 a huge treat tonight. Jonathan Taplin and Grail Marcus talking about Taplin's new heyday book, The Magic Years. And just some quick library announcements. You know that it is summer stride and it's not just for kids. So do your 20 hours of reading, get your iconic San Francisco public library tote bag with that beautiful art. We want to welcome you to the unceded land of the Aloni tribal people and acknowledge the many raw Mutush Aloni tribal groups and families as the rightful stewards of the lands in which we reside in our beautiful Bay Area. Our library is committed to uplifting the names of these lands and community members and we encourage you to learn more about first person and First Nations culture and about land rights. Later on I will put some link into the chat box that has links to some great resources on Native culture, Native and Indigenous culture and land rights as well as a whole bunch of other stuff and library news and links tonight's presenters and ways to get the book and as our presenters talk and things come up I'll also be adding those to the chat and to the main document. August 24th, Total SF will be joining us with Daniel Handler and Gary Kamaya. Our July and August on the same page is where we encourage all of San Francisco to read the same book, Jacqueline Woodson, Read at the Bone. Tomorrow the Asian Art Museum Virtual Library same time and then Thursday same time. Our COVID Command Center here in San Francisco was able to put artists to work and they will be coming to talk about the work that they did during their residency at the COVID Command Center. I don't know if many of you know but San Francisco Public Library does have a jail and reentry services department and I've heard it said that we serve all the jails west of the Mississippi as far as reference by mail and then we serve the jails in San Francisco in person including our last remaining youth prison but on July 20th we have Dr. Keisha Middlemass and Ruben Jr. Ruben J. Miller talking about the politics and racism of reentry. So join us for that I'm really proud of the work they do there. So like I said we have so much coming up for summer please come around stick it out check it out I mean and that's sfpl.org slash events. All right and without further ado tonight's event we have Jonathan Tabler, writer, film producer, scholar, director, emeritus at Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and was a professor at USC's Annenberg School. Sorry about that. Taklin began his entertainment career in 1969 as tour manager for Bob Dylan and the band. In 1973 he produced Martin Scorsese's first feature film Mean Streets and between 1974 and 1996 Taklin worked on developing television documentaries Cadillac Desert and PBS for PBS and The Prize. He also worked on 12 feature films including The Last Waltz until the end of the world under the fire and to die for. His films have been nominated for Oscars, Golden Globes and chosen for Cannes Film Fest five times. Grail Marcus is an American author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is not notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a broader framework of culture and politics. Marcus has been a rock critic and columnist for Rolling Stone, Cream, The Village Voice, Art Forum and Pitchfork. His book Mystery Train is in its sixth edition and his book The History of Rock and Roll and Ten Songs is which he selects ten songs recorded between 1956 and 2008 showing how each embody the story of rock and roll and like I said you are in for a treat tonight because these are two hard hitters of rock and roll and culture. Jonathan Grail take it away. Well okay good to be here. Jonathan there's a point in your book when you're talking about a festival that Joan Baez hosted. David Harris her husband who was really the face of draft resistance at that time is also there and you talk about how you know after a day of music making everybody is gathered at Esalen and you frame it as a choice between political engagement and hot tubs and you have a wonderful line that seems to me the crooks of the book that really sums up the moral dilemma that you're pursuing throughout the entire book and you say you could lose an examined life much easier than you could gain one and that seems to me the story that you're telling how to examine your life how to feel that you are in in touch with what you're doing with a sense of standing back from what you're doing and looking at it as an observer and I found that moral imperative in the book makes the chapters on owning a movie studio working as an investment banker just as riveting just as involving and as emblematic of the times that you're chronicling as anything that might have to do with the band or Bob Dylan or Martin Scorsese or anything else so I'd like you to talk about the vision that you're pursuing in this book. Well it seemed to me that I came of age as a young teenager in 1963 when a couple of seminal events happened one was in Birmingham, Alabama a bunch of kids who were my age had jumped over the fence of their school and had gone into the streets to protest civil rights of young black students and they were met with the force of Bull Connor police force with dogs fire hoses and it was it was on television and I saw it I was in school and I saw it and it affected me on a kind of deep visceral level I don't think I'd ever been as angry in my life and so at that point the connection between the culture Bob Dylan was going down to Mississippi to help recruit people in the SNCC Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee voting drives in 64 so the connection between the culture and the politics was absolutely tight and slowly that started to ebb away and of course by 1968 in the spring of 68 when in the course of two months Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy both got assassinated there was a kind of break for me personally and for a lot of people that that well politics it's just going to