Episode 118: Old Wisdom with David Crosby and The Bellamy Brothers
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Time Crisis.
In a time of crisis.
A FaceTime Time Crisis.
In this episode, we dig even deeper into the concept of old wisdom.
We talk to the men behind the song "Old Hippie".
The Bellamy Brothers.
We also talk to the absolute legend and icon, David Crosby.
This is an episode full of wisdom.
Time Crisis with Ezra Koenig.
They passed me by, all of those great romances.
They were a threat, robbing me of my rightful chances.
My picture clear, everything seemed so easy.
And so I dealt you the blow, one of us had to go.
Now it's different, I want you to know.
One of us is crying, one of us is lying.
Leave it on me babe.
Time Crisis back again, what's up Jake?
Hey man, good to see you again on the FT.
I mean at this point this is just kind of reality.
Yeah.
Yeah, you make like plans, we had a little drink the other night.
That was fun.
With the ladies.
Yeah, a non-Time Crisis hangout.
But still through FaceTime.
How are you holding up, what's your mood like?
My mood's good, yeah, pretty solid.
I just found out that I'm a TikTok sensation.
Oh right, so you were checking the old Wikipedia.
Some prankster added TikTok sensation to your bio.
News to me.
I mean, was that even like a Time Crisis joke?
We had jokes about YouTubers.
Yes.
We've never even covered TikTok on this show, do you know what TikTok is?
Not really, I mean it's like you post a video that, does the video go away or is it permanent?
I think if you wanted to it can be permanent, because people like to share TikToks.
It's a little like Vine, you remember Vine?
Right, I downloaded TikTok to my phone and I've never opened it.
Really?
Yeah.
Who possessed you to download TikTok?
A friend of mine who's also my age works for like a music licensing firm.
And she was like, oh yeah, like so much of the stuff that I run across or am shown is on TikTok.
It's definitely a phenomenon now, you hear a lot about it in the music industry, is that songs become hits.
Even like old songs that kind of like missed their chance, they become hits because somebody zeros in on like a 10 second part of it.
And there's like something funny you can do, like dance to it, do a meme to it.
And then suddenly everybody knows the song.
And yeah, whenever I talk to like music industry people who have like kids who are like 10 through 14, they're just like, oh yeah, they're like obsessed with that song.
Or at least like, you know, this 10 second part of it and they only know it through TikTok.
I feel like we've had a song or two in the top five that has like resurfaced because of TikTok.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
I think just last week when we listened to that Russian remix of a song, it kind of got a second life on TikTok.
I wonder if I put Mountain Brews on TikTok, it'll blow up.
That'd be tight because right now with all these TikTok hits, none of it is anything where you're just like, wow, this new technology radically shifted taste.
It's all just like this like EDM song or this like rap song became a hit starting with TikTok.
You're kind of like, yeah, all right.
I mean, it's cool for those songs, but those are like well-represented genres.
It would be kind of like wild if somebody was like, yeah, this kid just made like a TikTok to this Mountain Brews song.
And, you know, it was like, it was Jake's first top 40 hit.
First and last.
Why can't that be like a visual meme?
Suddenly all these kids, they can't go hang out, you know, at 7-Eleven anymore.
And you got all these kids from like rural areas just climbing up to the top of mountains with a can of something.
And just like, you know, 10 seconds Mountain Brew, it becomes like a meme.
It's Mountain Brewing.
It's sweeping the nation and like it's encouraging kids to get outdoors, hike a little bit.
Yeah, it could be like a Gatorade or, you know, like a Rockstar Energy drink.
We're not encouraging underage drinking.
So on TikTok, there is a Sweet Chili Heat by the Mountain Brews.
Oh, really?
You can listen to it. Yeah, it has zero views.
Oh, wow.
Wait, but what do you mean?
But somebody made a video or the song is in the system.
Someone just ripped it, which I've actually never seen on TikTok.
It's just the audio for Sweet Chili Heat.
What's the visual?
The visual is, I think, the cover of the album.
Okay.
From Let It Grow.
Weird. So it's not like a real, it's not a real TikTok.
No, but it is on the platform.
So maybe there's just someone who's just waiting to discover it and make it a viral sensation.
The only things that I've heard of that are like not exactly mainstream that kind of become hits are kind of like this,
I don't know what you call it, the kind of like neo indie pop.
I don't know if any music critics have come up with like a good word to describe it.
It's kind of like the post-Mac DeMarco, Tame Impala indie pop.
But I haven't heard anything about like a real old song, just like some super weird, old, crunchy song.
But that'd be tight.
Yeah, like there could be like a look at what the light did now, Little Wings, Renaissance.
Right.
Well, there is Kyle, the opening of the song, you know, Kyle going, time to crack another one.
Oh, no, Sweet Chili Heat.
On Sweet Chili Heat.
He's like, ooh, first one of the evening.
Oh, yeah. That moment could become a TikTok moment.
You're right.
I guess it's not what the kids are looking for.
I mean, but it's so much of it's about dancing, too.
So, you know, if your music doesn't encourage choreography, you know, you're definitely going to be at a disadvantage in the TikTok ecosystem.
Part of TikTok, I think, also is that you can record your dancing at a slower tempo and then speed it up and you're kind of like hitting it in an impressive way.
But yeah, like tasteful country rock might not inspire the same type of choreography.
So it might just be at a permanent disadvantage.
Well, I got to rethink the next EP then.
TikTok sensation.
You know what? I would I'd be happy for you if you became a TikTok sensation.
But I don't think you need more added to your opening Wikipedia sentence.
I think you've discussed on the show.
It's perfect.
American painter and radio personality.
Done.
Yeah, of course, you can go accomplish many more things in life outside of those two things.
But that's the perfect combo.
That's tight. The more like the more you add to that sentence, the weaker it becomes.
Right. Becomes diluted. Right.
American painter and radio personality.
I think somebody did a shirt of I think I saw that on From the Freezer.
There was like a Jake Longstreet. Obviously, there's the Wikipedia shirt, but there's another one.
Right.
Like said, Jake, American painter and radio personality.
Hannah made one of those, you know, those directors chairs, those like canvas directors chairs.
Oh, yeah.
And it has like the name of the actor or the director.
She made one for me that says Jake Longstreet, American painter and radio personality.
That's amazing.
Yeah.
Where do you have that now?
It's out on the patio.
Do you ever have like some people over for, you know, some chips and guac and beers and you come out and like somebody sitting in that chair and you're just like, it's like
Hannah's friend's boyfriend.
You don't know that well or something. And you're just like, uh, OK.
Yeah, bro. Get out of my seat.
Bro, read the canvas.
Oh, yeah. Sorry, man.
You wouldn't just go sit at the head of the table if you got invited over to somebody's house for Thanksgiving.
You don't just plop down in their director's chair.
Sunday morning, why don't we go for a hike?
Meet at the trailhead light around a quarter to three.
Me and Bobby stayed out late last night.
Get on the trail, shake the cobwebs free.
As we get to the top of the mountain, there's a view.
Take a load off and crack a few mountain brews.
Mountain brews.
Sweet mountain brews.
Mountain brews.
Sweet as morning dew.
The way time passes in these strange and uncertain times is pretty strange and uncertain.
And even though we do the show weekly, I feel like we are almost less on top of the current events than we were when we did it biweekly.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Like so much happens week to week. So I feel like I can barely even keep track.
One thing I did make a mental note to remember is that last week we talked about Nancy Pelosi showing off her two refrigerators in her James Corden interview.
And talking about all the ice cream that she has stockpiled for her family.
Like, you know, nothing wrong with having a sweet tooth.
But we were kind of half joking.
But also we were like a little bit harshed out by it.
We were half joking about that, you know, it's like perfect ammo for Trump to be like, you know, folks, like, what's up with this?
This woman with two fridges, she's here telling you she's for the working people.
Get out of here.
And like two days later, there was, you know, some like a Donald Trump campaign.
Republican ad was made that basically with like really like intense dark music.
Juxtaposing working class people in America, like showing their empty fridges and being like, we're screwed over, man, we're starving.
And then cutting to Nancy Pelosi in front of her two fridges, like fighting into a Dove bar and being like, I love chocolate.
And they call her Nancy Antoinette, a play on Marie Antoinette, let them eat cake.
And basically said, let them eat ice cream.
And you watch it and you're just like, on the one hand, you're just like, man, you guys, Trump, get out of here.
Like you really care about working people and starving people.
And you're obviously messing up the situation so much.
But there's also that part of you that's just like, God, how can you hand that footage over to the Republicans on a golden platter?
Just like you're doing their job for them in a way.
You're basically like just in front of the two fridges.
And they also in the ad, they say that the fridge costs twenty four thousand dollars.
Although we were discussing on the T.C. text thread, that's a little bit unclear if each fridge costs twelve thousand dollars or if each one costs twenty four thousand
dollars.
Based on your research, Jake, you were leaning towards we're talking twenty four K total for the whole fridge.
Yeah, based on just very cursory research on high end fridges that you could buy for your house, they top out at around fifteen grand.
Right. So it's very unlikely that each one of those fridges individually cost twenty four thousand dollars.
Right. And again, you know, one of the tragedies of this is that Nancy Pelosi is a very rich person.
She and her husband are very wealthy. I think she might be the wealthiest person in Congress, certainly up there.
I guess she can't help the house she lives in. You know, she's quarantined.
There probably aren't too many corners of her, you know, gorgeous San Francisco abode that look like a working class Americans.
OK, we understand she lives in like a high end place, but all they would have had to do is move the camera one foot to the left.
Right. And she would have just looked like a regular rich person, you know, with one fancy fridge.
Nobody would have said anything. I think even if she just pulled open one fridge and said, we got a lot of ice cream in here.
I think people because honestly, even when you're buying bougie, expensive ice cream like Jenny's, that was the brand that she had,
which is a very expensive hipster, bougie brand. But it is from the Midwest. It's from Ohio.
You know, the coastal elites love it, but it's like, cool. It comes from the heartland. Twelve dollars a pint.
OK, that's expensive. That's really expensive. But still, you know, it's like a small business started in Ohio.
It wasn't starting, you know, Loving that. So even if she pulled it open and had like four hundred dollars worth of ice cream,
that doesn't hit as hard as like the two fridge thing.
So all they would have to do is move the camera a little bit and she would have just looked like a normal rich person standing in front of their one expensive fridge full of
expensive food.
It's just that two fridge thing, man, just took it to the next level.
And it's unbelievable that nobody involved in the making of the video, which, you know, I guess in quarantine times might not be a lot of people even like pause for a
second.
I was just going to say maybe because she's quarantined, she doesn't have like some younger, less fabulously wealthy people with her who would be like, let's maybe
only show one fridge.
Right. Is it possible that she actually chose that camera position because she wanted to show both fridges a little bit?
I think Nancy Pelosi is a reasonable person. And I'm sure if you talk to her about, you know, the needs of working people and wealth inequality in this country,
despite her fabulous wealth, I 100 percent know and believe that she would have a much better sympathetic take on it than Donald Trump.
We're not questioning that, but these are the kind of paradoxes, the inconsistencies of a lot of people's lives.
And, you know, late capitalist America, it is possible that even though she cares about that stuff, advocates for it more than a Donald Trump.
She's only human. And there might be a part of her that's like maybe they recently renovated that kitchen and maybe she was really involved in it.
And, you know, she had some pride in the decor she picked out and the aesthetic decisions she made.
And it is possible that she might have been like having the two fridges created some sort of symmetry in it that she was like really proud of.
And maybe there was a part of her that was like, you know, move the camera so you can see both refrigerators.
Not because she was trying to flex on Americans and say, I'm so much richer than you, but just because she's a little bit out of touch and just wanted to be like, oh, yeah,
yeah.
The kitchen looks really nice when you can see both fridges. I feel like that actually could be possible.
Maybe she hosts a lot, you know, maybe she's hosting a lot of fundraisers for other local politicians farther down the food chain or, you know.
Right. I can totally believe that, too, that I don't think she's spoken on this, but I can totally believe that if like if she ever had to, that she would just be like, OK,
first of all, we don't have two fridges just because we, you know, eat so much food or something.
Our house is a base of operation. There are times where I have twenty five people in my house.
We're not even throwing a party between me and my husband and everybody who works for us.
