Inspiration.
Community.
Industry.
Gentrification.
Creativity.
Survival.
Starting over.
We've travelled all across the country
and we've been inspired at every stop along the way.
Now there's really only one place left to go.
Sync, corrected by icephoenix www.addic7ed.com
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These people and their stories,
these cities and their history,
the culture, the accent,
the geography, the music...
These interviews have all been more like lessons.
And it's all led us here
to the greatest city in America.
I love New York. When I want the insanity
and the energy of the city, I'm here.
The city is just alive. It literally is 24/7.
Just action all the time.
It is this confluence of cultures
from all over the world
and you literally get it walking down the street.
The whole thing of living in close proximity
not only to people that are different, but to strangers,
to people you don't know at all.
You take the subway when you're five years old.
You figure it out really fast.
And it's a little mini world, New York.
When you grow up in New York, you kind of get that walk.
You know, I know what I'm doing,
I know where I'm going, and don't mess with me.
I'm walking here! I'm walking here!
With New York, it's like everything has to come
with its own personal legend, it's own personal myth.
Live... from New York... it's Saturday night!
But that's why they say if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.
First place I lived in New York, it was $105 a month.
You could live in New York in the '70s
on no money because the city was really destitute.
And, yeah, I would run home every night,
but it was $105 a month.
I always remember hanging out
with the 75-year-old doorman where I worked
and I was just like, "Man, I really love this city, man.
Tonight I'm gonna go and see The Dead Boys
and Patti Smith Group, Television, and Talking Heads."
And he's like, "No, this city is a shadow
of what it used to be in the '40s."
And I looked at his face and was like,
"Really? It's gone for you?
Because it's killer for me right now."
There was no mediocrity in the city.
There never was mediocrity in New York.
To me, Paul Simon is New York.
He loves that city
and people that live there tend to write about it.
You're gonna be exposed to everything.
There's no way that you're just gonna be in New York
and only be aware of one kind of music.
You may prefer one type of music and have your favorites,
but you're gonna be familiar with all kinds of stuff.
And also, New York radio was very powerful.
You're listening to the Spinners,
but then also you're getting into Steely Dan.
You're getting a little bit of Gladys Knight and the Pips,
but you're also getting "Band On the Run."
Even at the creative level, the making of music
in this city is a business. It always was.
In Tin Pan Alley,
legendary home of Broadway's tune splishers and composers,
the nation's popular songs are created.
The original song factory would be Tin Pan Alley.
There was the Gershwins, Irving Berlin.
People wrote songs to be popular.
You know, you bought the sheet music.
Sheet music was the first records.
When they created the music industry,
they created it from a completely different place.
Why did John Hammond record Billie Holiday?
To sell records?
'Cause he ached when he heard her voice.
When they recorded Woody...
It was like hearing Whitman.
It was like hearing the truth.
It dealt with their lives and what they had gone through.
So the industry was created
because they thought this music was important.
The Brill Building scene.
Can you explain what that is?
The Brill Building by the '50s,
early '60s, mid '60s,
was the central and emotional
location for American pop music.
It's where the songwriters were.
Every floor had little offices
with a piano in it and a basic tape recorder.
The publishers were based in that building.
And you came to work and you wrote a song.
Just day after day after day.
The industry was centered here.
No disrespect to LA, but in many ways this was the center of it.
There is something about New York.
Everywhere you go has that intensity.
You go to a nightclub, go to a hamburger shop,
it's all hitting, bouncing off of people.
Then you go to the studio and there's five bands in the studio.
The mid '70s for recording in this town was incredible.
The places that made these time capsules,
these documents of the music that shook the world,
and to go into these bunkers was just the coolest thing.
And there there was the Record Plant.
There was a young assistant engineer
they called Jimmy Shoes.
In studios in those days, they'd wear suits.
I cared about how the Stones were dressing.
You know, Mick Jagger's got snakeskin shoes.
I'd take all my money and buy them.
And so people started messing with me.
Jimmy Shoes grew up to be Jimmy lovine,
arguably the most powerful guy in the music business.
Record Plant was ground zero.
David Bowie's doing "Young Americans" downstairs.
