RL115 - Rerememory

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: John wants to go under the blanket, referring to

The show title refers to going through your memories and re-remembering them, altering them slightly in the process every time you are doing this.

Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.

Do older people not need as much sleep? You should have 2-3 good BMs a day! (RL115)

It is pretty early! Merlin slept a very long time last night and he could sleep another very long time. Merlin 2014 has started to find a lot of value in sleep, he realized how many of his afflictions he could write down to the fact that he just wasn't sleeping very well, so he tries to make himself sleep well now. It has definitely helped his old man quotient. People wonder why he is such a homebody and never goes anywhere, but he would have to go to a bed at 11pm if he would do that.

John’s mom gets a full night’s sleep, but she wakes up at 4am, and John’s dad would stay up all night and wake up in the morning just fine and get by on 4-5 hours of sleep. When John was young people were telling him that older people didn't need as much sleep, but he does not know if he is finding that to be personally true, which probably means he is still young and he still needs 12 hours of sleep like a 4-year old.

Merlin’s amount of enjoyment of life in general and many things in specific comes from something related to how much control he has over the environment. One reason he didn't like jobs a lot in the past is because he didn't have that much control over the environment. You had to be in with the overhead lights and people and stuff like that. Maybe part of it is like that you have more control over your environment when you get older. People leave you alone, you sit around, you watch your stories, you clean the cat box, you go to sleep when it damn-well suits you, and then you get up at 4am and put on a tie to go to the DMV, even though you don't need to.

Maybe that all those ”old people need less sleep”-stories are failing to take into account the 3.5 hour nap they take sitting up in their chair, watching Walker, Texas Ranger. That counts as downtime! Old people also poop less, and that frustrates them. Merlin has known three old people at least. Merlin’s grandmother is somewhat emblematic of her generation. She is a post Kellogg American, and she really thought you were expected to poop every morning, otherwise you didn't leave the house, it would be like going out with your spats or something like that.

There was the priest that cornered John in the fish bar in Sandpoint, Idaho and asked him how many BMS he had a day. They were at the fish bar, which is a bar shaped like a fish, you walk in the mouth of the giant fish, they were drinking red beer, which is a North Idaho tradition: Half beer, half tomato juice, and the priest leaned over, they had been chatting, and he was like: ”Let me ask you: How many BM:s do you have a day?” - ”I don't know! One? Zero? Sometimes none for a couple of days, sometimes a whole bunch all at once!” - ”No, that is not healthy. You need to have 2-3 good, solid, healthy BMS a day!”

John was 19, and from that time to the present he has always in the back of his head had a little tally sheet, and if three BMs a day is the standard of good health he is probably 8200 BMs down, he has so much catching up to do, and he is not looking forward to getting that accounting square.

John being very good at remembering stories (RL115)

Sometimes John thinks back at the experiences he had as a young man, and he marvels at them: ”What the hell was happening? How do I remember?” There are people around him who can't remember what somebody said to them on the phone. Why do these things stick in his head? Every one of them is a small component of the DNA of his mantra and when he wakes up in the morning, it is like: ”Right, 3 BMs today, something to shoot for! Remember the Battle of Midway, and also: Welsh Troll (see RL55), the time that I used that word wrong in 1981, that guy with the tattoos on his hands that I insulted when I was working at Steve Broadway News, he is still mad at me for sure!”

Merlin thinks John is like a mythical Greek beast, almost like a Cassandra thing: He is condemned to never be able to forget. This is what scares him about his stupid kid: He has gotten now so into the thing of going like: ”I don't know if she is just not receiving information, if that information is being poorly encoded onto her hard drive!”, but they have a big problem with things like socks and understanding the role of socks and being able to leave the house. You need them, because then you got to put shoes on before you leave, and that is 25 minutes right there. Merlin has gotten into this terrible habit of thinking that his daughter doesn't hear anything, and then she will just blow his gourd off by remembering something deeply specific from when she was two or three.