We have a lot of people. And I'm sorry, but one refrigerator is not going to handle everything.
I liked I always like to make sure that we have subs for the interns.
I like to make sure that we have lots of drinks and I'm not going to send an intern to the garage to go get a root beer.
I want to make sure that there's always a few root beers, Coke, Diet Coke. I want to make sure there's Pepsi for people who don't like Coke.
I want to make sure there's RC Cola. And, you know, she might frame it that way. And that's why I need two fridges in the kitchen.
And she might be like, you know what? And if and yeah, I'm a wealthy person and I put money towards that. But like, I'm not ashamed of that.
What do you think the odds are that she would call in to discuss the two fridges?
I don't know. It's possible. I saw her.
I went to this party before the Grammys, the Clive Davis party, and she was there and I saw her.
She was like saying what's up to a lot of music industry people. Not me, of course.
But, you know, as somebody who represents California, somebody with a long history in California politics.
Sure. Of course, she's going to be very tapped in with the show business, which, again, is not to say that I have that connection, but just that that connection.
You know, maybe I know somebody who knows somebody who knows Nancy Pelosi.
But I could also imagine just from like a communications point of view that there she's just like, you know what? Let that story die.
And then the Republicans put it in an ad and probably everybody's like in a week, this won't matter.
Trump will be up to some new nonsense and we won't be sweating it anymore.
Sometimes.
You slow down and discover.
Can't help but wonder.
What's happening to my companion.
Are they lost or are they found?
Have they counted the cost of the tape to bring down?
All the earthly principles they're going to have to abandon.
And there's a slow, slow train coming.
I've been around.
I wanted to look up Donald Trump kitchens because I was like, I wonder what his kitchen looks like.
It was kind of hard to find. He also has so many residences.
Right. And I also have a feeling with like a Trump type dude.
It's possible he's like never in the kitchen.
Oh, completely.
I could also imagine Donald Trump having like a mini fridge in his office or bedroom where he just like has the staff like bring stuff from the main kitchen there all the
time.
Like there's no way that he's like walking to the kitchen to get a Diet Coke.
That's like within arm's reach already.
So you always see there's like these famous pictures of his New York apartment, which for a long time was his primary residence.
You can probably picture it. There's like photo shoots with him and Melania and everything's gold.
And it's like really ostentatious.
And, you know, I only spent a few minutes on it, but I was like Donald Trump kitchen.
And there kept these pictures kept coming up of the living room and the bedroom, even the bathroom.
But I couldn't see what the kitchen looked like.
He might be old school, too, where he's just kind of like the kitchen.
I'm not going to hang out in the kitchen. The kitchen is where the cooks make my food and then they bring it to my grand dining room.
Yeah, it's the servants are working there.
Right. That's kind of like a new phenomenon.
Relatively recently speaking, is that the kitchen is where everybody wants to hang out.
The kitchen is like actually better than the dining room.
It's not the place where the working class toils.
It's the place where everybody kind of like vibes out.
Right. Everyone's working on their new Alice in Roman recipe, hanging out by the kitchen aisle.
Right. Just having fun.
Kitchen Island. Yeah.
Maybe once in a blue moon, Trump will wander into the kitchen and make like a turkey sandwich.
But that's pushing it.
Make a turkey sandwich.
You know what I'm saying? Like if it's like one in the morning and this is before Trump's president, he's just one in the morning.
Trump, he's in his like his huge apartment in New York City.
It's 1 a.m. He's starving.
Yeah.
What's he do? He goes into the kitchen and like heating up a cereal.
Yeah. Microwaving something.
Making it. I think I could see him making a sandwich.
Right. I guess nobody's on deck.
I could imagine he never makes anything and that every day the staff like.
Oh, I see.
Makes like two or three extra lunches.
So like at any given moment, if you open the fridge, there's like a labeled like turkey sandwich Monday, March 13 or some shit.
And he just like grabs it. And if he doesn't eat it that night, they just like throw it away.
Tossed.
I think it's probably more like that.
I also wonder, yeah, what the food situation is like at the White House.
I have some vague memory of like one time Vampire Weekend, like took a tour of the White House.
Wow.
There's like one of Obama's staffers was like coming to our show in D.C.
And he was like, I'll give you guys a tour if you want.
So we like rolled over and kind of showed us around.
One thing that stood out to me was that there was something about they made it clear at some point that the president pays for their own food.
In fact, I've met I'd love to get into the details of this because I can't totally remember.
But I think we were like they're like showing us something.
Maybe the president like in the residence, the food is covered by the American taxpayer.
But in some kind of like situation room, if they're having lunch, there's like a menu with prices or something.
I can't totally remember.
But I just remember like just picturing every month like Obama or something.
OK, maybe this is it. Maybe they were like, listen, if it's like a state dinner that the president's not paying for his meal, that's his big catered event.
And that's, you know, the government pays for that. That's a state dinner.
We consider that a government expense that our president will like, you know, host the, you know, German chancellor or something.
But, you know, if it's ordering a BLT from the White House kitchen for lunch on just a working day.
Yeah, that goes on his tab.
I actually have done the number crunch.
Yeah, Seinfeld's absence.
Yeah, it is a fact that the president pays for the first family's groceries for their private meals.
That includes Thanksgiving.
That includes private parties and birthday parties.
So, yes, I think for a state dinner. No, that's probably something that's covered by the taxpayers.
But everything else is covered by the first family.
That's wild. I wonder if they're like, it's like airport prices.
Just like, oh yeah.
$17.99 for this turkey club. Are you kidding me?
They must not have to pay for the staff because that would be out of control.
But, you know, the president makes what, a couple hundred grand a year.
It's one thing to buy groceries for your family. It's another thing you can't be paying the whole kitchen staff.
I bet if you're like the secretary of defense and you're ordering a turkey club, you're paying for that.
Yes.
Right.
The White House must have a lot of fridges.
Maybe one is like the first family's household groceries.
And then the other is just like the kind of industrial institutional kitchen and pantry that you need to be making, you know, 200 turkey clubs a day for staffers.
And people like that.
It's probably like a big walk-in freezer.
Which is appropriate because they sometimes have to do state dinners and things like that.
I'm glad we're getting to the bottom of this.
There's probably more, but we'll save that for another episode.
Yeah. And also whatever the rules were, you know that Trump is just going absolutely.
Oh, haggled him. He talked him way down. He's a great deal maker.
And probably like sending the Secret Service out like constantly just to go grab McDonald's.
Well, you know, we talked about this before.
Trump asked the White House kitchen to recreate the McDonald's hamburger.
Wow.
When he couldn't go to McDonald's.
So he's, I mean, I'm reading through basically his sort of daily meal plan.
Yeah.
And yeah, first of all, it says like he eats like a just a giant breakfast like a McDonald's McMuffin, bacon, eggs, cereal, that sort of thing.
Then he's like pretty light on lunch.
They say he's a fan of meatloaf, which I think is sort of funny.
Yeah. And dinner, he's, it's fast food.
Honestly, like I think I know that Obama brought this chef, Sam Cass, from Chicago, like a really great Chicago chef to the White House to be his personal chef, which I'm
sure is pretty pricey.
But he's the one who but very clean farm to table.
So he was probably paying for that show.
And he had to have paid for that. Yes.
Right. Because you always hear with the White House staff that there's people who have worked there for 50 years through every administration, you know, working in
the kitchen or.
You know, something like that.
So, OK, so maybe Obama had that kind of money when he entered the White House to like bring his personal chef.
Yeah, I think that also I would just assume that that person that Sam I know is sort of like family to the Obamas and probably took some kind of pay cut leaving his
restaurant to do it.
But, yeah, they had to pay for it.
Yeah, I'm just looking just looking at what else he Trump eats.
It definitely sounds like he's certainly cheaper.
He's crushing 12. We've talked about this.
He crushes 12 diet cokes a day.
Strong, right?
It's very strong.
Potato chip. Is he getting straight up fast food?
Yeah, like Arby's and and Wendy's and Burger King for dinner, like delivered.
Yes.
So it's not the White House facsimile of those.
No, he's asked the White House to create a facsimile of it.
Probably because he can't always just have someone run out in the morning, but he's often eating actual fast food.
And I imagine it's difficult to get it to make it back to the White House, make it through all that security and keep it piping hot.
Yeah.
You know, because they have such hardcore security protocols.
Even the Secret Service, dude, you know, they have to probably, you know, put that through the metal detector.
They must have like a really good like thermal bag.
Right. As soon as they get it at McDonald's, they put it in, yeah, I guess like some kind of delivery bag.
Yeah.
Maybe even a next level one that has like a battery pack to keep it hot.
In 1984, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection.
Slowly screwing my way across Europe.
They had to make a correction.
Broken limbs, smoking where the infrared deer ones in the digital snakes.
I tell you, they make it so you can't shake hands.
When they make your hands shake.
I know you like to line dance.
Everything's so democratic and cool.
But baby, there's no guidance when you random move.
Have we talked about why he likes fast food? It's fascinating.
He has a specific reason?
Yeah, I'm sure he just sort of has like the taste, obviously he loves.
But I've been thinking about this a lot, obviously, through quarantine and where I'd be comfortable eating.
This is a quote from Trump.
One bad hamburger, you can destroy McDonald's.
One bad hamburger and you take Wendy's and all these other places and they're out of business.
I like cleanliness.
I think you're better off going there than maybe someplace that you have no idea where the food's coming from.
He likes the industrialized system around it.
Well, and to be fair, that's part of the origin of fast food.
You know, as we've discussed with the founder and McDonald's.
Sure.
This obsession with consistency.
Because back in the day, you're taking your family on a road trip.
And there probably was some like legit, even though right now, you know, from most of our POVs,
you want to be hitting small town mom and pop places because you want that local flavor and that variety.
You could imagine back in the day, people being a little more freaked out about like, what am I about to eat?
What if this is bad?
What if this like makes me sick or something?
And to feel like you're going to the same place every single time.
Yeah, sure.
I think the shift came from after like the 50s and 60s and people appreciating the consistency.
A lot of people started to be like, yeah, but it's consistently unhealthy,
which maybe Trump is not worried about too much.
What also makes me think that he has not actually stepped foot inside a fast food restaurant in many decades.
Because, yeah, like the 1950s version of a fast food restaurant was that it was clean and bright and new.
But now it's like those places are dingy, man.
Yeah, I mean, I guess it's funny, too.
It's like, no matter how many times they renovate or open new places,
it's just kind of like the bloom is off the rose from a brand.
Like I can't remember. I think we've talked about it before with like a Starbucks or Chipotle.
These places that kind of read as being like this new generation of fast food.
And in the 90s and 2000s, they felt like, yeah, very clean and put together.
And then just as time goes on, yeah, you're more likely than not to encounter a kind of dingy one.
It doesn't mean the food's unclean, but just, yeah,
it doesn't feel like you're entering a space that reads as deeply clean.
I just have to tell you, Trump's dinner order is a full McDonald's dinner of two Big Macs,
two filet of fish sandwiches and a chocolate shake, 2430 calories.
That's his dinner order.
So no fries.
It looks like no fries.
Do you remember that Morgan Spurlock documentary, Super Size Me?
Yeah, sure.
And there was a guy in that doc who was briefly featured who's been eating a McDonald's hamburger every day for like decades.
Oh, yeah. And I remember he was like really skinny.
And the catch was he never eats the fries.
Right. There might be something to that.
I've often found when I eat like fast food or even not fast food, even at like a nice restaurant,
if you get like a cheeseburger and fries, there is that feeling of like,
it's the fries that puts you over the edge.
Back when people gathered together at restaurants,
that was a classic low key move that actually had big consequences.
It's just like, get some fries for the table.
Fries for the table.
I mean, like how many could each person possibly eat?
Then they bring out some giant thing of fries.
Next thing you know, before your main course arrive,
you've already eaten like three potatoes worth of like salty ass fries.
Yeah, that'll f*** you up.
I don't agree with President Trump on much, but his anti-fry stance makes sense.
Fries should be thought of as like a meal.
That's what I like up in Canada.
They do poutine and it's like that.
That's it. That's what you're eating.
You could go big with like the meat and the gravy and all that stuff.
But like, that's the meal.
And the idea of being like, I think I have been to restaurants,
at least in the US and maybe a Canadian person will correct me.
