Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Such Podcast. My guest today is Dave dieterwer of the President of the United States of America. Dave, it's a thirty at the anniversary of your debut album. What do you have planned?
Not as much as I'd like. We don't play live anymore, and we have some nice offers and such, but I don't know how much we'll get up to, and we've always been I guess you'd have to say laissez faire, or you could call it punk rock or you know, pickywords wisely, but we just let the music speak for itself and hope people respond well. So we don't have any kind of blitz scheduled, just try to try to
do a few things here and there like this. This seemed like a good excuse to talk to you if nothing else.
Okay, there are two other members in the original band. How do all of you get along?
We get along unbelievably well. Actually, So there's my bandmates are Chris Blue, who's the bald guy and the singer, a primary singer, and then Jason Finn, the drummer. Chris and I have known each other since middle school. And Jason and I have known each other since we met at a urinal at a gig at Seattle University in about nineteen eighty four and I asked him to be in another band I had at the time, and somehow, over the course of thirty plus years of playing together,
we've gotten along famously. We don't really hang out with each other a lot outside of playing music, but we have this symbiosis whatever when we get together in a room with instruments, and then we'll get into it, I'm sure, but we have these incredibly lucky to have sort of complimentary musical talents and also complimentary, for lack of a better way to say it, business or professional skills and interests that allowed the thing to work really well and still work well thirty years later.
Yeah, but didn't you stop playing with the band a little over a decade ago?
I stopped our heyday was really ninety three to about ninety eight, and then Chris quit as he was starting his young family, and then at my instigation really around three we started up again. That was when we got the rights back to all the rights back to the masters to our debut record, our hit record, and it
was a good impetus to get going again. And for a few years at that time, I'd gone back into proper white collar work as a public affairs account executive, and I had two young daughters and you know, wife and a big house, and I was trying to do all of it. For about two years, I was working full time, being a dad, being a husband, and then trying to fly out two to four weekends a month to play, you know, one to three gigs a weekend.
And after about two years of the band being back together, maybe in six I just said I never actually quit. Actually I said I needed to take a break for six months. And a mutual friend of ours, Andrew mckaig, lovely guy and great musician, he filled in. And then they kept going for a number of years, touring without me. But yet we all the three of us, kept running the business and managing our managing the records we own, and you know, so the whole thing kept rolling. I just couldn't do it.
Okay, when you reform the group and you're flying out two or three weekends, is that more of the vanity project or you're making any money?
We were making money, and the challenge is, as you know, as a as a musical artist unless you're you know, Trans Siberian Orchestra or somebody in the Wiggles or somebody who figures out how to clone yourself. Well, there's only one of you, and you can only be in one place at a time. So the challenge was, is this what I want to hang my hat on for the rest of my working life? Is you know, maybe playing sixty to eighty shows a year and being gone two hundred days a year with kids, And I didn't want
to do that. So it was it wasn't a vanity thing. We were making money and could have made a great living at it.
So okay, a band that is you know, ten plus years pass its heyday or around that ballpark, you leave, you fly out, you come home. How much can you net?
We sort of put a floor on what we would do. You know, I don't think we would take any gig for sort of less than ten k after expenses. So if we felt like we were each netting before taxes three to four grand a gig, or grossing before taxes three to four grand a gig, that it was worth doing. And then as it evolved, you know, I bailed out at a certain point. But as it evolved, you take, as you know, in this industry, you get, you know, if you want to route a tour all the way
down the West coast. For us at that point, it didn't work very well because some places you get a twenty five hundred dollars guarantee, but then you might also get the gig at the Rodeo in Houston that's thirty five grand. Right, So the things sort of start to average out a little bit and you have to put some floor on it to be able to make it work.
Okay, you've always emailed me about your income. Let's start with the basics. Was the original deal with Columbia that you get the record back or is that a result of some kind of lawsuit or something.
No, we owned the record. So we made the record with our friend Conrad Huno, who had what was locally a legendary studio, Egg Studio in Seattle for years, and he recorded the young fresh Fellows who were sort of an you know, Seattle indie icons. Mud Honey records lots of other artists, and he had a label called pop Lama, and we just did a handshake deal with him in sometime in ninety four, as you know, it all happened
really fast, Bob. We started. Chris and I had had bands for ten years, starting in maybe nineteen eighty two or eighty three. We were both from Seattle. We started playing Me's. We went to high school together. We weren't really friends. Right after high school, I was a year ahead of him. The year after he graduated, we started playing together, making recordings, and we always had this chemistry. It was like it was just on from the first time we ever sat down together. We played Deer Prudence.
He was playing keyboards and I was playing guitar, and it was like, this is obviously like magic. So over of course of ten years, we had all these bands. I was going to school, he was going to college, and then he was moving back and forth from Denver. I was in Denver, excuse me. He was in New York and Boston. We'd both come back to Seattle at times, and we always had bands. So what happens fallow ninety three, he moves back to Seattle for good. We do what
we always did. I had a rehearsal studio at the time with I Think the Posy's, a great band called Flop another band seven year bitch I shared with them, and I'm like, okay, we got songs, I got a rehearsal studio, let's just start playing. And we started playing as a duo, and he has really bad tonight us and at the time he's like, I don't even want to have a drummer. Let's just play as a duo.
We started playing shows under these other names. We were the Lofies, we were Pure Frosting, we were I can't remember what else we called ourselves, and pretty quickly, you know, this is we got a following, even before we added drums. This is in the fall of nineteen ninety three, and
people dug us. You got to remember, Seattle nineteen ninety three is like people move in here from Phoenix, you know, and buying flannel and Doc Martin's and every show is like a wall of Marshall stacks and long hair and super loud and anks, dridden nonsense. And we get up on stage and I'm like dorky, preppy guy in a you know, a button down shirt and a grow grain belt and saddle shoes, and Chris is this spaz bald
spas with spray painted gold boots. And so the two of us plugged into this one, you know, like ninety dollars amplifier with our twenty dollars guitars coming out playing, you know, iggying the Stooge's tv I with no drummer. So I think we stood out right away. And at that point we'd been doing it for a long time, and I think we kind of knew what we were doing, so boom, it just all of a sudden we had attention. And then Jason, who was kind of at the time
known as the popa Pike Street, Seattle's hipster neighborhood. He's kind of like the coolest guy in town. He was in another band, Love Battery, who were on Subpop and at the time had just been signed to A and M. And he'd seen an earlier band Chris and I had called go and had the joke was the super cool rock guy had begged us for three years like next band, you're in, next band, you guys have I'm going to
be the drummer. I'm going to be the drummer. So he's begging us, you know, come on, I got to join the band, and Chris and I had these big heartfelt do we want a drummer Jason joins us, and it's even more magical. It's like the thing Chris and I had and then just I'll never forget. The first rehearsal was like, Okay, this is a thing, and boom it takes off. So early ninety four, all of a sudden, like we're packing places within a few months, and we went in to I don't think you've had him on
your podcast, you should. Barrett Jones, who was Dave Grohl's good buddy from back East and then his drum tech for years. He had a little studio and it's a long story, but somebody who liked the band gave us three hundred and fifty dollars to make a recording. We went in and made a ten song cassette and Jason was at the time bartender at the Comet Tavern, which is kind of the ground zero for hipsters in Seattle than in Now. He started selling it from behind the bar.
Chris takes off meanwhile, to go play bass in Beck's band on the Mellow Gold tour for six months, and Jason's selling these tapes from behind the bar just like he's selling hundreds.
Wait wait, wait, just how does he even know Beck?
He knows Beck. That's a long story. I think they may have met because they were mutually acquainted with the female singer songwriter Mary Lou Lord with him. That's fascinating, Okay, Yeah, So anyway, Yeah, Beck came up to Seattle once, did
a gig. Chris jumped on stage as he will with anybody anytime, for any reason, and played a harmonica solo, and then I think in the next few days after that, Chris went down to Olympia and played some slide guitar on what became One Foot in the Grave, and then Beck had this weird hit out of nowhere as you know, Loser,
which broke. You know, Beck was in Seattle because Seattle's one of the main places where it broke with Marco O'Collins, DJ at K and d D and Yeah, Chris moved down to la for a few weeks and hears and then went on tour with Beck on the Mellow Gold Tour. So at a certain point, Jason and I are calling Chris like, we're getting these gig offers, you got to come back. We're selling these tapes from behind the counter at the Commet and it's just kind of going.
On, Wait, wait, wait, selling the tapes behind the counter. Everybody lies if they say they sell one hundred thousand, they sold a thousand. But since you ended up having success, you can be honest. How many cassettes did you actually sell?
Hundreds? Somewhere between five hundred and a thousand.
That's a lot.
Having anything going on other than Jason b and you know, playing it at the bar and people starting to get a buzz around it. So so meanwhile Chris is on tour and we're calling him and saying, we're getting all these gig offers, when are you coming back? And then eventually, this is a good industry story, John Silva, Beck's manager fires Chris. I mean I think Beck fired him, but because this is when Beck was still super kind a dour and super serious and basically wanted to be thirston more.
It was before he got kind of was doing the robot in a captain's outfit and stuff, which he eventually did, and being fun. But Chris got kicked out of Beck's band for you know, being having too much fun, like smiling and jumping around on stage. It didn't fit the mo that they wanted to portray. So that was in you know, like I don't know. June nineteen ninety four, Chris came back and boom, all of a sudden. I mean, we are packing clubs and immediately like we are selling
out the Crocodile Cafe mos which is now new. Most these are all like four hundred to seven hundred seat rooms where within a month or two they're sold out and they are like eight hundred people outside trying to get in. And this is not hyperbolic, this is it was insane. It was just it just happened. And it was not like the hipsters in Seattle didn't think much of us, except for a few people like Kim Thale
always loved us. Everybody was telling you Jet that same summer of ninety four, Jason was making Love Battery's major label debut for A and M, and everybody's telling him, man, you got to just stick with Love Battery. You guys are going to do it. Meanwhile, this freight train was just gathering steam, and by the end of that summer we played an as gap. So this is August ninety four.
We played an ASCAP showcase the weekend of Bumbershoot in Seattle and it was packed and Tim Summers, who was an A and R guy at the time for Atlantic who signed Hoody and the Blowfish and who weirdly Chris knew because they had played a gig together with Chris's band and Tim's band, Hugo Largo I think at CBGB's years before. Tim accosted us that night and took us out for coffee the next morning and on there sitting there at Cafe Vita, I think on Pike Street. He
really was excited about us. He was the first day and our guy to be excited and I'll never forget. He said, you guys are going to be the police of the ninety and Chris just looked at him and said, maybe the minute work of the nineties. So from there on, all of a sudden, like a week later or two weeks later, we were in Hits magazine constantly. There was just this industry buzz. We didn't even have a manager
at the time. We eventually grabbed a friend who was managing seven year bitch, Stacy Slater, and asked her to manage us. And all of a sudden, We're going to do showcases, you know, in LA and New York, like every four to six weeks. Every label at that time, there were seven or eight majors. Every major but Interscope tried to sign us. It was nuts. I was in
grad school. I was my second year of grad school at the time, and I was, you know, managing all that and then taken off to New York or LA every few weeks to do these you know, play at the Viper Room or whatever. It was bizarre, and it
just kept gathering steam, you know. There was just this momentum and Jason eventually he didn't At that time, We're getting back to how we own our first record that fall of nineteen ninety four, We're like, we didn't even know if we're a band like Jason's in this other band. They've got a you know, major label deal. Can we even make a record together? So we uh made a handshake deal with Uno and went into the little pop Lama studios in his basement of.
His Wait wait, wait, wait, wait a little bit slower. Sure, Yeah, the three hundred and fifty dollars cassette tape.
That you're selling Froggy Style.
Subsequent to that, there's all this major label action, but you decide to cut an independent record instead of making a major label deal.
I think at the time, it was all happening so fast, we thought, let's just go ahead and make a record. And the other thing is we were getting indie. There were some other indie labels that were interested in us that and we started to get really crappy publishing offers, kind of from all corners. And I remember vividly that summer Chris and I sat down and had a long conversation. We're like, let's either just do the simplest thing with people we like, or let's grab for the brass ring.