If you ask most people what their earliest memories are, first of all there is all this stuff that they know because their family told them that over and over, but most people's memories as adults start around age 5. Merlin read recently that actually it just starts erasing a little bit around 5-6, and by 10 you are really forgetting a lot of stuff. That is what scares him: He doesn’t know what kind of bullshit he has said one time that she is going to use to guide her life regarding her BMs every morning, and it is just some off-handed thing he said.

John has to think about that quite a bit because he is governed by these constant little agenda to the Constitution that he is always adding. A lot of them are ancient. He has no idea whether 3 BMs a day is some kind of standard, or whether this priest was crazy, or whether this was some kind of come on, or whether it was an invitation to join the Society of Jesus that he was misinterpreting. Maybe BMs were like Besmillas?

John has a couple of close friends who both casually shrug off the idea that they have a really bad memory. ”Oh, I have a really bad memory!” Shrug. Normally that is either a self fulfilling prophecy or it is a cop out, but within the spectrum of human talents it is obvious: Having a bad memory is something that absolutely could be an affliction and the only way you would know is by comparing and contrasting your experience with other people where they are like: ”You remember that time when we blankety blank?” - ”Jesus, I don't! So I guess I must have a bad memory!”, but that could be a descriptor for a whole lot of things that were going on. ”Is the orange that I see the same orange that you see? We both call it orange!”

How do you gauge perception, except by an ungainly process of trying to describe your experience and seeing if it squares with other people. These friends that are like: ”I have a really bad memory!” - ”Do you have a bad memory for stuff that has happened recently? You also have a bad memory for stuff that happened to you a long time ago? Or is it just that you are not turning experiences into metaphors? Is it memory or is part of the process of remembering things changing memories into metaphors or stories or changing them into other forms that are easier to hold on to and process?”

25 other things happened that night in the fish bar in Sandpoint, Idaho, and John could not tell you who he was there with or why he was there or any of the other lead up to why he was at the Fish Bar in Sandpoint, Idaho, and where he was headed afterwards. This priest said this to him, John found it a remarkable conversation at the time, and it is not like when he brought this up he reeled back: ”Whoa, I got to remember this!”, but he was engaged in the conversation: ”Tell me more about how many poops I should be having! I feel like a grown-up, and you are definitely a grown-up. This is not a conversation I have had before with a fellow grown-up. I am really engaged!”

John was also drunk, but he took it away from there and put it in the big book of his memory and converted it somehow into a story that was a bigger story, it was more meaningful. Within the fog of this ”I remember the Fish Bar, I definitely know where that is. I could probably find it even, but I don't know who I was there with!”, but then out of the fog John can picture this priest, he knows exactly what he looked like, he knows right at the bar where they were standing, and he remembers the five minutes that they sat and talked about poop.

Why did he convert that of all the things that happened that night? Why was that a thing that turned into a marble? It became hard like a marble and went into his bag of marbles!

Unlike childhood memories where you have looked through the photo album sitting on your mom's lap, she has told you about the picture you are looking at, that affects your memory of it and pretty soon you are like: ”I totally remember the time I stuck a knife into a light socket!” - ”Well, do you? Or have you looked at that photo album so many times?”, but this memory of this priest, there was no other confirmation of it. The way memory works is that you recall that clip, you play it for yourself, you re-remember it, and then you store it away.

With each rerememory John has surely altered it, but it is such a simple story, he is not saying that the priest rode in on a custom low rider bicycle, there is no detail to it, it is just this moment and within that it is a very private recollection of himself standing next to this guy. Part of why he took it away was that it was one of those early adult interactions where he was 19, the drinking age in Idaho at the time was still 19, so he was legally in this bar and legally standing there with one foot on the brass rail, drinking an abomination, really, half tomato juice, half beer, disgusting, but it was was the flavor of this area and the fish bar is back in the woods and that was during that era of white supremacy in Northern Idaho, so Hayden Lake and the white nationalists were very active in that area at the time.

