 Welcome to economics and beyond. I'm Rob Johnson, president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I'm here today with Joe Boyd, music producer, author of particularly an esteemed book called White Bicycles and a man who's worked with artists such as R.E.M., Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, and many others. Joe was also a co-producer along with myself in the Aretha Franklin documentary of 2018, which is called Amazing Grace. But the difference between Joe and my participation is Joe was there managing things in the church at the time it was being made working with the people at Warner and so Joe, welcome. Thank you very much. I'm very keen to get your observations on a wild world. I don't want to use Kat Stevens too much, but it's a wild world. We've got a pandemic, we've got all kinds of rigid or authoritarian style orthodoxies that are in tatters. The picture's wide open. Characteristically at times like this, artists perhaps are the vanguard of what you call rising to the challenge. And so I think, I guess what I'd like to do is start with, what are your impressions of what's happening in this world? What do you see that concerns you and who do you see in the artistic world that's shedding light on the pathway that we need to carve? Well, I can't really present myself as any kind of visionary or pundit because I'm as bemused as everyone as to what shape things are going to take in the future. I mean, the fact that you have concerts with nobody in the audience, you have football games with nobody in the stands, you have Zoom harmonies, you know, with people taking different vocal parts, you have musicians giving home concerts on YouTube and other social media. I mean, all of this is so alien to the kind of music making that has been the focus of my life that I'm kind of like a deer in the headlights, you know, I mean, to me, you know, I've found myself a bit out of step with the modern way of making music because to me music is about a bunch of musicians in the same room, in the same space, looking each other in the eye, increasing or decreasing the intensity of the rhythm in the moment, not over the internet, you know, not as an overdub and and so where music goes from here, boy, your guess is as good as mine. Well, I mean, we did experience over the course of you and my musical lifetime the introduction of computerized drum machines, which created a certain mathematical precision, but it felt to me like it lost some of that interactive heartfulness. But this is taking it to another level for sure. I mean, the only encouraging thing is if you look back in history and in a way, I'm a backward-looking guy, you know, ever since I grew up when I was a teenager, I spent as much time listening to old Louis Armstrong and Johnny Dodds and Robert Johnson records as I did listening to rock and roll. But so, you know, I've always been hyper-conscious of the past and I think in a way if you look into the past you can at least take some solace from the fact that there have been moments in the past, many moments, musical moments where the view was the world that we know has ended nothing is going to ever be the same, the music we know is being destroyed, etc. And it's turned out differently. It's turned out some of these changes have been very positive. I mean, one of the most kind of cartoonish is 1834 or thereabouts the invention of the accordion and you know, this instrument came into Europe and around the rest of the world like an atomic bomb because it replaced piano players, violin players, clarinet players, bagpipers, you know, all these instruments who had been key to every kind of music making were suddenly replaced by one instrument. It was like the arrival of the synthesizer and and somehow music survived, you know, and great music even including the accordion, you know, survived. And the other the other great moment that I like to think about is for consolation at a moment like this is 1925 when network radio started in America and all of a sudden, you know, people could turn on the dial in California and hear a live broadcast of a big band from a ballroom or a soundstage in New York and the record companies were all going to jump, you know, the guys were all going to jump out of the 10th floor window. It was over. Why would anybody ever buy a record again when they could just turn on the radio and for nothing listen to their favorite song. And and so I mean people were really suicidal and it took a guy like Ralph Peer who was a pioneer record producer who said to his people at Victor Records or OK Records actually, he was with OK at the time. Well, the only thing we can salvage from this disaster situation is let's think of people who don't have electricity. Let's think of the rural poor and let's make some records for them because they can still play their wind-up gramophones and and so he went out into the hills of the South of America and he discovered Jimmy Rogers and the Carter family and the Memphis jug band and Charlie Patton and Sunhouse and eventually, you know, people like Robert Johnson and much to his astonishment