I'm working with John Lennon and Roy Cicala upstairs.
So you feel that. And when you walk by the rooms, you hear KISS.
And when you consider the people that are doing it...
Jimmy lovine working on John Lennon's "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night."
And he tells Jimmy, "By the way, Elton John's coming by to play piano."
And it's like, "Hello!"
You know, this is just an average day at work?
Well, in New York, it is.
I just remember the first time I was walking
past the old belly in front of Electric Lady.
You know, that brick facade that stuck out like a pregnant woman.
I went, "There it is."
Electric Lady Studios, Jimi Hendrix built.
Which was, you know, almost like Jesus coming down
and sanctifying the ground.
That place was running 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
You could have Zeppelin in studio A,
Jeff Beck and Stevie Wonder in studio B.
We did some stuff with Arcade Fire at Electric Lady
and recorded Bowie there, which was sort of crazy
'cause he's like, "Well, downstairs is where we did 'Fame.'"
Like, I wish I could say something like that.
Him just being like, "Huh, almost forgot."
Made "Fame" downstairs.
That studio was on the site of a club
that was originally called Salvation.
That was where Jimi jammed in and played in.
It's funny because Electric Lady is, in fact, the basement.
There was water running through it.
And that had to be dealt with
'cause there were these underground rivers
with, like, super rats.
One thing we know how to raise in New York, rats.
You can ride these things.
They were, I guess, drilling or doing whatever
and they hit an underground river.
Who expected there was going to be a river running
somewhere under West 8th Street in Lower Manhattan?
Here is this prehistoric thing
going on where this guy wants to create music
that's both ancient and to the future.
All of it happening in this one little spot
where most people would walk by and think,
"I've got to get up the street and buy my Daily News."
I considered a lot of studios in New York City,
but rather than use an iconic studio
that most people know about,
I found this tiny place in Soho.
Hi, Dave. Welcome to the Magic Shop.
I really like the name.
I just thought that was such a good name for a studio.
The Magic Shop.
Do you remember much about Steve?
Is he still alive?
- He's still alive. - Okay, good. Just wanted to check.
Come on in and I'll show you the live room.
So much about a studio is the atmosphere
that it's given by its boss.
Whereas Steve, you know, you can just feel the music coming out of him.
He just breathes it.
Then there's all these vintage keyboards
which I've been collecting over the years.
Like a Zombies Wurly.
Right? A tack piano.
This is a Baldwin grand piano.
And Steve is a New Yorker.
He can relate and talk and work with anybody.
This was a guy you knew you could trust.
And whoever you are, however you dress,
whatever you do, it can happen.
And that's basically it.
Well, we picked the Magic Shop because it doesn't look like anything.
Every day for three months, I walked past it.
I still don't know where the door is.
It's like Narnia in that respect.
You have to really try hard to access it.
Do you know the story about the record
at the Magic Shop that David Bowie made?
The one that he made in secret?
The most New York thing about the David Bowie record
"The Next Day" is that he made it in New York
and nobody knew a goddamn thing about it.
He was spotted many times walking down the street.
All the signs were there, but nobody figured out
that we were making the new David Bowie album. That was incredible.
One of the most iconic people can just be like,
"And now I'm wearing this hat
and no one's going to notice."
Like, I think it's pretty slick.
Also, for me, I would probably walk by him and not know him
because I would expect him to be gliding by on, like, a spaceship.
The thing that's really interesting about New York
is it's one of the most public cities
in the world and it's one of the most private.
You can do some of your best work
and do it totally under the radar.
And then when it comes out, it's like,
"Wow, where did it come from?"
And I'm thinking, "Well, it came from New York."
Around 1986 or so,
started toying with the idea of building a studio.
So what was this neighborhood like then?
Oh, man, this was an awful neighborhood.
So now, of course, it's Bloomingdale's
and Michael Kors and all that.
But then, it was really funky.
I would walk down the street
and every day there was broken glass
in front of the cars.
Why the fuck did you pick this place?
Here's why I picked it.
I wanted to have a great drum room.
And when you when in there and you whacked a snare drum,
it really sounded good.
This room sounds fucking sick.