If it starts gets to the point where we really feel like we have the opportunity to take this to as many people as possible, let's do it. But otherwise, let's just do what we want to do. We don't ever want to you know, we're I was thirty when we signed a record deal. We weren't kids, you know. We we knew how we wanted to live our lives, and that we weren't you know, we were fully committed to what we were doing, but we weren't gonna cowtow to anybody. We liked what we did and believed in it.
Okay, so cut that record? Is that the identical record, the Columbia Releases or is there any remixing, re recording.
So that the first record has I'm blanking right now. It has four or five songs that are actually from the first session with Barrett Jones that we remixed and in some case has added things to and then the rest of the thirteen songs are from the sessions at Egg's Studios. We put that all together as an album on pop Lama. It came out in March of nineteen ninety five. Where we are just at this is when we're playing every show we play, there are two to
five A and R people there. It's just bizarre. You know, it doesn't matter whether we went played in some crappy club and Belling.
Hill, Okay, but everybody's interested. How long is this period of time? And why don't you say yes to anybody?
Because we're this period of time from the time where all of a sudden we're in Hits magazine is like September of nineteen ninety four and we committed to Columbia by the first week in May nineteen ninety five, so it's pretty short. I mean, our recording period was pretty.
Short, okay, And when do you cut the record?
So We cut the record in the fall of nineteen ninety four and it comes out in March nineteen ninety five on poplom and it sold about five thousand copies in Seattle within the first month or two.
Okay, if everybody was interested, why did you make a deal with Colombia as opposed to anybody else?
So, as I said, everybody but Innerscope was interested. It came down to Colombia and Guio Siri and Freddie at Maverick and Madonna, who we met with a couple of times, and we were ultimately choosing between those two. And we really liked our and our guy at Columbia, Josh Sarabon, and also Donnie Einer. He was you know, he's a legendary figure for many reasons. But what we liked about him was he's very, very direct. He he heard, you know,
the record was out in March nineteen ninety five. These guys are really trying to sign us at this point, and he just said, look, you guys, I'll put this record out as is the first week in May nineteen ninety five. He said, I will have this record out by July. If you verbally commit now, it'll take us another four to six weeks to finalize the long form contract, but I give you my word, we will set the record up starting now and we'll give you a full push launch by mid July. And he fucking did it.
I mean that guy has my respect for lifetime. He committed verbally in early May. He said, we'll put the record out exactly as you want. We actually wanted to remix a couple songs and remaster it, and I'll do whatever you want. You want to remix it, do it, just get it done. I'll have the record out. And you know how long in the physical ERAa it took to set up a record. It didn't take a month and a half. It took six months to really push it out. So that's how we ended up in Columbia.
They just they were really direct with us.
Oh okay, so now you're making a deal with Columbia. It's major. You have one step better than garage management. Who is your lawyer making this deal?
We had a killer lawyer, David Kottako, thank you very much. At that time it was Cottaco, Guido and Carol was the name.
So how did you get You're in Seattle, they're in New York. How did you get hooked up?
We got hooked up. I have to say that our manager at the time, who Stacey, who's still in the industry. Ultimately no offense Stacy. Once we had a hit record, she didn't really she hadn't been through that. She didn't really know how to max out our opportunities.
But she was.
She's my age, she'd been working in the industry since she was seventeen. She knew everybody, you know, as we went through the courting process. We did not pay for a cup of coffee for you know, a year of getting flown around and courted and showcasing. So she knew everybody. We met with every lawyer you could mention in the top five or ten lawyers of that era. Katako was
the guy we hit it off with best. We felt like, you know, you want an asshole, but he needs to be your asshole, right, and he felt like our guy. Ken Hurtz was somebody we almost tied, and I have a horrible story about having to tell him we weren't hiring him while playing around to golf.
Well, we'll tell the terrible stories.
So we were down to Ken and David Cataco and I had made plans to I play golf along with pretty much every other sport, and I'd made agreed to go play around nine holes with Ken early in the morning. We were in LA for four or five days, and the night before we were at Canter's actually the band and our manager and we all decided we're hiring David. And we just had this huge pitch from Ken and
his partner. Meanwhile, this is really pre cell phone, right, this is and so so we'd make the decision at like nine thirty or ten at night, and the onus is on me, like, Okay, Dave, you got to tell Ken. I can't reach Ken. Cannot reach him. He's out at an event with his wife, his babysitter doesn't know how to reach him, you know, can't really leave this as a message. So I meet him at the golf club the next day. I think it was Brentwood. I can't remember where he was a member. I meet him. He's
just excited. He's walking out, all smiles, and he's a great He was a great guy. He's all smiles. You know. I'm on the driving range already warming up, and he walks out to the driving range and I got to tell him the first thing, like can I'm sorry, we're going with David Cottaco. That was the longest nine holes of golf I have ever played in my life. There was It was brutal. He was just steaming and and we got through it. And anyway, Hi, Ken, you're a great dude. Sorry it didn't work out.
I can't believe that you ultimately played. Okay, the record was done. You're dealing with plumb, You're dealing with Donnie. Doesn't Donnie want to own the record.
He wanted us badly enough that we were able to cut a deal where he didn't own the record. And I think in retrospect, you know, David was a good enough lawyer, so they we gave them control of the record, and I think he felt like there was a weird confluence of circumstances that allowed to get it back so quickly after it was a hit, which was the deal
was we got the record back. Basically one of the windows of opportunity was five years after the termination of the deal, and because we had such a high peak and then Chris decided to quit an absolutely adamant that he wanted to be dropped from Columbia immediately so we were out of our deal very shortly after having a hit record, and then there was a five year timeout on that and that's how we got it back. So eternal gratitude to David Kottako for that.
What about the second record? Who owns that?
Columbia still owns a second record which did about fifth as well as the first record. It has some good songs on it that did well, and then we had the two other kind of hits or valuable recordings we had are on the third record, which was Pure Frosting, which they put out after we split up, which has a bunch of kind of stuff we were working on, but it has the Cleveland Rocks, which was the theme, you know, the theme song for the Drew Carey Show
for seven or eight seasons. And it has our cover of video Killed the Radio Star, which was on the Wedding Singer record, which sold really really well.
Okay, why did he Chris quit the band?
I think at the time it was a few things. You know, the whole ride was pretty intense, and you know, he I would you know, it's his story to tell. But he always had a fantasy that would sort of be the sex Pistols that we'd break up, you know, before we even started, that we'd be this kind of colossal, colossal success slash failure. I think he also just started.
He was in his first marriage at the time, and his older child was a year or so old, and I think he was feeling the stress of that, and he'd gone from you know, I'd had sort of you know, professional careers in my twenties, but he'd been a guy who basically owned a phone pad and a fifty dollars guitar and was just making music. Had committed to like, I don't care if I have to paint houses and count checks in the basement of a bank as a temp.
I'm going to do this. So he'd gone from that to wow, I own a nice house, I'm married, I got a kid, And I think he just kind of freaked out, and he you know, it was also a little bit of a be careful what you wish for, and he capped to that to me a few years ago over lunch, just like you know, he said, basically, look, I was basically ready to quit right as our first
record became a hit. It just freaked me out. So and there's a lot of pressure there too, as well, so I think that's why I quit at the time.
Okay, it's over. Yeah, you know, he's not the first person to regret, you know. And Tom Petty Ron Blair was the bass player opened a bikini shop in the San Fernando Valley. Ultimately, when how we Epstein died, he came back.
Yeah.
Christine mcviee was living in the UK for ten years and woke up one day, So what the fuck did I do? So, you know, usually people wake up, you know, when no one when the phone isn't ringing.
I don't you know, we're weirdos, Bob. I mean, I think our approach was always like, we're not going to do anything we don't want to do. We always, in terms of how we've run our business and personal lives, we're all about the margin and the bottom line. And we all made a reasonable amount of money, you know,
in the presidents. Chris went on to have a very very successful career doing music back you know, he was sort of the first person, I don't know if you remember Pump Audio, which was one of the first pre licensed music companies. Through a variety of circumstances, he ended up getting in early on that so we had thousands of tracks out being licensed. Then he started a kid's music thing. I mean, he's like a poster child for music. Two dot.
Oh.
He started a kids music thing, Casper Baby Pants, which he's now shelved. But he put out I think eighteen records in ten years and became this absolute fixture in the Puget Sound area, playing you know, eighty or one hundred times a year to kids and honestly made a ton of money doing that and had a great time, and a whole generation of kids from this region loved the Casper Baby Pants record. So he's just a real smart, hardworking guy, you know.
Okay, did he ever have a day job?
He has not had any day job since since the presidents started, nor has Jason and I have only by choice really for a number of reasons.
Okay, So Chris says he wants to quit. What do the two other guys say.
Fuck, we knew, you know, we had agreed in late ninety seven that we were going to take a six month break. Let's have another meeting in two weeks. This was a Jason's house here in Seattle on Capitol Hill at the time. Chris walks in the door of the next meeting. Two minutes later, he's like, we don't even need to have this meeting because I quit. I've decided I want to call cottacol right now. I want to
call Columbia. I want out of the deal now. Since then, years later he admitted that this was not the best way to make this decision. But he's a he's a classic mercual, mercurial that's a hard word to say, artist type, and you know, he's the person when he decides something, he decides it and commits fully. So I knew there was no talking him out of it. Was I was also burned out. I just wanted to take a break
for six months and keep going. The weird thing is that is that within nine months of us breaking up, we started a new band with the three of us and Sir mix a lot called Subset, which frankly should have been freaking huge, and for a variety of reasons, we had tracks out on Napster kind of that that were I think, I'm told down loaded heavily in the hundreds of thousands, and we made basically a full album, but it just didn't ever come together. So weirdly, he quit.
But then months later we were in the studio with the three of us in sir mix a lot making new recordings.
Okay, you're not the only one involved. There's a manager, there's Katakau, there's Donnie and Columbia.
What did they all say they were? I think they felt like they'd had a great run with our first record and our second record did okay. I think they were very happy to take take the spoils from our first record and walk away and enjoy that and not sweat it too much. You know, they talked for a
while they didn't want us to use our name. So if you see actually in our last video we made, which was for video Killed the Radio Star on Jason's kick drum, it says the Quitters and you know, they didn't want to let us use our name for anything.
But I don't think they And they tried to, you know, threaten to exercise leaving them or you know, sort of exclusivity clauses, but they didn't never really put the hammer down, you know, it was there was no I think they were very happy to have unexpectedly made tens of millions of dollars off our first record.
Okay, why was the second record not as successful I think.
I don't think it's I think it's a good record when I listen to it now. The first record is really an anomaly. It's a very weird record, and I'm most proud of having made what I think is a highly authentic piece of art with real integrity that became wildly popular. I mean even sonically our first record, I mentioned, you know, some of the tracks are from the first session with Barrett Jones on a little half inch eight
track machine, which is very low fidelity. Conrad's studio was sixteen track, one inch I think, and then we transferred all of that at one point to two inch on a mobile truck. And even just like the tape hiss and the tape compression, just the sound of the record is unlike anything else from that era. It's a and then you know, we're playing these weird, weirdly strong tuned instruments,
and I mean, it's the first record is crazy. And I think one of the problems with the second record is then we had to go out and be like a loud rock band on tour, and the second records more of like a rock band, and that's not really I think our Forte was being like, and I think of it as like folk music meets the MC five, you know, with a little bit of psilocybin thrown in. It's It was a little weirder than direct rock music. But I just think, you know, lightning strikes not always
more than once. You know that there are moments in time.
Okay, Lou Christie. The record comes out July.
Yeah, okay, third week of July nineteen ninety.
Most people have no idea of the Mailstrom of being the act at the center of success. So tell us about that.
Oh god, it was. It was amazing. So I'm finishing up at that point, I just, uh, while we were in the Bob Lang studio in the Seattle area remixing the record, I'm sitting in one of the ISO chambers finishing my last work on a master's in urban planning for the University of Washington. So we're doing that, and then a few weeks later, they're like, oh, yeah, you're gonna go. You guys are going to do some promo tour thing. I'm like, whatever, I guess I'll write my
thesis after this promo tour is over. So all of a sudden, we start getting this news like the advanced stuff. There are a few stations, influenced, influential stations around the country picked up Lump, which is the first single you know off not even off the advanced single, just stuff the advanced CD before they even started pushing the single in early July, and that included WHFS in the DC area, which was a big taste maker in commercial alternative at
the time. I think ninety nine X in Atlanta. K Rock was probably a little bit behind it. And so there's a little momentum, which is great. All of a sudden,
then we go do this promo tour. So for the month of September nineteen ninety five, our month of August and September, we did a promo tour in the US and Europe, and I've apparently was told it was legendary at Colombia because we were willing to do anything like the day we did in La Among other things, we played in the parking lot at Pink's Hot Hot Dogs on Librea. We played on the third Street promenade in Santa Monica, and we were doing this every day, flying
from one city to another. We play on the back of a flatbed truck, played on the Beach in San Diego. The day we did. I always described the day we did in New York to try to give people an idea of what it was like. I think we flew in from Atlanta, Sony Rep picked us up. We got in the car at like ten at night at JFK. He turns on the radio and what's the huge top forty station in the New York area that it's got like a Jillian listeners. I'm blanking on it right now.