Sometimes you get poutine for the table and everybody still has like a burger or something.
But it's just like too much.
Fries are like a meal.
Same with nachos. Nachos should be a meal, not a side.
Oh, fully agree.
I always try to exercise restraint and order a salad instead of fries when I'm at a restaurant.
If I'm doing like a burger or a sandwich, I try to, I mean, once in a while I'll break down and get fries.
But 90% of the time I'm going side salad with a sandwich or a burger.
That makes a lot of sense.
I feel great about it.
And you know what? I like that. Just having a policy.
Yep.
Where it's not every single, yeah, because I don't have a policy.
So I feel like every time I'm in burger mode, then it's like, you know, the debate begins anew.
Yep.
Well, you know, it's just one meal, blah, blah, blah, you know, but it's a lot.
I imagine fry consumption is really down in the US because it's such a, it's so not a home food.
Of course you can make fries at home.
Yep.
And people do. I've had fries at home.
And you can buy like the frozen, like some Ore-Ida frozen fries and make them at home.
But at the end of the day, a truly great fry involves a deep fryer, right?
A big industrial deep fryer.
So it's like, it's just not something that you can really pull off at home.
Although some people have a deep fryer.
Probably some people have two deep fryers, two deep fryer households.
That would be, that would be such a deep choice to like buy a deep fryer for your house.
I mean, maybe if you have like eight kids and you're just like, f*** it, everybody gets one burger and then we're doing a giant plate of fries.
You have that basket with the, you're just dumping the like raw frozen sliced potatoes into the basket and then just the dunk.
It's basically, it's impossible to make like a classic fry without a deep fryer, right?
Because there was like a video I used to always see.
I mean, it's basically a vine.
I'm sure now it's on TikTok, remix.
That's like a dude who has like, basically like a pot of like boiling oil on his stove.
And then he like, I think he like throws some like fries in or something.
Like that.
And it basically like explodes and it's like, because you can't, you can't just use oil and a pot and a stove to do something like that.
So yeah, I imagine that fry consumption is way down.
I guess luckily the potato industry, if they react quickly enough, they can start pushing their potatoes, you know, into other potato arenas and not keep it as fries.
One place that I read about that doesn't quite have that luxury or one industry is the chicken wing industry.
Did you see this chick?
There was this, there was an article about how, you know, they, the chicken wing industry, which is, must be somewhat distinct from just the general chicken industry.
Cause you got to grow the chicken in such a way that the wing is the right size and who knows what kind of weirdo science experiment they do.
But basically such a huge percentage of chicken wing consumption happens at sporting events.
And again, it's an outside the home food.
So basically they were saying how the, starting with the cancellation of March madness, the NCAA tournament and the NBA season, like things were, you know, they were
on track like Superbowl season.
Great.
They produce a load of wings, a load of wings are consumed at Superbowl weekend.
But then their next big spike in the year is March as more people are like, I don't know, going to events, watching games at like a Buffalo wild wings or a sports bar.
Yeah.
Suddenly the, the demand just plummeted.
There's no way that the average person is going to eat that many wings when there's not basketball to watch and certainly not at their house.
It's like the price of oil.
Yeah, exactly.
So the price of chicken wings just plummeted.
You have all these chicken wing producers just sitting on this, all this stuff.
And you would think that there'd be some way to like get those wings to hungry people.
But then nobody's coordinating that.
And in all likelihood, they're probably just destroying the wings because these businesses are like, well, we don't know how to do that.
And we're not going to spend our own money to, you know, schlep our wings across the country.
Yeah, it's crazy how the, the price of oil briefly dipped below zero.
And so the oil producers were like paying people to take oil off their hands for a day.
Right.
There's nowhere to put it.
That would have been great if chicken wings price dip below zero and Purdue and Tyson were paying people to take their wings to food banks.
That would have been cool.
I mean, hopefully some of that did happen, but yet the same thing, oil, chicken wings, fries.
That's a backbone of the American economy.
I mean, there must be so many other weird food things like that, like just truly outside the home foods that just the demand essentially drops to zero.
Funnel cakes.
I wonder if there's like a funnel cake distributor who's just like slashing prices.
We should look some of this stuff up.
And I wonder if, if you do happen to live near like a chicken wing distributor, if you could go get a great deal right now.
Yeah, you get that chest freezer.
If you have a...
Lonnie's dad style.
If you have a chest freezer, you could fill it with fries and chicken wings.
And yeah, because there must be these companies that are supply bowling alleys and arenas.
And you know, they're, they must be sitting on all sorts of weird stuff that they just like can't really do anything with.
So on the last episode...
Oh, hey, what's up?
Hey, what's up guys?
Just saying what's up.
Chilling.
So on the last episode, we listened to a song called Old Hippie by the Bellamy Brothers.
And it's a song that made a big impression on me and Jake.
A touching song about a hippie born in 1950.
And this song came out in 1985 when this guy was 35.
And it tells the story of this 35 year old hippie.
Doesn't quite know what to do with himself.
Should he hang on to the old ways?
Should he grab on to the new?
You know, we kind of imagined this dude maybe like living with his parents,
growing a little bit of weed in the backyard.
Just kind of not sure what music to listen to in between generations, trying to figure it all out.
And we found it to be a very interesting song.
What we didn't know is that Old Hippie is more than just a song.
There's actually a whole Old Hippie universe.
And there's many songs.
In fact, the Bellamy Brothers have released three sequels to Old Hippie.
So we had no idea and we were just jamming out to the original Old Hippie from 1985.
So the first sequel, which is called Old Hippie in parentheses, the sequel.
And I think this is one of the more interesting ones.
So let's check out Old Hippie the sequel, which came out in '95.
He'll be 45 come Wednesday.
His gray hair is getting thin.
Ten years later.
Yeah.
But he's still hanging in there.
Don't feel too bad for the shape he's in.
He's seen yuppies in the White House, but he thinks they're going to fail.
Because he just don't trust a president that never has in hell.
And he prays to God to stop his crime.
But it seems to no avail.
Very provocative.
Very convoluted message.
Right.
So clearly this is the Clinton years.
Clinton is the yuppie in the White House.
You know, for our younger listeners who don't remember,
it's kind of quaint to think that there was a time when there was this
like whole big scandal/joke about whether or not Bill Clinton never smoked weed.
And he was, I think, the first president ever to admit that he smoked weed.
Which, you know, in the early '90s kind of made him cool to admit that.
Edgy.
He made him edgy to admit he'd smoked weed.
Because also, you know, he was a dude who like grew up in the '60s.
Like it'd be weird if he was never even around it.
He had no plausible deniability.
But even then, the early '90s, he couldn't say like,
"Hell yeah, I smoked weed for years, man. But not anymore."
I'm like, you know.
So the way that he kind of dealt with it was by saying,
"I smoked weed, but I didn't inhale."
It's the perfect centrist move, right?
Right.
Arguably modern centrism began with that.
It's like all this surface stuff with none of what actually matters.
The exact quote he said was,
"When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two,
and I didn't like it, I didn't inhale it, and I never tried it again."
Okay, so even that statement is totally convoluted.
So maybe the Bellamy brothers are right to call that out.
But so, returning back to old Hippie, though,
what I was going to say, they're all over the place.
Because he's, like on one hand, he's a yuppie in the White House.
And he thinks that Clinton will fail.
But he also can't trust the president because he never inhaled.
So which is it?
That Clinton is too much of a wimp,
and he's not a real hippie, so he didn't inhale?
Or is he a yuppie, who's like a square?
Right.
It's confusing.
And then he adds, "He prays to God to stop this crime,
but it seems to no avail."
I like to imagine that the crime they're talking about
is the crime of smoking weed but not inhaling.
But I think what they're talking about is kind of more like
the right-wing '90s talking point.
That's just like, "Crime is out of control."
Right.
"We need a law and order president."
And the truth is, the Democrats, infamously,
a year before the song came out, pushed the crime bill,
which still haunts the Clintons and the Bidens, you know,
because it locked up unfairly many, many people,
mostly African-Americans.
I mean, look, I could imagine an old hippie
who was very confident in his worldview in his 20s
started to question his 30s, and by 40,
he just, like, is kind of weird and bitter and hates everything.
He's just like, "F--- yuppie Clinton, man.
He's fake as hell, man. He didn't even inhale weed.
And on top of that, he's not tough on crime."
And you're just like, "Whoa, whoa. Bro, what the f---?
You're all over the place."
And then he's just like, "Yeah, so what? This world's crazy."
♪ Well, he still loves country music ♪
♪ He's been left out in the dark ♪
♪
♪ 'Cause they don't play Merle and George no more ♪
♪ He don't know Billy Ray Vergarth ♪
He likes old country. He doesn't like '90s country.
♪ And he's heard of Woodstock too ♪
♪ But it never could compete ♪
♪ 'Cause he was there the day that Hendrix ♪
♪ Played the anthem with his teeth ♪
Damn.
♪ Back when all those grunge bands ♪
♪ Couldn't even keep a beat ♪
All right, he doesn't like grunge. He doesn't like '90s country.
That makes sense.
♪ He's an old hippie, even older than before ♪
♪ Wondering what to pay attention to ♪
♪ And what should he know ♪
♪ He's an old hippie still just into the change ♪
♪ He just tried to find some balance ♪
♪ In a world gone totally insane ♪
Okay, so the second verse makes total sense.
He's this guy who--
He didn't know what to listen to in the '80s.
He got into country 'cause he wasn't into new wave.
And now it's a whole new decade,
and there's this, like, weird new commercial country,
like Billy Ray, Cyrus, and Garth Brooks.
Yeah.
He's like, "I don't know."
He thought I liked country, but I don't know
if I like this, like, stadium country.
And he's also not into grunge because he's like,
"Man, there's nothing that a candlebox is doing
that Jimi Hendrix didn't do better."
Like, fair enough.
That's, like, probably a lot of 45-year-olds
felt that way in the '90s.
But the chorus, which they changed
for this version of "Old Hippie,"
is basically, he's just trying to find some balance
in a world gone totally insane.
And even though this song is not as moving
as the original "Old Hippie,"
it does seem kind of right on the money
about, like, the worldview of a lot of
former hippies in the '90s
who had some weird mix of, like,
hippie indignation plus just, like,
the beginning of, like, middle-aged anger.
It reminds me a lot of
when the Eagles came back in the early '90s,
and you had, like, Don Henley,
who's ostensibly, like, a Democrat,
you know, he's very into conservation.
They were definitely, I think,
Clinton supporters.
And then their comeback single was called
"Get Over It," and it was like...
- ♪ Get over it ♪ - ♪ Get over it ♪
And he's, like, I think, like, the first verse is about--
I think we were talking about it on the show,
that he's, like, watching TV, and he's like,
"Man, all these talk shows, all I hear is people complaining.
Man, get over it, you big babies."
So, like, this weird mix of being kind of, like--
when we were protesting Vietnam in the '60s,
that made sense.
But now in the '90s, everybody's just a big baby.
Their worldview was getting kind of weird.
And so I'm sure a lot of, like,
old hippies did throw their hands up in the '90s.
Their probably worldview was a mix of
left-wing and right-wing talking points.
So I could imagine a lot of them just throwing their hands up,
being like, "This world's gone totally insane."
- Yeah. - The next song
that the Bellamy brothers dropped
to check in with the old hippie
is from one of their Christian albums.
And so this is in the 2000s.
- ♪
- Music always exactly the same.
- ♪
- ♪ He'll be 55 this weekend ♪
♪ Can't believe he's lived this long ♪
- Oh, so they really kept every ten years.
- Yeah. - ♪ But now he hangs out ♪
♪ With the grandkids ♪
♪ Instead of toking on his bong ♪
- [laughs]
- ♪ He still thinks about the crazy days ♪
♪ But thanks his God above ♪
♪ That he traded in the lovings ♪
♪ For a greater kind of love ♪
♪ He still shoots 'em that old peace sign ♪
♪ Still gentle as a dove ♪
- ♪
- ♪ He loves all kinds of music ♪
♪ Country rock with a little roll ♪
- So he chilled out a little bit.
Now he just--he likes all the music.
- Yeah. - ♪ But nowadays he's partial to ♪
♪ The melodies that save his soul ♪
- Okay. Melodies that save his soul.
