Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast. My guest today is guitarist Richard Lloyd. Richard, why do you start your live shows with the song respect?
Well? I was asked to do a Nuggets, a reunion or a couple of the songs. I chose where one of them was respect But it's not the it's the Vagrance version, so to say. The lyrics are a little different, and there's no R s P E C T in it, and it's not Aretha. It's you know, a modern take of it by Moir, but based on the Vagrants. You can look it up on YouTube.
Okay, I've been I will the Vagrants version came before or after Wretha's version?
I have that. I have no idea.
Can you tell us any of the lyrical changes?
Just instead of the rspcis there's just hey, hey, hey hey, after every verse and you know, no, I can't I play it? And what the hell?
You also do the velvets waiting for my Man?
Not really. I do two verses of it and embedded in another song of mine called the Word.
Okay, for those who haven't seen you act, tell us a little bit more.
I don't want to really talk about music with you, Bob. You gotta have something else. Let's have it.
Ohkay. Let me be clear, you have something very specific you'd like to talk about.
Uh uh huh, anything you like? Okay, but you don't subjects interest you.
You know, we believe I got a lot of somejects interest me. I just want to you would rather not talk about music.
Well, you're asking me pointing questions about my own performance, which is my own performance, and I'm not scheduled or I'm not able to give a critique of my own work in that regard, Okay, And you're asking me to, you know, talk about songwriting and the intricacies of putting a set together and why I did this and why I do that? Is not something that interests me at all.
I play and people come to see it and they enjoy it, and we've been getting a great deal of We're playing small places, but we're getting sellouts and people are very excited about it and really happy smiles everywhere we go. So that's enough for me. Okay.
Do you enjoy the process of going on the road and touring?
I do. I do. It's interesting to be paid to go where tourists pay to go, and when you get there, they applaud usually unless they're throwing tomatoes at you, but they don't do that for me.
Okay, are you the type of person who stays in the hotel room all day or do you take advantage of these places that normal tourists pay to go to.
You know, I've been to Paris like eleven times, and I've never been to the not the Statue of Liberty, that other thing.
The Eiffel Tower.
Eiffel Tower. And I've walked past the Louver many times, going to a restaurant or such, or just taking a walk, but I've never been inside the Louver. So it's a mixture of I am joy the geography and the people and the cuisines, but as to the touristy type of things, I really don't partake in that.
What's the most interesting place you've been to?
Oh, gosh, everywhere. Athens, Greece, where you can't breathe because the pollution is so bad now and the cars are crazy and the driving is crazy. Japan, where you look out and there's two thousand people and not one of them has anything but black hair. That's very interesting and just about anywhere in the States is cool? San Francisco, you know, La New York.
Have you been to South America?
I've been to San Paulo where we played the Rio Festival, and San Polo and Rio.
Yeah, I've been to Rio. Interesting place. So are you the type of person who's deep into your own world or do you follow the news.
I've been following the news now that I get a little older, But I don't really talk about politics either. Music and politics are kind of they're preculiar tastes that people have. I may follow of a man named George Ivanovitch Kerdyev. Are you familiar with that?
I am not. I'm not, I don't think so. Tell me.
Well, he was a I guess you'd call him a mystic or a master of himself. And he tried to impart to mankind the possibilities that are open to human being who's quote working on themselves end quote. And he provided steps to achieve a greater potential for man than he usually is. He's sleepwalking. If you look, you can practically see people dream daydreaming, and daydreams are nothing. They don't exist. When reality hits you, they're gone. And so
to live one's life in clouds. So to say is you know a negative and people are fulled with full of negative emotions.
Let's just talk about you. Have you followed this gentleman's precepts and to what degree have they helped or changed you.
I'm free of most of the former habits that I had and negative emotions that I carried with me. There's no point to having negative emotions. They don't do anything for you except to ruin your health. And I'm talking about pride, lust, anger, fear, apathy, grief. They're all useless. They don't do anything for you. They don't act in the world.
Just to get a spectrum here. Let's say you buy a pizza, pizza, slice of pizza and it falls on the ground. Are we talking about something as minor as that?
Or could you say, what's the point of crying over spilt milk? That's the old saying. So a pizza is the same thing. It falls from your hands. You know, if you pick it up and it falls again, it can get frustrating to some people. But I mean that's physics. Now we want to talk about physics.
No, I'd rather not talk about physics, not an area of expertise for me. What about as we get older, we have contemporaries who pass away. How does one deal with the emotions of that.
I don't have much emotions around death. It's a natural part of life. In fact, it's the goal of life is to reach death, but put it off as long as it's necessary to gain some kind of spiritual beingness. I mean, the point of man is to reflect the glory of the creator, if there is such a thing, or you could call it out of space, and the glory of the Sun and the planets and the Earth and the moon and the galaxies. We could talk about astrophysics if you like, but you don't deal in physics.
Whit Wait wait, wait, wait, wait, a couple of things. First, Yeah, do you believe in it after life?
It depends. It depends what you mean by an afterlife, and it would take a great deal of discussion, hopefully not one sided discussion, to come to any kind of uh and understanding. I don't think the physical body reanimates, that's certain. The emotions and the kind of cloud of consciousness departs, and maybe it goes somewhere and lasts for
a while in the atmosphere of the Earth. Maybe it's drawn towards the moon, where mister Gridjief said that organic life on Earth feeds the Moon and that it's a young being, not quite the but that we don't look at cosmic time the way that archaeologists do. We're talking about cycles of Brahma. We could talk about the Indian Hindu religion and it's start in the never changing Wisdom.
Okay, let's go back to astrophysics. If it's something that you have expertise in, I'm certainly willing to be edified here.
Well, expertise is not not what I would claim for myself. It's just a strong interest. I have many, many interests. I believe. We sent you a copy of my book where you yes, look through it? Yes, yes, I was through read it from cover to cover. It's yes, full of vignettes. Yes, we could talk about any of those or the ideas in the book.
Well, what I find in the book is a strong sense of alienation and a strong sense of going down your own path.
Well, those are both true.
And also finding yourself observing a lot. So yes, as you have gone through life, do you find your self feeling that you're outside or that you have moments when you're feel totally connected, you know, what has been your experience on the planet.