it sold, those records sold to everybody. They sold to the urban people. They sold to the rural poor. They sold to white people. And so I can just say that we can only hope here that disruption is creative and it opens up new possibilities. And I think we can look to history for encouragement. And the I guess the other dimension that I was kind of thinking about online streaming in recent years at least when I worked with Peter Himberger and Ed Gerard, there was a lot of discussion about how the record used to carry the financial weight and subsidized tours and marketing and what have you but was streaming. At some level, the loss leader became the record and the live show and merchandise became the source of revenue or strategy about becoming prosperous. Yeah. And so I think the, how I say, the channels are constantly in flux. The structure of audiences changes. I mean, looking at some of these two hundred and sixty five million spins on Spotify all over the world is a very different market. I've always recall John Sinclair who was kind of a mentor to my life, co-wrote a book with a man named Robert Levin and it was called Music and Politics. And there were chapters in there about how if you were in Detroit and you want to smoke a joint, you could get your head cracked open. If you were in San Francisco and you wanted to smoke a joint, the law officer would ask if he could have a talk along with you. Yeah. And what John was saying was in those days, he was illustrating the tenor of the music, that kind of hard garage rock edgy Detroit sound and that smooth, warm, romantic sound that came from San Francisco were a reflection of the environment. But John went on to project that the knowing that the national and then eventually global market would be integrated. Artists would start to game what sold. Not what you might call emit reflections upon their local environment or about their local environment to the how they say to the betterment of all. So he was concerned that music was going to become somewhat shallower and driven by the equivalent of sound bites and hooks. And I don't I don't quite know where we are because I see artists of kind of of both types now. Well, I think he he certainly had a vision and he wasn't wrong. I think. You know, music that comes out of a certain culture, a certain local culture. I mean, it's music is. I don't like everything in life. It's very complex. I mean, I think you if you study the music of any particular style, any particular culture, you see a huge element of it grows from the soil, grows from the traditions that are part of that geographical area, part of that cultural history. But it's also hugely influenced by. What they hear over the radio and what comes in what records they play and what strikes people from outside, you know, it's always been music has never been pure. And I think the thing that that is slightly worrying, I think if you look back in culture. History, you know, there are certain great periods of art, for example. I mean, you know, Italy and a certain 50 year period, you know, there's such an incredible number of great masterpieces that came out in that. In a certain period in the early 16th century or around that time. And, you know, the 19th century novel, you know, something about what was in the water at that time in Russia and France and England. And America, you know, produced some of the great works of the world's literature. And I think if you look at music, there was this moment. Starting around 1925 with electrical recording, when people from traditional cultures were moving from rural. Home, homelands into the city and encountering. PA systems and electrical recording and different urban circumstances that changed and mutated the rural music that they brought with them. And that. Metamorphosis was very exciting and created some of the greatest works of art that have been recorded. You know, from Louis Armstrong's Hot Five to Carlos Gargels, Tango Records, to our senior Rodriguez's, you know, Cuban Afro Cuban music that was the basis of salsa, you know, all these things happened in that sort of 15 years following the beginning of electrical recording. And you could call it a golden age, you know, that that maybe we're going to look back on 200 years and say, well, took 100 years after 1975 or whatever for music to recover and to get back to something interesting again, looking at from a long point of view. I think it's we don't we're not necessarily we don't have the right to great music in every decade and every era. And I think we may have seen the passing of a golden age, you know, which were technology, demographics, culture, financial ebbs and flows, you know, all came together to create a fantastic body of work. Yeah, I always reminded there was a wonderful jazz pianist who died a couple of years ago in his 90s, Randy Weston. Oh, yeah. He was from, I believe he was from the Bronx or Brooklyn, lived a lot in Western Massachusetts and then went to Africa and France. Yeah, and he loved Morocco. Yes. And Randy, what was the name of his first record that he did? Langston Hughes wrote the