break your heart it's it's going to you're going to invest all this energy and hope and everything in these people and then they're going to get killed and so then the world kind of turned towards well for me I'm I'm joining the circus I'm gonna I'm gonna be with this rock and roll band and take Bob Dylan to England and meet the Beatles and do all this and so at some point that tension gets very strong and and the the place you cite in 1967 in an Esalen was incredibly finite in the sense that David Harris was urging the collected wealth of the music business including David Crosby and Joni Mitchell and Stephen Stills and all these people that they should do what he was about to do which was to go to jail for not agreeing to be drafted and David Crosby who was a little stoned at the time I'm asserted that maybe he could have more power on the outside taking with culture and so that question of whether culture had power or actual politics had power was something that always seemed to me to be attention that we lived with all our lives and and obviously I think we're still living with it today and and so I don't think I've ever really resolved it but I do believe that on some deep level we we're all trying to find a place to stand in this world and sometimes we we opt for the hop tub you know and sometimes some people who are incredibly courageous are willing to go to jail but not everybody you know and so it's it's a hard question and and and I would say it's something that's just as relevant today because I made a remark last week to a friend that that in in the summer during the Black Lives Matter protests and in the fall during the drive to get young people to vote I saw much more presence from LeBron James than I saw from Jay-Z in other ways I saw the musicians falling into the background in this struggle and the basketball players going into the foreground and and I don't know why that is but it exists and so I think these questions of just how involved you get morally are still going on. There's a another signal moment in the book when you code a speech by Bobby Kennedy when he was running for president in 1968 at the University of Kansas and it's a speech that I was completely unaware of and I immediately went online and read the entire speech that you quote from which is absolutely extraordinary and it it sums up the the moral vision that I think a lot of us have always wished we could live up to and in different ways have tried and in different ways have failed and yet it is it is such an open passage that you quote it essentially says we're all part of something bigger and everything we do contributes to the health or the decay of our polity of our society of our republic of the world that we live in and he's talking about what the gross national product really is. I wonder if you could read that passage from page 95. Yeah our gross national product now is over 800 billion a year but that gross national product if we judge the United States of America by that that gross national product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage it counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them it counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl it counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads an armored car for the police to fight the riots in our cities it measures neither our wit nor our courage neither our wisdom nor our learning neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country it measures everything in short except that which makes life worthwhile it can tell us everything about america except why we are proud that we are americans and he goes on to expand that in one of the most stunning passages where he says the national the gross national project excuse me the gross national product includes richard specks knife and charles whitman's rifle in other words it includes every kind of horror every kind of crime and it seems to me impossible to listen to that passage and and say this has nothing to do with me this is not my world when and and that in a way brings me to another question i've wanted to ask ever since i saw the cover of your book when it was in an in advance reading copy where you're on the festival express in 1970 on a train that's going through canada playing concerts along the way and there's a very famous video from the film that was made of that um that i've watched many times it's it's on the train and rick danco is leading a group of people singing the old lead belly song ain't no more cane on the brazos and rick danco is singing janice joblin is sitting next to him sitting next to her is john dawson of the new writers of the purple sage across from them is jerry garcia playing guitar and off to his side is bob weir the grateful dead playing guitar and every time i look at that and from the first time i ever saw it i thought everybody in this video except for bob weir is dead and a lot of them have been dead for a long time some of those were people i knew went to school with john dawson why are we here and they're not what kind of world were you moving through how are you examining yourself on that on that trip that particular event right well i wasn't as reckless as some of those people i will tell you that i also did not have any illusions about the romance that heroin might have for someone who thought it would bring them closer to the blues and and because i knew janice pretty well she actually believed that she was kind of billy holiday reincarnated in some weird way that that was part of the what made her a great blues singer and and of course the tragedy is i don't think janice janice certainly didn't mean to kill herself she was at probably the better place in her life than she'd ever been she had the first really good band behind her that she'd ever had and um but you know i i think having observed jimmy hendrix eric clapton keith richards a lot of people who went way deep and of course it affected rick danco it affected richard