- ♪ Life has put him through the wringer ♪
♪ Friends have fallen through the cracks ♪
♪ And all the trips he's taken ♪
♪ Have been to hell and back ♪
♪ He don't feel that cool no more ♪
♪ He don't care and that's a fact ♪
- ♪
- ♪ He's an old hippie ♪
♪ Getting older every day ♪
♪ But his eyes are on the prize ♪
♪ And his faith ain't gonna stray ♪
♪ He's an old hippie ♪
♪ He knows what his life is for ♪
♪ Trying to get right with the man ♪
♪ Before he goes ♪
♪ Knocking on heaven's door ♪
- Okay. The old hippie found God.
- Yeah, he sounds like he's at peace with himself.
- In 2005, he definitely seems like he's in a better place
than '95. Like, he finally--
- Yeah. - --found something that makes sense.
You would have hoped that by '95,
he would have kind of gotten it together,
'cause clearly he was at a crisis point in '85.
- Yeah. - But '95, arguably,
it was even harder to make sense of the world.
And then by 2005, I like that.
He's not still looking at new music
and being like, "I don't get this [bleep]."
They just say he likes all kind of music.
- He's mellowed out. - He chilled out.
- Yeah. - I like they say he's gentle as a dove,
and he still shoots them the old peace sign.
- [laughs]
- He's not stressing about politics like he was in '95.
He's got grandkids.
Like, you know, in some ways, it kind of feels like--
and this is also, like, a pretty common path,
that in some ways, he was a hippie when he was young.
The '80s and '90s were confusing.
Could he hang on to the old ways,
or should he get on with the new?
And then by 2005, he's kind of--
puts it all together, and he was like,
"You know what, man?
You know what the ultimate way to be an old hippie is?
Is to be a Christian."
And we don't have to listen to it,
but their fourth song is "Old Hippie Christmas."
You can imagine the music is just about the same.
And in that song, there's a line that's basically like,
"Wasn't Jesus the ultimate hippie?"
It's this kind of full-circle thing
where it's like, "I was a hippie in my youth.
Can I still be a hippie?
Does it make sense to be a hippie?
Do I even want to be a hippie in a world
that's gone totally insane?"
And then finally, it's like, "I do want to be a hippie.
I want to be a Christian hippie
because Jesus is the ultimate hippie."
- Yeah. - It's really a nice arc.
- And that was the original ethos of the hippies in the '60s,
that the world was insane,
and that they were going to drop out of society
and try to create their own utopias,
whether that's a commune that was maybe ill-fated,
or whether it was just a lot of like--
You know, a lot of hippies did get into Christianity
in the '70s or New Age
as a way of self-preservation through healing
and tuning out the world.
So it sounds like he kind of got back to his roots.
- Yeah, it's definitely a nice arc,
and I feel a lot happier for the old hippie in 2005
than I did in '85 or '95.
And, yeah, when they--
In "Old Hippie Christmas," you know,
he's got the whole family,
and he's got a kid named Sunshine
and one's named Rainbow, and they're tie-dying.
They even give the Grateful Dead a shout-out
in "Old Hippie Christmas." - Really?
What's the lyric?
- They say--like, they're playing music,
and they say, "The Grateful Dead sing 'Silent Night,'"
which the Grateful Dead never did a version of "Silent Night,"
but I don't think that was their point.
But anyway, we're very lucky today
that we don't have to just look at the O.H.U.,
the old hippie universe, through our own eyes.
We're actually gonna get the Bellamy brothers themselves
on the horn to talk about the old hippie
and the rest of their career.
- Now let's go to the "Time Crisis" hotline.
[phone ringing]
- Hello?
- Hey, what's up? Is this Howard and David?
- It is. Yeah, man.
- The Bellamy brothers.
Well, we're honored to have you here on "Time Crisis."
I'm Ezra, also known as my co-host Jake.
Thanks for being with us. - Hey, guys.
Thanks, guys.
- So where are you guys based at?
Are you down in Florida?
- We are. We're out about 30 miles north of Tampa.
- You guys were born and raised in Florida,
and you've always lived there?
- We have, yes. We're Florida natives, yes.
Very rare breed. [laughs]
- Right. A lot of people moving down there.
- Oh, yeah.
- So what's the vibe in Florida right now?
- Well, here at the ranch, it's pretty much normal, you know,
because everything's slow and sunny out here at the ranch.
But, you know, the towns and cities are pretty much like
they were elsewhere.
Everybody's, you know, in panic mode.
- Well, you don't see anybody.
- Yeah.
- It's like back in the '50s or something.
Car about every 10 miles.
- Right. So everything's okay, but it's pretty quiet.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, it is out here in the country.
It's actually been quite nice, but I haven't seen a person.
- You're one of the first people I've seen on the beach.
- Oh, really? Oh, good to see you.
Wait, so do you guys live in the same kind of complex?
- Yeah. This is our old family ranch.
There's a couple hundred acres here,
and Howard lives just down the road.
We're in our old office.
This is our mom's, what we call the home place.
And then my house is next door.
So kind of a little commune.
- Oh, that's amazing.
Okay, so first question then,
now that we know you live on a commune,
are you guys old hippies?
- We used to live in a hippie commune years back.
- Okay, so we've been listening to all of the old hippie songs,
and we have a lot of questions.
So I guess first and foremost,
just to understand the context of the Bellamy Brothers,
your first big hit was "Let Your Love Flow" in the late '70s.
When that song came out,
did people think of you guys as country?
'Cause I always heard that song,
and I was like, that song's kind of like country rock or something.
Like, where did you stand in the world of music?
Were you guys were country guys,
or you were just musicians?
- Well, we were, you know, we grew up really very, very country.
We grew up, and we're cattle ranchers and farmers,
and we grew up in that environment.
But our first, you know, our exposure to music
was listen to everything down here.
We used to listen to rock and reggae and country
and bluegrass and gospel.
We grew up on gospel music.
So we had a pretty big, broad background of things,
and "Let Your Love Flow," we ran across that song.
It was one of those things that we just loved the song.
We cut it, and it became a really huge worldwide pop hit.
So, you know, we weren't gonna argue about it.
We just let it go.
It was number one almost all over the world.
But when we were cutting more songs,
more like that Nashville would play at that time,
I think, you know, people for a while, they were going,
"Oh, I thought you guys were a pop or a rock band."
To us, it was just always a matter of, like,
trying to find good songs.
- So you guys were just doing your thing,
finding good songs.
Eventually, the world came to see you primarily as country.
In terms of how you guys identified just as people,
you came of age in the '60s and early '70s.
Did you have a time where you identified as hippies?
- No doubt.
We had our own little gardens here
before the local police even knew what it was.
Used to be pot plants on our dance hog pen
back in this old house here.
- In that part of the country,
were you really standing out being hippies,
or was there kind of like a big hippie scene?
- Well, in the entire South, we stood out, yes,
because we started booking with an agency out of Atlanta.
Our first hit, we had a band called Jericho,
and we played mainly the Southeast.
So the Longhairs had to be really careful
getting out in some rural areas of South Georgia and Alabama.
You had to be really careful.
The hippies were--well, Easy Rider.
Remember the movie Easy Rider?
That stuff actually went on.
- Oddly enough, a lot of the kids we grew up around that era,
a lot of them were really pretty much country hippies.
Country hippies here were fairly common.
I mean, the establishment didn't necessarily like them,
but there was a big group of sort of country hippie kids.
- Right, the concept of the country hippies is interesting
because for us being a younger generation,
sometimes when we watch media
or read about the '60s or something,
like you said, Easy Rider, there's almost like this binary
between the San Francisco, New York City, L.A.,
blue state hippie,
and then the conservative world of the South.
But you guys are testament to there being a kind of synergy
that was neither one nor the other.
- Yeah, yeah, for sure.
I mean, we grew up around--we had really great parents.
They were very tolerant of us.
I mean, we still worked on the ranch and did farming
and all that stuff, but they were very tolerant of us
as far as what we wanted to do and play music and everything.
We used to go up to--drive up to Gaines Sunday
and see Mud Crutch, Tom Petty's old band.
- Oh, yeah, right.
- There was a place called The Farm up there,
and everybody would just go up there and smoke weed
and watch those guys play.
We used to go see the Allman Brothers jam
in Piedmont Park in Atlanta when we first moved up there,
and so there was a whole sort of culture in the South,
but then there was a--kind of-- didn't necessarily like it.
- ♪ There's a reason for the sunshine in the sky ♪
♪ And there's a reason why I'm feeling so high ♪
♪ Must be the season when that love light shines ♪
♪ All around us ♪
♪ So let that feeling grab you deep inside ♪
♪ And send you reeling where your love can't hide ♪
♪ And then go stealing through the moonlit nights ♪
♪ With your love, girl ♪
♪ Just let your love flow like a mountain stream ♪
♪ And let your love grow with the smallest of dreams ♪
♪ And let your love show ♪
♪ And you'll know what I mean if the season ♪
♪ Let your love fly like a bird on the wing ♪
♪ And let your love bind you to all living things ♪
♪ And let your love shine ♪
♪ And you'll know what I mean ♪
♪ That's the reason ♪
- Okay, so then once we get to 1985,
and you guys drop the song "Old Hippie,"
to what extent is that song autobiographical?
- It started out being pretty much autobiographical,
and then as I went on to write it,
it kind of started to include people that I knew
as well as ourselves, you know,
friends of ours that had gone to Vietnam
and come back and had problems,
and this is back before PTSD and everything,
and so it became a compositive,
a lot of guys we grew up with and ourselves.
- I think that kind of gives me some sense
of one question that we had,
which was the extent to which that song--
I'm sure this is obvious to you,
but we were just kind of listening to it,
you know, just thinking about the lyrics--
the extent to which the song
is really sympathetic to the old hippie.
- Yeah.
- You're not really judging the old hippie.
You want the listener to stand in his shoes
and feel the kind of difficulty of being 35
at a weird moment when things are changing.
Is that a fair assessment?
- Yeah, and we were actually telling the story yesterday
that when I first finished it, I showed it to Howard,
and the first thing I said to him,
I said, "I don't think this is--
this is probably something we wouldn't want to cut."
You know, I don't think anybody would relate to it,
but I said, "I like it a lot,
and let's see what you think about it."
So I played it for him,
and he said, "Man, we got to cut that.
That's great."
He said, "Everybody's going to relate to that."
- Well, you know, we were considered a country act
at the time, and we were wondering
what their reaction would be
to take this old hippie country song, you know?
- Yeah.
- Little did we know that our producer at the time
was like a closet hippie,
and he smoked more pot than anybody who knew,
but not everybody--
just his tight circle knew that,
but not the general public did.
- Ah, right, because in 1985 in the country world,
it was still reasonable to wonder
if a certain country listener might be like,
"An old hippie?
Man, who cares about them?
Those guys are losers."
Like, was that kind of a vibe?
- Yeah, yeah.
They didn't want to venture out too far
from the fringes of drinking and cheating,
and so it was--
[laughter]
You know, that's--
- Life, that's a better thing to do, right?
- Right.
[laughter]
But it's funny.
Everybody unanimously loved that song
at the label and everything.
It was great.
- Even old conservative rednecks,
they were never hippies, loved that song.
- Yeah.
- They can't figure out what it is.
- Yeah, they'd come up and say,
"Man, you wrote that song about me,"
and they'd just say--
- And they never have been a hippie.
- They never have been a hippie.
- Right.
Well, that's kind of cool,
'cause I guess you would hope that
whether or not you were an old hippie,
the idea of, you know, being in your mid-30s
when the world's changing around you
and wondering if you should hang on to the old ways
or grab on to the new,
yeah, that should apply to kind of anybody.
So that's cool that the non-hippies
were into that song.
One thing that I was thinking about
is that in the last verse of that song,
there's that line about pretty soon
the species will just up and fade away,
like the smoke from that torpedo just up and fade away.
At that time, did you feel like
that the hippie values were disappearing?
Because obviously at the time,
you couldn't have known that in the early '90s
there'd be this huge resurgence
of the Grateful Dead touring stadiums
and all that stuff.
But in 1985, what was the feeling
about the future of hippie values and hippie culture?
Well, it seemed to me like the species itself,
you know, the hippies that grew up in that era,
you know, were gonna, you know,
it's like the end of the World War II vets,
you know, they kind of,
that era just ended where there was none of those guys left.