Certain studios just have a magical something.
I don't think it comes down to the design.
Either it has it or it doesn't.
That's cool right there.
There's no way to control it.
- Hey, I have a question. - Oh, yeah.
Butch, where does this come up?
- Do you know? - Good question.
- Your talkback? - Oh, my God!
Oh, shit. Holy shit.
Fuckin' A.
The talkback!
Hey, Butch! I have a question!
When does this mike come up?!
I have a history with The Magic Shop.
I recorded Sonic Youth's "Dirty" there.
It's an amazing sounding room
and I love that they have that old Neve console.
When I walked in the doors with the Foo Fighters,
the studio looked exactly the same
as when I'd been there 20 years ago.
All right, so here are some session reports
for people that were here. So here's The Dictators.
Lou Reed's records. Suzanne Vega.
The session reports for The Ramones.
Here's Patty Smyth.
- Not Patti Smith, but Patty Smyth. - Yeah.
She didn't like me very much.
- Warren Zevon. - Steve, this looks like fifth grade homework.
- I know. So here is... - Oh, wow.
What it looked like when it was opened
with those red risers that I was telling you about.
That's the same carpet, huh?
Yeah, man. I haven't changed my carpet.
- It's really awful. - I can tell.
It's really disgusting, I know.
I get people complaining about it all the time.
And this is a really nice letter
that Rupert wrote to the studio.
I guess I could... I don't want to read it,
but you can see it now.
"Thank you for taking care of my console
and thank you again for your hospitality.
My very best wishes for the future."
You should do something about the carpet.
Things started to change around here...
I think it was maybe '97 or '98 maybe.
Over the holidays, MTV stopped playing rock music
and all of a sudden started playing,
like, what was Justin Timberlake's boy band?
- NSYNC. - NSYNC.
That really impacted the studio pretty seriously.
And the budgets dried up and so the bands dried up.
It was at that point that I moved the studio
in a different direction.
Come on down.
Upstairs we do new records
and then down here is where we do all the audio restoration
and preservation work like Sam Cooke.
My dad had Huntington's disease
for most of my life.
Huntington's changes the way you walk, the way you talk.
After a few years, he couldn't play guitar,
he couldn't sing.
He'd always talk with a slur.
He looked like a drunk.
That's the effect of the disease.
It was really tough as a kid to walk down the street
with people looking at you saying,
"Oh, look at that drunk walking with his kids."
And then years later, here comes this guy Steve
and he plays me this little clip that he had worked on
of my dad talking and singing.
And I just went, "Wow!"
And he was healthy and he was adorable
and he was powerful and he was right.
It opened a door to me to want to know more
about who the young guy was, who the healthy guy was.
Doing restoration work
had a really positive impact
on keeping The Magic Shop going during those years
where people didn't play as much.
Everybody in New York City at that point
hated singer-songwriters, hated Americana music.
Didn't want to hear any of that stuff.
That's the kind of music that we really loved
and we, you know, cultivated.
Every generation has to reinvent itself
musically on every level.
And none of us exist in a vacuum,
so we are influenced and we actually copy.
I mean, Dylan would be the first to tell you that he copied Woody Guthrie.
But look what he did.
Dylan came to our house in 1961
and he was interested in Woody.
And I was watching American Bandstand
and he knocked at the door
and I was so upset because they were teaching the Locomotion.
But he was very insistent. I closed the door twice.
Woody Guthrie is not here. Good-bye.
Finally Arlo came to the door, saw that he had a guitar.
If Arlo hadn't answered the door the third time,
music history would be really different.
The Village was alive.
Lots of places to play.
And everybody was down there.
Those were the formative years
for people like Dylan and Joan Baez.
I came in to be in the middle of the energy.
I went to New York City without a clue.
There was so much happening in music.
There was something so empowering
about three chords and the music that you could make and the camaraderie.
My parents, surprisingly, used to go down to the Village.
So they would take me down there.
There was a great, great music scene.
But by the time I came up in the ranks,
the scene changed.
If you think about it, it was a throwback to the '50s
when Little Richard and all those rock and roll groups,
they would wear lavender suits and eye makeup.