There was all this adulthood John was feeling in that moment. This is what adults do, they go to bars and they drink terrible potions and I am talking to a priest, a real priest, he is not a junior priest, he is not a Minister, but he is a priest who goes all the way back to St. Peter. This is what he wants to talk about. At the time John had no way of knowing if this was what all his adult conversations are going to be like. He is going to be drinking beer mixed with something in a bar shaped like an animal, could be in a pig bar, there is a sense that outside the doors of the bar right across the dirt parking lot you are in the wilderness of Northern Idaho and you are surrounded by Klansmen or worse, skinheads, and what do you talk about?

If he had said: ”How many times do you cum a day?” - ”This is what we are talking about! I guess I am new here. I am 19 years old and I could go to Vietnam right now if it was 20 years ago, but instead I am learning about what it is to be a man here!” and if you can learn how to be a man, it might as well be from a priest in a fish bar in Idaho. Why the fuck wouldn't that turn into a marble and go in his bag?

Merlin remembering the story how he got into Macs wrong (RL115)

When you are young, you don't think about your poop. When you are young, you don't think about your memories. You don't have any reason to because everything is running. Even in psychology classes Merlin would hear about how memories actually work, which seemed completely foreign because his memories were great. You hear about things like cognitive biases and go: ”That is very interesting for people who aren't as smart as me!” and now it is one thing to realize you don't remember things, it is another thing to remember you don't remember them as well as you thought.

What fucks Merlin up hard is that old VHS tape of that memory, every time you play it, it degrades a little bit. Every time you tell that story, even if it is not a tall tale, you are hearing that as well as saying it, and it is hurting some of the fidelity of the original memory, if it was ever there at all. What gets Merlin is when he finds out he remembers something wrong, when he has something that he considers a hard little marble and he has been telling this story for years, and then somebody goes: ”That is not how that went!” and he feels so chastened.

One of his go-to stories in interviews for a long time was: ”How did you get into Macs?” and he said the same story over and over: ”I had dated this wonderful woman when I started in my freshman year, she had a Magnavox word processor, I wrote all my papers on it, and when she broke up with me, I had to learn to type on something else and I ended up going to the Mac-lab!” Every little bit of that is true, except for one important detail: He went to lunch with her one day after she had heard this anecdote and she said: ”You know, you broke up with me!” and all he needed to do was hear her say those words and he went: ”Oh my God, you are right! I broke up with you!" That is a different story!

It is not crucial to the story, but how much else did he get wrong? That is a real tent pole of the story. What an asshole! He had a wonderful girlfriend from New England with a Magnivox and he broke up with her! He felt like such a dick. It is exactly the kind of thing now that makes him doubt himself, because he is one of those people who says: ”I don't remember things!” He thought he remembered that, and he wonders how much other stuff he just gets dead wrong or remembers the context wrong, or he didn't take a step back and think about all the facts and evidence.

John conflating two concert stories (RL115)

When John learns that a story that he has told many times has a factual error it is usually exactly the thing that Merlin was just talking about: ”The second time I went to see the Grateful Dead, I met up with my bro in his Volkswagen Bug and we smoked pot the whole way over from Spokane and Santana was the opener and that was the night that I got thrown out of the Tacoma Dome because I had a bottle of peach schnapps and a guy found me and threw me out.” It is an amazing story, except that the peach schnapps story was actually ZZ Top at the Tacoma Dome and everything else was true about the second time he saw the Grateful Dead what ends up being the window dressing on the story.

The peach schnapps story or the fish bar story, the reason that turns into a marble and you walk away with it, is that John has been trying to fit that marble into the right slot for the intervening 25 years, he pulls that marble out sometimes and goes: ”Is this where this story belongs? Did I learn that because it applies here and I push it into a contemporary context, like: the peach schnapps story at ZZ Top fits here and I try it out because I am looking for a place where that is a metaphor for this, I am trying to interpret a new experience, and I know I have been carrying around this bag of marbles for a reason and he reaches in and goes: Does this story finally make sense in the context of this new information?”, and in most cases you try and fit it in there and you are like: ”Huh, kind of!”, but every once in a while you get one of those where you just stick the thing in there and it just locks and you are like: ”Holy shit, the story is completed!”

