER_04]: What was your parents' reaction to being in rock and roll?
[SPEAKER_04]: Like, is your dad's a professor, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: And see, millions of people have also very much education kind of driven.
[SPEAKER_04]: Were they on board with this as long as you kept it the schooling for medicine or?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: I never got any pushback from them about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Plus, I wasn't, I didn't know them.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, when I left home at age 17,
[SPEAKER_01]: I never look back.
[SPEAKER_01]: I never took any money from them.
[SPEAKER_01]: I completely made my own way.
[SPEAKER_01]: They paid for nothing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And not that they didn't want to, but I didn't want to accept any money from them because I didn't want them to have any say in what I did.
[SPEAKER_04]: was it important for you to kind of carve your own way like that like to go out and not stay in Michigan to go to Australia to be somewhere completely different?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_04]: Was was what was their reaction to you being in the military and your brother being in the military?
[SPEAKER_04]: Were they like you?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, of course my brother there was no surprise there.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what he always wanted to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: But me, I think it was a big surprise.
[SPEAKER_01]: They weren't unhappy about it, but I think they're early, shocked.
[SPEAKER_04]: What about peers at that time, too, your friends, that, like, because it is such a change from what you've been doing?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, well, I think some of them were, you know, it wasn't like,
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, Judas, you've betrayed the, you know, the revolution or anything like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was, it was, but there was some people thought that's really weird.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why is he doing that?
[SPEAKER_01]: Grabbed in and understand it at all.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I was going to ask about that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Still, he still doesn't, but he lives, he lives with it.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, I think that's the thing about a band, too.
[SPEAKER_04]: Especially you and Rob and the relationship you guys have.
[SPEAKER_04]: There's nothing as intimate, short of being married.
[SPEAKER_04]: Someone earn a romantic relationship as being in a band with someone where it's closer than family.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's right.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like being married to the person.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's a sexless, loveless marriage.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_04]: This period that you're involved in, in flying these planes seems like this is the period where America became obsessed with fighter pilots.
[SPEAKER_04]: And in Canada, we get like snippets of American culture and snippets of British culture and kind of piece together own culture out of the pieces.
[SPEAKER_04]: But there were so many video games.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like I remember playing my Sega afterburner video game, yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: And these movies, and did you feel that being involved in it?
[SPEAKER_04]: Or is it completely removed when you're inside the thing?
[SPEAKER_01]: It's completely removed when you're inside the thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's almost like being in a motorcycle gang.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's, you know, because everybody has a call sign.
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't, nobody is referred to by their real name.
[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of those guys, I never even knew what their real name was.
[SPEAKER_01]: Just what, you know, they were always Pope or dizzy or dog food or bone, you know, you just go by the call sign.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's what's on your name tag.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, and the, it's,
[SPEAKER_01]: all the, you know, all the socializing that you do is with those guys and their families.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's very insulated.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's very insulated.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this was, of course, this was under Reagan time.
[SPEAKER_01]: Ronald Reagan was the president, and so we had a big defense budget and plenty of money for training.
[SPEAKER_01]: We got to fly a lot.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, your flight hours are directly related to how much is in the budget for that because it's expensive and and there was no wars.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, it couldn't have been a better time to do what I did.
[SPEAKER_04]: at that point.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like there's a moment where these writers show up from the movie Top Gun and they embed themselves with you guys for like two weeks, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: Right.
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, like where your thoughts on like a screen writing crew showing up?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it was they're making a movie about about about jets, you know, and we didn't really know anything.
[SPEAKER_01]: more about it than that and it's just like another thing that you put up with this to have these people around and have to show them around and take them out to the jet and you know this is the hand this is what you pull if you want to get out of the jet in a hurry don't touch it and you know stuff like that and you know they've just walked around with their
[SPEAKER_01]: little tape recorders and cameras and clipboards and made notes about everything and there's going to be a movie called Top Gun and we figured well it's going to be about the top gun school which is which is a great you know fighter weapon school and yeah if you're going to make
[SPEAKER_01]: I was just playing with the movie when it came out.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was just two, two Hollywood and it wasn't realistic enough.
[SPEAKER_01]: The second one was better.
[SPEAKER_04]: Did you know that they were going to take your call sign before you saw it?
[SPEAKER_01]: No.
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't know there was a nice man in that movie.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they might have had that before.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I don't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: It could have been in the script already.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have no idea.
[SPEAKER_01]: Were they hanging out with you guys and your families or was it just, no, no, and just at the, just down at the squadron, the, um, we were at our base, which is in, and another part of why, uh, then where I am right now.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we were, we were between deployments.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, and, and we were flying just training, training flights around the islands.