Music was getting too serious.
So here were these young dudes coming up
saying, "Damn it, people just wanted to have fun."
Led Zeppelin was cool, but it was just like,
"Well, I can't really be that 'cause that's superhero rock."
So bands like KISS were really important to kids like me.
We were the black sheep of the black sheep.
We weren't cool. The cool guys were hanging out
at Max's Kansas City and going out at night.
They became the soundtrack to a fashion show.
We were trying to kick ass
and we kind of left them with their mouths open.
It's not enough to read Rimbaud or Kerouac
or hang out with Robert Mapplethorpe.
That doesn't make you credible at rock and roll.
Nor does makeup.
It comes down to having the roots,
really understanding rock and roll and preaching it.
What was it like going out, seeing bands at the time?
Like in the early '70s in New York?
'Cause it sounds fucking crazy.
It was CBGB's.
I loved CBGB's. You know, it stands for
country, bluegrass, and blues.
But I don't remember a country artist being there ever.
It was underground and it was undiscovered
and it was a magnet for really eclectic people.
I saw Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs at CBGB.
That's where all the energy was.
And even all the visual artists in New York,
that's where they would be.
That's where Basquiat was. He was at CBGB.
It was tight, sweaty, and dirty.
It was what rock and roll clubs were supposed to be.
Yeah, it was crazy. And, boy, that was a filthy freakin' bathroom.
Man, oh, man.
- I took a dump in there once. - Go, baby.
I think it's no accident that punk rock
had its birth and flowering in New York City.
People were creating pretty raw,
confrontational music
because it was a raw, confrontational time.
Bands like The Stooges and MC5
that were sort of expressing that vibration
from, like, this urban sort of nightmare zone,
it was not popular at all.
Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young,
James Taylor... All those album covers are on boats
with dogs or, like, on porches
and they're kind of rustic, smoking weed, being free.
That was very hip.
You know, the legend is 13 people bought the first Stooges album.
They're the ones who became The Ramones.
I'd been hearing about The Ramones, The Ramones, The Ramones.
And my wife, she went down and saw them
and came back raving.
So the next day
I rented a rehearsal studio and they came in.
They must have played 15 or 18 songs
in 15 minutes.
And I said, "Stop. Let's do a deal."
Seeing that cover of these guys
on that cover against this brick wall in New York
was really interesting to me 'cause the singer
was as tall as I was.
'Cause I'm tall. I'm like 6'6", 6'7", right?
And nobody on stage was tall. These guys are all...
It was Robert Plant, shirt off, big muscles
and just singing, you know?
Roger Daltrey, you know?
There was nobody who was skinny and horrible-looking like I was.
Except for this singer in this band The Ramones.
I was like, "Who... What's that?"
And I was so curious to hear what that sounded like.
It just made me laugh uncontrollably.
Just seemed like a joke
because there was no point of reference for music that fast.
But I did see The Ramones probably 50 times
and they were my favorite group by far.
If you've met all the Ramones,
you know that The Ramones are bigger than the four members.
Same is true with the Beatles.
And they're amazing, incredibly talented,
amazing, inventive people.
The Beatles is a much bigger thing.
The Ramones are a much bigger thing.
It's not four people.
All of a sudden, the energy of the urban was really cool.
That was our thing.
The hip-hop scene was more indicative
of real New York because most people involved with New York hip-hop
were people who grew up, were indigenous to New York City.
Hip-hop started in New York.
If people wasn't able to play these records in clubs,
then they were gonna figure out how to play these records in the streets.
You know, when Kool Herc came over here
and just started jamming in the park,
everything clicked.
New York definitely influenced hip-hop in a huge way.
The DJ, two turntables, a mixer,
the crowd, every day was unexpected.
It started in the Bronx, but everything
is kind of tied together with transit systems.
So whatever started in the Bronx,
sure enough was going to be in Brooklyn,
Queens, Long Island, Manhattan.
The mecca of black life.
We used to be running around doing handstands on the subway
on our way to the studio.
It was bananas.
In the early days of hip-hop,
all the artists felt like they shared a secret.
We knew something there that people didn't know.