He turns on that station. I'm sorry, I can't remember it right now. They're playing Lump. He's clear. I'm sure he set it up right, you know, down to the minute we go to the hotel. We go over to that. It's killing me that I can't remember the name of the station. We go across the w you know, New.
York Change after it was wplj NO, and there was k Rock, there was Scott Shannon station.
It was the big top forty FM station at the time. So we go across the river to their place at you know, like midnight, and there's still a huge audience at the time. We go on there for fifteen or twenty minutes, maybe with acoustic guitars, go back to the hotel, go to sleep. At one thirty, get up, and this is when we still would agree to do morning drive time. Get up, Go to one rock station, do an interview, play three songs live on the air during drivetime. Get
in the van. Go to whatever the commercial alternative station was at the time. Do an on air segment, play two or three songs live on the air. Get in the van. Go to five fifty Madison Avenue, the famous Philip Johnson AT and T Building, which was Sony headquarters at the time. Play a full set before lunch to all Sony employees and anybody who's walking by in the glass lobby of that building, which is sonically a nightmare
but exciting. Then go upstairs, have marketing meetings. Somebody remembers to give us a sandwich at some point, right, and this is August, it's ninety with you know, like ninety percent humidity. Then we get in the van. We go down to Washington Square Park. And this is all if you're lucky to do this right, this is a privilege. Go down to Washington Square Park. They have a stage set up in generators in full pa. We played a full set in Washington Square park for whoever happened to
be walking by. It's like ninety We're right in the sun. There's no shade, no nothing. Then that we do get to go back to the hotel for like an hour. Then we go to some pizza joint and it's a meet and greet with at the time, all the people run the one stops and the the you know, the tower managers and stuff from the Tri State area all invited. So we stand around and drink beer and eat pizza and make nice with all the people who are gonna determine whether we're on the end caps at tower or not.
And then we the band, pushed the air hockey tables aside, set up a little pa and all our stuff that we were flying with, and play another full set to this you know this crowd. And then we go back to the hotel and I don't know, got up at six the next morning for another lobby call and went and did that again. So we did that every day for two months through the US and Europe, and that was before we even started proper touring, and meanwhile the record was blowing lump was blowing up.
Okay, couple of questions in retrospect was that necessary.
I don't know if it was necessary, but I think it helped. I mean some of these things, a lot of stations were already playing us. You'd have to ask what John Leche was, the guy who I think was really the architect of the marketing campaign at the time, who I'm still in touch with. I don't know how much of a difference it made, but I think our willingness to work made a big difference. We were always on time, ready to go, ready to kick ass, and we would you know an example, some of the stations.
You know, we went to some markets. Like I said, WHFS was playing us already. They had set up a thing where we played in the Inner Harbor in Baltimore. We had no idea we were doing these things, two or three of them a day. We show up to do that and like three thousand kids shows up, show up the songs. I mean, this place, this Amphitheater on the Harbor is packed, and we've got this crappy little traveling drum kit where Jason's kick drum is a suitcase, and Chris and I have these tiny ams and we
play at full set to other places. We went to other stations in August where they hadn't added the song and a couple of those we went into their boardroom and set up our gear on their boardroom table and said, come intherfuckers and have your lunch. We're going to blow your minds. And so I think it had to have helped to at least some degree. Would I would like to think so, because it was really hard work.
Okay, the human body can only take so much. Most of this is regular roadwork. You're playing to thousands, you can't calm down. Then the sun comes up. So there are drugs involved alcohol. How did you guys manage this physically and emotionally?
I can speak best for myself. I didn't manage it very well physically. It didn't really agree with me. I'm a guy who wants to be like I mean, you can see my skis on the ceiling behind us. I want to be out. My bike's right there on the trainer. I want to be out skiing or climbing with my friends. That was my whole thing, was doing sports and being outside. That's my whole life growing up and with my best friends. And I also don't have I certainly don't have an
iron stomach or an iron constitution. So the whole thing really disagreed with me. And I think, you know, at least it feels like it took years off my life, even just doing it for maybe four years for long.
Well, did you cope with drugs and alcohol? No?
I would have coped with alcohol, but my body just can't, you like, my digestive system just can't handle it. Or I would have drunk heavily.
Okay, let's go back. You said you were willing to do anything. Do you think that was because you were older thirty or you were unique individuals? You were college graduates. Why were you willing to do anything and do all this work?
I think we had decided, Well, Jason, I would I try to speak for the other guys. First. Jason had been through this with Love Battery, and the whole time we're going through it with the Presidency's like, you, guys, you don't understand. This is not how it works. You don't just walk in and everybody wants to sign you. We were out, you know, Love Battery was out beating the bushes, you know, put out three records on subpop, toured the country twenty times in a van. He's like,
this is not normal. So I think he was just super psyched to get a shot and do it, you know, with with a lot of juice behind it. I think for Chris and myself, you know, we, as I said, like Chris doing his kids music thing, were people who like, if you're going to do something, do it right. Actually, you know my dad who has passed, that's one of his.
When I asked my parents as they've gotten older, my other my stepdad, mom are still alive, like, what's some advice my dad's his number one was whatever you do do it well. You know, if you're going to do something, give it everything. So we and I also think we felt like we can do it on our own terms. So we didn't feel like anybody was pushing us. We felt like we're making all the choices here. We're not
going to do anything that we do. We agreed among the three of us we're not doing anything we don't all three of us don't want to do.
So okay, tell me about making the videos, which we're all over empty.
The videos were fun, you know. We did the first few videos with Roman Coppola, who was just a lovely, awesome dude, and he came up to Seattle. We made the Lump video in.
What was the connection? How did you get cooked up with them?
With Roman? You know? Weirdly, it turned out that I went to Colorado College just for one year of my freshman year, and it turned out that I one of my classmates was somebody he went to high school with. So we ended up having a weird connection. But we had no connection. We just got set a bunch of reels and we loved he had made a couple of videos at that point. He might have made a Rentals video and maybe a Green Day video. I can't remember.
We just liked his videos the best, and we liked him the most, and we talked to him on the phone, and it was a great choice. He was a soup. We were totally simpatico with him. We were on the same wavelength, so.
Well, you know, you talked to most acts. It happened so fast and retrosect. They said, we didn't really have any control. It was the director's vision. It's not really what we want or wanted. What did you feel?
I love the videos. I think that the Lump. There are two Lump videos, one of which they wanted We Columbia wanted MTV to play both. They wouldn't play the second one because it had Chris jumping up and down on a tiny battery powered amplifier that was set on fire in his backyard while we had a barbecue, and
they thought that was too violent. But the first one, you know, shows us in starts with us in the swamp in the arboretum, which is kind of in the university area in in Seattle, which is like a mile from where I grew up and a mile from where Chris and I went to middle school and high school together. So and then the barge that we're out on in Elliott Bay at the end, that's my stepdad's barge or was he was in the tug and barge business. So they were out there with my stepdad driving us around
doing our things. So the whole thing felt very you know, natural and like us. And then the Peaches video, which you know was we fight the Ninjas and the and that was great. Roman came to us and he's like, Peaches, do you guys have any ideas? And he just had, like, what if we're under a tree and has Kansas Peaches hanging out? He's like, yeah, that's great, but that's dumb. So that's how it starts. And at the time he was super into these you know, b movie martial arts movies.
He's like, what if you guys fight ninjas at the end. We're like, like that found sounds awesome. So we spent the day with the Hollywood ninjas and got launched off ramps and you know, it was it was blast. I don't know, he got our sensibility that we were just taking the piss and having a good time. And the whole thing. I think our take on the whole thing as we went through is that ultimately, you know, pop
culture is a cosmic joke, right. The art can be beautiful and very real and very powerful even if you're quote unquote goofy like we are. It's you know, I mean, listen to the Beatles, Like one in three Beatles songs is Goofy. Chuck Berry's the Goofy is motherfucking lyricist of all time and he's still the best. But it's it's authentic art. But it's still a piss take, you know. That's the fun of it. That's that's what rock and
roll is. It's supposed to be fun, you know, it's supposed to be a laugh.
Oh, okay, you're on MTV. They're banging these videos. Do you start to get recognized?
Got recognized. I'm a pretty normal looking dude, you know, I didn't Chris Jason. Already everybody in Seattle knew who was at that time. For a few years, I would get recognized in Seattle on the Seattle side of the water, you know, kind of in neighborhoods where people are younger and hipper. I had moved as soon as we all got a big publishing check. I bought a house on
the east side of Lake Washington. And even just going across the water to the suburbs, I would like the beer guy at the grocery store would recognize me occasionally, but very rarely and the only time sort of will maybe get there. But our first record was big in the US, but it was absolutely mega in Australia. I don't know how many times platinum it is now Australia.
The first time we went was the one time where it was weird where they're like we had aliases at the hotels, but there would still be forty or fifty kids in the lobby freaking out when you'd come through and that for my money. I don't know that. I didn't like that. I think that would be miserable to be that famous.
I will okay, So now you start working, do you start as a headliner, do you open for other people? How frequently are you working?
We went on tours soon as we finished that promo tour in September of ninety five, the next kind of year. I actually think we overdid it the first year, and that's kind of what killed us because between start of August nineteen ninety five and the end of August nineteen ninety six, we toured the US sort of two and a half times, went to Continental Europe or the UK ten times, went to Japan for ten days, went to Australia for three and a half week, and recorded our
second record all in a year or thirteen months. So we just went out and hammered and Columbia. You know, as at the time, major labels really tried to sequence the timing of releases so that the band or the artists could go from territory to territory and promote things sequentially. I think our record, my understanding, was somewhat blew up organically in many many territories at once, and so they
wanted us to be everywhere at once. So I'm not sure that we ever fully capitalized like the time when we could have been doing our most lucrative touring in the US in early nineteen ninety six. You know, let's go back to Germany for the fourth time and see if we can break that, because the time they were the maybe third biggest market after the US and Japan. So we we tried to be everywhere on tour. So
we started in a van and we always headlined. We got offers, you know, I'll never we had offers to The best offer when we started out was ac DC. That was just the most I just still wonder somebody would have climbed on stage and actually killed one of us by the middle of the second song if we'd been out there opening for ac DC. But for some reason they wanted to open for us. We other offers. Lenny Kravitz wanted us to open for us, but again we just decided, now we want to do it the
way we want to do it. And a lot of the time we had our friends' bands come open for us, sometimes probably to the detriment of the bill, and they get booed, and you know, we had I don't know if you know. He is Jesse Dayton, who's like a career honky tnker from Beaumont. Originally we connected with him. He was friends with the Supersuckers and I love the guy,
love honky talk music. We had him open for us for like two weeks in Texas and Oklahoma, and you know, people didn't get it, but we didn't care.
You know, Okay, you're on the road. Are you partaking of the fruits of the road.
At that point, I'm thirty, I'm married. My stomach can't handle heavy drinking, so now I'm just pretty much trying to survive. I was a true blue guy to my ex wife.
I was not.
I was not partaking. Chris was also married, Jason was not.
Okay, she's your ex wife. How long were you married? Why you divorced?
Been divorced for a few years and married for a long long time twenty plus So what caused the divorce just didn't work out? I don't feel like it's I have a bully pulpit to tell the story. My ex wife does not, So I'll just leave it as the gracious thing to say, is I just think it nothing horrible, nothing, nobody did anything awful.
Okay, who wanted the divorce? And it's never mutual?
Wow, that's a hard question too. If I had to answer that question with my life on the line, I would say that ultimately I wanted the divorce, but oddly my wife was the one who filed.
But okay, so you're thirty, you're already married. When did you meet this woman and when did you get married?