I am connected. I can't say totally because there's a degree to it. There's a percentage I'm awake in the sense of being vertical, such as the New Testament talks about sleep not you never know the time. There are all the parables we could talk about that if you like.
Let's go to some of the specifics of your life. You did not finish senior year of high school in one year, then you went to another school and didn't finish senior year there, can you tell us what happened?
I was at Stuyvesant High School, which is in all science. It was a boys' school at the time. There were no women and no girls. And I was to graduate in sixty nine. And then when they stopped teaching, I quit and I refused to take a diploma because I had already in the twelfth grade. I had taken my guitar to school and I remember my physics teacher saying, where are your books? And I said they're in the case, and he says, well, open the case and get out
the books. So I opened the guitar case and there's my electric guitar. And he says, so that doesn't look like a physics book to me, And I said, it's the physic physics book I'm studying, and it's not going to change for me. And I was delighted. I'd be delighted if you were to teach, But to ask your students to go and teach themselves by reading materials that you didn't write and you're not enthusiastic about is not the way to teach. I had a math teacher in
seventh and eighth grade. I was on the math team in the algebra competitions in New York City and we actually won one year that I was there, that was the seventh and the eighth grade. It was a Japanese man named Tad Saphora, who then later became the principal of the grade school that I was going to, the junior high that I went to, and he was a remarkable man. He was a fifth degree black belt in karate and in ikido, and he would stop. The junior
high school I went to was rather difficult. There were a lot of beatings and robberies, and you had to put money in several places when you went to school because you were certain to get mugged and someone would take your lunch money, so you had to have more in your shoe. Anyway, he could stop those just by appearing. People would drop their knives and chains upon seeing him, because he could dismantle them quite easily. Anyway. He taught
only four days a week. That we went to school five days a week, obviously, and he had us for forty five minutes each of those days. And on Fridays he would lecture on various subjects, all of which were extremely interesting to him and to us. We were a group of children who were like sponges ready to absorb, and he had a fascinating ability. Six weeks before school ended in the eighth grade, he came and he said, I have good news, and I have good news. Which
do you want? And he said, well, we've all passed this year, and I've thought you half of next year's curriculum. In case you don't have me as a teacher. You should not rest on your laurels, but you should continue to study anyway. I wasn't so good in trig trigonometry, but algebram I was very good at and chess and games like that go. He taught us Go. Do you know Go?
I am familiar with the game. I've played it for like five minutes, so keep going.
Oh it's quite terrific. It's a game where you could think you're winning and one move will flip everything on the board. And these games go on for weeks. In Japan, maybe one move a day. People contemplate this. It's a game of borders and of surrounding your enemy. It's a fascinating game, and it's precedes chess according to you know, studies of ancient gamesmanship.
Okay, since this gentleman taught you half of next year's course, Yeah, what happened the following year, Well.
I didn't have him, and that was very sad to me. But I visited him in his office a number of times and asked for his direction. He was a as I said before, he remarkable man, you know, versed in many many subjects, which is something I aspire to, which is why I'm not trying to be hostile. I'm trying to talk to you in something that will entertain us and the audience both. But I do music as a it's not a hobby what I do for a living, and it's very personal to me. I don't want to
dismantle and have an autopsy of my performances. So I could talk about anything you like. No, No, that's not bring me anything to the table.
Well, if I was going to row Bob, if I was going to bring to the table, it sounds like you're a person. If you were on the Bath team, your person who dedicates yourself and is totally involved in school, you will apply and get into Stevenson what happens to make you go left as opposed to Stingo left?
I stayed the course of my own direction.
Well, that's my question. Why did you do that?
The world would be a better place? But we all succumb to the hypnosis.
Since most people's coucil. Since most people succumb, how did you not succumb?
I was born this way. I was born awake, and I looked around and it grieved to me the way human beings, they didn't think and feel the same. They would get into the They for instance, they took poisons such as alcohol, and then they got into fights. And if you took away alcohol, you can't And probition proved that you can't really take the pleasure out of ordinary
people's lives. And so I've been this way since. I used to meditate as I'm taught now, sitting on my heels in the living room, stopping my breathing and trying to stop my heart when I was two and three years old. So I've been around the block in terms of the human condition and find it mostly lacking. But unfortunately, that's not how most people see it. They see their lives as full and entertaining. I'm not interested in that.
Okay, let's go back to the fact pattern. When you're bring your guitar to school and you don't get your diploma, what do your parents say and to what degree were your parents in influence in your life.
Well, at that time, my parents moved from New York, from Manhattan, from Greenwich Village to Montclair, New Jersey, and they said to me they bought a big house and I had I took over the third floor of the house. Remarkably affluent, I'll say, where in the village we weren't that affluent. So my step dad reached a point of affluence and bought himself a Mercedes in this house, huge house, and he was a film editor, mostly did TV commercials.
Once brought me a Mickey Mantle signed baseball to Ricky from you know, Mickey Mantle, and I used it in a game and somebody hit a home run and the ball was lost out in the woods. And it's never bothered me. It was a baseball. It was meant to be used in a game. And people that collect these things, you know, just make me sort of smile.
What did your stepfather say, if anything, when he found out the ball was lost?
Nothing, No, he was astute. Anyway, They said, listen, you could do one of three things. You could get a job and pay rent to be here, you could move out, or you could go back to high school. And finished the twelfth grade. So I went back to high school, although I didn't really go to take courses because this was an ordinary high school, not a specialized high school.
And I went and I borrowed a saxophone, and I went and sat down on a park bench across the street from the steps leading into the registration hall, and all the kids would come and laugh at me because I really can't play the saxophone. I was honking and bleeding, and this young black guy came up to me and
he said, what are you doing? And I told him I'm calling you, And it turned out to be a fellow named Albert Anderson who went on to play with Bob Marley, mostly because he could smoke pot the way they did, and if it weren't for me, you wouldn't have smoked pot. I talked him into it after a couple of months of pressure, peer pressure. I talked everybody into getting high at the time and had a great deal of fun.
Okay, the high school that you went to to repeat senior year was that in the suburbs in Montclair?