We were punk rock kids and the second we heard hip-hop, that's for us.
Hip-hop became the most important thing in my life.
There was a tremendous, exciting
revelation in this music.
It's the same way that punk rock did it.
Punk rock had Doc Martens, spiky hair.
Hip-hop had sneakers and sheepskin coats.
A different uniform, but the attitude was exactly the same.
This kid we knew introduced us to Rick Rubin.
He's got a PA, he's got turntables,
and he's got a bubble machine.
We're like, "We're in."
I was working with the Beasties.
Adam Horowitz would listen to all the demos that came in.
One day he's like, "Rick, you should listen to this one.
This kid is good." And it was LL Cool J.
He was 16 and he had this encyclopedic knowledge.
I made LL's first record, brought it to Russell.
Through hearing that, we decided to start Def Jam basically.
And LL was the only person to write lyrics
for a Run DMC song other than Run DMC.
That's how much they thought of him.
They were the architects for what we wanted to do.
Then the Beasties become, like, the biggest
fucking band in the word. Did anyone see that coming?
No. At no time did we think anything
that we ever made would ever be heard by anyone.
There was no point of reference.
It wouldn't be realistic to ever expect that anybody would like it.
Even people who liked it thought it wasn't music.
And I felt like there's a way to illustrate
that this is one thing.
"Walk This Way" was the expansion of hip-hop
into the mainstream world.
- Rap seemed like it was kind of like... - It was a party.
And then all of a sudden you have Public Enemy.
One day we're hanging gig posters.
We had taken the picture of Malcolm X
when he was looking outside with the carbine rifle.
This young guy comes by and says,
"Oh, wow, you guys are getting down? Okay.
Who's this Malcolm the tenth?"
There was a certain militancy
and I don't think think any hip-hop record
before or after had that.
The '60s.
I remember clearly everything in my life from,
you know, the murders and the assassinations, Vietnam War.
I had uncles coming back, losing body parts.
And, you know, this was the first 10 years of my life.
Why wouldn't these things be commentary, like, 10 years later?
We really were dealing with what we experienced
and what we saw or we had heard,
what we were taught, what we had learned.
That's what made us say these kids need to know.
The first time I came to New York City,
I was maybe 11 or 12 years old.
My mother, who was a public schoolteacher,
saved up all her money
so she could take my sister and I to New York for the weekend.
We found the cheapest hotel room.
We saw a Broadway play.
We went to the top of the World Trade Center,
the Empire State Building,
the Statue of Liberty. Took the Staten Island Ferry.
And pretty much every night
I'd go to a hot dog cart
and eat, like, seven hot dogs.
And then I'd just go be ill in my hotel room.
I could still remember it all very vividly.
And I still love coming here.
Yeah, I mean, I do want to talk about 9/11.
You know, we're only about 12 or 13 blocks away.
And I remember clearly coming here
a couple of days after when they finally let you into the neighborhood
that there was dust on the doorstep here.
I mean, you could smell it,
what had happened.
Someone in the building here,
Charles McCrann, was a really nice guy. He died that day.
His son was actually interning for me.
My son passed away earlier that year as well.
It was a dark time.
We actually talked about whether we would go on or not.
Nobody wanted to come to New York.
All the bookings that had been booked in advance
completely dried up.
So the business became completely local.
The only people that came after 9/11
were New Yorkers.
I had to try to figure out a way to continue the studio.
About six months after 9/11,
I called Steve because I got a package in the office.
And there was a little package about this big, square,
brown paper, and twine tied around it.
At that time, there were warnings all over the place,
like, do not open unusual-looking packages
with brown paper and twine
because they could be bombs.
I said, "Okay, I'm opening this and I'll go out with a blast, right?"
And inside were four little boxes about that big
of metal spool with wire.
Was there a letter that came with this crazy package
that explained what it was?
Not really. It just said "Woody."
Turns out it was the only performance of my dad live
with an audience.
A wire recorder is actually something that was only used
for a year and a half in the '40s before they used tape.
When I was a kid growing up, I was like,
"Is it the songs? Is it what they stand for?"
When I heard that wire recording,
I went, "There it is."
And that's 'cause of Steve.