manual and affected levon helm i think somehow they they thought it could help them escape and you know when you're the tour manager you have that's not an option for you so i mean i think it's a sad situation that people romanticize drugs and of course some of them came so close and then picked them up selves up i mean certainly keith richards and eric clapton never thought they'd see their 75th birthday and yet here they are you know and so it's it's strange you know and of course i've always thought that trying to keep a band together is a pretty hard thing um i should say that just to the audience that i think part of the reason why the began why the band became well regarded was because of grills early writing about them uh you understood what they were trying to do better than almost anyone and and those early years were pretty magical but by 1971 72 it wasn't any fun anymore i mean that's why i ended up leaving and going to try and make movies with with marnie scorsese because it just became too hard uh you know i tell a story of trying to get leave on up in the morning to get on an airplane to go to chicago and he comes after me with a bowie knife you know i mean so that that's that's not a life that you want to have you know there seems to me more joy more a sense that something's really at stake that anything you do you or the other people around you can either make a or break a project that you you have to be absolutely aware at all times whether whether it's a phone call whether it's deal making whether it's shooting a scene um everything everything is really contingent there seems to be more of a sense of that in your descriptions particularly of producing mean streets uh then in any of the musical adventures that the book follows is is that your feeling well or or your your sense of things no the the stakes are higher in movies in the sense that that at least for me you know i came to hollywood as a very naive kid who had produced 100 and some concerts for the band and dylan and and george harrison and i thought well if i can do that why can't i produce movies and nobody ever told me about opm other people's money and so i made the mistake of investing my own money into uh mean streets along with the that of a friend and so we each put up 250 000 so in that level the stakes are very high it's it's very uh make or break and and fortunately marty who i had met through a friend that i think you know as well jay cox sure um he had said to me when i was leaving wood stock he said well look if you're going to california meet go check out called marty scorsese he edited wood stock and he is a great fan of the band and you guys will get along really well and so i i just i called him up he came up to see me he he brought this script with him that he'd been trying to make for three years and i i didn't know enough not to do it and my confidence in his student films was repaid 100 times over because he had wanted to make the movie so badly that he had literally drawn out every camera move every shot every frame on these little books of storyboard books just like he made the last wall yeah and he he did it so finitely that he could just show the cameraman exactly what to do and bang bang bang and so we were shooting 30 setups a day which was astonishing in those days so in that sense it was the stakes were high you're right uh but he had it together he really knew what he was doing and and it you know fortunately warner brothers liked the movie and and and bought it and we got our money back and so and you know i still get a check every year from warner brothers 50 years later so that's that's unique in the the film business that's wonderful um i felt as energized by certain passages about business in this book um then i did as as much as anything else um there is one point when you talk about the roots of the modern music business modern music business as it was in the 1970s late 60s early 70s as essentially being myra lansky you talk about the beginnings of donald trump in michael milkin right um i'd like you to talk about your sense of your place in the world when you're in the midst of hard business right so you know the fact that both music corporation of america mca which is now known as universal and warner communications which was originally a parking lot company called kenny both were financed from the way that the mafia liked to clean money which was get from illegitimate businesses into supposedly legitimate businesses so the roots of mca was that julstein who founded it was both a agent in chicago in the 20s and 30s when the mob owned all the speakeasies and they owned the control the musicians union so there was no point in trying to not be trying to get in the middle of that you just had to go along with what was supposed to do and of course uh warners was a classic mafia operation parking lots and then they bought something called seven arts which was a warner seven arts was a failing movie company and you know eventually it all comes around i mean my sense is that the the mike milkin story is is much more interesting to me in the following sense that the foundation of the modern media business whether it's news corp or clear channel are all we're all financed by mike milkin and you know rupert murdoch would not exist without mike milkin and clear channel would not have destroyed the record business without the help of mike milkin i mean i i i talk about a tour that we did the band did in in early 1970 we toured through the south and then up into the midwest and the tour started in san antonio and we met this guy named sir douglas the sir douglas quintet and in san antonio there was a radio station that just played this kind of text mechs music that sir douglas was making and then we went up to austin and there was the you know wail and jeng's was there and there was a completely different music scene in austin and then when we over to new orleans and there was dr john and alan tusan and there