And then you have the Vietnam vets
who also kind of coincide with the age of the old hippie.
And that's why I just put like the smoke from the torpedo,
because we used to call joints torpedos.
Yeah, not everybody knows that a torpedo
was just a huge joint, you know.
Oh, wow.
That's what it was, and it was fat in the middle
and each end was rolled really tight.
Like one of those cheats and chonks.
That was called torpedo in the hippie days.
Right. Wow, I didn't know that.
So then in the subsequent old hippie songs,
we see this arc,
we were just listening through them,
in "Old Hippie," the sequel in '95,
the old hippie seems equally confused as '85.
They're not sure what to make of Bill Clinton,
and it's kind of unclear where they're at.
But then by 2005, it seems like finally,
there's some stability in the old hippie universe
with finding or refinding faith.
Is that journey autobiographical?
Somewhat.
I think the reason we started writing sequels
was because we got so many people writing sequels for us.
We used to get like four or five a week.
Right.
I mean, everybody would say,
"Hey, I just rewrote your old hippie. Read this."
There were so many.
Finally, I said, "Well, you know,
maybe we ought to just do a sequel or two here."
So we did the first one,
and then everybody seemed to like that.
And there's also a Christmas one.
Right, yeah, we heard that one.
That's kind of how those started, you know.
I was just kind of having fun more so
than really taking that journey.
But, yeah, okay, regardless if it's autobiographical,
was that kind of journey from the old hippie
who didn't know what to do with themselves in the '80s,
wasn't all that much sure in the '90s,
but then later in life, once they had grandkids,
came around to Christianity,
was that something that you witnessed?
Well, you know, we were grown up in a Christian family.
And so, you know, somebody say,
"Hey, did you find Jesus?"
I said, "No, he's always been with me,
but I took him on a hell of a detour a few times."
Yeah.
But, you know, that's really kind of,
"Man made alcohol, God made pot.
Who do you trust?"
Yeah.
Good point.
I mean, we grew up around an old Southern Baptist Christian family,
grew up on gospel music.
We still love gospel music.
We did a sort of an East Indian-inspired song,
"Sitar," called "Grandma's God,"
that actually is a song about us testing religions.
There's a song about experimenting with Hindu religion
and this whole thing called "Grandma's God."
So those things, spirituality is not uncommon to us,
but we grew up basically just an old Southern Baptist family.
Well, you know, Rasta was a religion.
Yeah.
You know, it just depends, I think, how it really evolved.
And now, at this point, all those old people who were against it at one point,
they did all the research and they found the medicinal purposes
and usefulness of this thing that we own.
Actually, I give it credit for stopping me from drinking, really, years back.
And now all of a sudden it's cool.
I mean, like 70% of the people in Florida here,
when they legalized medical, it was 70% positive from old people.
And you guys have your own weed brand now?
Yeah, yeah, the Old Hippie Stash, yeah.
Old Hippie Stash.
So that also makes me wonder,
I don't know if you're planning on another sequel or anything,
do you have a sense, as the authors, of what the Old Hippie would be up to now, 2020?
I think this pandemic would lay some good groundwork for another rewrite.
It certainly would.
Yeah.
We had a funny experience, you know, we were on the road with Blake Shelton
for the last two years, doing really, really huge auditoriums
and 18 to 25,000 people.
We were literally, we were in Wichita tonight, playing a big, huge solo,
and the next day we got to Omaha and they shut everything down.
We caught a plane home and the next day we were going to a garden.
But a legal garden.
Yeah.
Right.
I think the Old Hippie, you know, has gone through quite a few changes, even recently.
Right.
This is definitely a time where people are figuring out what they truly believe in.
Yeah.
No doubt.
On our show, we have a lot of classic topics, and we wondered if you would do,
just to wrap things up, a little time crisis questionnaire, kind of like a rapid fire.
We just ask you a few, your basic opinion on a handful of things.
Sure.
And you can say whatever comes to mind.
So, number one, something we talk about a lot on this show, Grateful Dead.
Love the Grateful Dead.
Oh, yeah.
You know, we--
Trucking.
We all keep on trucking.
Oh, I love the Grateful Dead.
Yeah, we lived out on the West Coast.
We did a radio show with Bob Weir.
That's true.
Oh, really?
Yeah, that was pretty cool.
Very tight.
Number two, Flamin' Hot Cheetos.
Ever had them?
Do you eat them?
Got an opinion?
If I'm going to eat hot food, I like--
I like hot chilies more than Flamin' Hot Cheetos.
Yeah, non-processed to eat.
You guys keep it pretty healthy.
You got a little bit of that hippie, clean eating vibe?
Yeah, we have that holistic vibe, yeah.
Okay.
Number three, Bernie Sanders.
I'm not really a socialist.
I am impressed by his delivery.
Yeah, he's--
I must say.
Man.
Very smart, and I like to watch him.
But we normally hate all politicians equally.
Right.
You know?
We normally don't trust--
We're suspect of pretty much everything.
Either side.
Yeah.
That's fair enough.
It is a question, too, because even when we go back to the old hippie,
when you first wrote that song, you had Reagan in the White House.
Right.
I can't imagine a lot of old hippies were huge fans of Reagan.
Probably made them feel like, "Wow, I thought things were heading in a different direction."
But then in the sequel, '95, the old hippie was equally unimpressed by Bill Clinton.
He never inhaled. That was the problem.
Yeah, that's the problem.
[laughs]
Was the old hippie voting, you think?
I don't know, but I'll tell you this.
That's a good question.
But I'll tell you this.
I know you guys aren't old enough to remember this, but you're talking about Bernie Sanders.
I voted for George McGovern back when he was running.
I think he was just in the primaries.
That's so long ago I forgot.
But George McGovern was Bernie Sanders of his day.
We've been hearing that definitely from people from the previous generation.
Yeah.
There definitely is a sentiment among some voters from the baby boomer era that even if they like things about Bernie Sanders,
there was something about George McGovern's loss that kind of created a long-term trauma for a lot of people about what's actually possible.
Right, right.
Well, thanks so much to the Bellamy brothers.
Please get a sequel, or what would at this point be, 'Old Hippie 5.'
[laughs]
Please get one out soon.
We're working on it. We've got plenty of time.
Yeah, we've got plenty of time.
All right. Well, have a good one. We appreciate it.
All right, guys. Take care.
All right. You too.
Thank you.
I grew up in the 60s with the Beatles and the Stones
Following the ghouls with the other hippie clones
Transcendental meditation, tripping with the freaks
Falling in and following some new god every week
Then one day while soul searching I discovered what was real
My mother's mother's faith came back and taught me how I feel
Grandma's God is mightier than all the universe
His love is a real love like the love she had for us
She brought me around full circle though she did not spare the rock
And when I pray today you know I pray to Grandma's God
You're listening to Time Crisis.
Well, I like those Bellamy brothers. They're pretty chill dudes.
Very chill. Man-made alcohol, God-made weed. Who are you going to trust?
I mean, I feel that. I mean, I definitely buy the more natural something is.
Obviously, there's natural poison and things like that, but the more natural something is,
the more likely that it's been part of human society and existence for a long time.
It's the same argument you get about LSD versus shrooms.
Sure.
That, you know, LSD, that was made in a lab.
It was actually recently the anniversary of the first acid trip.
Is that documented?
Yeah, it's called Bicycle Day. It was April 19th, 1943.
Wow, during World War II.
Yeah, wow. Wait, not to be confused. This is according to Wikipedia.
Not to be confused with the United Nations designated World Bicycle Day. Totally different.
That's the UN celebrating bicycles. This is celebrating the first LSD trip.
So yeah, it was the Swiss chemist, Albert Hoffman.
He was working out of a laboratory in Basel, Switzerland.
And he performed a self-experiment to determine the true effects of LSD, April 19th, 1943.
Good thing he was in a neutral country.
I guess in Switzerland, things were mellow enough that the fighting is crazy around Europe.
But in Switzerland, you know, just another day at the lab, trying out LSD.
And I think it's called Bicycle Day because he wasn't feeling anything at first.
And then he got on his bike to ride home, and then he started tripping.
It's interesting that there's this cluster of kind of like kind vibe or heady holidays right in the middle of April.
Because April 19th is Bicycle Day, then 4/20, and then 4/22 is Earth Day.
Damn, this is crusty.
Is there anything on 4/21?
No, but don't forget about April Fools. April Fools, the day of mirth.
And my birthday is in April. I've always been kind of... I always thought that April is like a pretty chill month.
So I was like, "All right, man, April 8th." I felt like right tucked in.
April 21st? Yeah, it's National Kindergarten Day.
Can't spell kindergarten without kind.
True. That's true.
21st is also apparently National Bulldogs Are Beautiful Day.
Any kind 4/21 birthdays?
We got Iggy Pop. Is that kind?
Ish.
But anyway, that's a real heady week, is the week of 4/19.
It's like a special like Jubilee Week of various events.
Plus, you got Easter. Jesus Christ coming back from the dead.
Yeah, when you put it that way, Easter is the kindest Christian holiday.
Christmas obviously gets a lot of burn. It's a major holiday.
But Christmas is like very sacred and holy. It's the birth.
But the rebirth, that's actually like way more chilled out, you know?
Oh, it's also the birthday of America's most foremost Tonys, Tony Danza and Tony Romo.
They were both born on 4/21?
21, yeah.
Busy week. It's also cool that all these things are happening in like springtime.
Which some people say the reason that Easter and a lot of other religions have holidays that are kind of about rebirth and stuff
is because obviously like springtime, it's when you want to think about those concepts.
After all the snow and the cold, it's getting warm. The flowers are coming out.
Things are turning green again. It is kind of like a kind time of year.
Maybe not this year. This is the true silent spring. The pandemic spring.
Yeah.
Is that even though you're like watching the weather get a little better and things come back to life,
there's also such huge fear about like, is the world going to come back to life?
Yeah, this is a pretty silent spring.
Yeah, there's something haunting about that, right?
Like picturing all the trees in bloom.
Right.
But like no one out there like frolicking on the nice new meadow.
Just like empty.
Did we actually talk about it? Like not to always go on and on about the dead,
but like I think we played a little bit of Morning Dew in a recent FaceTime episode.
The song Morning Dew, which the dead famously covered, although it's not a dead original.
It was a contemporary folk song that they started covering.
Bonnie Dobson.
A bunch of people covered it.
Yeah.
Bonnie Dobson. And one time I looked it up and like Robert Plant sings it a lot in concert.
That's like one of his go-to's.
Oh, interesting.
That's similar to the concept of silent spring, which, and silent spring is a early environmental book.
I think the, what's her name? Rachel Carson wrote in the 60s.
Yep.
I wonder if Morning Dew is inspired by silent spring or vice versa.
Because the song Morning Dew is about a person stepping out in the morning,
walking out in the morning dew, a really beautiful pastoral image.
You picture somebody lives out in the countryside and you're stepping out in the morning dew.
Like it's, you know, such a beautiful time of day.
You picture somebody walking out in the morning dew.
That's like a human who's in touch with nature. Right?
Yeah.
You're experiencing the morning dew. It's like, it's beautiful.
Also, you think about mountain brews, sweet as morning dew.
There's a reason that, you know, morning dew of all these natural phenomenon is one that we associate with sweetness and beauty.
Because it's the start of the day, you know, it's a rebirth.
But in the song Morning Dew, it's somebody steps out in the morning dew, which is beautiful,
but it's eerie because you kind of get the impression that like everybody's dead.
Yeah.
Or at the very least, it's a children of men scenario in which the entire world's become infertile.
Because one of the classic haunting lines of Morning Dew is, "I thought I heard a baby cry this morning."
I thought the song was, yeah, maybe about like sort of like a nuclear...
Nuclear fallout.
Holocaust has... it's height of the Cold War, obviously.
And it's about like, everyone's wiped out.
But like nature will continue eventually.
Right. That must be it.
Because in the 60s, definitely, yeah, nuclear war was, that was the apocalyptic event on people's minds.
More than say pandemics.
Yeah. So imagine that almost everybody's dead, but you're like a survivor.
Once everybody's dead, the world will get weirdly quiet.
And like you said, nature will spring back to life.
And the lyric is actually, "I can't walk you out in the morning dew today."