lyrics. I think it was called Uhuru Africa. Right. But Randy, who I got to know in his last few years, because through his friend and wonderful saxophonist, Billy Harper, and I talked to Randy on a number of occasions. And one time he went on to Amy Goodman show, Democracy Now. Right. They made about a 20 minute segment, which I'll put on the website as associated with this particular podcast. And he was talking about a Sufi poet or a mystic. I think his name was Moussef and Randy Weston quoted him as saying, the music is like a thermometer, a barometer of the culture. And when you have really creative music, you have really creative society. When you have very stale music, it is a symptom of something going to rise in society. Yeah. And I think that there is, how would I say, there's an element of that. But I'm reminded in a conversation that I had earlier today when someone said to me, well, in the 60s, anti-war movement, anti, excuse me, civil rights movement, and there was a lot of energy. You're in my friend, Danny Goldberg. Wrote an interesting book about the late 60s called In Search of the Lost Chord. Right. And using a Moody Blues song or album as its metaphor title. But the idea was that the 60s were supposed to be this consciousness raising and it's pretty hard to tell my son's stories now, given where we are, that somehow that music delivered us to a place. It's almost as if it was thwarted by a counter initiative that has created a much more grim and potentially authoritarian society before us now. You grew up in, as I recall, near Princeton, New Jersey. Yeah. And you've told me stories about what was going on in New Jersey. You've told me stories about working with people and finding people who are superb traditional blues and roots artists that, how do I say, you brought them to Princeton, you brought them into a culture. You saw a culture blossom and we'll get to your book, White Bicycles, which I must add Elton John often espouses as one of the greatest music books he's ever read. What, take me through your life trajectory and how you saw music from a childhood in New Jersey, through that blossoming of the 60s and then the withering and how does this all stack up in your mind? Well, I mean, you know, I grew up, as you say, in Princeton, Jersey. I had a grandmother who had studied in Vienna with Leschetiske and worked with Arthur Schnabel in Berlin. And I used to, as a kid, three, four or five years old, I used to sit under the piano and listen to her play Chopin and Mozart and Beethoven and stuff. So I kind of had a little bit of a head start in terms of honing my ear and my ability to listen. And my mother had some Edith Piaf records, Marlena Dietrich, Carmen Miranda. You know, so I got some other stuff that I was exposed to, Pairi Belafonte. And listening was just something that I did all the time. And I think by the time I started actually producing records, I had logged so many hours of listening to the past. You know, I was I was pretty obsessed with old blues and jazz. My brother and a friend of ours called Jeff Moldore, who became the lead singer with the Butterfield Blues Band and the Queskin Jug Band and the great solo artist in his own right. The three of us used to sit around in the weekends and just listen to Johnny Dodds. You know, every Johnny Dodds clarinet solo we had on record. And then every Robert, every Robert Johnson record, every Sunhouse record, etc, etc. And we'd go through that different one every weekend. And at the same time, we were listening to we were listening to Rock and Roll. We were listening to Chuck Berry and Pat Stomano and Little Richard. And and we saw the two things as quite separate. And we were a bit secretive about the blues because the kids, the 13, 14, 15, 16 year old kids would think it was a bit nerdy. And and then I realized I came to this realization that one was a continuity of the other. Because in those days in the late fifties, there was no books that explained all of this, how one old blues led in Big Bill Brunzi recorded with an electric guitar and, you know, made hit records in Chicago in 1949, 1950. We didn't know this. We didn't realize that this was all connected to this was just a few years before in the same chess record studio that Chuck Berry recorded. We didn't realize this. But finally, the connection was made for me. And I realized that that's what I wanted to do was to be a record producer. And, you know, the all the cliches apply to my life, you know, in terms of the idealism of the sixties, the feeling that music was going to change the world, the feeling that you know, this this sort of optimism that grew out of this love of music. And I think if you start back in the late fifties, you'll see that this idealism suffered a series of blows. You know, the first one was in the late fifties, when the major labels realized that the Indies were making so much money with all this doo-wop and rock and roll that they better get get you know, squash this and get back in control. And so the, you know, the prosecution of Dick Clark for Paola, which, you know, he probably was probably guilty