We had been together for a long time. We had been together since we were twenty five and twenty two, and we got married.
So how'd you meet her?
Just friend? A friend actually you know, weirdly name dropper story. She used to go out with one of my best friend's younger brothers and their mom lived on the water on Lake Washington in a house that Duff McKagan is also an old Seattle homie lives in now and bought from their mom years ago. Just hanging out at this friend's house was down the street from my house, and we met her then. We were friends. We're from the
same social circle. We're friends for three or four years before we started going out.
Okay, you're going to graduate school. What is she doing?
She was an artist and had gone undergrad in art and went to MFAT in California for a year, but then was living in Seattle and working and making her paintings.
What did she think about all of this with the presidents?
I think she thought it was fun. I mean, she liked going on the parts of it that you know, Japan's fun. Oklahoma in December is not as fun, but you know, I think she thought it was pretty cool. She was an artist herself.
How often did she come with you?
Usually to the fun places, like I said, you know, to go to Europe, go to Australia, go to Japan. So a fair amount of the time, as much as we can muster she was working for at the start. She was still working full time before she quit, so once she quit, she came more often.
Okay, do you have kids.
I have two wonderful daughters, twenty two and twenty four.
And what are they up to?
They are both recent graduates of Enemy of the State, Columbia University, and one of them is still living in New York working as a paralegal. She's going to law school next year, and the others in New York right now visiting some friends and her undergraduate degree is and architecture. So younger one graduated last spring and older one a year and a half ago, and younger ones just hanging out and joining life for the moment and figuring out what to do.
Okay, you mentioned earlier that Columbia made tens of millions of dollars. Hey, do you think that was that much? And how much did you make? And do you think money slipped through your fingers you got ripped off?
I think there are three parts to that question. One is, you know, something people don't talk about that's always interesting is sort of you know, in the film business they talk about box office, right, what's opening weekend? What is
a move? What box office? That's ticket sales? Right? And then sort of as a side card of that, to help us think about it, it's often noted that while the music business hasn't always been the biggest media business relative to film or publishing, it's been the most lucrative. And this is why. Is you take a record like ours, which costs Colombia nothing to make, right, it was already made.
It didn't cost them that much to sign us. They gave us a few hundred thousand dollars in advance, and they spent you know, our marketing campaign was aggressive, but I don't think it was very expensive for them, right, So let's say they spent under a million dollars including probably you know, sunk costs of staff to sign us and launch the record. The record sells. I think it ultimately worldwide sold probably five million copies. Let's say that
are accounted for. So retail price of those, if you look at the box office, right, that's seventy five million dollars right at let's say average price of fifteen dollars a ticket. Now, I'm not privy to the exact numbers for their their what they got out of the whole all on each one of those, but let's say they made six or seven dollars a record. If you can make you know, thirty five to forty million dollars on
a six hundred thousand dollars investment, that's pretty good. So the record business and the record business is even better now because they don't have to fucking make anything or ship it anywhere, right, they don't have to do any of that. They just you know, press a button and release it on all major streaming services. So, yes, Columbia made a lot of money off of us, and that's, you know, which is great, and we were happy to make that, you know, devil's bargain. We went in with
eyes wide open. We wanted to be everywhere. We wanted to reach as many places as possible. So if you look at us, we're getting whatever, sixteen points or eighteen points on wholesale, on retail, and you know, we the first year where the numbers started coming in. I think over a couple of years, I probably made just over two million dollars before taxes.
Okay, you're thirty years old. You manage that money well, I like to think.
So I'm comfortable, and I think my ex wife is reasonably comfortable, and I think I did. I mean, I had good money manager, bought really nice piece of real estate in one of the most expensive zip codes in the country and which I sold a couple of years ago as part of my divorce settlement, and all those things seem to have gone pretty well. And then I kept working my ass off. I mean I made I'm sure I made.
I probably might ok wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, let's let's let's park that for a second. The presidents are dead. Okay, just for the record, the band is called the President's United States of America because.
So I told you we were playing as a duo in the fall of nineteen ninety three and we're the low Fis. We were pure Frosting. Oh, we're the dynamic duo. I'll never forget. Chris called me one must have been a Sunday morning, because he would have and out Saturday night. He's like, I got the name for the band. I got the name for the band. I was at this party in North Seattle last night and I was just there.
There were people jamming in the basement. So I went down and started jamming with him and there were like nine people listening and they were just everybody was super baked. And I was just making up a different song name. Between every song. I was like, we're the Electric Bunny Rabbits, and you know, I was just trying to get a laugh, and he's like, finally between I don't know what I was, you know, thinking, I just like, between between two jams, I was like, we are the Presidents of the United
States of America. And he's like, all nine stone people laugh. So it's great, let's do it. So we thought it was great, given that we were this tiny, little as I described, these kind of two skinny, dorky guys with little instruments and cheap gear and no real show. The grandiosity of the name in juxtaposition to you know, the the ridiculous tininess and sort of cultured patheticness of what
we were doing was a great kind of contrast. It became a bit of an albatross, but it worked great for what we were trying to represent as we were starting.
Okay, so tell me about it being in albatros.
Well, you know, then you have to go through the whole thing where like the first single comes out in Columbia, it's somewhat at our insistence is like, no DJs need to call the band by their full name the presidents of the United States of America every time they call it out, you know, and you know, it's just a lot of letters and words. There's a lot of characters, and it's you know, the president's is a lot easier.
And although there was a president's already in a funk band I think the seventies.
But did you have to make a deal with the other band, No.
We had no issues with them. I mean, I guess our name was different. We did have one really interesting thing, actually that's apropos of current political climate and the current administration. In the interior sleeve of our first record when it came out on pop Lama is a picture of the three of us with Bill Clinton, which was a real picture. We met him. We played at his rally in Seattle on before Black Tuesday, November nineteen ninety four, when every
dem in the fucking country lost. He came into the rally in Seattle and the posies and we and a local gospel choir played before and he walked through the room and we got the picture. And then when the record came out with Columbia, their legal counsel would not let us use it because you can't use the president's name and likeness for profit. But it turns out maybe that's not the case, based on what we're seeing.
Now, that's for sure. Okay, let's go back to the publishing deal. Yeah, how did you split up the writing credits?
So the writing credits? We figured that out before it became an issue, which is one of the smartest things we did. And frankly, I will take credit for that because I could see what the problem and we were lucky to have friends who had been through it. Right. We're in Seattle in the nineties. We know all these people who are already famous in huge rock stars, and some of them are childhood friends. So I was talking to all those people, and I was reading every book
I could get on the music business. So I was like, we need to figure this out now. So Chris's clearly the main writer, and he's written jillions of songs, but it's also true that we brought the songs to life, and the only life they'll probably ever have was in the in the way we represented them in our Masters. So we just worked it out. You know, we basically split things forty thirty thirty where Chris gets a little, he gets a little more that acknowledges that he's the
primary writer. So it's a long story, short version. We do have some complications now because, for various reasons, we didn't register them that way. Jason already had been signed to Universal Music Publishing Group in a bad deal with Love Battery where they all got to quit their barista jobs for a what scened at the time a huge advance to sign away the rest of their rights forever.
So we had to manage that a little bit, but we choose we split them the way we chose to, and then we have to manage bringing them in and then dividing them in the math.
Okay, so you're saying, if we looked at the registration, it may say something, but in reality it's forty thirty thirty roughly.
Yeah, yeah, right around in there. Yeah, And that took some doing.
Took some doing, relative tools, did you.
Know, personal relationships and Chris Chris wanted to be partly felt like he deserved more compensation, but in a lot of ways just more recognition too, you know, as being the primary songwriter. So it took a lot of it took a few deep conversations. Let's put it.
Well, you said forty thirty thirty, and then all of a sudden you said something like.
That, Well it's like twenty nine and a half. Twenty nine and a half.
Oh, okay, okay, do you own the publishing.
We own all but the share that Jason controls, which he had signed a deal with PolyGram Universal Music Publishing Group, still controls it, and we have tried to negotiate with them a number of times to just buy it back unsuccessfully to date.
Okay, if there's a licensing deal or anything, does PolyGram, whoever the title of the company is today, do they have any input or they just get a check.
They get a check and they've agreed to everything, and we it would be nice to have it all right now. The share the portions that Chris and I control are administered by Cobalt. We've had many different publishing agreements over the last thirty years, but we've been with Cobalt for a while. UMPG's never had an issue with anything. We've wanted the license because if we can get Jason's back, then we're completely one stop shop for the debut record because control the masters.
Okay, have you had any offers to buy these songs?
We have had.
We have never seriously entertained any offers, but we occasionally get offers, and you know, I think we might have gotten to this via email that for us, the time value equation with money just does and the offers never high enough to pay out versus what we make right now owning the rights and just taking the income from streaming services.
Okay, so what multiple would you entertain.
The multiple would need to be It would need to be over twenty.
So if I came, you know, that's hard to get. But in the heyday of hypnosis, who may or may not have been interested, somebody comes in with a twenty three multiple, you're in.
Maybe maybe the problem is it's pretty easy to do the time value. It's easy to look. Okay, let's say we do for a multiple of twenty and we get million dollars. Okay, we pay taxes on that. We got to pay some capital gains tax on it, we got to pay various state and federal taxes. We each net you know, let's say somewhere in two thirds to three quarters of that, our third of that, and Conrad Uno too,
he owns a quarter of the masters. So we take that and then you sort of if you just do the math, so like, okay, let's put that in an income bearing investment, put it in the market. You can take three to five percent a year, right, sort of safely while preserving the capital. And that number has just never reached what we're each making from publishing and masters every year, from the money we're getting from the business.
It's never even really gotten close. And as Jason pointed out the last time we talked about this, he really enjoys having a hedge against the markets, right, we all have investments in financial markets and or real estate. And he's like, well, hey, you know, I'm pretty sure people are still going to stream our record during the next recession, so it's a way to be diversified. So the multiple would have to be pretty high for us all to just go yep, we'll take it.
But also, you're a sophisticated guy. You worked with the Amazon, etc. Can you also see in the thirty years since the record was a hit that there been more opportunities such for monetization that could not have been envisioned. Has that been a factor?
It is a factor, and there are more opportunities for monetization. And one of the arguments for selling the asset or part of it would be that somebody else could make better use of it. Right. Like I said, we're pretty laissez fair punk rock. We just basically sit on this thing. We don't do much to promote it, and somebody who's craftier and I'm not sure it's private equity companies buying musical copyrights, but there are certain buyers who are going
to work the asset. They may be able to Those have been the deals that have been more interesting are like, maybe sell part of it, but we have an interest in the upside if they figure out a way to have it make more money from some of these newer avenues.
Okay, at this late date, overall for the presidents, what percentage of the income is from masters and what percentage from publishing.
It's kind of what you'd expect. It breaks down on that sort of I'd say seventy thirty to eighty twenty. Seventy thirty at most to publishing, probably more like eighty twenty.
Okay. I realize every year is not identical, but if you took an average year and the three of you got paid before taxes, is there enough to live on.
There's enough to live on. Now that I'm a guy who has a partner who works, and I'm not paying my kids tuition at Columbia anymore, and you know, I'm sort of in that contracting phase of my life. I think when I was in the expanse of trying to raise a family in an upper middle class way, if one of us were a solo artist, it would be enough for me as an individual, it wouldn't be enough. It's a wonderful annuity for me that pays a lot.
Okay at this moment in time, do you have any other income, active income as opposed to investments?
Nope?
Okay, so this is it. Okay, let's go back, so five years. You essentially get the record, the master back in the year two thousand, year two thousand and one or whatever.
Two thousand and three, we got it back two.
Thousand and three, Different economic landscape, different distribution, etc. What do you do now that you have the record?
Well, first we have a long conversation of do we want to just do another deal with Sony and let them keep it, which of course they were interested in doing. Do we want to you know, get it back ourselves. Do we want to talk to other labels? We decided because since as I said, we've always taken this fairly DIY contrarian let's do it our way approach, well, let's
do it ourselves. And so we took it back. We created our own little label, and we were lucky that us getting it back and sort of you know, as you would imagine, it took Sony Columbia years to wind down their physical you know, inventory and account for all of it, and there were a lot of heated exchanges where it looked like they were wilfully, wilfully still selling it while they didn't have the rights, which I don't
think was the case. I think it's just, you know, as the saying goes, never assume mal intent when simple incompetence will explain the problem. So it took a few years. But as that happened, the iTunes store launched right, which, as you know, was from like four to twenty twelve, was the only music store in the world that mattered. And at the time we got the rights back, we had reformed and we were touring, and we had a new management team that included a guy you probably know,
Mike Tiraney, who was kind of it. He's he has my old job at Amazon now actually running music programming, but he was he's been at labels, PD easton radio. Everything.