Yeah, right, Montclair High School.
That must have been huge culture shock after being in New York.
Yes, it was. But we Albert and I and a guy named Ed Rogers. They were in a band called Redbread who won Battle of the Bands in New Jersey. Anyway, we used to bring our electric guitars into the senior lounge and play during the breaks or when we cut classes, and after about three months the place, the senior lounge was so full of kids that they shut it down. I mean, we've always drawn a crowd people who are interested in our interests, and at the time, you know,
we were playing electric guitars with no amplifiers. Just trading licks back and forth, you know, all reaching that unapproachable goal of so called making it in the music business.
Okay, let's go back to Greenwich Village. You know a lot of the sixties emanated from Greenwich Village.
That's right.
Did you just feel that you were living there or were you feeling that something was going on?
Definitely felt that something was going on. We were at the top of the rocket of civilization in New York and Greenwich Village specifically in the early and mid sixties. I mean it was incredible. And you know, we chased Bob Dylan around in coffee shops and Jimmy Hendrix is playing the cafe. Wha. I never went down the stairs of the cafe why? And I I kind of regret that, but I later on met him and many other of the so called rock stars. I didn't want to really
grovel in front of them. I wanted to meet them as older peers, older brothers, and I did that and hung out with many of the top musicians of the day. And the day was pretty bright, you know, sixty four to sixty to sixty nine.
Okay, why do you think society changed and pulled back? I mean, the cliche would be the army stole the slogan, you know, be all that you can be. That was the etho of the teenagers in twenty somethings. What happened in society? What do you attribute the change in the outlook in people over the ensuing decades.
Well, we were in a Cold War, and I went through the Cuban missile crisis with everybody else, and we were, you know, the United States and Russia, we're in a real tussle. And then we got into a war in Vietnam, and that was ridiculous foreign war where we're killing people that do nothing to us, can't do anything to us, They couldn't send. The United States has been isolated. Nobody can reach us because we have two oceans protecting us.
And anyway, we get in these ridiculous wars. And I was drafted and I got out of it because I had had psychiatric problems prior, and I had good documentation and a psychiatrist that said, you know, you can't put them in the army. He'll shoot officers just that, Would you know stop the war?
Were you afraid that you were going to have to go?
I was number seventeen in the draft, so I would have been cannon fodder for sure, But I wasn't going to run. I was going to take whatever came my way. And when I went down to the draft board, a funny thing happened because during the hearing test, you're wearing your headphones and everybody else if you hear something in your right or raise your right hand, you know, and I'm raising my left and I'm raising my right opposite.
I'd put the headphones on backwards and the guy says, you're going in the army man, you ain't getting out of this. But when I saw the psychiatrist, he was of a different shade of color.
What caused you or what motivated you to go to the psychiatrist?
That alter everybody went to the psychiatrist, and people wore dresses, you know, boys were outrageous clothing and stuff to try to convince the psychiatrists. And they'd come out with their head hung low. They were going, and you know, somebody come out with their papers and go yeah, and everybody, yeah, you got out of it. So it was a thing to do.
Well. I thought that you said though, that you had previous psychiatric history prior to the draft.
That's right. I'd been in Roosevelt Tower ten, and later on I've been in two state mental institutions that make one flew over the cuckoos and nest looked like a kindergarten party, and I'm serious, tied to a gurney.
Tell me about the first todd First.
Well, I was fifteen, and I was sick of my parents, and you know, in a rebellious place, and they took pills and drank alcohol and it really got to me. So I went into the bathroom one day or one evening, and I took all the pills out, all the prescriptions out, and put them down the toilet, and then told my parents that I had taken them all. And they rushed
me to Roosevelt Hospital, where they pumped my stomach. The doctor said, I know you haven't taken your stone sober, but I'm going to pump your stomach anyway as a lesson to you. And after that they put me in the psychiatric unit of Roosevelt Hospital, which was called Tower ten. I spent two weeks there and they then they sent me on a pass to go home, and I didn't want to go home. You know, the hospital was much
nicer than my home was at the time to me. Anyway, I came back from the pass and I was happy as a lark in the hospital setting. And the guy in charge of me said, you know you're back on drugs. We're giving you these passes and you're back on drugs. And I was like, no, I'm not, and he said, yes you are, and we're transferring you to Creedmore, which was the statemental hospital out in Queen's or Long Island somewhere, and I was in Building forty and that's the flight deck.
That's where they assessed you for forty days. So I spent three months there. They gave people electroshock therapy, and they gave me a chemical shock therapy. It's adrenaline insulin shock therapy where they put you to sleep for two weeks and then they put you in a literal rubber room and you work it out for two three four days. But people would come out of the electro shock and
walk into walls. And my friend Albert Anderson, who had been talking about earlier, he came to see me and he says he started crying and I said, Albert, why are you crying? He said, because you're gone, you're not there, and I said, well, I'll come back. Don't worry about it, and I did every time. So my head is stronger than their medicine.
Okay, was there any benefit in either of these two hospitals to you?
Yeah, it's a life is an adventure, and no matter what happens to you, it's part of a process, and it's a magnificent one. Nothing that's ever happened to me has stop me from trying to become a better person, trying. Although I don't succumb to new age crap. I'm a scientist and one of the sciences is the human condition, and I've done a lot of studying of it and had a mentor you know, or two or three or four.
Okay, you're in the mental institution. Does anybody connect with you? Are there any doctors or anybody there say listen, I know who you are, I know what's going on. You're okay, let's just kind of get through this. Or you were you alone there?
Oh No, At the time, they weren't like that. Doctors lorded it over the patients. They were, you know, God in charge and if they wrote something down that was gospel, so you know, they would write the worst things about you, and then you would suffer the consequences.
And the other people who were there with you. Were they reasonable or were they truly mentally ill?
Both? There were plenty of truly mentally ill, catatonic people, people with the I remember they brought a guy in strapped to a gurney and they kept him there for a couple of weeks because he was a sex psychotic and would grab at people's testicles and that just didn't stop.
So how did you convince them the second time that you were fine and should be let out.