The question of: ”Was a Grateful Dead or ZZ Top?” That stuff is the shocker and John has been telling this story wrong the whole time. Ultimately that doesn't matter, that isn't the reason you made that into a story to carry with you, unless you are sitting around in a group of people and everybody is telling Grateful Dead stories. Usually that is where it comes out, you start to tell your Grateful Dead story and you are like: ”Holy shit…!” You probably wouldn’t get kicked out of a Grateful Dead concert for having peach schnapps. The security guards at the Tacoma Dome for a Grateful Dead and Santana show have bigger fish to fry, whereas at this ZZ Top show for whatever reason they were looking for Southern Comfort, and they found peach schnapps in this instance and were like: ”Good enough! You are out on the street!” John is so mad still!

Grateful Dead (RL115)

Merlin heard a song and felt a little twinge on the back of his neck because this song is really good. He was pretty sure he had heard it before, but he was fighting himself because he had a very strong feeling that it was almost certainly a Grateful Dead song, and he took out his phone and hit the Shazaam and it turned out to be Box of Rain from (the Grateful Dead album) American Beauty. What a nice song! What an excellent album! He was thinking that this could be something that R.E.M. put out in 1985/86, it is really great, it is not extraneous, not full of bullshit that he associates with the Grateful Dead, it is very manicured and well edited, and it made him angry, but it a really good song.

John thinks American Beauty is full of really excellent songwriting and at that moment in history they were contemporaneous with The Band and Crosby, Stills & Nash, all part of the same school as those guys, they were all collaborating on records with one another. That was their Pop record and it is a fantastic album.

Their guitarist Jerry Garcia is a really good pedal steel player, doesn't he play on Teach Your Children (by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)? John does not know about that. There was some thing with the recording of that album and maybe the one before it, and he ended up having to play more pedal steel, and he is pretty good at it. They are all really good musicians except maybe Bob Weir. The Grateful Dead hate is understandable. There is a lot of out of tune singing and on a lot of their live recordings they are so messed up on drugs that it is not good.

Merlin was going to a hippie school and he ended up hearing some Grateful Dead, but you hear about the Grateful Dead a lot. Like people who are into Tool. Merlin couldn't even name a Tool song, but the people who are really into Tool or the people who, to quote Sloane, are really into consolidated: God, you are so annoying! As Merlin grew as a person he filed it more under his more grown up thing from maybe Merlin revision 12 that this was just not for him. Now he might have to go back and check his memories.

The key elements to be conscious of in the Grateful Dead are that they really pioneered the loud, clean guitar tone, mostly unprocessed, which, as Dave Bazan pointed out the other day, you hear again in The Cure. In something like Echo & the Bunnymen there will be a lot of shaping of the sound. He is using the chorusing effects that we started to hear later on clean guitar. Jerry Garcia was doing all this in and out of phase stuff. He had a guitar with eleven different switches on it, and all the switches are: ”This pickup is in phase now and this pickup is out of phase…”, and it creates a chorusing or filtering effect on the tone, but really it always was a very clean tone.

Phil Lesh, the bass player, never plays the same note twice. His bass lines are weaving, bobbing up and down courses of notes that are miraculous. However he hears the patterns of music, it is a dimension closer to Jazz or further from the surface of the Earth than where John lives. The baselines are all over the place and extraordinary musical pieces on their own. Then of course every once in a while they would write a killer tune.

Merlin is going to give them another chance. The bass thing is very appealing. A lot of bass players start as guitar players and you can tell who those people are, but somebody who takes the bass for what it needs to be, like John Entwistle (from The Who) plays the bass in a way that only a bass could be played, whereas Merlin is more like Lou Barlow. Like, going GGGGDDDDCCCCDDDD. Entwistle looks so calm and implacable, but in his bass playing there is ferociousness and pure fury. And Phil Lesh is another step out onto the grass. There is not a lot of fury in him, but it is also not just dumb calm noodling either, he is chasing a unicorn across a lake.