Oh, whoa.
So it's like two people. One saying, "Walk me out in the morning dew, my honey. Walk me out."
And the other person saying, "I can't walk you out there."
Because it's a fallout zone.
And then someone's, "I thought I heard a baby crying this morning."
And the person says, "You didn't hear a baby crying."
Oh, man. That's even more haunting when you think about it.
Yeah, because now I'm picturing the people, they survived because they lived outside the blast zone.
Right.
They didn't live in like Manhattan, where the Soviets dropped the bomb or something.
They lived upstate.
But still, the radiation is like covering thousands of miles.
And they're like looking out the window in this quiet scene where they still see birds flying.
And they see some stuff is growing. It's still green or something.
But they know they can't step out into that beautiful bit of morning nature because they will be poisoned.
And then the song ends on the most nihilistic note, "I guess it doesn't matter anyway."
Because we're going to die.
"Walk me out in the morning dew, my honey. Walk me out in the morning dew today."
And then finally, the other person says, "I'll walk you out in the morning dew, my honey. I guess it doesn't matter anyway."
Oh, that's really dark.
Because basically it's like, we're going to starve.
It's like, we only have enough ramen for two more weeks.
So we're going to starve in this house either way.
Let's just go out, bask in this final moment of peaceful, quiet nature as the radiation poisoning destroys us.
Ooh, yikes.
That's crazy.
No wonder that was this classic moment for the dead.
Jerry just wailing on this really dark, frightening song.
People just on acid in the crowd.
This crazy mix of nature, but apocalypse.
Pessimism, but optimism all combined into a 12-minute jam.
Heavy.
Petty brew, man. Petty brew.
"Walk me out in the morning dew, my honey. Walk me out in the morning dew today.
Can't walk you out in the morning dew, my honey. I can't walk you out in the morning dew today.
I thought I heard a baby cry this morning. I thought I heard a baby cry today.
You didn't hear no baby cry this morning. You didn't hear no baby cry today."
Speaking of petty brews, this has kind of become the old wisdom episode because to talk about old hippie,
we were lucky enough to get the Bellamy brothers. We've got another person from that generation,
a little bit older, and a true icon, David Crosby. Member of the Byrds, great solo work.
Member of Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Quite the life.
Lots to talk about. Let's get him on the horn. Check in with David Crosby.
Now, let's go to the Time Crisis Hotline.
Hello. Oh, hey. David Crosby. Is this working? Can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you great.
Welcome to the show, man. This is Time Crisis. You're on with Ezra and Jake.
Hi, you guys. Where are you at right now? I'm home. It's not that hard, much of a hardship.
I'm up here in Central California, out in the country, and it's really pretty.
You were going to be on the road, but being at home is not too bad either.
If it were only that simple. Being home with my family is good. That's a basic, yes.
But being on the road is what pays for the groceries and the mortgage and stuff.
So I love being with my family, but I really don't like losing these tours.
I've lost – I had three tours booked for this year, and I've lost the first one already, the whole tour.
So I think we're doing the right thing. I think staying home and not having concerts, not having sports gatherings,
not doing all of the kinds of close personal contact that we normally would be is correct.
I think we're doing the right thing. But it's very difficult if you're not rich and you don't have a whole bunch of money in the bank,
which would definitely be the case here. It gets pretty scary when the tour goes away.
I'm responsible for a bunch of other people in my band, my crew. They're all out of work too, and I care about them.
They're my friends. So it's necessary. I think we're doing the right thing, like I said, but it's kind of hard.
Sure. That's got to be stressful. Well, if you don't mind, we just got so many different questions for you about different areas of your life.
Okay, cool. I might start out with a bit of that. You can ask me anything.
That's awesome. Well, you know, actually, David, one question that I do have, you are famously in the 60s were a fashion icon.
You weren't just like just another hippie. A lot of people were dressing in a hippie style, but you had a very specific style with the fringe jacket,
the facial hair, even Dennis Hopper. He based his character in Easy Rider off of you. And you had a few different looks.
You had the kind of country fringe leather jacket. You also had your kind of Russian look where you were wearing that Russian hat and the Russian shirt,
which was influential and kind of unusual. So one thing that's always been interesting to me is that in the 60s, you were this trendsetter.
And then in the 70s, famously, the Crosby, Stills and Nash era, you guys didn't dress up that much.
You'd be playing these massive shows and just wearing a T-shirt and jeans. So I guess my question is, as somebody who was a fashion trendsetter in the 60s,
were there other moments later in your life where you were interested in where fashion was heading or want to kind of dress up more?
Or is that something that for you was just about that era of your life and afterwards you stopped caring?
I mean, arguably, the laid back Crosby, Stills and Nash look was influential in its own way as well.
But I'm curious about your relationship to clothes post 60s.
Well, it's a very complex subject. Basically, I've never really given a hoot about fashion at all.
And when I did wear clothes that were in kind of attention getting, it had to do with girls.
That was the aim in mind there. I was trying to get the attention of girls. I have been fascinated with girls my whole life.
And I married one that worked out well.
So you were peacocking?
Back then I was peacocking seriously. And that was that was my aim. Great choice of words.
But yeah, that's primarily what I was doing.
And so then from then on, you weren't really giving a hoot, but did you kind of like keep an eye out?
Like, do you remember like when Air Jordans came out or something like that? Did you just like notice these trends?
No, I didn't. The truth is, man, I'm singularly silly about fashion. I don't pay any attention to it at all.
I'm not putting it down.
Yeah, fair enough. It's not.
I think I probably influenced it without meaning to. But it was never like a conscious concern for me.
I wasn't like trying to be hip and groovy.
Another thing that we were thinking about, we're wondering, have you heard that Bob Dylan song that he dropped a few weeks ago called Murder Most Foul?
Yes, I have.
The 17 minute JFK one. So you also famously didn't buy the official story of JFK and you've written about it.
Yeah.
So when we heard that Bob Dylan song, you know, it's in classic Dylan fashion.
You're not sure exactly what to make of it, but he does seem to indicate a kind of conspiratorial mindset about that.
So is the JFK assassination something that you still think about a lot?
And can you kind of explain to us at this current moment in 2020 what your take is on the JFK assassination?
I can give you a couple of tips. One is they made a movie about it.
The guy wrote Johnny Got His Gun, that book. He directed a movie and the movie was called Executive Action.
It's very close to being exactly what happened.
What I believe happened is this. I think Kennedy had offended some people in this country very strongly.
They hired what I think happened. They hired contract operators who did sort of deniable work for CIA to shoot him.
And if you watch the Zapparator film, it's hit from the front, not the back.
The first shot comes at him from up on the hill up to the right.
I've stood behind that fence right here. It's very short distance.
There was a guy in the control tower of that switch yard that they're about to go under when they're driving around that corner and going into the tunnel.
That's a railroad switch yard. There was a guy up there. He saw somebody behind that fence with a rifle.
But I definitely think it was a conspiracy. I definitely think there were multiple shooters.
I definitely think that it was suppressed afterwards.
If you watch that movie, you will see what most of us who have studied the thing think happened.
And we think that the team that did it died the next day.
Wow.
Well, so David, having that experience, you know, as a young person watching the president die and being pretty convinced that there's a conspiracy,
has that affected the way that you see the world, other major events?
I mean, even right now with the pandemic, you can't go on Twitter without seeing some version of people questioning the official account of events.
Are you still conspiracy theory minded?
Yeah, I don't think there's any question about it at all.
In my mind, I'm certain that there was a conspiracy and that it was covered up.
I could go through it with you for an hour. I mean, there's a lot of stuff.
When you saw the Bob Dylan song came out, obviously you've known him for a long time and you saw the subject matter.
Were you kind of like, hell yeah, man. What was your vibe?
Well, I think Bob's an intelligent guy and I don't think he ever bought the story either.
And I think that's why he wrote the song.
I think if you looked around, you'd probably find other people that agree with Bob and myself and that it wasn't that we haven't heard the right story.
Absolutely.
So one question that I have is you famously didn't like Jim Morrison.
One thing that I've always found very interesting about you is that sometimes on Twitter, you'll just like talk, but then when I actually see interviews with you and
hear your voice and see footage of you, you actually seem like a very mellow, peaceful guy.
So I'm definitely inclined to say that you probably have good reason to dislike Jim Morrison times where he personally treated you in a negative way.
But then one thing that was interesting is I was going back and listening to some of your work and I saw that the first track on the CPR album, one of your other bands from
the 90s, track one is called Morrison.
That song actually seems like at least a partially sympathetic portrait of Jim Morrison.
So then I realized, OK, maybe he's not just a dude who offended you a couple of times in the 60s, but he's somebody who's made some kind of larger impression on you.
So do you have a complicated relationship with Morrison that maybe is not fully contained in some of your tweets about him?
Great question. Great way you phrased it. Very delicate.
OK, what you hear in the song is that I felt he was lost.
I felt that he was a lost soul.
I don't think he was an evil guy or anything.
I think he just didn't have a clue.
I didn't like how he sang.
I didn't think he was that good a poet.
And the way he behaved on stage was not how I want to behave on stage.
My problem with the Doors runs much deeper than that.
My problem with the Doors is that they didn't swing.
They didn't swing because they didn't have a bass player.
They didn't swing because the keyboard player's left hand was playing the bass on that.
What was it? A Farfisa?
Most awful sounding bass sound you've ever heard.
And he couldn't swing.
The guy just was a square wheel.
He played...
It was awful bass.
They needed a bass player.
And as a result, the Doors never swung.
Never swung at all.
They made some records that were sort of OK, but they never swung.
They never actually cooked like a real band cooks.
What do I mean by a band that cooks?
Creedence Clearwater cooks.
Steely Dan cooks.
The Beatles cook.
Rolling Stones cook.
They all swing.
This band did not swing.
And that was my initial problem with him.
Not personal at all? Just purely musical?
No, no, no. He never did any bad things.
He just offended me because he was such a poser.
He was up there, you know, doing all this very dramatic bullsh*t
that had nothing to do with the songs.
And it was just like him, you know, trying to exaggerate his mystique.
And I understand it.
I don't condone it.
It doesn't excite me.
It didn't turn me on.
I don't hate the guy.
I don't think he had a clue what he was doing,
and that's why he did so much dumb stuff.
And I feel like you must have had a lot of compassion for him
if in the late 90s you were still thinking about him
and his short life enough to write that song.
So it does come from a place of empathy.
Yeah. I understand being lost.
I've done some of that being lost stuff myself.
We found an interview from him recently where an interviewer,
this is like one of, towards the end of his life,
and an interviewer is asking him about gaining weight.
It seemed like weirdly ahead of his time
because nowadays you have people talk about body types
and not fat shaming, but I know that wasn't the case
in the late 60s, early 70s.
And Morrison said, you know,
"What's so bad with like packing on a few pounds, man?
Why is that such a negative thing?"
And we heard that.
We were like, "That's actually kind of a modern sentiment."
I can't really speak to his stage persona,
but maybe he was at least ahead of his time
with regards to his attitudes about fat shaming.
I don't think that's what it was, but okay.
You don't think Jim Morrison was ahead of his time
with regards to fat shaming? All right.
No, I think he just didn't like you saying that.
Okay. Agree to disagree.
♪ He was lost and I don't think ♪
♪ He wanted it that way ♪
♪ Like a gull blown inland ♪
♪ On a stormy day ♪
♪ Lost in round one ♪
♪ Spitting out pieces of his teeth ♪
♪ Lost in a Paris graveyard ♪
♪ Carrying his own ring ♪
♪ And I've seen that movie ♪
♪ And it wasn't like that ♪
♪ He was mad and lonely ♪
♪ Blind as he'd bet ♪
♪ To the bridge and the palm tree ♪
♪ Too deaf to hear his own song ♪
♪ You see ♪
One kind of general question,
and it kind of speaks to the same thing about Jim Morrison,
is that, and I also watched the documentary about you,
which is a great film, and all of our listeners
should go see the doc that came out last year.
It's a really great portrait and way to know
your whole history and your amazing career.
But one thing that comes up a lot in the doc
is that clearly there was a lot of drama
within the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young universe,
and of course the movie's about you,
so you talk about some,
and you recently did a Rolling Stone interview
where you're talking about things you said about Neil Young
and trying to reach out and the difficulties of that.