I don't know. But the second time I was in Graystone, State where they sent me to a drug rehabilitation halfway house, one of these you know, tough love places, and they were in the middle of a work marathon, and twenty four hours of like, they gave me a toothbrush and they made me go along the carpeted floor picking up stuff. And after about about twenty hours of that, I walked out and they couldn't stop me. You know, I wasn't
in the confines of the mental hospital anymore. It was in somewhere near new and I walked home to Montclair. You know, many miles till I rest. I've always been that way. If I have a determination, I carry through.
And what'd your parents say when you showed up at a house?
They were actually happy. I was okay. I was straight and sober. Not for long, however, But you know, I liked intoxicants. Birds like intoxicants, Cows like intoxicants. Deer eat rotten fruit and fall down. They love it, and so human beings have always sought after intoxicants of various qualities and natures. When I first got into the Gurjief work, my teacher, a woman named Patty, said to me, what have drugs ever done for you? What about? And I said, well,
I know the difference in quality between materials. A pound of flour and a pound of heroin weigh the same, but the significant affect and the significant what they can do is remarkably different. And there you got LSD, you know, which you can't even see, and you can take it and have an extraordinary brain trip.
Anyway, when did you first start, as they used to say back in the sixties, experimenting with intoxicants.
When I was nine and a half, I stole a cigarette that was the entrance from my grandmother's pack of cigarettes, and I went up the alleyway. It was some summer. I was nine and a half and I smoked a cigarette and got dizzy and enjoyed it. So there I was. Then I snuck into the liquor cabinet because I wondered why adults took poison, and alcohol clearly a neurotoxin given in sufficient quantities. And I drank a bunch of different
liquors and made myself. The room spun and I vomited, you know, projectile, vomited into the toilet, and as soon as I could, I did it again. So there was some measure of I guess if a psychologist would say self loathing going on, you know in the place that I was. And I was given a lot of love when I was young, but it wasn't sufficient. I had an absent father, and that, really, I would say, it numbed me to that side of the emotional part of a human being.
Okay, when you say absent father, do you mean he was never there or there irregularly.
He came to visit two or three times when I was really little, you know, in diapers and as a toddler. Then he joined the Navy and split and that was that. My parents got divorced when I was like six months old, and my mother took me to her parents' place and that's where I lived for the first six years. So my mother went to New York to become an actress and met my stepfather, who was a film editor in acting school, and then she sent for me and I went to New York.
So the absent father, since you really didn't know you never really lived with.
Your father, that's correct.
What was the feeling of that, How do the apps and how did it manifest itself into what degree does it still play into your psychology today?
Well, I had a terrific stepfather who did everything in his power to help me and to support me, and but that didn't happen right away. So there was a hole in me, a deep hole, you know. My grandfather stood in as the male figure and my grandmother, you know, was the loving person. And my mother was sort of flighty and concerned about her own self, and so she moved to New York and then she called me on the telephone and said this is I was six, and she said, this is your decision. You can come live
with me or you can stay with your grandparents. And I was, and I said, against my own wishes, I said, you're my mother, I'll come and live with you. She says, oh really, oh great. But I didn't really want to go. So there was a hole in me. That's all I can say.
Okay, So it was this hole connected to intoxicants.
That's not how I see it. How do you see the connection.
Well, a lot of people, a lot of famous people, whether they you know, not athletes but artists. They're trying to fill a hole that that frequently cannot be filled. They didn't get enough love for their father, they need certain adulation, etc.
So everybody has a hole in them, Bob, everybody, and they can't be filled even with God. It needs to be like a spark plug has to have a gap in it. A human being has to have this unconquerable sorrow in them. It's a kind of suffering that all human beings must face in some way or another, and most of them turn to some kind of escape from it, which is not how I interpret the taking of intoxicants. To me, it was a search, a total search for
myself within this. I used to take things that would make you go to sleep and then stay awake, or take things that would send you up and go to sleep on them. So I was always headfirst into this kind of grand adventure. And when I was fifteen, I said to myself, they showed this movie, you know, Reefer Madness, and afterwards all those kids talked about how we wanted to refer you know, where could we find some? And our older brothers were beat nicks, so we got it
from them and started smoking. When I was fifteen, I asked myself, I said, let's sit down, Richard and figure this out. I said, out of a thousand people who take drugs, none of them recover except maybe one. Because what was it? Ulysses had himself strapped to the mast so he couldn't hear the sirens, or so he could rather hear the sirens but couldn't go to them in his doom. And I wondered, so do I have a mask such as that that's going to save me in
the end? And I said my answer back was no. And then the question was, well, are you going to do them anyway? And the answer came back to me yes. I plunged into it. I believe in guardian angels, and I have a phlans of them. They're protecting me, They've always protected me.
Okay, let's go back one chapter. You said everybody's got a hole in them.
That's right.
So let's say you know, conventional science that we read about. If we're not scientists, ourselves say they're spectrums. Okay, there are people who are deeply depressed. There are people who say they never get depressed. Are they just lying? What would the hole be in those who would say, I'm well adjusted and I'm happy.
Ah, they're hypnotized by the society. Oh, hypnotism, that is. You know. I looked at my the adults around me when I was really little, and I noticed that that I could see that their emotions didn't match their speech, that they lied, that they simply lied to themselves and to others about their own condition and didn't fully embrace or accept the fact that they were, you know, and harmed by the shocks of life. You can take the
shocks of life two ways. You can either ride them like riding the tiger, or you can get crushed by them, eating up alive. I'm not sure that people, I suggest that there are a percentage of people who are well adjusted to society's norms, and they live a life just like an animal. They go through life and then they perish and that's the end of them.
Okay, once you're an adult in society, there are a lot of people living in denial. How do you find your people?
Ah? Well, that took many years. I didn't have a mentor until I found a man who had died in nineteen forty nine, mister Gurdjief, who I've spoken about it in our talk, and it was a Greek Armenian fellow who started teaching in nineteen twelve in Russia in Moscow, but ended up in France, you know, because of the Russian Revolution and all with a bunch of people, and started a school there called the Harmonia the Harmonious in
the Institute for the Harmonious Evolution of Man. I'm paraphrasing that. And I read a book, you know, it practically fell on my head. I was going to spiritual bookstores and reading all sorts of stuff, and I found this book.