of. But it was part of a whole maneuver by big corporate interests to take control back of the music industry. And Bob Dylan writes about it very, very eloquently in his his book. Chronicles about the way he was disillusioned with rock and roll in the late fifties. And that's when he went out and started listening to the Harry Smith collection of early American folk music and and started. Dancing to a different drummer, you know, and listening to Doc Boggs and, you know, Camper Red and Georgia Tom and all this kind of stuff. And the Stanley Brothers. Yeah, the Stanley Brothers and and and that's where Dylan. Came back into. The spotlight with this authenticity, this sort of authenticity that he'd borrowed from these old recordings. And suddenly, you know, that had a power that no one was ready for, that no one is prepared for. And at the same time, the other blow that that hit us, of course, was the Kennedy assassination. And that really, I think. Knocked a lot of the stuffing out of the optimism and the idealism of that time. And then not just, you know, we might have survived the one. But the second one, the Bobby Kennedy and the Martin Luther King and the Malcolm X, you know, all of a sudden, right in a row, right so fast, one after another. I think people. Never really recovered from that. I think the spirit of that time. Was given, delivered such a blow by those deaths. And then I don't know whether you can call this cause or effect. But I think a lot of the explorations that people were doing with their consciousness, smoking dope, taking acid. You know, this all was creating some pretty interesting stuff, musically. But then around the end of the sixties. Along came cocaine. And I think cocaine. Did unbelievable damage to all the things we're talking about. Because I don't think you're going to be very idealistic or very optimistic or very visionary on cocaine. You become harder edged, you become shorter of attention span, you become. You know, yeah, you become irritable and and and you become shallower. And, you know, sitting in the control room with musicians in the studio. I've heard sessions. That have improved when somebody passes a bottle of scotch around. I've heard sessions that improve when somebody passes a joint around. You know, but I have never heard a session improve when they get out the white lines. It always goes downhill. And so I think, you know, if you look at the. Legacy of that. Extraordinary energy and idealism, which blossomed in the sixties. You know, you can look at. Violence, you can look at in the Vietnam War, I mean, you know, talk about assassinations. I mean, that those are people at the top of society. But, you know, people all the way through society were being killed in Southeast Asia. And I think it's corrosive. I think it, it, it, you know, and then you throw in commercialism, you saw in the fact that idealism, American capitalism is fantastic at its ability to co-opt anything, you know, anything, no matter how anti-capitalist it may sound on the surface can be turned into an advertising jingle. Thomas Frank wrote a wonderful book. It was called The Conquest of Kool and how the sixties got turned into marketing for Volkswagen and others. Exactly. Yeah. But I remember that. But I just would, would want a footnote this by saying that, you know, we, we look back on the sixties as, as you say, as you said in your question, where did it all go wrong? What happened with all this wonderful energy and idealism? How do we end up where we are now? But I think that so many things that we take for granted now, women's rights, consciousness of the environment, human rights, you know, these things were blossomed in the sixties. I mean, you know, people look at the sixties from a woman's point of view quite rightly and say the hippie ethos was nowhere near as, you know, liberating for women as, as advertised and they're right. But nonetheless, so many things that sort of taking the lid off and allowing people to, you know, whether it was the whole earth catalog that made people much more conscious of the environment, whether it was, you know, Jermaine Greer's books that, you know, opened up the dialogue on women's rights and women's situation in society. So many of the great things about what we hang on to as, as positive today originated in the sixties. And I always say it's a bit simplistic, but I always say, you know, whenever you mention the sixties, right wing politicians start to get red and splutter and bluster and complain and curse. And so, you know, we must have done something right. That's right. How they say criticism is the most sincere form of flattery, right? Exactly. I'm thinking about various songs. If we were going to create a playlist and I think JJ Kale's cocaine has to be added. American Pie by Don McLean, Murder Most Fault recently by Bob Dylan, takes you on tour through a lot of these ups and downs of emotion and which I call the cultural force fields that influence music. It's very... And for what it's worth by Buffalo Springfield, I mean, which is a good example of the complexity of the question because it's