When my dad came to New York, it was 1940
and he moved into a fleabag hotel
on 43rd Street and 6th Avenue.
Looking out the window, watching New Yorkers walk by,
in the two weeks he was there,
he wrote five of his greatest songs.
The first one being "This Land is Your Land."
Wow.
He had just travelled across the country,
so it was kind of a journal about what he'd been through.
At the bottom of "This Land is Your Land,"
he wrote a little line, "All you can write is what you see."
This is all connected. We were talking before.
Everybody's connected.
Write what you see.
It's a different type of writing for me
because I've always gone inward
to discover things within myself.
This time it's more like reporting.
I love this.
Someone asked me if any of these lyrics were personal
because I was writing them about other people.
And I said yes. Once you find that inspiration,
you shouldn't be afraid to follow it
because anything is possible.
Wow. Wow.
Fucking great.
We decided not to do a lot of guitars on this one.
Yeah.
Think you could write some strings for it?
Of course. I started writing them.
Very nice.
Wait, I'm done. Let's go in.
When do we start?
The making of music in this city is still kind of a business.
And, you know, it goes against the trend now
where musicians have their own home studios
and they're working on laptops.
So every time a studio folds,
people cry, "Oh, I miss that place.
I miss this studio. I miss that studio."
Well, dude, you know, just close your laptop
and support your local studio.
You know? That's how you keep these places open.
And the important part of this story is the mentorship
and the fact of helping younger people.
When I was a kid, I got a job at the Record Plant
and this guy Roy Cicala was a teacher.
That's what his thing was. And it was unbelievable.
But that whole mentorship thing at recording studios
is disintegrating quickly.
So how do you see the future of this place?
Future?
Cloudy.
People still need to play together.
I guess. I hope.
We'll see if recording studios last.
We'll see if this is something that goes the way of the buggy.
I feel like people like Steve Rosenthal
are a dying breed.
You could still walk down a New York City street,
open a tiny little door and find someone like Steve Rosenthal.
But if you're not careful, you'd never know.
- For sure. - One of the dudes. One of the guys in a way.
At least that's who... She just strikes...
I don't know her that well, but...
- Yeah, there's that. - Yeah.
What's up, buddy?
- How are you? I'm Dave. - Hey, Dave.
- How you doing? - Good.
- What's going on? - We're learning your songs on guitar.
No way! They're really easy.
Wow.
He's written essays about you guys at school.
Dude! You want to come in and see what it's like to make a Foo Fighters record?
Come on in. Check it out. Come here.
This is where everybody sits when we record.
So that's the sound board.
And so I'll sit here and play guitar.
It's really loud and it's really fun.
How long have you been playing guitar?
Since third grade.
What else do you play right now?
Right now I'm playing "Bohemian Rhapsody" on guitar.
Jeez Louise. Are you good? You're good.
How many hours did you practice when you were a kid playing guitar?
Well, I was obsessed with the guitar.
And so I would come home from school and I would just sit there and play.
Like until dinner. And then after dinner.
- There you go. There you go. - And that was it.
See, this whole rock and roll album thing
isn't as glamorous as you'd imagine.
So what would you like the legacy of this place to be?
I want people to think that it was a...
A place that they could be comfortable in,
that worked well,
and that things happened musically
that couldn't have happened anywhere else.
And a-one, and a-two, and a-three.
Got it.
- Thank you so much. - Bye, guys.
I'm just gonna keep going until...
I get kicked out, I guess.
New York is very different than the New York I grew up in.
I guess that's true of everywhere, though.
It's just the mom-and-pop nature of it has gone away.
I'm all for making the city better,
making it cleaner, making it safer.
There is a character to it that's just gone.
My wife and I helped transform this neighborhood.
And now it's completely yuppified.
And what they want to do is put condos and corporate-controlled stores
and kick out all the mom-and-pop stores.
And they don't want any music.
You would think there would be some sort of a government agency
which would say, "You know what?
Instead of destroying the reason why people
want to come to this neighborhood in the first place,
why don't I help support the culture?"
It pisses me off when I go to the bank.
So I've owned this place for 25 years.
Is that meaningful? No.