If you listen to The Who and you zoom in on the bass, you will have a tremendous experience that for John is very emotional. Phil Lesh does more the incomprehensible noodling of jam bands with a lot of Jazz inflections. If you don't get that stuff right, it is a pretty rough road. Entwistle, even if he does a little pentatonic fill it sounds like a building is falling down.

John listening to isolated bass an drum tracks on YouTube (RL115)

Just three days ago John was listening to soloed Geddy Lee (from Rush) bass parts on YouTube. When he started going down there he told himself: ”Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Get out! Get out! You just listened to a YYZ with the bass soloed. That is indefensible! This is not useful!”, but it is thrilling. The reason that got him there was that he was listening to soloed Helmet drum tracks. John saw Helmet within a couple of years when they got back together, and it was phenomenal, but listening to the drum tracks of Helmet soloed, the first thing that you notice is: Wow, that snare is really tuned up, it is a tight ringing snare.

For most of the tune it is just kick and snare, like Nabil used to say when they would do sound check and the guy would have him hit the tom 15 times, he would say: ”Well, that is 4 times more often than I hit the tom in my entire set!” Listening to the kick and snare of these Helmet drum tracks, the kick drum is just so dead-on, so relentless. You don't think of that music as having any swing because it doesn't, but the pocket of it is just extraordinary. So, ”Fuck!”, John will listen to soloed musicians forever in a day, and it is just not healthy.

Merlin has reached some nadir of both music dorkiness and just really every kind of dorkiness when he is sitting there and one of his go-to’s Dave Grohl’s on Queens of the Stone Age’s No One Knows. Those fills are from another planet, to get to those four fills that he is looking for he will listen to three minutes of Dunk Cha, which is really good Dunk Cha. It is basically like My Sharona (by The Knack) It is depressing, but it is a nice way to spend an evening, better than listening to Noam Chomsky lectures.

John being influenced by Queens of the Stone Age, songs that stand on its own, or are dependent on production (RL115)

That Queens of the Stone Age record is still a real influence on John and he can't square that with any of the music that he makes. The sound, the tone, the feel of it, the attitude of it… You can very easily put that into a couple of different genres, it really is its own thing, it is aggressive without being angrily stupid. There is always a little bit of restraint to it, but with menace.
That song Go With the Flow had such an impact on John. It is obviously surfer philosophy and they are famously a stoner band, but there is also something ironic in the delivery of Go With the Flow or with the background of the music. It feels like a pretty aggressive take on that Go With the Flow philosophy.

In trying to take that song apart and see what it is made of John realized that, like a lot of great songs, there is nothing to it. It is two chords basically, and the impact of the tune is 100% production and attitude. There is nothing complicated about it, it is just sound. As a songwriter John always aspired to write songs that were not dependent on sound, that the song itself was elegantly built. You could play it just on a piano, you could play it on a guitar by yourself and it doesn't need strings to be good. Bittersweet Symphony wouldn’t come across well on a ukulele.

Solitary Man (by Neil Diamond) can be covered by 700 different artists and the greatness of the song shines through, but no other band could cover Go With the Flow and make any dent in it or any improvement. The album version is always going to be the best because it is a sound creation. That is different from The Cure, which all those records are sonic creations, but you could cover a Cure song and do a cool interpretation of it and make it into something different. But you couldn't cover a My Bloody Valentine song.

How Queens of the Stone Age manage to be in that My Bloody Valentine category although the songs have hooks and they pop, but it is a cake of sound and you take any one element and try to zoom in on it and say: ”It is the guitar part!” - ”It is just two chords through a distortion box, it is nothing!" As John evolves and progresses, his interest in the last five years has been about trying to make these sonic tapestries, but that isn't his tradition and that is not what he knows best, and in a way that is why he has been so unproductive. He wanted to make a record that sounds like Loveless for years.