I guess one general question I have is,
I've always been surprised when bands from kind of your world
seem to have so much tension and hurt feelings
and people not talking to each other,
and this is also my naivete, you know,
but you guys came up in the 60s doing Acid, Peace & Love,
how come that stuff didn't really keep people together?
And this is not about you in particular,
it's the whole generation.
Do you think that your guys' generation
had any less tension than other generations of music?
No.
I would have loved to have thanked that man,
because you know, I'm a hippie, but no.
Bands are like a marriage,
and a four-person marriage is pretty much destined to fail at some point.
Lives do not go in parallel paths.
You are always growing closer or further away.
What happens with bands, just about every band,
is that you start out, you're in love with each other,
you love each other's music,
it's all very exciting, and you are buddies,
and you are trying to please each other.
You compete with each other,
but 40 years later, it's devolved.
It's devolved into turn on the smoke machine and play your hits.
And the love isn't there, the friendship isn't there,
the paycheck is there.
And that's not really a good place to make art.
That's a good place to make money,
but it's not a good place to make art.
And what happened with me is that I had to get out of there.
So you, because they didn't talk about this too explicitly in the doc,
you straight up left Crosby, Stills, and Nash in 2015.
That's how it went down?
Yeah, I sent them a message saying,
"Look, I can't book any more work with you guys, it's just not,
there's no fun, there's no joy to it.
We're only doing it for the money, we don't like each other,
and this is thoroughly unpleasant, and I don't want to do it,
so there it is, I'm leaving."
I think it was the right thing to do.
Yes, money is important.
Money is a really good servant,
it's a really lousy master.
If you let it run you, your choices are going to be wrong.
If you let art run your choices,
the joy of making music, the lift,
music is a lifting force, man, it actually makes things better.
If you let that be your motivation,
then you're going to have a happier life,
and you're going to make better music.
Making music just to make a lot of money,
you can do good work that way,
you know, God knows some people have.
But for me, there just isn't any question about it.
The value here, the real valuable stuff,
is in the creating really good music,
and moving people with it,
and lifting, being a lifting force.
Look, it's really hard times out there right now, man.
A lot of people are just really going under hard.
People need a lift right now.
And music is a lifting thing.
I don't think that you should do your musical life
just to get a paycheck.
I think you should do your musical life
because it is a joy for you,
and it's a joy for the people that are listening to it.
And if it isn't either of those things,
you shouldn't be doing it.
Well, absolutely, and it's really cool to hear you say that,
because I think one question I have,
you know, talking to somebody with an illustrious career like you,
and just for all human beings looking, you know,
to somebody who's lived a life like you have,
I think we all hope, because, you know,
we're all in our 30s and 40s on this show,
I think we all hope that by the time we're in our 70s,
we'll have chilled out a bit.
You know, you want to believe that life gets more mellow in some way.
So I guess sometimes when I hear about a band splitting up
when people are in their 60s or 70s,
it's kind of like when you hear about people getting divorced in their 70s.
You're just like, "Damn!"
It makes you worried, like, "Oh, no, the problems just keep coming."
But I guess for you, it sounds like you're leaving the band
wasn't because you weren't mellow.
It actually sounds like you were so mellow that you were just placing art above money.
Is that a fair interpretation?
I don't know if that's mellow, but yeah, it has to do with what's valuable to you.
And to me, the music is very, very valuable.
It has, you know, lasting worth on a lot of levels.
Money? Money's just a tool.
And like I said, it's a good servant and a lousy master.
Have you mellowed with age personally?
Yeah, a lot.
Well, in first place, I'm not a junkie.
- I used to be a junkie. - Right, so that's a huge change.
Yeah, I'm now reasonably happy with myself.
Back then, I hated my guts.
You know, you have to figure out what's really valuable to you in your life, man,
in order to keep trucking.
And I have. It's my family and it's the music.
And, you know, I've been trying to, like you said,
I have been trying to apologize to Neil for slagging his girlfriend,
which I did do.
But it's mostly because of what CSNY,
which is a different ballgame,
could do in this next election.
I wanted CSNY to get together and work for Bernie.
I voted for Bernie.
I thought he was the most genuine one.
Right, and then, yeah, we saw that.
We were very happy to see that.
And then Neil also came out for Bernie.
But so you guys never, at that point, you weren't talking.
So this was just two independent decisions.
No, we're still not talking.
And here's my problem.
My problem is that I understand if he doesn't want to be in a band with me.
I did say something bad about his girlfriend.
And him not wanting to be in a band with me is completely reasonable.
I get it.
Now, having said that, we're faced with this.
We've got a president who is really bad news.
And we are going through some really awful stuff because he's there.
We need to get him out of there.
It's desperately important for this reason.
Global warming, climate change is a real thing.
It's not a fake thing.
It's a real thing.
And we can't address it.
We can't even start addressing it as long as he and Mitch McConnell are in the seats of power that they are in.
Because they are going to continue going after the dollar.
That's their God.
So we can't start trying to save our great grandchildren's world until we get rid of those guys.
We can't get rid of those guys unless we win this next election.
I wanted to get CSNY together to work against Trump and for Biden, who he's our nominee.
That's about the best I can say.
And I wanted to work for him.
I want to defeat Trump.
That's a great idea.
Well, I think it's absolutely the right thing to do.
Whether or not it's more important, again, we're getting down to what matters, what your value system is.
If it's more important to Neil to make sure that I understand that I totally screwed up and he's really mad at me.
If that's more important to him than getting rid of Donald Trump as the President of the United States, well, then I don't understand.
That doesn't make sense.
And also, just to clarify, because of course you've done really big stuff with just Stills and Nash.
But you feel like the stakes are so high, you need that Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young to really combine the right amount of power.
Yeah.
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young played Baseball City.
Crosby, Stills and Nash played big theater.
It's just at such a different level when you all combine, including Neil.
Yeah.
All right.
We're talking about the future of the human race, us having a home planet that works.
We're talking about our great-grandchildren.
We're talking about our children's children.
I think it doesn't get any more important than that.
To me, it's much more important than me insulting his girlfriend, which I've apologized for publicly several times.
And what happened to her face.
I just think this is more important.
But obviously, he doesn't.
Or there's some other part to it that I don't understand.
Right.
I don't know if this has crossed your mind, but it's kind of a bummer to think that you and Neil are two of the only musicians of your generation to really come out in the
press and say you supported Bernie.
And that's been very confusing for us because, like we said, you guys are from the peace and love generation that changed culture.
As Bernie is a little bit older, but a similar generation.
We were, you know, here on this show, we were always very surprised that there were so few members of your generation, especially musicians, who are riding hard for
Bernie.
It was almost like there's something holding people back.
Different generation of musicians.
If you'd asked us in 1969, 1970, 1971, you would have got 80% of the musicians for Bernie.
Nowadays, the music business is largely concerned with pop music, making pop records to make money.
And if you go and try to be political, your manager is going to tell you to shut the f*** up.
There were a decent amount of young musicians who came out, but it seemed like a lot of your peers from your generation in particular kept pretty quiet, aside from you
and Neil.
So in that sense, you have quite a bit in common.
Yeah, I can't give you a really good reason for that because it doesn't make sense to me.
I think we should have all backed him up because he was the most genuine one.
My problem with Biden is that I'm not sure he can deal with what I think he ought to have to deal with.
What we need to do as a human race is get off of fossil fuels.
Coal and oil can't run our world anymore if we wanted to have a future.
Now, that's a big hunk of stuff.
Coal and oil. You want to try and get us off it.
Well, those companies are going to fight to the death to keep it the way it is.
Right.
Because that's what companies do.
You've been talking about this since the 60s and very little has changed.
Very little has changed. We're talking inertia here. It's very tough.
And what the next president is going to have to do if we want to have a future is deal with that.
They have to say, OK, unfortunately, this is the truth and we do have to shift the entire economy of the world off of fossil fuels.
Now, a lot of people don't think we can do it.
The one thing we can be absolutely sure of is that we can't even start trying to deal with it unless we get rid of this guy.
That's the truth.
I know it's probably frustrating, but are you going to keep emailing Neil?
No.
No more emails?
No.
I said it. I said it honestly. I said it without any rancor.
I said it respectfully. He's a grown up man.
If he read it and it didn't move him, then he read it and it didn't move him.
That's that.
He knows what I think and he knows why I think it.
Right. So you're disappointed, but at this point you're letting it go.
You would have heard by now, you think?
The only reason I would do it is because I think our country is in such drastic trouble.
Me personally, I'm in two bands that are making me really happy already.
Really good ones.
Right.
The Lighthouse Band with Michael Leigh and Becca and Michelle.
Fantastic band.
My Skytrails Band with my son James and Jeff Bevor.
That's just a killer f***ing band.
And I don't feel any lack of musical inspiration.
Right. Musically, you got it covered.
Oh man, I'm having so much fun.
I've made four really good records in the last four years.
And I'm halfway through a fifth one.
And my other band, the Lighthouse Band, wants to make a sixth one.
I'm very happy musically with my state of affairs.
I'm not happy with how it is in the music business because it's booming for the record business.
It's not booming for the musicians.
Yeah.
But that being the situation, then we come into this where we're totally dependent on a live performance.
And we got no live performance.
This is going to be a tough while.
This is b****, man. It's really hard for me.
I've watched them cancel my whole first tour.
I got two more of them.
If they cancel both of those, I'm out of business.
The dream fades and I'm lying awake
Before I open my eyes, trying to picture where I'll be
Untrodden seas, am I close to the breakers?
It's time to get out of bed, but my heart won't follow me
It's funny, I don't even know what city I am in
Or what time it is where I am or where you are
My only constancy is you're the one who feels like home to me
So why was I so careless with your heart?
David, I wanted to ask you also, I feel like, you know, I'm guilty of this too,
because you're part of such an iconic group of musicians in Laurel Canyon, LA in the 60s and 70s,
you get asked about the same people over and over again.
Jim Morrison, Joni Mitchell, obviously your bandmates.
I'm just curious to throw a few names out there of other contemporaries of yours from the 60s till now.
And just curious if you have any stories or any feelings.
And I wanted to start with Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, who are a very famous New York 60s band.
And I know they played with the dead a little bit.
Did you cross paths with them at all in that era? Or was that an alternate universe?
I didn't, and it's another one where I'm going to get in trouble. I didn't like them.
So you heard the records and you're just like, not into it.
Yeah, didn't do it for me.
What about the 70s Lou Reed stuff? That win you over?
No.
Yeah, Jared, fair enough. Just wasn't for you.
I mentioned musically really complex stuff. Steely Dan kind of level.
It's more my kind of thing.
What about Pink Floyd? They're a little more complex.
Love them. Love Pink Floyd.
When Pink Floyd got big in the 70s, you were just like, hell yeah. Cool. Happy to see it.
Not everything, but David Gilmour is, boy Fender guitars meant to erect a monument to that guy.
He's a wonderful musician.
And yeah, they made some records that I absolutely loved because they were stretching the envelope.
And I love it when people do that.
How about Talking Heads? When that wave of kind of punk and new music from New York and London, the late 70s came out,
were you paying attention at that era?
Did you care? And did Talking Heads as one of the more complex, funky bands mean much to you?
No. The people that got me, man, were the singer songwriters and singer songwriter bands, mostly.
The obvious ones, you know, Beatles, James Taylor, Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, you know, writers, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell.
That's the stuff that really tripped my trigger.
And then musical virtuosity. I'm a big Weather Report fan. I really loved them.
Great band.
Yeah, I love them. I like more complex stuff.
I didn't like any of the punk bands at all and just never felt that that was my part of things.
What do you think of the Eagles?
I like it, how good at it they are.
I don't like it that they play the record Note For Note.
Live, right.
Yeah, and they're my friends. And I got to tell you, you have to respect them, man.
They go out and they do a fantastic job.
They do a fantastic show. Go to a live Eagles show.
They will not miss one note. They will cream you. They will play really, really well.
I wish that they would take more chances.
But what do you think of like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin?
Led Zeppelin transcended hard rock because of the writing.
Led Zeppelin's writing took them up above everybody. Black Sabbath? No, sorry.
No, fair enough. Well, one person that we talk a lot about on this show, and I think you might have some insight into it, is Steve Miller.