All that's meaningful is what happened in the last 60 days.
People's lives,
it's the qualitative total of their life,
of what they've done in their life
that should have some meaning.
You know what's weird? It used to.
New York City is gonna end up a place
with condos, co-ops and corporations.
And no reason for people to come here anymore.
So that's what'll happen to the studio, I assume.
Unless I figure out...
Figure out some crazy way around it.
I don't know, Dave.
I was feeling good, but now I'm getting depressed.
Steve was one of my first interviews.
That conversation grew into something so much bigger.
Rather than talk about the color of the knobs
on his really awesome Neve board,
we wound up talking about America
and how we used to take care of each other.
I looked at my interview with Steve
like the message of this entire project.
We're all connected by something.
Maybe it's a river that runs underground.
Maybe it's Woody Guthrie.
Maybe it's Chuck D. Whatever.
That conversation became my goal.
I want to talk about these people.
I want to talk about music.
But I want to get to this.
I want this to be the exclamation point.
Music is life.
I don't think your life is remotely complete
without music of some kind in it.
Innately, we all know what we're capable of doing.
And then somebody comes along and tells us it's impossible.
The person who always tells you that something's impossible is the one who failed.
It's like, yo, man, keep your attention
on being able to get out of yourself
with that art underneath your arms
and you go rushing into the end zone.
Do what you feel like doing.
Sometimes it's gonna work, sometimes it's not.
Those are the moments when you just got to stay true to you.
It's all about the truth, right?
Like, trying to get to the truth through your guitar
or your drums or whatever it is.
Know your history. Just listen.
Listen to the early stuff. The early blues.
The early rock.
It's important to chase what catches your fancy,
but above all, learn to play what you want to hear.
What's happening in New York now?
If you want to find out what's going on in the city,
what you want to do is talk to a 44-year-old
who stays home most of the time.
Finger on the pulse.
Hopefully there's a room full of people who think what I did is stupid,
making awesome shit and high-fiving each other.
Have fun.
If you're lucky enough to be talented,
that's a blessing and you almost owe it to the creator
or whatever the powers that be are
to have fun with it. That's your job.
Don't fall for the idea of purist
that everything has to be analog or everything has to be electronic
or everything has to be anything.
Have a field day with it
'cause there's so many awesome things you could do.
It's a burning coal.
It's not cold. You know, it's hot stuff.
You want to start a fire? I got the coal.
That's what history is to me.
And it attracts the right person to do something with it.
To create the next fire.
And fires are fuel and food and energy and life.
I remember being in the White House once
for a performance in the East Room.
And on a break I went downstairs into the small library.
The first book that caught my eye
was a book of Bob Dylan lyrics.
And in that moment,
I realized that every American has the opportunity,
that every American has a voice.
I'm sure Bob Dylan never imagined
that a book of his lyrics would be in the library
of the White House for any president to walk downstairs and read
and maybe inspire a president to change the world.
He was a huge musical influence to me.
He was somebody who reminded me
of how powerful the American story can be told through music.
Part of the American music tradition
is not just being a consumer of music, it's being a producer of music.
How do you inspire that next generation
to go out and do that?
You know, my sense is that the creativity
that this culture produces, it's inexhaustible.
It's just going to keep on going.
So we want our kids to make sure
that they're part of that communal process.
'Cause it's all about the garage band.
It's about the juke joint...
The jazz club.
It's about people rejecting what is already there
to try to create something entirely new.
To me, the beautiful thing about our country
is that you can be Buddy Guy
and make your instrument from a piece of your screen porch
and wind up in the Kennedy Center.
Or be a kid from Springfield, Virginia,
and then get into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Or be a kid from Hawaii who becomes the president.
- You know what I mean? - Absolutely.
And that's always been a theme
in American popular music and rock and roll.
You got a dream and you take a chance
and you make it.
And all you got is your wits or an idea.
You know, kids are always gonna come up with something
that you haven't heard before.
What's also nice, though, is how there is a connection.
All these different musical rivers that run together
to make American music.
There's nothing more unifying in this country
than our music.
_
Sync, corrected by icephoenix www.addic7ed.com