Just just go back in the hey, hey, who was the manager?
A woman named Stacy Slater, who's oh.
No, but it sounds like you got rid of her at some point now time.
We were trying to get rid of her. Right as we broke up the first time we were we were talking to all the people.
Okay, so she rode the ship to the end. Okay, she got a new manager.
Keep going anyway. So Mike was connected with everybody, and at the time he knew somebody at iTunes and we were able to get We did a deal with what was then Iota that gradually got folded in as part of the Orchard, now Kevin Arnold. So we did a deal with him for all the other digital distribution, which accounted to Bubkas in two thousand and four, two thousand and five, and we were lucky we did a deal. We were like the last micro label to do a
deal directly with Apple. Somehow Tyranny knew somebody. We got in. We basically had one record on our label. We later had two or three more that don't matter that we own, and so we had direct distribution to Apple from through the whole heyday of the iTunes store, and we were just and are you know they were taking their thirty percent off the top and we're getting our seventy percent on every sale. It was beautiful and that ramped up quickly.
And what was really interesting was we're still getting statements from Sony right. So by by the two thousand and one, two thousand and two, we're selling like worldwide, like one thousand records a month. Okay, looking at the statements, nothing right, and we're getting you know, bupkus on those we're getting a buck maybe a year. Immediately with the launch of the iTunes store, not only are we you know, we own it, so we're getting seventy percent instead of fifteen percent.
We're our volume. All of a sudden, you're selling like, okay, we're selling a thousand records, which is track equivalent maybe fifteen thousand tracks a month. Right, all of a sudden, we're selling you know, like, you know, tens of thousands of tracks a month. You know what that was? The bizarre thing was like, I get it, the margin was way better, but the vaulme was way higher too, which was just mine.
So what do you what do you think it counts for that?
I think people were it was. You got to give credit to Steve Jobs for seeing the appetite there and somehow talking the labels in. I don't I was not privy. I was not really in the trenches in the digital music industry at that time. But I don't know how all that went down, But he solved the problem for them,
and they sort of solved the problem for him. But that you know, I think everybody who's had a career in at a major label or publisher in the last twenty years should like go to Steve Jobs' grave like twice a year and put flowers on it. And he saved the music industry as far as I'm concerned. He just figured out something that was simple, easy to do between the hardware and the software. Was any numbskull could
figure it out. You've got your iPod, you download the songs, you put it on there, you take them everywhere.
You know, it just works as the saying goes okay was the adoption. The sales were those up because in the physical era, maybe the store didn't have your record. Yeah, digitally that's what you think was good.
I think that. And then there was obviously I've never been able to really understand how much piracy there was in the nineties and into the two thousands, but I know I can say based anecdotally that you know, at our peak, we would hear, hey, I was just in like the Philippines or you know, Columbia, and wow, your record was everywhere, Like yeah, I don't think we got anything for that, So God knows how much piracy there was in the you know, the the industry only has
itself to blame. They released music on high quality, unencrypted digital format for years, right, like pretty easy to copy that, Okay.
Tell me about the transition from sales to streams.
Sales to streams just was gradual, and it was kind of I saw it from all sides because I was at Amazon Music during that really where that transition took off kind of. I was at Amazon Music from twenty twelve to about twenty seventeen, which is and we conceived and launched the Prime Music and Music Unlimited. Then, you know, I think Daniel Leck got it done somehow. I don't
you know that's there. There's a whole story there that I'm sure you can have people on the show who can tell better than I can, and I'm not sure I can.
Tell you a lot. But that's not really my question. My question is, as it goes to streaming, your income go down up or stay the same.
It's gone up just because because I think more just the digital music market grew, right. It's every market has kind of an S curve growth, right, It's slow and then it ramps up and it's in the steep part and then it's now it's leveling off right where at the top half half of the S curve now, So I think we are seeing more income. But I can't tell you if the iTunes store was still dominant and
just the digital music market had grown. But I don't think the digital music market would have grown if we'd stuck with ninety nine cent MP three's. I just think there were that was a.
Moment in time, just like we have a moment in time for eight tracks, cassettes, et cetera. Right, But leaving that in the rear view mirror conventional wisdom, forget about knowledgeable people or people who work for these companies. You hear it every minute of the day. Spotify is ripping me off, They're not paying me, blah blah blah. What is your experience with the presidents?
Yes, Spotify is not ripping anybody off. And Spotify can't come out and say you have a shitty deal with your label. They can't defend themselves because they'll piss off their most important partners. I mean, the whole thing is, don't I don't even know why or how. And in Spotify, even on their own, they don't disclose everything. But if you dig into their website, they pretty much tell you exactly how they do business if you want to know
if you're an artist or a label. So it is hard math obviously, if you have one hundred let's say that you only had one hundred Spotify paying subscribers, and they're each paying ten dollars a month. If you're trying, you can't pay a penny rate, right because one month those hundred people might stream five songs each, but the
next month they might stream one hundred songs each. So there is some very tricky math to how it all works out, and at least so far, it hasn't gone the way of the black boxes, you know, some of the pros where you're not sure. I think the math is pretty clear and fair, and I just don't see I don't get it. I mean, I get that somebody's resentful because things aren't the way they want it to be. But too bad. It's not Spotify or Amazon Music or
Apple Music that's screwing you. It's most likely, in most cases, you have a bad deal with your label or your distributor, or no one is listening. Well, there's that's a whole other thing. And as I've said sort of started. You know, from the start of the digital anybody can make a good sounding record in their bedroom now, right. You used to have to have a lot of money to have a board and a tape machine and outboard gear that it took to make a good sounding recording. I'm using Carmela,
my engineer friend's laptop right now. You can make a killer sounding record on this Mac laptop with just the like a one in out right and this microphone that I'm talking on right now. You can make a major label quality record. But just you know whatever. You know, look, Marvin Gay would have been a superstar in like fifteen sixty eight, seventeen sixty eight, nineteen sixty eight, twenty one sixty eight quality. You know. Not everybody's that good, you know,
I mean, that's that's the reality is. And I'm a big believer in the market, the wisdom of the market that the cream does actually rise to the top. You know, people know what they like. It's yeah, you still have to.
Be good, Okay. So you know, there are many avenues of remuneration. There are certainly streams, there's subscriber streams. I don't want to get for paid not paid streams on Spotify it's irrelevant. But there's streams on Pandora that are radio streams. But there's other places where people license music. A what percentage of your revenue is purely from the traditional streamers Amazon, Apple, you know? And how much is these other areas and what are they?
That's a great that's a good question because we've beat our heads against this wall for twenty years since we got the rights back. We don't get a ton of film, TV AD licenses. We've had a couple of good ones in the last two years. Last summer we had Bush Beer licensed Peaches for a peach flavored beer, which I don't want to drink. I don't think I don't think it was in my market. You'll take the check, yeah, But we don't get a lot of licenses of that nature,
and we've never been able to figure out why. We've gone through all the options, and anybody who's in the industry will know what I'm talking about. You there are people who want an exclusive, and I say, they'll go out and pitch your stuff to everybody and they'll get you placements. That's never worked for us. Chris, my bandmate's done more of this. He's found that it's always opportunistic, so you just got to be out there. So we
just very occasionally get stuff. But I have to say depend unless it's a weird year, one in three or five, like ninety five plus percent of our stuff is just streaming. It's straight up.
You know.
We've had a few anomaloust things here and there. The for a while it looked like as you know, like Guitar Hero and rock Band were like, whoa, these are big checks for like three years and then that went away. So I keep waiting for the you know, the nineties, the nineties John Hughes style nostalgia film She's Lump, where they're going to give us a two million dollar check. Use that is the title track. But you know, we haven't figured out how to tap into that vein as
much as i'd like to. Chris has with his own music, but we haven't.
Okay, who actually does the business for the presidents?
We do it. I mean I get the emails. I mean sometimes they still come to Sony if it's a master license for our debut record, because because people will think that you'll have the CD and it says on it, but there Sony's great about you know, we have our contacts there, they'll email me. So I do most of it. Jason does some. Chris is very happy to let us do it. Jason, Chris and I both did go to college. Jason didn't. Although Jason is one of the smartest people
I've ever met in my life. He absolutely brilliant guy. So we have plenty of you know, capability and horsepower. We do it. We have a business manager, we use Summit Business Management down in the Greater LA area, who we were introduced to through our friend weird Al who's a brilliant, brilliant business person. And we always have a lawyer.
Our lawyer mostly has been Ed Pearson, who was at Warner Chapel for years and up in Seattle for the last ten or fifteen years representing Maclamore and Head and the Heart and a bunch of artists. So we generally, well, we'll have a lawyer and we have a good business manager, and that's enough really for us. We don't need a manager.
Okay, let's go back to the beginning. So you grow up exactly where.
I grew up in the Seattle area, in the northeast part of the town called Laurelhurst, which is like a you know, when I grew up there, it was stay at home moms, university professors, professionals. You know, it's a nice neighborhood near the University of Washington.
And what did your parents do for a living?
My dad was a PR guy. Actually he went his family business is a great story. But my grandpa and my uncle ran a fur brokerage business, but my dad chose not to go into that business, and he started a PR firm right after the World's Fair in Seattle. That's this guy Jay Rocky, who was a legend here who got the World's Fair on the cover of Life magazine twice. And they started a PR firm in the early sixties and they ran that for years till my dad retired when he was sixty five. So he was a words guy.
Okay, how long has your family been in America?
Four to five generations?
Do you know why they came?
Yeah, it's some of them on my dad's side of the family. My paternal grandfather was German and they were part of US diaspora of crafts people who went from Germany sort of the you know alsace lran like the the western part of Germany in the mid nineteenth century to Tsarist Russia to a particular river valley to be craftspeople for the czar and there there I've read a book about it. They sort of then dispersed to northern US and Canada, and a lot of them in Texas
as well. You know, if you drive around Texas there Flugerville, there are German place names everywhere. So they moved to Saskatchewan or Alberta, my great great grand my great grandfather on my dad's side, and then eventually to Montana. And then my paternal grandfather, who was quite a guy, moved to Seattle sort of before the start of the depression and worked his way up from nothing to being the owner and president of this big for brokerage house. And
then yeah, mom's side mostly Irish, Irish Catholic. You know, I don't know how they ended up over here.
You know.
Another side of the family was French, and weirdly this is on my dad's side. My grandparents were originally from like five miles away from each other in France and Germany in that Alsace Lran region, which is just bizarre. So they came through Yeah, any homesteading in Minnesota.
Okay, you say your parents were divorced. How old were you when they got divorced.
I was eight when they split up.
Okay, how many kids in the family?
Myself and my sister Claire, who's a writer, and she's older, younger, she's two and a half years younger than I am, and she's way more famous than I am.
Now it's okay, But what's it like when your parents divorced when you're ead?
I think it sucked. I don't think at the time I was able to really process that. I think I'm incredibly lucky that my dad, my mom, and my stepdad whom my mom, they're still together and they got them getting together as part of my parents splitting up. Are all like I thought this was normal, But they are all like kind reasonable, rational people who don't lose their tempers, you know. I mean, I just I didn't know how much I hit the jackpot with my family until I
got older and saw friends, families and more dysfunction. So somehow it was okay. I think, you know, there was maybe if anything was missing, it was maybe a chance to actually get pissed off when I was that young and sort of expressed.
Me Okay, but you're your parents are divorce in a totally different era now, it's all you know in terms of back dead. A lot of times the kid lived with one parent, usually the mother. You know, there's not the co parenting there was. What was it like for you?
We lived mostly with my mom and stayed in the same house that we'd been in, and my dad after a year or two moved into super cool house boat that my sister and I own now kind of like Sleepless in Seattle, down on Lake Union in Seattle. And he had some other partners in his life, but never long. You know, he never remarried. And we would spend you know, one to three days a week with him in the winter,
like every weekend we went skiing with him. Summertime, we go hiking, go to the mountains with him for weeks at a time, and so we saw both of them often. We didn't split fifty to fifty. We really did live at my mom.