a fantastic song and, you know, people used it, you know, it was covered in Jamaica during the gun court, you know, time in Jamaica and paranoia there and it speaks to so many people, that song. And yet it was inspired not by some big idealistic principle by, but by a police action to clear the sidewalks in front of the whiskey at Gogo on Sunset Boulevard on Friday nights. You know, it wasn't exactly the pinnacle of idealism, but it's a fantastic song that speaks to, you know, repressive regimes all over the world at any time. And in the, which am I called, context of profound social upheaval and change, I'd also put ballad of a thin man in that mixture where there's something happening here and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones? I think there was a kind of consciousness of transformation. Yeah. But then it created both a kind of daunting and fearful thread within society, some of the reaction on the right nostalgia that Ronald Reagan espoused reflects that, but it also created a hopefulness that we could move to a higher level of consciousness. And I want to bring up one of my favorite philosophical writers is the late Stephen Toolman, who wrote a book called Cosmopolis about the Cartesian enlightenment and how society organized itself from the 30 years war to the present. Oh, yeah. But one of his punchlines was this, whenever you're on the cusp of profound change, it's scary. And people are at the equivalent of a fork in the road between lurching back to the familiar and clinging or stepping forward in light of the fault lines that have been revealed. And I, I guess I think that one of the roles of the arts at these frightening times, but what I'll call unsustainable times is how they can contribute to the forward nudge rather than the backward. What can I call retrenchment? But I have to say, I have to say, I'm not hearing a lot. Maybe I'm just not listening in the right places. Well, you worked with R.E.M. Their song, The End of the World Is, we know it might be a good anthem. Yeah. And I feel fine. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, irony and deconstruction and witty cynicism, you know, were some of the things that really beautifully emerge from the 60s and have endured. But, you know, the, the sort of committed idealism, I mean, you know, and one of the problems maybe is that the committed idealism of those early songs of Dylan, you know, Blowing in the Wind and The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll and all masters of war, he says in his book that it was kind of an act, you know, that he sized up the situation and decided that he, it was a good move, good career move for him to be Woody Guthrie Jr. And he just put on that, that, that costume. And the minute he'd gotten high enough up so he could move wherever he wanted, he left that. I mean, you know, there's a, there's a fantastic, I don't know if you've seen that film called The Other Side of the Mirror. It's all of Dylan's footage from the 1963, 64 and 65 Newport folk festivals. Wow. And it's a fantastic, fascinating portrait. You see the young kid in 63 singing a ballad about the coal miners in Minnesota and all the old guard of the folk scene just looking at him like, my God, this is the second coming, you know, Woody. And, and then in 64, you have Pete Seeger introducing him at a workshop in the afternoon, and he introduces him as the voice of a generation. And you can see how proud like a dad, you know, he is to introduce Dylan, who appears in denim shirt jeans, you know, with a harmonica rack around his neck. And then he goes straight into singing Mr. Tambourine Man. And the camera is close on Dylan for the whole first verse. And then as it gets to the chorus, he pulls focus. So you go backwards and you start to see the whole stage. It's a very small, flimsy stage in one of the fields in Newport. It was just a workshop. And you see Pete Seeger sitting on the stage at the back of the stage behind Dylan with his head in his hands. Like, what the hell is this? Mr. Tambourine Man? What does that mean? Who's going to sing that at the barricades? You know, it was a moment where you saw that Dylan was parting company with all these supporters who had pushed him and followed him and supported him to that point. And then, of course, a year later, when I was there, you know, you had that moment where Dylan just comes out with an electric guitar and an electric bass and a drum kit and blasts Maggie's farm out into the air. And the old guard, Pete Seeger and those guys just were apoplectic. I mean, they could not stand it. And, you know, I mean, he was always, he had his eye on that always. And which is not to say, you know, no way to diminish his artistry. I mean, you know, and the greatness of those early songs. But they weren't coming from a guy like, I mean, Phil Oaks got left behind. Phil Oaks passionately believed all that stuff. And he wrote song after song after song. It was so committed to political change and political awareness. And he was stunned. He was completely blindsided by, you know, like a rolling stone. He didn't know what to