[SPEAKER_01]: there's actually a there's a training area north of a law where airliners are not supposed to go and we would go out there and do you know mock aerial combat there and and come back and so they were at a hotel somewhere in
[SPEAKER_01]: in Honolulu and they would come to this to the squatter and every day and hang out and talk to guys and take notes, but they never then ever went home with us or anything like that to our families.
[SPEAKER_04]: What do you feel is a more accurate representation, the pit of emergency room doctors or
[SPEAKER_01]: I can't watch that emergency department stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: I cannot watch it because I'm going no don't do that If that was my resident, I'd be you know pulling him a sign saying don't I do that In either situations have you ever had people recognize you from the band?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yes Yeah, I have yeah, and
[SPEAKER_01]: I try to keep that compartmentalized.
[SPEAKER_01]: If I'm working in the emergency department, I don't want to talk to people about music.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm too busy.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I've had, you know, grandma is there with a stroke, and having an acute stroke.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the guy, the son, and I'm taking care of them, the families there at the bedside.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm taking care of this woman, this having
[SPEAKER_01]: and the guy goes home, gets goes to the car and goes home, brings back alms for me to sign.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm, I try to be really gracious about that, and friendly, and I do, I will sign it, but I don't like it when that happens.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's very often, just once in a while.
[SPEAKER_04]: Does it take you out of the job you're supposed to be doing?
[SPEAKER_01]: At that point, like, you cannot, let it take you out of the job you're doing.
[SPEAKER_01]: It could, but I don't allow that to happen.
[SPEAKER_04]: And what about in the military today and we'll never recognize you from the band suffered or awareness?
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I, we had to pick up band in the Philippines.
[SPEAKER_01]: uh... called dust in the rotor heads they're they're helicopter pilots and they had a band and they found out that i played but they didn't know anything about it but they found out that i played and and invited me to sit in with them and so i i did a few gigs in in a long-a-pole with dust in the rotor heads what kind of style was that that they're not covers you know like
[SPEAKER_04]: Louis Louis and, you know, and the cars and Rolling Stones covers and things like that, when you're in these kind of like other fields, how where were you of kind of the increasing legend of radio a bird band?
[SPEAKER_01]: Not at all, only found out about.
[SPEAKER_01]: You only get an idea about that when you go back to.
[SPEAKER_01]: like when the band reformed in 1996 and we started playing, you know, festivals and things like that and then you'd see what the, and then talk to the press and then you'd find out that the legend has really grown and probably the best thing a band can do is to disappear for 15 years.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, because it felt like by the time I was getting this music into the in the early
[SPEAKER_04]: It was already well established that radio Bergman's like on the Mount Rushmore of these bands and like it was it was already these comp series about music before you guys because that's how significant radio Bergman was when radio Bergman happened in Australia.
[SPEAKER_04]: So it must have been
[SPEAKER_04]: Kind of a shock.
[SPEAKER_04]: I guess for you like kind of realizing that this thing that you had done and probably moved on from in a certain way obviously not music was really hard.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was hard to believe and and but it was there, but it was.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it was a shock.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, and bands covering you guys from all over the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: Come believe that.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I find like, and obviously you stepped out of this world a lot more than I have, but like when I stepped out of this music world, I realized how small and ultimately insignificant.
[SPEAKER_04]: It is in a lot of ways.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: But then once you're inside, you realize it's the most important thing ever.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: So at this point, what keeps you making music?
[SPEAKER_03]: I just love doing it.
[SPEAKER_04]: And is that like, because you've also now started a coffee company.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like it just seems like you're always game for new adventures.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, there's so much to do and so much in the world to learn.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, I'm always, there's a lot of stuff I want to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to learn how to speak French.
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to learn how to play piano.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of stuff out there that I want to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't really recognize any limitation on that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I did write a book.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's just gone to the publisher now.
[SPEAKER_04]: a biography.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a memoir.
[SPEAKER_04]: Oh, amazing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's it's not a standard autobiography.
[SPEAKER_01]: It reads like a bunch of short stories.
[SPEAKER_01]: But all the stories are things that happened to me that I did or around me.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's yeah, it's like a bunch of 50 50 chapters.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we've touched on some
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of stories back there and I couldn't even do a volume two and it still wouldn't reach the bottom of it.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I think I could have talked to you for an hour about TV Jones.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a couple of really great TV Jones stories in the book.
[SPEAKER_04]: It it seems like a band that was really hated from what you even internally.
[SPEAKER_04]: There was a lot of hatred towards the band.
[SPEAKER_04]: It seems like you got kicked out by that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some point I got kicked out.
[SPEAKER_01]: I got fired.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I was sacked for being the bad influence.
[SPEAKER_04]: A doctor is the bad influence.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, when the book comes out, please come back on because I could talk to you for another hour plus of it all sorts of other things.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, that'd be fun.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've enjoyed talking to you and I would enjoy doing it again.