So did he (probably Kevin Shields from My Bloody Valentine). Isn't there a story how he nearly bankrupted Creation Records with the creation of that record? The actual stuff that happened in the recording was pretty simple: Loud guitar, mic in front of the amp, but stories about how Loveless was recorded, where he created a tent out of blankets and would poke his head out and say to the engineer: "Just keep recording! Don't ever talk to me through the talkback mic!” and then he would go under the blanket or whatever and be under there for 4 hours, and half of that time it is just the sound of him chewing gum.

Wouldn't it be great to be the incredibly stressed out label owner and you stick your head in to just see how things are going, and there is a blanket and the engineer goes: ”He has been doing that for 90 minutes!” The vocals on Loveless were recorded extemporaneously a lot of the time, and they just would go under the blanket and make mouth sounds and keep the tape rolling until those mouth sounds turned into word sounds and then they did it until they had a take.

John actually has a fourth Long Winters record that has vocals on 13 songs that are all mouths and he is afraid that he is going to die in a plane crash and somebody is going to go on his computer and find all the unreleased Long Winters music, or even worse: Hand those things off to his friends: ”Hey, would you guys like to finish this song that John was working on?” Mike Squires Revenge! What a nightmare! What if they got all of the disgruntled ex Long Winters people together to record that, or every singer in the country that has some vague grudge that was never fully articulated? That is going to take some work!

Merlin saw Colin Meloy in a Bob Mold video (he is in the video to the song I Don’t Know You Anymore). That video was directed by John’s friend Alicia J. Rose who was the original stylist and photographer of The Decemberists. All those photographs that you see of them holding red flags on top of a Castle Mount, looking like diluted miners on a break, a big part of that look that defined them early on, all those pictures were taken by Alicia. She is a Portland original and apparently she has naked hot-tub parties, too. John keeps getting invited down to like: ”Hey, if you need a place to crash…!”

John in the early 1990s being part of the modern primitive culture (RL115)

The other day John was looking through some photographs and he found pictures of himself in the very early 1990s when he was in his modern primitive culture. He was still pretty much like he is now, but for whatever reason he found himself in a modern primitive circle for a large portion of his social calendar, and that involved a lot of mud and nakedness and industrial music and the early days of tattoos in places other than on your forearms and of graphic elements other than anchors.

He was always a little bit outside because he is always a little bit outside of every culture he participates in, but this group of people really did embrace him and he embraced them for a period of a few years. They were all very close and covered with mud, and you could not put intoxicating substances in them fast enough. John has a couple of photographs of him sitting next to a fire pit with a dreadlocked girl sitting in his lap and a bald guy with a long goatee and pan boots playing a flute and dancing around a goat carcass. ”What the fuck was I up to?” That was a long time ago!

At the time John was trying to figure out what was next in the world and that was the logical extension of what hippie values would lead to, that seemed like next gen. It wasn't friendly anymore, it was trending dark again, and John felt like he needed to be there, boots on the ground, figure out what this was all about. He didn't have logger boots at the time, just some old boots, but there were a lot of people in really nice logger boots, really high up with lots of laces and all the extra pole climbers. John didn't have any money then, so he didn't even go to the store to look at how much those things cost.

Merlin remembers Doc Martins seeming out of his range, and they were $100! Back then you could get a pair of Chuck Taylors for $15. John was waltzing around through that culture, definitely feeling like everybody got amazing boots. The boots that he had passed muster because they were just old and thrashed, but they weren't tall. Even then those boots were probably $200 at a time when he was making $200 a month. Even when he had a job. Right.

John finding an uncashed $150 paycheck from 1994 in his boxes of paper (RL115)

John was going through a box of papers not very long ago and found an uncashed paycheck from 1994 for $150 and he has no fucking idea how that would have even ended up in a that box (see RW182 when it was a $350 check from 1993) He definitely has a lot of boxes of papers. Inside the front door he has a stack of cigar boxes that now is probably five foot tall. There is a cigar box for airplane tickets, a cigar box for concert tickets, a cigar box for unused drink tickets because everywhere he goes he gets paid in drink tickets and he doesn't drink.