Okay, you have a bad day in school, would you call your father?
I'd call my mom. My mom was my emotional support. My dad was a very loving, supportive guy, but my mom was definitely my primary parent.
And what was the story with your stepfather.
My stepfather, interestingly, is younger. My mom is eight years younger than my dad was, and my stepdad is eight years younger than my mom, so he he only sixteen years older than I am. And he was a pretty young guy when he and my mom got together. He would have been in maybe twenty four, my mom would have been thirty two. And he just turned out to be an awesome guy. Just I mean, the whole thing on paper is just a fucking disaster if you think
about it. It should have been horrible, but somehow everybody was thoughtful and tolerant, and it was in some ways I benefited because I saw even more. We ended up doing things through what my stepdad wanted to do that I never would have gotten to do, which.
Was and would your stepdad do for a living?
He when he and my mom got together, he ran He was the production manager for Conley Water Skis. He was just a kind of crafty. He had gotten an economics degree for the University of Washington, and then he was a guy. He's one of those people who just can't sit still and is always doing a project. So he was the guy who figured out how to you know, make a water ski press out of nothing, out of a hydraulic machine, and or figure out how to make
a new mill to cut wood. And then he bought a piece of property on Stuart Island, which is one of the San Juan islands that doesn't have ferry service. And he had grown up his dad was a builder or a you know, a carpenter, and so he had grown up building houses. So we built a house in the summers on Stuart Island over a couple of summers. And to do that, we had to build a little barge that we towed behind our motor sailor to get
the wood to the island. And so we did that, and then all these people saw the house that he built and were like, this is really cool. Can you build me one of these? And somehow Larry, my stepdad, at some point was in Harbor Town on Puget Sound and he saw like a forty five foot tug old old wood tug log towing tugboat for sailings, just like, I'm going to quit my job and buy that and
start a business. Than he did, and it was it was incredible for me because he eventually turned into be a pretty big you know like sand and gravel moving operation with barges and tugs. But the first four or five years, every summer we would build a house on Stuart Island and we did the tug and barge work to get the materials over there. And I would get up every morning and put on my boots, my shorts and my tool belt and go like getting a skiff and take the skiff to the job site and dig
holes or pound nails all day. It was I look again, looking back on that, I'm like, seem normal at the time, But holy shit, was I lucky to get to do that.
So how many tug boats and how many barges did he end up with?
He eventually ended up with at the peak of a couple of boats and a few barges. And his specialty was sand and gravel. And because you know, where you have a big waterway like Puget Sound, it's way less expensive to move that via a barge than via trucks, right if you can put thousands of yards on a barge. And then he built this crazy conveyor that could shoot material way way way up on the beach, and it
was unique. So he would and he eventually got to the point where he could just park his barges and lease it and other people would deliver the material. He had this kind of slick set up for getting the material way up onto the beach or up onto a job site. And he did that for years, and he sold business about ten years ago.
How far is Stuart Island from downtown Seattle.
Stuart Island is the most northwesternmost point in the contiguous forty eight states. So you'd drive, you know, seventy miles to anacordis and then you'd have to take a ferry to San Juan Island, the biggest ferry service island, which takes two or three hours, and then take a skiff twenty minutes to Stuart Island.
So what kind of kid are you growing up? You have friends? You don't have friends? Good at school? Not good at school?
I had I was I was never the boss. I was always part of a crew. I guess, you know. I played sports, so my friends were sporty, sporty kids and probably smart kids. I think I was good in school, you know, I was usually like in grade school. I was always you know, like going up a grade or two to read and our grades. I went to public school. Through fifth grade, and we had a gifted program. I
think I was in the gifted program. And then I went to I had a really really bad fifth grade teacher, and my parents decided that and I was getting in a little trouble at the time. I had shoplifted a few times, and my parents moved me and actually two of my best friends. We all moved to a private school in Seattle in sixth grade and I went there through high school.
Was that boys only, No, it was co ed.
It was a school called the Bush School, which had been girls only and had gone co ed in the early seventies. And I got really lucky there. I look back, I got, you know, a lot of life is luck. I ended up at this school that was super progressive and had all these aquarian age teachers who were high minded and wanted to do stuff with the kids and take us out in the woods and you know, share their passions with us, and that would just happen again
a moment in time. That school, for that seven or eight years, I got really lucky.
Okay, so what year are you born in. I was born in sixty four, so you're born in sixty four. World's Fair is in sixty two. You know, we have the blow up of the Seattle scene in the early nineties. We have the Seattle pilots before that, who leave. Let was talking about this earlier, you know, in the seventies. You know, you drive in the West, you're out of cell service. I mean there was no cell service. You
were totally disconnected. Now you're connected everywhere. So it sounds like a dumb question, and maybe it's all you know, But what was it like growing up in Seattle in that time? Let me give you a different experience and maybe it might help you Know, I'm growing up fifty miles from New York City. There's New York City media, all the TV shows, and music is coming from Hollywood. You could you know, what's it like living in the Pacific Northwest.
That's a great question, and I I would answer that. So it was a beautiful place. You know, as my partner Jenna and I talked about it all the times. You grew up here as well, like you drive around now and there's trash everywhere. There was you know, it was clean and people were kind and respectful to each other.
It was not very crowded. Yet nobody knew about it and I mean, one of my ways to answer that question is I went to Brown University for junior and senior year of college, so I transferred there and I'd taken a year off, So I guess they went there in the fall of nineteen eighty five, and you know, as you said, we weren't connected. I mean, I remember people like the first day that late fall it snowed, and someone's like, oh, yeah, you're well, you're used to this.
It's like, you know, they thought Seattle was fucking Alaska, right, no idea, like, no, it maybe snow's an inch once year. And then that the real moment was so listen to a fair amount of jazz growing up. My mom liked it, and then I, as I started to play guitar, I really liked jazz and listened to it a lot. And so I'd listened to like, you know, Miles Davis or Joe Pass or this New York City music in Seattle, and I dug it. And I'll never forget the Thanksgiving,
the first joy I was there. I had bought this crappy Vovo wagon and a friend invited me to go to Thanksgiving at his house in Brooklyn with his family and So I drove four of us down, you know, down nine ninety five down through Connecticut into the city. And as you know, that drive, like if you can imagine what it's like if you grew up in Seattle, it's like N ninety five is like twelve lanes wide as you come in north of the city. We come in and we drive basically all the way down you know,
Broadway right. We went the full length of Manhattan, and I will never forget pulling into Times Square and it was late, it was probably ten thirty or eleven at night. I'll never forget pulling up and right in the heart of Times Square to a stop light, and I had my window down, and I was like, oh, that's what I've been listening to, Like that ride symbol. That's when you listen to, you know, any jazz from the six
fifties or early sixties, that's the sound. That's why they were making that sound, because that's the sound of this city. You know. Another thing I thought, you know, as we were coming down nine ninety five, growing up in Seattle, it's like you'd see McDonald's commercials or like a Buick commercial in National Geographic, or a Schlitz commercial and you'd look at the people in the ad and go, who the fuck are these people? These are not the people
that I'm around ever in the Pacific Northwest. I don't know what this is. And I, you know, forty five minutes before the jazz moment in Times Square, I remember being in that traffic twelve lanes, eight lanes wide and just going, Oh, these are the people who buy the Schlitz and the Buick, and this is what this is all about. This is you know, this is this is the market that I've been seeing. So it was lovely.
It was provincial. You know, That's that's really the big downfall with digital media and the Internet is the loss of provinciality.
Okay, so you have the revolution and music in nineties, early nineties to mid nineties. Then Microsoft blows up Amazon just before the turn of the century. How has that changed Seattle? What is Seattle like now?
It's so radically different. And you know, my dad died three and a half years ago, and I used to talk to him about it about how wow this is. You know, we're sort of stuck in the middle. We're not dense enough yet to have all the benefits of being a you know Brooklyn or a European city, but we've lost that thing where I can just drive my car an hour in any direction and lay out my sleeping bag on the side of the road. So we're sort of stuck. And my dad, he was interesting. His dad,
my grandpa was a big civic booster. He was involved in putting the World's Fair together, and big civic leader. And his response was like your grandpa would just he'd look around and be pleased as punch. This is what he and all those guys were working toward tirelessly, you know, for fifty years, was to put Seattle on the map.
So it's cool that we're on the map, Seattle Metropolitan Seattle is sort of unrecognizable because of the influx of wealth and wealthy singletons and double income no kid people who have no allegiance to the city other than that maybe Amazon's you know, they're doing. They're working at one or more of the fang companies. They're going to do two years at Amazon, then they're going to go to Netflix,
then they're going to go to Google. So we don't have that sense of identity like we did, but you know, there is a vibrancy there's live music every night of the week. There's all sorts of stuff going on. There's, you know, a good tax base, there's the benefit of having your property value go up, all that stuff, So you know, you can't really fight. I'm a little bit of a There was a famous columnist in Seattle for the Seattle Post Intelligencer, EMMITTT. Watson, and he was an
advocate for quote unquote lesser Seattle. He considered himself the mayor of lesser Seattle. He was he was always grouching about, you know, losing the old flavor. But you know, I'm sure they said the same thing during the gold Rush boom, you know, when people were headed to the Klong Dyke.
You can't Okay, I'm gonna ask a dumb question, but a lot of people have not been to the Pacific Northwest. What would you say the difference is between Seattle, Portland and Vancouver.
Seattle. But we were just talking about this. Carmela, who's here engineering the session, lived in Portland for ten years. I think of Portland as simultaneously what Seattle was like twenty five years ago and what it could have been if we'd been a little bit better at urban planning Portland. You know, Portland for example, has like an amazing culinary scene, and now Portland's I think struggling catching up because as they get better at cost of living goes up, property
values go up. Like if you ever go to Portland, go try to go to a show at Mississippi Studios in the Mississippi neighborhood, which is kind of in the north northeast part of the city. That's one of those neighborhoods you look at, like went there where Elbow, Grease and sweat Equity could do it, which they haven't been able to do it in Seattle for thirty years. It's just too fucking expensive, right, you can't be an artist and like, you know, live in a squad, which you
could forty years ago. So Portland's sort of twenty years behind us and twenty years ahead of us. Vancouver is another world because I think being a crown country, all the y two k influx of wealth from Hong Kong and or you know, mainland China, they've been way better at embracing urban density. It's much more of a futuristic
kind of urban environment. Although I have to say their brilliance was Stanley Park, the big park that sticks north of downtown is one of the most along with Central Park, is probably the most brilliant piece of civic planning of all time to preserve the most beautiful spot right in the middle of your city. So, yeah, Vancouver is it's like a I don't know, I've spent quite a bit of time there. It's like friendly blade runner, I guess is what I call it.
Okay, let's go back. So you're growing up, when do you start playing in the instrument? What music are you listening to?
One of my earliest memories is musical. I was in the car with my mom. We had a white Ford Galaxy five hundred, and I have one of my earliest, most vivid childhood memories is getting in the car in the backseat, no kids. You know, I was probably three or four five at the most, and as you know back then, you turn the ignition on and if the radio was already on, the radio would come on and it was some like I don't know what it was,
I just remember that. If I think back, I think it had to have been like Otis Redding or Wilson Pickett or something. But it came on and it was some like super high energy, kind of soul music, and my mom turned it off, and I just remember having a massive tantrum, like, turn it back on, turn it back on, turn it back on. So from a very early age, I really really liked music. We didn't have
a piano in the house. Neither of my parents nor Larry, my stepdad, played an instrument, but everybody liked music, all three of my parents and Larry kind of moved in, and he's a little bit younger, right, so his record collection was from like the late sixties early seventies. So my mom's listening to Bob Dylan on repeat in the house. Larry moves in, and all of a sudden, my friend
Eddie Hewletts comes over and sees led Zeppelin four. We're in like fifth grade, and he's kind of a cool dude, ended up being a real fixture on the Seattle punk rock scene. He's like, hey, deater, chick this out, you know, and he pulls it out of the sleeve, puts it down and puts black Dog on, and I just I'm like, holy shit, that's what I want to do. So from that age, I really wanted to do it. And then and I didn't start playing imber until I was in
eighth grade. There was a guy in my class, Matt Bowman, who was brilliant ended up going to Yale a year early. He's a business guy now. He was like a keyboard prodigy. Actually, when he was in ninth grade, Roger Fisher was leaving Heart and asked him to join his band. So he was really good, and so we put together a band in eighth grade. Sagittarius. Bob was the name of.