It was called In Search of the Miraculous and I read it and in it it's the story of a student's three year tutorship under mister Kajief, and it's full of mister Gajief's lectures at the time in early nineteen fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, those years, and in it I recognized something of extraordinary value in what mister Gajief was postulating, that we're not reaching our potential, the human potential to be an image of the creation. That we live narrow, small lives and
we're happy with them. If you're happy they are sheep, that's okay. But once in a while there's a black sheep who gets away from the sheep who knows what happens to them when they go into the mountains or what have you, when they run away because they've accidentally seen the slaughterhouse. And we too, as men, are asked for our skins at a certain point and we give them.
Just understand you say that after reading the book, you went to actual classes about this.
Well, I found I don't know how it happened. I found Yeah. I looked up the Gurgief Foundation of New York and I wrote them a letter. I spoke to a woman who was selling books related to this subject, a woman named Elizabeth who ran a bookstore and it's still in existence called Well It'll come to me anyway, I would get books drop shifted to me on tour and spent my time reading things about Gurdjief and his teachings. And there's plenty to read if you want to read
up on it. Any number of his students wrote books about life with mister Gurdjieff. Anyway, I wrote this letter to the Gurjeef Foundation, and I hand delivered it because I was unsure of the address and whether it really existed or not. And I went there and I knocked on the door and the button of the bell, and
nobody came for five minutes. So I rang it again, and nobody came for five minutes, and I rang it and knocked one more time, and I said, if they don't come in five minutes, I'm going to leave and turn my back on this and find something else. And the door opened and a woman who I was later in a group with, Patty Hemmainger, she asked me yes, and I said, is this address correct on the letter? And she said yes, and I said, well, then I've
delivered it. And the next day I got a call from this woman, Patty Yosa, who became my teacher or protectress in the Kerchief Foundation. She had met mister er Chief when she was seventeen and one Christmas he gave out the choice of seven silver dollar or a ten dollar bill, and most of the boys took the ten dollar bill, and most of the girls took the silver
seven silver dollars, which she still had. Anyway, she asked a fellow named Stafford Ordall to help her run this meeting and began to have meetings in doctor Welsh's house. Doctor Welsh was the doctor who cared for mister Kjief in his last week or so in the hospital before he perished of every organ in his body corrupted. That's the guy who knew how to live.
Okay, Why were there so many black sheep in the sixties and why do we live in an era of conformity today?
You're right about that. There were a lot of black shoes, so to say, not all of them made it, you know, some of them expired on the way, on the path, and some of us are still on the path. But yes, conformity is the name of the game nowadays. And what do you conform to? I mean, if it's politics, you've only got two choices, and neither of them are very up to standards.
You want to talk politics, No, No, I want to talk you know, I think that the world was changed when Reagan came in and legitimized greed.
That's the nineteen eighty we selected first.
Yeah, yeah, I would say that. You know, we had the peace and love generation of the sixties. We have the back to the land licking our wounds in the seventies, and then we had even Jerry Rubin went straight okay, and then it became about the money, and of course ultimately we have income inequality, which makes the struggle of life even harder.
Right, Reaganomics.
Right. But where we used to have okay, you we have the same frame of reference where it used to be that the artist, let's talk musical artists existed outside the system. They were beacons. The first, you know, true breakthrough was the Beatles. Now the popular I'm talking about I don't want to you know, you know what I mean?
Him on Sullivan, by the way, of.
Course, I saw them on at Sullivan.
Yeah, me too.
I saw him on Jack Parr a few months before that.
Oh wow.
But in any event, my point is people looked to them for answers. They were influenced, and of course John Lennon said, you know, we're bigger than Jesus. They were outside the system.
That ruined them. They couldn't tour after that.
But today the artists are capitalists. Not that the artists of your never cared about money, but they are selling out to the band, whether it be you know, doing privates and this and that and the other thing and having perfumed. So there's a big change in terms of, you know, who the heroes are, who to follow, because if everybody sold out.
What do you do? Then well I wouldn't know. Thank god, not everyone sells out in the way that you're painting it. I agree with you completely in this regard. You know, there are conformists and then there are capitalists. And anybody can get across the line and get to be a capitalist, then they're gonna, I mean, as far as I'm concerned, to kind of ruin and buy it money corrupts.
Let's go back to the drugs. You know, people say let's use heroin as example. You're always chasing that first high. With your experience with drugs, can you say any drug you took you say this was a great experience. Glad I took it better than regular life.
Absolutely. Yeah. Every drug I took was influential in that regard, made it a dent, made a difference, a positive difference, as I've said, you know the difference. I remember first time we took Riddlin and it was the most marvelous experience. It was as though our bodies weighed four hundred pounds, but we could talk a mile a minute and my friend and I traded stories for hours on end. Uh, you know, prompted by this drug. Everything is drug anyway, it's all chemicals.
Have you taken ayahuasca?
No, I put down that kind of adventure when I found what I was looking for, and I found what I was looking for, and I'm holding on to it dearly.
Okay, But you did go to rehab a couple of times to stop taking drugs, correct.
No, that's what they wanted there, they meaning parents and police and judges and the rest of society. I mean, I was bonkers. I once wore a karate gee out into the middle of the street in mark Clair, New Jersey, stopping traffic and going beep beep, take me to the aliens, went I was one. It's arrested in the one hundred and sixth floor of the World Trade Center where they actually have jail cells, three of them, and they put me in and called the people from Bellevue who came
and took me away. And it was all very exciting to me. You know, I'm excited no matter where I am, I can find reason to sort of love the course of action my life has taken. Not everybody can say that.
When you stopped going to school, Yeah, what did you think you were going to do going forward?
Music? That's simple. I was going to play guitar and a rock band like the Beatles.
And how long till you could earn a living doing that?
Oh? The first time television played CBG's. Television was really my first band. I bided my time until something came along that made sense to me. Anyway. The first time we played a club called CBGB's, we each made a dollar. That meant we were professional musicians, and that's all that mattered.
How did you exist for the years between high school and television?