do. And he flailed around and failed and tried to make senior songwriter records and eventually died to kill himself. But he was the real idealist, but he was never as great as Dylan. Well, there was, say, another band at the time of Dylan's rise called the Beatles. Yeah. And they had a certain influence and they evolved quite powerfully. And they also interacted with Dylan. There are stories that around the time of Rubber Soul, he was quite an inspiration to their digging deeper and going further. Oh, absolutely. I mean, when you think, if you try and put yourself back to that night, July 65, when Dylan so-called went electric, you know, the word rock was never used in 1965. It was rock and roll. And the Beatles were pop music. And the Beatles in 1965 still wore suits on stage. And so for Dylan to walk out on stage dressed in jeans and whatever he happened to be to put on that morning when he fell out of bed. And sing songs that had nothing to do with Boy, Girl, Moon, June romance. And the Beatles in 1965 were still writing love songs. You know, they were writing very wonderful, sophisticated pop songs about love. And what Dylan did absolutely blew them out of the water. I mean, they were so stunned by it. And it, you know, you can only explain what happened to them subsequently with Rubber Soul with Revolver with Sergeant Pepper as being their response to Dylan. As you mentioned early on, wrote what he... Yeah, he responded to them. He responded to them. I mean, it was the greatness of the Beatles records that led him to recruit Robbie Robertson and those guys. And to make something like Blonde & Blonde, which was much more ethereal. And as he said, he got tired of doing those finger pointing songs. Meaning portraits of injustice. And he went to what you might call a more aspirational portrait to be painted to guide people to a positive place rather than drive them out of a negative place. How did... I mean, you look at it, it's like, you know, you look at the sort of Mozart to Beethoven to Schubert, you know, I mean, it's not unlike that. Each one showing the other one something and elevating the art to another level. Well, let's let's go fishing a little bit here together. I mean, the other guy that I think reigns supreme. No joke contended here is John Coltrane, who just walked in, climbed up through the jazz scene and then went to a place of spirit and creativity that was just unyielding. And I see him in that 63-66 window as another point you might call evolving very rapidly. Absolutely. And it's but it's a tragedy because, you know, what he was the directions that he was going when he died, they kind of stopped. You know, I mean, Miles did something completely different. You can't look at Bitches Brew and what followed from Miles or what followed from a lot of the other greats in the same as following on from what Coltrane was where he was going. I mean, maybe I mean, obviously, McCoy-Tiner had a fantastic career after that. But but quietly, you know, and it's I mean, I listen that, you know, the one of the ironies is the summer of 65 when Dylan went electric. The Newport Folk Festival took place three weeks after the Newport Jazz Festival. And I was, I mean, unbelievably lucky to have been hired to be the production manager for both those festivals. And Friday night of the Jazz Festival started with Art Blakey. And then it went to Coltrane, Monk and Miles. You know, and and you could have sat there on the Friday night and then Saturday night, you had Frank Sinatra coming in by helicopter to play with the Count Basie band under the baton of Quincy Jones. And you could have sat there on the Friday and Saturday night and thought to yourself, my God, jazz is never been more powerful, healthier, more adventurous, more full of sure of itself. You know, it was overwhelmingly powerful as a festival. And three weeks later, it was over because, you know, once, once Dylan had done what he did. I mean, within a year, jazz clubs around the country were converted to rock clubs. You know, and the kind of people that in 61, 62, the kind of young guys who bought a turtleneck sweater and a beret and a pack of, you know, a cart and a goal was, you know, and sat around listening to Monk and Miles and Coltrane. They were all wearing tie-dye and dropping acid. Generations changed into something else. They became, as you said, psychedelic holders, catalog. Yeah. And what Coltrane was doing, as magnificent as it was, didn't change jazz's direction. It became, you know, jazz split into splinters. You know, there was jazz rock fusion. There was free jazz. The Eiler Brothers and Archie Shetland and all that, the angry abstractions. Yeah. And then there was CTI, you know, Creed Taylor and smooth jazz, the elevator jazz, you know, which paid some sort of lip service to the spirituality of Coltrane, but not really. It was much more like a kind of bossa nova light. So let's talk now about, you see all those changes. You see the ways in which people inspire. Inspire through saying, this is wrong. Inspire through creating an idyllic vision. And you and I, you are originally from the