The Wait wait, wait, wait, way you left out when you picked up an instrument, So.
Eighth grade that this band was for me. So we're going to have a band. Sagittarius. Matt, the brilliant piano player is going to play well.
So you're gonna have a band. And at that time you would not do not have an instrument.
No, don't have an instrument. So somebody has to play bass. So two or three of us rent or buy basses and start taking lessons. I don't get the gig, but I take the bass back and I rent an acoustic guitar. And the only lessons I've ever taken really were the next one or two years. This great guy rest in peace, Chuck Bennett, who was kind of the first call casuals
jazz whatever guy around town. He was my guitar teacher, and I just started taking guitar lessons and you know, trying to play with my friends in the neighborhood and stuff. And they didn't really maybe have a proper band until senior year in high school. Was probably the first real band I had. But you know, just music was I mean, once we start talking about music, we're going to need another three hours because that's getting okay.
But just to stay on this point, you have a band in high school, is it playing gigs? Are you getting paid?
I think that band my senior year, Sandino and the Leftists, I think we played one gig at my school and probably didn't get paid. And then the next year I went freshman year school, all of a sudden, I was in a band there in Colorado College, and weirdly was the same drummer who had been in Sagittarius in eighth grade.
We reconnected, and the guitar player in that band I gradually learned, you know, started playing whenever I could, and you get in bands with people like the guitar player in that band had been in a band that really played in the Bay Area, were college freshmen and made records and stuff, so he actually knew kind of how to because it's not about really about playing your instrument, it's understanding how all the pieces fit together and how
to listen to other people. That's really what music is about. So then gradually and actually the guy I really had a band there, moved back to Seattle, took a year off of school, and my best friend Kermit Rosen and I had bands for a couple of years in what was really like the immediately pre grunge scene in Seattle, and we're getting better again. Then I went to Brown and I resuscitated this funk band that had fallen apart
when someone graduated. And the other guitar player in that band was the guy whose house I went for Thanksgiving, Matt MOONISTERI. He became a well known trad jazz guitar player in New York. He was already a he was from Brooklyn, but somehow became a bluegrass banjo prodigy in like junior high in high school, and he was a serious musician, and he was the guy who taught me
how to play music. We played you know, James Brown and current you know, CAMEO funk music, R and B music, and he was a task master and he could really play. And he was the first guy, and he was a bit of a hard ass. He was the first guy who just sat me down and said, no, that's not good enough. You're going to sit here with me and tell we use this metronome and you can actually play this in time and make it groove. And he good enough is not good enough? Has to be fucking awesome.
So why did you go to Colorado College? Why did it not work out? And then how did you end up at Brown?
Oh? You really? I was enrolled at four schools in four years I went. I applied to a bunch of school we actually I only applied to Colorado College in Berkeley. I got into Colorado College and Berkeley. I decided to go to Colorado College because I had some friends there and I just wanted to go climbing, honestly, and they had you know, they have the block program where you go to school for three and a half weeks. I just wanted to go climbing for five days every month.
And I had friends climbing friends from Seattle. One was already there and one was going So that was Colorada College. I got there, I'm like, this is I don't see the point of moving fifteen hundred miles to be with like eighteen hundred other kids. This is just not a big enough thing for me. So I reapplied to Berkeley. They let me back in, and then that summer my Kermit and then I started a band, and like a week before I was supposed to go to Berkeley. This
is cal Berkeley, not Berkeley College of Music. I flaked out and decided not to go. We kept our band going the next year. We wanted to keep playing music. So Kermit and I he had gone to uh.
Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait this being is in Seattle.
Or yeah, yeah in Seattle. Back in Seattle.
Wait wait how long did you go to Colorado College?
One year?
Okay, one year, you go back to Seattle. You say you're going to go to Berkeley. You don't go to Berkeley because you have this band. Continue with your education.
Okay, Yeah, I've got the band, and Kermit and I are working at this communist pizza restaurant in the university district and playing music. Keep playing music. The next year. We want to keep playing music in Seattle go to the University Washington undergrad for a year, and that also felt like I was an English major. I was always the one or two of the kids in the front row actually engaged going to office hours, and it didn't feel that exciting. My girlfriend at the time went to Brown.
I really liked her, and I thought I need a bigger challenge, so I only applied to one school. I applied to Brown, and I got in and just went how.
Long did it you go to Brown? Did it continue with the girlfriend? And for how long?
It mostly continued for the next two years and maybe half a year year after that, but it didn't. It didn't last forever.
Well, but you know, when you go to a school in the middle, how do you make friends? How does it work?
Well? I knew her and so I had her friend group pretty quickly. Somehow I ended up connecting with some other transfer students that I hit it off with. That was one guy who became the bass player in the funk band Dimensioned and was a climber, so we'd like totally hit it off on the all fronts. Another guy, Andrew Stevens from Columbia, Missouri, who ended up working for Richard get part for years. Was just a really he transferred from Vassar. Just a fucking hilarious smart guy. You know,
so I hit it. I'm pretty you know, I'm pretty gregarious. I'm not a shrinking violin.
Oh okay, since you go to Colorado, which is certainly different from Seattle, But what do you learn other than your eye ninety five experiences? And I'm not talking about classroom What do you learn going to Brown that is different from what you already know so much?
And this is all going to resonate with you as an East Coaster who moved to the West coast. You know, as you said, what was it like growing up in the Pacific Northwest? I remember just the first week at Brown, Like you know, if you're a Western kid at least at that time, Like when you meet people, it's like what music do you like? Oh, let's go throw the frisbee? What do you like to do? You meet kids at an Ivy League school, they're like, where'd you prep? Does
your dad know my dad? On the street or on Capitol Hill. It's like, oh, okay, this is a whole different game. This is a game I have no interest in it. And to continue to answer your question. That was the big value of living there. Two years was about all it could take. But I got that view of, Oh, these are the people who buy Schlitz and buicks. Oh these are the people who are going to run the country.
These people I'm going to school with, for better or worse, are the people who are going to be on Wall Street and Capitol Hill in five years, ten years, twenty years. So it was a real window into how the oligarchy actually functions in the United States. It was a real eye opener. I'm really glad I did it.
It turned out, Okay, you graduate, do you immediately go back to Seattle? And why No.
I knew I wanted to be an high school English teacher, and I sent out, you know, not emails letters to forty or fifty schools, and my only requirement was the school be west of the Mississippi, I'll be totally honest. And I ended up at a school in Denver, Kent Denver School, private school in Cherry Hill.
So just because we're this far, where does the euro paramour end up?
She ended up kind of continuing she was an anthropology major. She ended up in flag Staff at a museum there, and eventually going to grad school in anthropology. And actually she's been back in the Boston area for twenty five years.
So what broke up the relationship pure distance.
I think just a it just was not She's a great person, and honestly was you know, just was not the time of life.
Okay, So you go to teach and you're teaching where and what?
Teaching at Kent Denver School in suburban Denver, and I was there two years. I taught English and coach soccer and basketball.
High school.
Yeah, high school. I had middle school too. Middle school. Middle schoolers crushed me, but the high school part I enjoyed. Middle schoolers had my number.
So, okay, you're a teacher for two years, you stop?
Because I decided after two years there, I did want to move back to Seattle. I missed. I was just having this conversation with my younger daughter because she's trying to figure out what to do with her life, and I knew I wanted to be in a community where I knew all kinds of people right all ages, where I had a deep connection culturally and family wise. So I just thought, I'm going to move back to Seattle. I'm back to Seattle, and I ended up not the one thing I was sure I wasn't gonna do was
teach at my alma mater. I got back that summer and the head of the upper school, who I'd stayed friends with, called me, is like, I got a pregnant English teacher, you want a job. So I ended up teaching English and for another three years and coaching soccer, and I did took kids out climbing and you know, doing stuff in the woods, and that was great. It was really fun three years. So I taught for three years and then it was onto the next phase.
Well what was the next phase?
The next phase was sitting around thinking, Wow, I'm getting better at being a teacher. But one of the big problems with being a teacher is if you're an ambitious person, you're inevitably going to become an administrator. And being a teacher is really really fun, and I think being an administrator at a private independent school is maybe less fun, pretty hard. You're answering to parents, students, faculty, staff, and
everybody's kind of pissed off at you all the time. Right, So I sort of saw the writing on the wall. So I actually made kind of a real conscious decision, like, Okay, I've enjoyed doing something where I feel like I'm kind of hopefully contributing to the positive side of the karmic balance sheet every day. What else do I care about? So this is like nineteen eighty nine, and this was the start of the influx of chain of out Californians
and other in Seattle. And I loved the natural environment here and grew up out on the water and in the mountains, and I thought, well, I want to get involved in, you know, natural resource issues. So I spent a year applying to law school, because what do you do when you're a fucking English major. You go to law school, right, You're not going to go back and
get a PhD and in you know, bioengineering. So I did that, and I got all my acceptances and rejections, and my dad and I were in Sun Valley skiing for a couple of weeks in the spring, and I remember after dark going over and sitting on the stopped chairlift at the bottom of warm springs and looking up at the hill and going, I don't want to be a lawyer. What am I doing? So then I spent another year working doing some public affairs stuff and applying to graduate school in urban.
So wirebin planning.
It seemed like the other land use planning seemed like the one other professional degree that I could angle my way into with an English degree and where I could get involved in these natural resource issues that I wanted.
Well, needless to say, you didn't continue on that path, but before you stopped, was it a good experience in graduate school?
It was great. I loved it. I was in the Yeah, I was the University Washington graduate school. I was in the land use planning track. I was actually writing my thesis on what at the time was a fairly nascent subject area, which was green or environmentally conscious golf course design and management, which in nineteen ninety three was not really a thing. Now it's kind of pro forma. So
my timing was great. I was super excited. So when we were, you know, a year and a half later, contemplating Columbia's offer, I was actually a really hard decision for me. I was like on a path that I'd struggled to get on, really had taken some work, and I was ready to go do it. And I just
kind of eventually the advance was big enough. I basically made a very calculated mercenary decision, like I can live like a grad student for another two years on this advance, and the industry's buzzing, and I think something's going to happen, so I guess I'll go for it.
Okay, the band is over.
What do you do?
Well? The band is over. We did the thing with sir mix a Lot for like a year and a half subset, which I really thought was going to be massive. It was so good. Mix a Lot is you gotta have him on your show. He is the most fascinating, brilliant dude. You know he is. He's a he's so smart. And that band was you know, me and Chris and Jason Keys drums, bass, guitar, mix and one of his sidekicks, out of Sight another rapper, and the recordings are out there,
they're on YouTube, and it was. The shows we played were like, I mean the Presidents at their heyday, Like playing at the Crocodile and Seattle was insane. This was like an order of magnitude. I have never seen an audience like these, you know, maybe the thirty or forty shows we played. And Mix a Lot was just a master. He could just hold the audience in the palm of his hand, just for ninety minutes. But it just didn't
come together. Whether it was timing with the sound or our management situation or whatever, it just never got any traction organically. It was just on fire. So we did that and then I kind of started getting I talked to E Music was interested in me doing a solo deal with them. That's when they were just starting out as an electronic music label, not really a you know, a streaming service. I never forgot to have a meeting with Sandy Pearlman, who made some of my favorite records.
I didn't really I did make some solo recordings that I still have, you know, sitting around in a box somewhere. It wasn't that excited about it. Spent some time you asked if we got screwed, spent some time leading our auditing of Sony Music and EMI. That was some work for a while, and eventually kind of just realized, wow, you know, that was a good chapter in my life. But I like, the reason I like to work is because I like to learn, So I'm going to keep
doing stuff. So I eventually sort of gravitated back toward this public affairs stuff i'd been doing, which was around natural resource issues and civic stuff and social justice, and ended up back I'd helped in nineteen ninety three start this company called Pyramid Communications, which became a big public
affairs firm in Seattle, and they're still around. Actually the first two employees were me and Nicole Vandenberg, who for many, many, many years has run Pearl Jam philanthropic efforts and kind of co manage them. And so I went back to that company and ended up working there for a few
years and in the meantime on the side. Because I was an artist and I've sort of managed the president's stuff and I could put two sentences together, I without trying became I guess you'd say, a thought leader around digital music because I get invited to be on panels or to moderate panels at Digital Music Form West or East or any of these, you know, all these events, and I'd meet people and get invited to be on
advisory boards. And I got invited to be on advisory board of a venture backed company in Seattle called Melodio, who had been one of the first to try to do MP three downloads to you know, direct to digital phones. And I joined the advisory board, and after a few years they kept trying to hire me, and at the end of two thousand and six, I jumped ship from the public affairs thing, went there, helped run that company for like four four and a half years. We helped
we sold it to Hewlett Packard. I did two years at Hewlett Packard, which is a whole episode of The Office that is another conversation. And then my kind of key hire earnout ended there and I ended up at Amazon.