I who took odd jobs. I was a dishwasher for a while, and the diners and restaurants, and you know, I never graduated to becoming a waiter or anything. There were more important things going on and through begging through you know, I got stuck in Boston once and had to hit the street and for spare change. I'm not above that. Old Italian ices from a push cart in Boston sold drugs, you know, not hard drugs, but pot and stuff that was before it finally became legalized pretty
much everywhere. And that's a wonderful thing to behold.
I know, they talked about it for decades. It's amazing, you know, it's like having a black president. You can't believe it actually happened.
Right exactly, It's it's something else. Now they've psilocybin, the magic mushrooms are becoming derriguur for therapy and pleasure, you know, and that's a good thing. They're legal in Oregon, so sooner or later they'll be legal most everywhere.
Tell us about heroin. Did you first start taking heroin? What was your experience on heroin?
Well, the first time I took heroin was in junior high school. There. We used to be able to go and get dollar or two dollars bags of heroin that last you two weeks and sniff it, you know, snorted. And when did the dividing line came and I started using intervenous. It wasn't that long. I figured, God, for God's sakes, you go to a doctor, he sticks a needle in you anyway and takes stuff out and put stuff in. So why can't I do that? I'll be my own doctor. And if I want to take heroin,
boy did that work in the beginning. In the beginning, I have to caution the listener even that it works in the beginning, but soon takes over all your interests, and so the only thing you can do is like a rug rat, you know, find more heroin and suffer the consequences when you can't find it. And I've been through many withdrawals, super withdrawals, But I like suffering.
A couple of things. The high, I understand the line where it consumes you and you have to get money every day to feed the habit. Is the high? Ever? Still good?
Yeah? Period, that's my answer. Yes, it is okay.
You like suffering, Certainly withdrawal is suffering. Give me another example of suffering you like?
Hmm. I was once and fell over backwards and broke my cocksacks, and I woke up having a dream of people on the battlefield screaming their heads off, you know,
for whatever, for morphine or to be saved. And as I woke up, I realized that was me screaming, and I was screaming at the top of my lungs, and you know, had the authorities called because they didn't know what was going on anyway, I waited three days before I went to the hospital and got some pain relief from them, which I then didn't take because I wanted to wait until the pain went away, and that took
a long time. But I was stalwart in my in my desire to let it wait until I could use it pleasurably instead of as a relief.
Let's go back to that period between high school and television. You're doing odd jobs, you're bigging on the streets of Boston.
It sounds depressing, sure, yeah to you.
Well that's my question. Did you always know that you were going to play guitar and be successful?
Yes? You did, Yes, absolutely, I just needed to bide my time and practice.
And you know there are different levels of musicians. How much did you practice.
All the time every day without an amplifier? An electric guitar without an amplifier is fine for practicing.
I see during our talk that you're drinking something. What exactly are you drinking?
Lemonade?
Lemonade? I see it comes from a bottle. What is there specific brand of lemonade you like?
No, any old lemonade.
Okay. So when television implodes, how does that affect you emotionally?
Oh? That was awful? But you know, the game was up and Tom wanted to get all the money, and so he went solo. And at the time I told him, look, I was thinking of leading the band anyway, so let's just call it quits. And I went on to make my first solo record for Electra called Alchemy.
Why were you thinking of leaving the band?
Well, I couldn't get any songwriting in. Tom had a lock on that, and he had a lock. He was one of the funniest people I've ever met, and I love him dearly. But he used to say no to everything under the sun. Used to shoot us in the foot. He had veto power, and managers came to us and wanted to manage us and make us millionaires, and he would say no. Scoundrels would come and he would say no,
and I'd agree with him. But there were legitimate people in the industry who would have stood on their heads and buckets of sand to help us. And he said no. And there's nothing you can do about that when you're in a group where one person is the principal singer songwriter, and that was Tom, and I lay no claim to that property. He was that and he was a genius and when we first started, he was a far better guitarist than I was. And yeah, so.
Why was he the type to always say no?
I think my own take on it is he had a fraternal twin and I think there was not enough room in the womb for the two of them, and I think they had a strange relationship. And because of it, Tom was afraid that somebody was going everybody was going to rip him off, that everybody was going to tell him what to do, and he don't want anybody telling him what to do. And I think it goes back to the womb. And it was a very deep streak in Tom and there was really nothing that could be done about it.
What happened with his brother.
Well, his brother died of a drug overdose in the eighties, I believe, Yeah, that's what happened to him.
But did that liberate Tom in some way?
I'm not sure if it did. You know, he was caught in a thing that was largely un conscious. His habits and drives, you know, precluded him suddenly seeing sunlight.
You know, the two television albums come out. First, one's a classic, second one doesn't get his good reviews, although I noticed you play Ain't That Nothing, which is my favorite song from that album.
Cool.
Does Tom ever wake up and realized, helly, maybe I made a mistake here.
Well, we did do a third record, and we got back together in ninety and ninety one and made a record for Capital, the third television epinonymous record, just called television anyway, the eponymous we went. We did a lot of touring between ninety one, ninety two and two thousand and seven, when I finally left the band.
Well, I guess you know this is this rock and roll one on one. Yeah, where the group came back together because that's the way everybody could get paid. Or did Tom have any artistic change and realize it'd be better to be with the group again.
The way it happened was both I had a manager and he had a manager, and they both ran into each other at a party, and at the party, you know, what's Tom doing? Not much? What's Richard doing much? Maybe we could get them together, and that's what happened. We took a year to hammer out a band agreement, you know, and one of the things Tom put in it was that the performers always needed to wear black shoes, I mean and ludicrous. Yeah, what are you going to do
with that? Anyway? And we but television always in live performances and in artists. Royalty split four ways, and that's still true even though Tom's no longer with us. We split four ways with the income, but he took the publishing, which is where the big money is. And you know, what can you do about that? I fought him on several songs, and I still have misgivings about several songs that I provided the essential parts for and didn't get credit.
What are you gonna do? You know? We got to move on.
Life is short, absolutely, I agree. So subsequent to television breaking up the first time?
The first time?
Yeah, the first time? And today, have you been able to make your living in music or did you ever have to have a street job?