And as far as we're concerned, he's written a few great songs.
But we've always been perplexed by the fact that he had a relationship with the Grateful Dead, who you also knew very well,
and even opened for them in the early 90s.
And yet after Jerry died, he'd done a whole series of interviews where he would defer to them very derisively,
even kind of casting doubt on Jerry's ability as a guitar player.
So I wonder, do you know much about Steve Miller?
And as somebody who, you know, you've occasionally had very blunt things to say about your peers,
do you think he was in the wrong for posthumously dissing the dead? Or is that his right as a musician?
Yeah, he's got a right to shoot his mouth off in any direction he wants. It's free speech.
But the day that he even approaches Jerry's skill as a guitar player will be a cold day in hell.
He's not even close. He's a guy who could play a simple rock and roll groove pretty well.
Nothing past that. There's no subtlety. There's no sophistication.
There's no complexity. There's no genuine melodies. There's no really no good chord changes.
So, no, I wouldn't rank him as a first class guitar player and never have.
And Garcia, Garcia was a goddamn magician. If he and I could sit down with two guitars, man, it was magical.
I don't have the words to tell you how much music was in that guy.
But we could play anything and start having fun. We could go anywhere and start having fun.
There were absolutely no boundaries.
We could and did play purely electronic music that was trying as hard as we could to be as weird as we could possibly think up.
We also just played the simplest you ever heard. It was like country bluegrass.
I'm sure when you talk about electronic music, are you talking about that Seastones record?
Yeah. I wanted to ask you about that because not a lot of people have heard it, but it's pretty ahead of its time.
That's the the Ned Lagin album. It was, you know, mid-70s.
Oh, Legend. Legend. Thank you. Thank you. I'm sorry about that.
So this Ned Lagin album and it's very ahead of its time in terms of creating electronic music.
A lot of members of the dead played on it and you. It's kind of getting rediscovered in some circles now.
But yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about that project?
Well, Phil has always been very conscious of classical music and jazz and advanced, you know, current day writing.
And Garcia, very much so also. And I and Mickey, they all pretty conscious of that stuff.
Ned was an early computer music guy.
He was an early synth player and was, you know, really good at making up prepared sounds and strange, weird stuff.
I just went along for it because it was brand new territory, because I love breaking new ground.
I love going any place I haven't been because I'm going to learn something.
I can pretty much guarantee. And that's what happened.
I didn't make any anywhere near as much of a contribution to it as Jerry did.
But we all have always been willing to go pretty much anywhere looking for new relationships, new stuff.
You know, world music, bluegrass, jazz. It's all music, you know, and I think it seems like you've always been kind of cold on rap music.
Is that fair? It lacks some of the things that I like best. Melody, harmony, rap music is like most kinds of music, a complex thing.
There are kinds of it. There are people in it doing work that is surprisingly good.
OK, much of it, if not most of it is very bad poetry recited very badly over other people's music.
And it doesn't move me. I'm not saying you shouldn't do it. It's fine with me if it trips your trigger.
God bless you. Whatever you do tonight. Look, I'm used to wordsmiths who are doing really several levels higher than that in the word work.
Joni, Bob, when the rap writers get that good, then I'll be more interested in rap music.
People like rap music, 100 percent believe that there is the rap equivalent of all those writers.
So it just must not be for you. I think, you know, I have to be able to hear it and understand it.
And I have heard some. There are some people that have impressed me. Only a couple, though.
We can send you a mixtape, but I'm sure people have before. Has anybody ever really been like, David, man, you're just missing it.
Let me get you deep into rap. Are you just like, you know what? You don't need that.
I doubt that it would be successful, but I'm open. OK, well, that's cool that you're open.
One thing, David, I just wondered, did you watch the last Tarantino movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood?
I tried to watch it twice now. I just don't like Tarantino's movie.
Oh, you've never been a fan. Wow. He always goes for the cheap shot.
He always goes for the shallow pool. It's just I just don't like how he approaches films.
And the fact that it took place in 1969, L.A., a place where you were, that wasn't enough to get you over the things you didn't like about his work.
Yeah. No, it's just not good enough. Fair.
Are you surprised by how influential and prevalent the culture from the 60s and 70s still is, even though it's a good 50 years on?
I think it speaks to the level that some of that work achieved.
I think if you do work as good as the Beatles did, it lasts.
I think if you do work as good as Dylan did or Steely Dan, it lasts.
It has to do with the quality of the writing, I think.
So in like 1970, were you guys listening to a lot of music from like the teens or 20s?
No, we were listening to each other and we were listening to a bit of world music.
We had discovered Indian music. That's where we started getting into the world.
And we were listening to jazz and jazz was a head stretcher, you know, miles and train.
Who yikes. We knew about, you know, music from before us, but we were trying to get away from it.
We didn't really realize how good a singer Frank Sinatra was.
We just wanted to be in another world. Right.
He was definitely a good singer.
Well, David, it's been an absolute pleasure and an honor to talk to you and have you on the show.
We hope that we'll be able to see you live soon.
I've definitely seen footage of, you know, your voice sounds amazing, band six.
So hopefully that'll be happening sooner rather than later.
Thank you, man.
Yeah. So hope you and your family stay healthy and safe and hopefully we'll talk to you again in the future.
Thanks, guys.
All right. Have a good one.
Thank you.
I thought I met a man who said he knew a man who knew what was going on.
I was mistaken.
Oh, oh, oh.
Crosby, hell of a guy. True legend.
Yeah.
Great having him on the show.
So, Jake, we both watched that documentary, which absolutely people should check out.
And I think one thing that we both felt a little bit and I felt this way talking to him is that sometimes when you see him on Twitter,
Crosby is very famous for just like, yeah, going off, just being like Jim Morrison suck.
But then when you talk to him, he seems like a pretty, like, reasonable dude.
And like, you know, like we talked about, he had negative feelings towards Jim Morrison, but he also wrote a song about him.
He kind of felt bad for him. You're just kind of like normal stuff. Right.
Some people have tension. But in the film, you learn that there's this deep tension, not just with Neil Young, but with Stills and Nash.
And obviously, Mr. Crosby was more than forthcoming with us.
I don't want to press him about it.
But yeah, I'm always kind of curious about what are these when people talk about, like, all the tension in a band or something.
And of course, it's a real thing. But when you picture these guys who made it all the way to 2015 touring with each other, and maybe this is normal, petty stuff,
just like offhand remarks about like somebody's playing or like, you know, they're just like sitting backstage in Milwaukee and just like Crosby's just like, damn,
Stephen, you look like a real dork.
Your new haircut really makes you look like a dork.
And Stills is just like, Jesus Christ, I hate this dude. Because yeah, in the doc, there's some really dramatic language, but you never exactly know what anybody's
talking about.
Yeah. Crosby tells the audience watching the doc that the other members of the band have told him that they can't stand him and they hate him, but they don't tell you what
happened.
So it's sort of like, is it Crosby saying to Stills like, hey, maybe lay off the lasagna backstage.
I don't know if you want a second helping of that.
In these troubled times, I definitely didn't want to like press him on like the perhaps the truly small and petty little dramas between people who played music
together for 50 years.
But it is like, you know, and I respect his answer to about basically being like, he wasn't going to do it for a paycheck.
And here it is pretty disturbing. Like he said, if David Crosby is stressing about money in his late 70s, a dude, you know, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young,
he said they played stadiums.
Yeah, that's '74 tour. Yeah.
Yeah. You see this footage of these guys, just like four dudes dressed kind of schlubby, T-shirt and jeans, no production, and just like 80,000 people in front of them,
just like singing harmonies.
You're kind of like, that's crazy. And so they were huge. They sold tens of millions of records.
It's not like finding out that some kind of like culty band that you're like, oh, no, I mean, everybody loves like, you know, television.
And somebody is like, no, but dude, television never sold a ton of records.
They're like an amazing band. Yeah.
They didn't play stadium. But no, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, they sold a lot of records.
Their songs, you would imagine, are still getting played and producing money.
You're just like, damn, is that really how dark the music industry has gotten?
Like I entered the music industry in the crisis period.
So my expectations have always been like super low.
When you drop your first record in 2008, you're kind of like, right.
But if even Crosby's running about money, you know, and of course there could be more to it.
You're like, damn, the vibe I got from watching that doc was that he probably has a pretty high overhead.
I mean, it seemed like he had like a horse ranch. Right.
It sounds like he has a big overhead. Yeah, to some extent.
But it's like, you know, it's not like he's living in like a Fifth Avenue penthouse, you know, horse ranch in central California.
Like that's you. One would like to think that that's no problem. Really?
Yeah. Having a horse ranch and some. Yeah, that's big money.
But I wanted to say, speaking of the old wisdom, he dropped a real nugget on us, which was money is a great servant, but a lousy master.
Yes. We got a lot of good wisdom from some of the old heads today.
The Bellamy brothers talking about alcohol and weed and Cros talking about money and art.
Yeah. And yet there is something like pretty tight about that.
Like, look, you know, we don't know his actual finances or, you know.
And like you said, he's sympathetic to the people, you know, struggling on a really deep level.
And, you know, Torrent, he's when he talks about touring, he's not just thinking about himself.
He's thinking about his family, his band, all those people.
But there is something tight and probably very Crosby ish about in 2015 being in your early 70s and just like having a fairly lucrative.
What did he say? Large auditorium level touring thing going with with Stills and Nash and just like looking at those dudes and being like, guys, this like because there
was a part of me.
I didn't want to ask him because he made it clear what his values were.
But it was almost like, man, you can just like jump on the bus with those two dudes for like six weeks a year just to pull in the cash.
And he's just like, no, it's like either it's like a living thing where we're doing real touring and and enjoying each other's company or not.
I mean, in a way, I respect it. I mean, you know, again, we don't know the backstory.
If it was that pure, then it's sort of like, damn, respect.
Maybe we should make a long term goal that over the next year we get CSNY on this show.
I think why I love the idea. I think why it's pretty much impossible.
Not going to happen.
I think Nash we could do.
And I bet Stills is a no. That's my guess.
That's just your gut.
Also, I was pretty shocked that there was such a disparity between the CSM level of touring and CSNY.
Yeah, I guess if you just if you have Neil just dropping Heart of Gold into the set list, the number of tickets just like, you know, jumps to the next level.
Yeah, I was surprised by that, too, though, because you don't I don't think of Neil Young as like a celebrity or something.
He's a legend.
I never thought of him as like a huge seller.
I mean, obviously he was. Harvest was a huge record.
Yeah, he's an icon and he could definitely go.
I think he probably plays arenas in a lot of cities.
Do you think Neil Young would play like the Staples Center?
Well, I remember having friends go see him at the Garden, although for all I know, I might be thinking of something like 20 years ago.
But I feel like Neil could come through New York and play the Garden.
Yeah, but I don't think he's playing like arenas every single place.
Yeah, no. So I think you're right. Also, like the idea that like, you know, Neil's got a few like huge hits that everybody knows.
And so does Crosby, Stills and Nash.
Yeah, I can imagine for some fans it's like more exciting when you get like all four together.
But yeah, for sure.
Yeah, who knows? But maybe he was done with it anyway.
I got to say, I appreciate getting the old wisdom from the old old people.
But I hate to imagine being in my late 70s and like just having like weird interpersonal conflicts with people about something somebody said about somebody's
girlfriend.
Just having to like send them an email and just be like, haven't heard back.
Maybe that is the old wisdom is that you got to make your peace with that.
Life is petty. You do your best.
But occasionally for some people, you end up being 78 years old and things haven't exactly mellowed out.
And, you know, it is what it is. You can't control.
Yeah, I think any stage of life is potentially rife with drama.
Yeah, I mean, there's drama at nursing homes.
There literally are the sometimes cool kids tables in the cafeteria at nursing homes.
People get excluded. So yeah, maybe it shouldn't be a shocker that, you know, sometimes people can't hash out interpersonal difficulties, even at that late stage.
All right. Well, that was a true episode full of old wisdom.
Thank you to the Bellamy Brothers. Thank you to David Crosby.
We'll talk to you guys in a week and maybe take some of that old wisdom and apply it to some young music, something like that.
All right, Jake, I'll see you soon.
All right, bud.
All right. Peace.
Time Crisis with Ezra Koenig.
NIGG!
(siren blaring)
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