Rather than hand those out to people and say: ”Hey, everybody! I got ten drink tickets. Why don't you go get yourself an extra drink?” he greedily keeps them and goes home and he probably has $50,000 worth of drink tickets. He has a separate cigar box for sports game tickets, a cigar box for old IDs, a cigar box for other people's IDs that he finds, a cigar box for backstage passes that are stickers and then a separate cigar box for backstage passes that are laminates. Also he collects cigar boxes and is always out looking for cigar boxes.

Somehow in one of these cigar boxes he has an uncashed pay stub from 1994. He knew enough somehow to put this in a box, but not enough to cash it. He can't imagine… It is one of those butterfly in China situations. If he had cashed that $150 and had an extra $150 that month in 1994, would he be where he is today? Would the decisions he made based on having that extra $150 set him on a separate path? He might have bought an ice cream cake, put a down-payment on a pair of lagers boots.

How Chris Caniglia made John buy his first guitar, a 1967 Rickenbacker (RL115)

John got fired one time, and he was sitting in a cafe the next day, bemoaning having been fired and his good friend Chris Caniglia came in and sat down: ”So you got fired?” - ”Yapp!” - ”How much money do you have in the bank?” - ”I have actually been saving for the last year. I got $800 in the bank!” - ”What are you going to do with the $800?” - ”I don't know. Probably drink for a couple of months.” - ”You are going to take that $800 and just going to sit around, not work, and just drink?” - ”Can you think of something better?”

”Let’s go right now and buy you a guitar!” - ”What?” - ”For $800 you can get a killer guitar! You are always talking about wanting to play music. You are always talking about wanting to start a band. You don't even have a fucking electric guitar!” - ”Well yeah, you are right!” - ”Let's go, let's get on the bus, go to the guitar store, buy a guitar!” It was such a revolutionary idea, and they walked out of the cafe, got on the bus, went to the guitar store, and John had never perceived himself as having this opportunity before, so they down to The Trading Musician in the University district.

There a blonde Rickenbacker was sitting on a stand inside the door: ”Well, I can't afford a Rickenbacker!” The price tag said it was from 1967, it was $650, and somebody had taken out the FilterTrons pickups that came with Rickenbackers and put 1960s Gibson pickups in there. ”Look at that!” and John picked it up and played it. It was extraordinary. It was almost his entire savings and: ”Look at this thing!” - ”You can buy it right now!”

John put it down, walked around the store, spent a couple of hours looking at every other guitar, and he kept coming back to this Rickenbacker. Chris was standing there: ”That is the one you want. Buy it! This is what people do with money: They buy the thing that they want with it!” - ”But it is so much money. I could live on this money. I could drink 1000 Papst Blue Ribbons with this money!” - ”… or you could buy this guitar!”

John took it up to the counter and said: ”I will buy this guitar!” and it was the first real thing he ever bought. That guitar was the guitar that he started The Bun Family Players with and the guitar that he started The Western State Hurricanes with, and the guitar he started The Long Winters with. John still has that guitar!

All that because of Chris Cornelia, saying: ”Do you know what money does? Are you aware of what other people do with money? Do you know how money works in the world?” - ”I know how money works. You put it in a shoe box or a cigar box and you stack it until you have a lot of it, and then you look at it and then you drink your way through it!” - ”The reason it is hard for other people to save money is that they buy the things that they want, which obviously you don't have that problem, but every once in a while you actually should buy a thing that you want!” and this guitar was the thing that made it all possible, a 1967 Rickenbacker with Gibson pickups.

Merlin wonders if John is pretty sure he remembers most of that correctly, they should get Chris Caniglia on here and see if he validates that story. Chris would pretty shortly try and steer the story toward the time that John broke into his apartment and put a knife in his chest and told him he was going to fuck him. He is like that!

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