No? I make my living through music. I still get paid for Marquee Moon of all things, and it's wonderful. It's coming up on our fiftieth.
The ear Okay, Marquis Moon, there's two albums for Elektra. And you know, usually everybody's in a negative position, so if you're making money, they're royalties from them, and not to match fact that that's right, they're split four ways.
That's right. And it took us eight years of legal maneuvering to get Electra to acknowledge that we were not in the red, but we were in the black, and they owed us a lot of money. And after, like I said, eight years of wrangling, we finally got them to acknowledge that, in fact, they owed us quite a bit of money, and so we got paid then and henceforth we get monies every three months or four months or whatever it is. I don't even pay attention.
But are they significant amounts?
Yeah? They're enough to live on. Okay, barely, barely barely if you're not not eating food. Food costs so much nowadays, there's you know, you better get skinny because it's ridiculous.
Okay, So how many times been married twice? So what can you tell us about marriage? Having been married twice?
Well, it's a wonderful institution. I'm a serial monogamist. I'm with one woman for four years and another woman with it for eight and then I was my first wife for twenty two years and we have a son that's now in his thirties. And my second wife, we've been together for sixteen years and she's just terrific, supports me in every way, and I go on tour, so you know, there's a certain amount of loneliness that occurs naturally, and
I'm not the one that goes skirt chasing anymore. It's a long time since that, so you know, marriage is great.
So how'd you meet your second wife?
She was at an AA I was at when she was like sixteen, and she looked at me, and I looked at her and sparks flew, but she was too young and nothing happened of it. Then when Facebook exploded, she got in touch with me and we began her correspondence and then we went on a date and then we got together. And that's the way it's been.
Okay, in between singer at the AA meeting and connecting on Facebook. How many years was that.
Ooh, twenty twenty five something like that, And.
When she reached out. Did you say to yourself, this woman is interested, maybe something's going on here, and say, oh, this is just somebody from my past.
Oh no, I knew right away. Oh that's that girl. There she is.
And had she been married before?
No, so it's our first marriage.
Okay. And what does she do all day when you're not talking to me and playing music?
Oh? Nothing much. Deals with her family. She took care of her aging parents till they passed away, the mother just recently and the father five years ago. She took care of them a great deal and that was kind of her job. So she's in a space now where she's not sure you know, what's supposed to be next. But we're making it. We're making it. We're doing all right.
Okay. So the kind of discussion we're having now, are these the kinds of discussions you have with your wife?
Sure? Yeah, we could we talk every day.
And what does your son do all day?
Uh? He's a computer whiz. Obviously, he's at that age where you know, computers were going up. And he does something for some financial organization that makes him loads of money. And so that's what he does. And he goes to visit his friends in India and here and there. You know, he's got friends and a good gig. I'm happy for him.
And how's your relationship with him?
Oh wonderful. He comes to my shows when I'm in New York City. He lives in Brooklyn.
And what caused the breakup of your first marriage?
Oh? I don't know. It just ran its course, I suppose. And after all this said and done, and she couldn't deal with me whatever.
Me is, Well, do you find that a lot of people can't deal with you?
No, not at this time. Maybe in the past. I can be snarky, and in the beginning of our interview I was rather.
Like that, why do you think you're like that?
I don't suffer foolishness as much as some people. But who determines what's foolishness or not? I don't know.
Well you get to determine, yeah, for myself. But the question would be when you first start to interact with people.
I try to be as graceful as as humanly possible, but people have their own level of understanding, and obviously they're going to come at you with that. I get a lot of hero worship lately, and sometimes it's difficult because people want to say hello and shake your hand, and then they don't want to let go. Literally, you've got people glimbing onto you. And you know, I've often thought, well, I'm gonna eventually I'm gonna need a bodyguard because some
people are absolutely out of their minds about it. And then they get a bit of alcohol in them and that's so and they approach you and they you know, as soon as you say, oh, I've got to go do this, or you know, we've had enough time together, and then they go, oh, you're a wash up and spit on you. You know, they can turn into like turn on a dime, But lately I haven't gotten any of that that type. Just the hero worship, guitar hero so.
To say, Okay, you know, it's like they say, you win an oscar and it feels great, but then all of a sudden you wake up a couple of days later, it's like nothing happened exactly. So does this hero worship do anything for you? And emotionally, well.
It's gratifying. I suppose that people are involved and interested in still in the things that I've done in my twenties with the CBGB's and television and like that. They're very obsessed with that period of time. And that's okay. I'm not the kind of person who doesn't want to talk about the past at all. I'm willing to talk about any part of my life. I'm proud of my life. I'm still here.
But does it bother you that some people are stuck in the past and you want.
People that's their problem or difficulty or maybe not, maybe they're just enjoying themselves.
Does your music mean as much to you today and is as fulfilling as it was back then?
It does? Yeah, I'm having a great time. We've just been on tour for a month and I loved it. Most of the shows sold. You know out, okay? And
where do you live now? I live in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where my wife, my current wife's parents were and she wanted to be able to be with them at the end of their lives, and so we came down here because the New York that I knew is gone and the New York that we were in we had a dispute with our landlord and he eventually had to buy us out of the apartment that paid for our move and where we were we going to go since she had contacts in Chattanooga who went there. I hardly go out.
I don't see many people. But I'm perfectly content being I've always been content being alone. In fact, I need a loneeness. I need not loneliness, the opposite a loneness, perfect a loneness.
Oh okay, there's a vibration between this a loneness and being lonely on the road. Tell us about that.
Well, I don't get lonely on the road. I'm talking to my wife every day, and I have my bandmates with me and there's no re And then I got the fans and people that come to the show, so there's no reason for me to get upset whatsoever. It's all good, at least in today's running.
Is this a loneness because you have so much you want to do alone or is it a socially aandwing anxiety.
Neither. It's really my content with myself, my ability to be with myself and enjoy my time with me with Richard. I don't need another person to authorize me to exist. And in yoga, yoga the ultimate goal is called kaivalia, which means perfect loneliness, not the opposite of loneliness. It's all grace.
And when you are alone, what are you doing?
How's that for an answer.