United States living in London now, but we often have discussed American politics and, you know, world politics, but America sits at the fulcrum of the world system. It's in quite a bit of jeopardy right now. If you were running. Right. What kind of music would be informing your speeches, your way of convincing this world that there's a better way into change course in the context of all the cynicism and corruption and everything. And what I'll call despondency and despair. That's been evident in these political systems for the last few years. Well, I, you know, I'm, I'm afraid I would, I would be a disaster as a, as a manager or a campaign. Because I just, you know, I, I try, I listen a lot to new releases, modern music and stuff. But I, I have the problem that when I hear a drum machine or a click track, it enters my head from a different door than music does. It can be interesting. It can sound clever and I can enjoy hearing it once, but it doesn't really make me want to hear it again. And I think that a new generation of music listeners and of course voters have been brought up differently. They're used to a certain kind of clean, correct, rhythmically mechanical music that they love and they relate to. And I would be the worst possible choice for putting together a playlist for a candidate or even my own candidacy. And because I think I would be out of touch. And I don't think there's anything I can do. Well, perhaps we could start with Eric Burden and the animals. We got to get out of this place. If it's the last thing we ever do. Yeah. And what was that song? You're out of touch. I'm out of time. I think you're out of time. You're out of time, my baby, my sweet old fashioned baby. Yeah. That's the Stones. That's a Rolling Stones song. Baby, baby, you're out of time. I mean, some of those early Rolling Stones records are great. You know, the songwriting at that time with Jagger and Richard was really sensational. And that's a pretty good example of it. But, you know, I mean, it's, it's, you still walk into, I mean, the few record stores that are left, you walk in and what are the box sets piled by the cash register? They're mostly from the 60s. Or artists, you know, or the early 70s, you know, the boys, the who, the Dylan, you know, I mean, I do think we were fortunate to live in a, you know, in a golden age of a kind, you know. And I think, you know, that film that you and I connected on how we met is a perfect example because there you go, 1972, February, Aretha at the height of her power with its rhythm section. It's unbelievable rhythm section. Fornell Dupri and Bernard Purdy and, you know, and this choir, this unbelievable choir. And, you know, at the time, we thought, you know, I was disappointed that the sound hadn't worked on the guys that screwed it up. You're talking about the sound on the film. Technical problems. Right, right. Yeah, I'm talking about amazing grace. And, and, and, you know, because we thought, you know, with the arrogance of youth, we thought, Oh, this is great. And tomorrow, there'll be something else really great that we can see that we could film that we could record that we could, you know, just, just experience. And we didn't realize that this was it. This was the end. This was over that, you know, within a year and a half and now Aretha was going to be making disco records and, and that pop gospel was coming in. And all these people there, you know, that are mentioned during that concert, you know, the staple singers, the Clara Ward, Mahalia Jackson. These people were dead or retired. And, and we, you know, we were experiencing the flash of sunset rather than the beginning of something. And, and, you know, I don't know, it's too big a question to say whether the, what I perceive as a decline in the music is a reflection of or parallel or locked in somehow to the decline in our political culture and our, and our, and the strength of our society. But, you know, it's tempting to say that, you know, the fact that we don't, I mean, who, who can we remember exactly from, you know, the 80s and the 90s that has the same that we know 100 years from now, people are going to listen to them go, wow, like they will to Amazing Grace or like they will to Blonde on Blonde or like they will to Rubber Soul. You know, I don't, I don't know. It's, it's, it's a big leap, but it's tempting to think of it as a correlated. The, I guess the current, what should I call, state of government structure, I find quite haunting because the, the faith in democracy. Democracy could, could be what you might call on a pendulum, a romantic ideal on one side. But the despondency about democracy and about the principles that are in the Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, Constitution almost feel like a romantic dream. And what concerns me now is that in the despair as the fear accelerates the temptation towards authoritarian rule becomes what you might call more viable. And I don't know how, how do, how do you arrest that? How do you turn that super tanker around? Well, I don't know. I guess, you know, I have, I guess try to be concise, but I