How'd you end up at Amazon?
I ended up at Amazon because an old friend, Chris de Vore, who I knew from way back to like middle school, as an entrepreneur in Seattle, and his brother Andrew, who I also knew from childhood, is senior counsel there. And I was having lunch with Chris, and he's like, you got the other hiring on the music You got
to talk to my brother. And so I talked to Andrew and he put me into the you know, the the grinder of the Amazon hiring process, and you know, six months later, I ended up getting hired to do a job I didn't really want to do at the time, which was I got hired to run the licensing team to negotiate with the labels, and did that for about ten months. And when I joined, we had no plans to launch a streaming service, which was a surprise because
they don't tell you anything when you're interviewing. But in the ensuing six months we wrote you know, some of these epic legendary Amazon six pages and got approval to launch Prime Music. And then as we're getting ready to launch Prime Music, it donned on everybody, oh, we have no music programming or editorial function whatsoever. So I sort of put my hand up and wrote the job description to lead that, and led that for the first few years and hired the you know, the initial group of
music programmers and editorial people. And that was a whole other adventure that who you know, who knows my kids ask you know, who knows what should I do? I'm like, you know, if you told me when I was twenty three teaching English that ten years later I'd be selling millions of records, and then told me ten years later I'd be working for Hewlett Packard, like I wouldn't have believed any of it, Like, how the hell did this happen? And I'm risk averse. I'm not a risk taker.
Tell me a little bit more about that.
I'm a fairly self contained, you know, left brain to a fault, kind of hyper rational linear thinker. I'm not a look before you leap, and I look back on what I did, and I'm like, I have no idea how and why I made these choices, but they were all deeply considered at the time, and I don't know. It's a mystery to me.
Well, you talk about these old friends, Are you a networker? Are you the type of person who keeps contact with old friends?
And the older I get, the more I really just try to double down on my half dozen closest friends, you know. And those are all from high school, honestly, really or before, mostly people that I spent time doing stuff in the woods with, you know, skiing, climbing, mountaineering and that kind of stuff. Those are still my best friends.
So how does it end in Amazon?
It ends at Amazon. I did five years on the music team and kind of reached a point where there wasn't the right job for me there and they needed somebody to do BIZDV on the Echo Alexa team to
do deals with the outside music services. So the last four and a half years, I went to the Alexa team and I did deals, you know, with to bring Apple Music and Apple Podcasts to Echo Alexa, etc. So talking to all those Pandora, the obvious partner Spotify, and I did that for four and a half years, and the last year I was there, I spent I wrote, infinitely rewrote one of these six pages on finding ways to monetize advertising revenue from sports broadcasting cast over Alexa
and kind of after iterating a million times, kind of reached a dead end with that in terms of whether our team could push it through or not. And at that point, I'm fifty seven or whatever, fifty eight, and I knew I wasn't gonna work at Amazon past sixty at the most. And it was just the right It was either leave or go to another part of the company. And then you really got to double down for a few years to prove yourself again.
So it's just the right time, Okay, Is that the last day job you've had?
It is the last day job, okay?
Interacting with people at Amazon, it you essentially worked there for ten years, and you were referencing this earlier people worked for a couple of years they go to Netflix. Whatever you hear that.
It's a.
Cutthroat is not the right word, but you know, a harryd lifestyle. They're working you, you know all the time. There's a lot of pressure, not many human concerns.
What was your experience, my experience. I loved my experience there. I loved you know, it's a culture of writing for the most part. Now some of this has changed. When I joined, there were eight or ten thousand corporate employees. Now they're like one hundred and twenty five thousand, right, So I would say the culture is got maybe a
little bit less rigorous. But when I got there one it was kind of an eye opener because the soft skills that I have that I have worked for me, like being charming and gary less and being social, weren't worth shit. It was like, put up a shut up and write it down. You know, these six pages you write, single space, ten point font, tiny margin, write out what you want to do. Fortunately, I like to write. I grew up in a family of writers, and so I
loved that intellectual rigor. I totally thrived on that. Also, particularly the first four or five years I was there, I did not I would have to say, every single person I worked with I felt was smarter than I was. And that is fun to work with people where you feel like you have to raise your own game every day. And that's people three levels below me to Bezos, who I only had one business meeting with, and he was so fucking smart it was scary.
You know, Well, since you have this experience and you realize he was smart. What was that meeting?
The meeting was it's the final review before we launched Prime Music. A few months before we launched it. It was his final sign off, So it was him and most of the SVP team and then like maybe five of us from the music team. And since I was leading music programming, I was there to share our music programming strategy. And what I remember from the meeting that I can share is, you know, you may have heard about these meetings there. They're like grad school seminars. You
come in the room, it's a very dense document. You sit in silence for at least an hour and read it and annotate it. And so you do that and then you start discussing it and marking it up and if there are problems with it, Like I was in meetings where people are where the SVP or senior leaders, Like on this page, page one, this you know revenue number is this, and then you cite the same number
on page four. It's not a different number. So fucking fix that, and then we'll come back and have the meeting, because why should I trust anything in this document? Anyway, our document was okay within the first five minutes of
the meeting. You know this how complicated this stuff is, like the functionality that you can do in a digital service versus the penny rate you're paying, and sort of the trade offs there and all the negotiation involved, and how complicated it is for me, even when I was working in it full time, Like I have to be doing that part of the job all day every day to stay conversant in all the details. And Bezos is not a music guy. He doesn't he's not into listening
to music. He thinks the music business sucked, or he did for a long time when it was a sales or an acquisition based business. Within the first five minutes of the meeting, he asked this question that was so inside baseball based on product functionality versus the rate we were paying. I just I was like stupefied. Like my jaw dropped. I was just like, how the fuck did you do that? This is somebody who doesn't even pay
attention to the music business. And he went like right to the heart of the kind of the nexus of where the cost met, what the challenges, what we could do in terms of what we delivered to customers. It was it was mind blowing. It was like watching It's like you're running one hundred meter dash and you're watching Carl Lewis or Ussein Bolt next to you. It's just like, clearly some people are genetically more gifted in as far as intelling.
Okay, when you work for Amazon, is it a nine to five job? Is twenty four to seven job?
It's twenty four to seven. And that's the fun of it, Like, you know, for me work because I've always wanted to have jobs. I'm making rabbit ears where I'm into it. I mean, if you're not into it and you're not learning, I've never really cared about title or career achievement. If I'm learning and I believe what I'm doing is sort of karmically positive and I feel like I'm reasonably well paid, then I'm happy, And oh my god, talk about learning
and also, I you know, different teams are different. The music team has incredible retention at Amazon. Steve Boom is an awesome dude. He's a great human being and a very strong and powerful business leader, which is not always the case. Ryan Reddington, who now mostly runs the business now that Steve's been promoted, exact same thing, like the most down to earth guy, super smart, super humble, actually
cares about the people who work on his team. So I think the music team at Amazon, in particulars has been I know a ton of the people I hired ten years ago are still there, which is, you know, not the norm.
So does every musician in Seattle know each other.
Of a certain generation? For sure? Like my generation? Definitely there's I mean, we all, okay.
Sir, mix A lot stayed in Seattle. Duff McKagan went to La Guns n' Roses. How do you end up playing with Duff mccig.
So, Duff and I grew up in adjacent neighborhoods, and I met him in seventh grade. And when I went to private school, the friends that I had from grade school, I went to the big feeder public middle school that I would have gone to, which is so good that I didn't go there because by seventh grade I would have been stealing cars with stuff and the other juvenile delinquents there because I was into that. I would have been all into it. So he became friends with, you know,
a bunch of my grade school friends. So I knew him in like junior high and high school. He went to Roosevelt High School, which is my neighborhood high school, and we weren't friends, but you know, everybody knew each other. We were at the same high school class. And then he and I re met the first time the Presidents played a show that wasn't a showcase in LA it was in the La Times. It was kind of funny
because he and I didn't really know each other as kids. Mean, we you know, we're at the keegar at little Hurst
Park together and had mutual friends. But yeah, we're playing at the Whiskey and I look up in the balcony, you know, in the green rooms up there by the cocony, and I'm like, I'm like fuck because he had, you know, he'd he bought this house in Seattle, like a half block from my mom's house, and I'd seen him when he was still drinking heavily and stuff, and I was just like, see him come out to his car and stuff. I'm like, I don't really need to stop and say hi.
But this point he's sober. It's nineteen ninety five and he's up. I'm like, oh, that's tough. And we finished playing. We walk up to the green room door and I walk over to Duff. I'm like, hey, duff' stave dietere. You know, like, you went to school with my cousin Mark, and you're best friends with Brian, you know McCarty who was you know, we have all these friends in common. He's like, oh, fuck yeah. And he was so funny.
He's like, you know, he has a period of his life where he doesn't remember everything, and I'll never forget what he said. He said. I looked at that. I saw it in the La Times to Day and I saw that you guys were from Seattle and how old you are, and I was like, fuck, I must know one of those guys. So he and I just kind of hit it off. And then in the late nineties he was living in Seattle full time for a few years,
so we had a couple bands together. We had this kind of mellow duo The Gentleman, and then he had this hard rock band loaded, and I played in that band a little bit, and then he, you know, was I think it was a benefit for I'm going to get this wrong, Randy Castillo, somebody from some eighties metal band, and that was when he and Slash and Saurim got back together and that led to Velvet Revolver. And he hasn't been in Seattle as much since then. I think he's around most of the time.
Now.
I haven't seen him much lately.
So to what degree are you still playing music?
I'm playing more than ever and totally into it. It was for like in the mid two thousands when I stopped touring, I was really trying to be a great dad and a good provider and a good husband, and I just there are only so many hours in the day, and I'd still play the guitar all the time. But then, like,
I don't know, it's a few different things. Maybe eight or nine years ago, I got invited to an industry thing at a n arm They had like an industry legends and rockstar jam thing, you know, at the hotel there, and I did that a couple of years I'm like, I'm in the industry and I used to be a rock star. I should be able to do that. Hey, do you guys mind if I join you? And that was fun. My kids started playing music in high school.
One of them, a younger one, Lolo, plays the drums, and Una, older one played bass, and they're in the jazz band. And we formed a little jazz trio and we started playing gigs. We probably played fifty gigs in a year and a half before Una graduated from high school. And then I just started. I'm in a band, a kind of like dad band of friends here in suburban Seattle.
In another band, Megacat. I haven't been playing with as much, but I've got a couple of records out on a subpop imprint, and that band's getting a lot of buzz right now, so much so that they're so busy I can't do all the gigs. It's like weirdo instruments like krungbin meets the banana splits or something. I don't know how to describe it. As killer in a band Bowie Rex and his Boogie Army all late seventies through early post punk, which is me and a bunch of other
Seattle pros. It's me and drummers Mike Musburger who was in the Posy and the Fastbacks. Other guitar players Tim Degiulio who's in Duff's band right now. Just a killer band of local season pros. So I'm playing as many gigs as I can play. It's like being a kid in a candy store again, just for fun.
How many gigs?
Is that? It was too many? Last year I actually had to back off. I just backed off on Mega Cat a little bit. Last summer. I had two or three gigs a week for like three and a half months, and it was cutting into my recreation time with Jenna, who still has a full, full time gig. So we need to be out on our bikes and doing stuff out in the woods and running.
And Okay, I think we're gonna put a bow on this chapter. As you said, you know, we could go deeper into music, but I think this is a good stopping point. We've covered the basics. Dave. I want to thank you so much for taking this time to talk to my audience.
As an absolute pleasure. Thank you, Bob. I appreciate it.
Till next time. This is Bob left six
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