That I understood would be the answer that fits with your personality. But theoretically, you know, there are people who take drugs and just zone out. There are people who meditator, do yoga. There are people who read, people listen to music, people watch television.
I'd come into two and three of what you said, you listen to music and you read? Was that it? I don't listen to music.
You read and you watch television.
No, you read? You read this the first thing I mentioned.
Okay, the first thing. The first thing was meditating and yoga. Yes, I do that, And you also read? Do you read? I understand there's this gentleman who's informed your life. But do you read fiction and nonfiction too?
No? I read nonfiction science books mostly?
And what science books might they be?
Oh? Anything about physics, modern physics, historical physics, anything about chemistry, anything about astrobiology, anything about biology. Anything anything that is non fictional interests me. So I scurry along reading everything I can get my hands on in that area of expertise.
So let's assume you want to call somebody and your wife is predisposed you have like a close friend or close friends that you stay in regular contact with.
I have close friends, yeah, best friends, Yeah, I've always had best friends. A few of them, not too many.
And are they from what era in your life? Do you go through different ones or these the same ones for decades?
The same ones for decades? Yeah?
What is the commonality that makes them friends with you?
I wish I knew I could conjure up a few to my liking.
Okay, so if we will look at the world at large, what do you see down the pike?
I don't look down the pike.
Well, we've said here that there are a lot of somnambulent people who are just, you know, doing what they're supposed to do.
Who says they're supposed to do?
No, No, that's what they believe they're supposed to do.
Oh buy that.
So there's there's the climate crisis. Never mind political unrest. I'm not talking just about an election, but Ukraine, Israel, et cetera, et cetera. So did you think this is deregur or word a point of a it's derregar.
Mankind has always been at war since we were apes. We were being at odds with each other. And I don't really understand it fully, but people suddenly feel like they're not secure, that they're threatened, and this evokes an action from their instinctual and moving centers that turns into wars, and there's conflict all over the globe at the moment, genocides and pitched battles.
When we were growing up in the sixties, everybody was our age was a liberal. That's no longer the case, that's right. Why do you think that changed?
Well, you mentioned it before that as Reagan came in. Things changed with Reaganomics and the this split between the haves and the haves nots, and I think the have nots kind of woke up a little bit to their dismay at this situation, and it's only getting worse. So some of them cross over and pretend that they're on the other side. And you know, politically, it's a war going on, and hopefully it will resolve in November, but
I have no illusions about it. We will continue on a course of action determined by propaganda and more illusion.
It was a genius thing that the friends of mister Trump suggested that he learned chaos theory and this chaos theory has permeated his politics to the point that he has infatuated hundreds of thousands and millions of people that don't know how else to respond to this chaos, and he introduces more and more chaos, and he's been it's been suggested to him that he continue in this path of lying and people will eventually believe it because he repeats it enough. This is true from Goebbels on and
perhaps earlier. There was a guy who was a nephew of Sigmund Freud, and during World War two he was active in persuasion, and the cigarette companies came to him and said, we would like to introduce smoking to more women. And so he rounded up a bunch of women, and when the war was won, they were on parade and he gave all cigarettes and said, at my waving through the window or whatever my mark, you'll all light these cigarettes. And they all lit the cigarettes, and he said, gentlemen.
He had all the publicity people with him, and he said, gentlemen, I want you to observe the women. These are the flames of freedom. And from that moment on, nobody could complain about a woman smoking the same thing with the aspirin is somebody. You can't this is hard to believe, but somebody came up with the grand idea of tell of advertise not to the patient, but to the doctors and tell them to send them away, stating take two and call me in the morning. That was the go
to phrase. Take two meant that you used up your bottle of aspirin twice as fast. Why not take one? Why take two? Because it was a scam and it worked the same with the salmon industry got decimated by the tuna industry when they came out with the slogan Tuna Guaranteed not to turn pink in the can. I mean these kind of things. The toothpaste people were like, how can we increase our sales of toothpaste? Well, get
into the toothbrush business and make bigger brushes. Then people will naturally put on more toothpaste and they'll run out sooner and have to buy more. So we've been driven by this kind of insanity for as long as I can remember. You know, I'm born aways back, but not that far. And it's been going on ever since.
So this chaos theory is there? Any is there any anthidotes? Is there any fight it.
Nope, just to be vertical, to really understand what I'll say, Jesus Christ, for want of a stronger personality, what he actually said and taught to be vertical, to be sober, and not in the sense of alcohol, in the sense of being upright, being vertical. You know, we spend half our lives horizontally asleep. Then most people their bodies get up, but they don't. They continue dreaming through the day and through the night. And that's the shame that human beings refuse to feel. So they invent.
A little bit slower. When you say that you're dreaming, what are they actually dreaming about?
Take a look. They're dreaming of their fantasies. They're dreaming of their future, they're dreaming of their past. You ever get into an argument with somebody and you know you're wrong, Then the next three days you have that same dialogue in your head, but you keep changing your response so that you'll be upright and right. That's how we lose touch with ourselves, this kind of self inaugurated correctness, to be brutally upright all the time without concern for anybody else.
Okay, that's bad, you're saying that's bad.
Yeah, whatever bad is okay?
And do you care about legacy at all?
Sure I do.
I already have one, but it's important to you to be remembered.
Well, I've made name Gladiators. Spartacus has a name. He's immortal through his name. Kennedy has name and more. And that's one way to become immortal is to make a name for oneself. I'm not that immortal. Let me tell you. I die, and the physical body dies, and the rest of me dies after some time, I'm sure, and I'll just go on. But the name won't last somewhere, you know, fifty to one hundred years from now, television as a band won't exist maybe two hundred years. We're not Benjamin Franklin.
We didn't invent anything.
Although it's interesting what is remembered in the future is not always what was big in its era.
That's absolutely correct.
Yeah, well, Richard, I want to thank you so much for taking time to speak with my audience and let them in on some of your philosophy and feelings and beliefs. So thanks so much.
All right, thank you very much for talking with me. I hope I wasn't too antagonistic at the beginning, and I hope that we've helped some of your audience members come to a better state inside themselves.
Let's hope. Until next time, this is Bob Left SAIDs