guess my view of the situation now is on the one hand there was a very interesting column in The Guardian the other day. I can't remember the name of the author, but basically it was saying that the Anglophone model has failed in this coronavirus situation. If you look at England and America, there's something rotten about the state of the politics that has led, you know, both of them to basically privatize their medical system or try to, to rely on hype and PR campaigns and facile slogans instead of real political addressing issues in a deep way politically. And it's no coincidence, according to this column, that Britain and America are having some of the worst results in dealing with the coronavirus of any country. And it's very easy to get very pessimistic about the state of our democracy even though, you know, we have two very different systems, Britain and America, the parliamentary system versus the presidential system. But, and I think it's a big but, you know, I look at Prime Minister's Question Time in the British Parliament and I see Keir Starmer taking Boris Johnson apart and being seen to take him apart. And you look at, you know, the elections, the bi-elections or the last midterm elections in America which delivered a majority for the Democrats in the House. And you look at the fact that, you know, from now it looks like, as chaotic as the Democrats are, it's going to be pretty hard for them to lose the next election. And so you feel like you look at, you compare this to Poland and Hungary and Italy and, you know, and you think, well actually our system isn't too. The democracy in the Anglophone countries is wobbling. It's done some, it's going on some terrible side journeys and down some blind alleys. But the structure is much more robust than it is in a lot of places. You look at, you know, I think the examples that you see in flourishing democracies, you can look around the world, you can look at South Korea, you can look at Taiwan, you can look at New Zealand, you know, and see real hopeful signs of the power of democracy, you know, of an inspired electorate actually doing something right. And I'm, call me naive, but I still believe that that's possible in the two countries that I live in. Well I think the, how would I say, the hope and the prayer and the sensibility are all there. But I do think these are, how would I say, these are treacherous times and the softening and the inspiration comes from film, comes from music, comes from poetry. At very least it can't hurt. I think they take the heart to a deeper place. I've cited on several of the podcasts one of my favorite books. It's called The Life of Poetry by Muriel Ruckheiser. And the first part of the book is called The Resistances. And the first chapter is called The Fear of Poetry. And in the introduction to the first edition, she talks very, very, what you might call, lucidly and very tenderly about what poetry can do. And it's really kind of an American example. But she says, I've tried to get behind the resistance, which is often a fear of poetry and to show what might be ahead of this culture that's in conflict with its background of strength and antagonism. If we are free, we're free to choose a tradition. And we find in the past, as well as the present, our poets of outrage like Melville and our poets of possibility like Whitman. Joe, I think you've worked with people. You've observed people. You've written about people. And you've created things that are both Melville and Whitman. And it's been very, very, how would I say, nourishing to talk with you today and to work with you over these last few years we got to know one another. But I hope I can enlist you to come back in a couple months and take another, how do I say, take another snapshot of where we are and what we're thinking. And I want everybody to read White Bicycles and you have a new book, which you've shared little bits of pieces of with me, which looks at world music, South Africa. And as you know, I used to work a bit with Hugh Masekela and then Jamaica and Cuba, Brazil. And there's so many musics in this globalized world where the nation state is almost the, what I'll call the Treaty of West Failure is almost an anachorism. The idea that's contained in your view of the, what I'll call British and American system of the 60s, you're going to now shed light on very important musics from many places in the world. So what I definitely want to, as that book is approaching release, we'll want to get together again. But once again, I want to thank you for today for setting the table and inspiring curiosity at a time when, how I say, we need your light. Well, Rob, thank you so much. And I'll tell you, it's been, you know, you've been a great inspiration and a great support. And, you know, it's not often you find somebody who is so fluent in the good side of economics with such an ear, such a feel for music and such a love of music. And it's great. So anyway, pleasure anytime. And we'll see you again soon. Bye bye. Okay, bye bye. And check out more from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at InetEconomics.org.