was a completely different scene with radio stations that just played that music and then we went up to memphis and we met the people at stax volt and and there was this completely different scene in memphis and we met duck don and steve cropper and and and there was just this whole other thing and then we went up to detroit and there was obviously a completely different music scene from what there was in chicago and san francisco was different than la and so it seemed to me like there was a wealth of cultures in america and it's always been that way i mean apalachia and and god knows you've written about it better than anybody that that america came from all these strange cultural roots and for anyone today to say well the immigrants are trying to wreck our american culture is insane american culture has always been immigrants and then where do you think the fiddle music in apalachia came from it came from scotland you know i mean really i mean so i i and and quite frankly when mike milkin financed clear channel they bought up every fm station in the country of any significance and said oh we'll program it all out of one place in austin and it'll save us all this money we won't have to pay all these local dj's to do their own curation we'll just do one thing for the whole country and then it became like mcdonald's yeah i remember when one of our radio stations in san francisco was taken over it was you know in an instant overnight it was invasion of the body snatchers it was you couldn't not be overwhelmed by the chill in the air right um one of the things you write about is the making of the band's second album in los angeles in a house that you procured for them and i've you know that that is such a wonderful album it is so rich it's so full of invention and playfulness and humor in the music in the words in the attitudes um really it feels like people coming into their own and i wonder if there are some moments from the making of that album that um stand out for you today just you know talking about music music making i mean first off the making of the album came out of a desire on ravi's part to not be in a recording studio with a clock ticking and to be closer to what the band had done with bob in that basement in socrates called big pink in other words just sit around smoke have a little fun eventually get to the place where you're going to make some music and then and then it comes out of it so we set it up in this house at sammy davis jr owned and it had a pool house and we set up this recording studio and there was no wall between where the board was and where the band was it was all in one room and so at some point i went back to princeton to try and finish my degree and and turn in my thesis and i came back and the first night i was back because we were going to play some concerts in san francisco winterland robbie and the boys took me down and and they played the night they drove old dixie down for me and i swear to god by the time the song was over i was in tears it was so beautiful it was so poignant and it was so different from what i had ever thought about because my sense of what that song was about was somewhat akin to uh james a g's and walker ebbons let us now pray his famous men in other words this is about the poorest of the poorest share croppers and and what their life was about in other words you know we can all think about the way politicians have used racism to get the poor white folks to think they're better than somebody else and so at least but these people and quite frankly livon's father was one of them had been taken advantage of just as deeply and screwed just as deeply and and so it was a song about pride in a way and for someone who had marched with art luther king and been a member of the student nonviolent coordinating committee it was kind of a a shock to my system to have to rethink what a southern white man like livon was like and god knows i don't think livon had a racist bone in his body he was he was a man who took sunny boy williamson into his house when he was really sick and and took care of him and and so i mean he's these are tricky things um so i mean i think i agree with you i think it's one of the great albums that's ever been made you know in in terms of the the canon that album is there it's it's better than big pink music from big pink and it's i think it's the best thing the band ever did um what was i gonna ask you you know i had i just had one thought that came up from our earlier talk about you know where you have a place to stand and and i just because i i love the way you think i'd like to run an idea past you which is is the following it seems to me that the music of the early 60s was very aspirational the times they are a changing the answer is blowing in the wind we shall overcome and when i look at the the big cultural output of the post 9 11 era which gen z has been raised on i see something very different if i think about the the great cultural movement of the post 9 11 era i wouldn't say it's music i would say it's tv drama and if i would name them just in order the sopranos mad men breaking bad game of throne succession they all seem unified by one basic thing which is that they're anti-heroic they are dramas in which the protagonist is an incredibly corrupt person fighting in an incredibly corrupt world for power and it seems to me that if you constantly put that out as the way the world is that you cannot be totally surprised when you arrive at somebody in 2016 saying well that's the way the world is and we need someone just like tony soprano to be our president we need a corrupt motherfucker and we need somebody because he only he can train the swamp and that to me i i need to wonder whether the culture didn't play some kind of role in in making us all feel that the world is nihilistic dystopian and there is no hope there is no aspiration there is not and that the artist's role as in you know the epigram of the of the book from from marcusa is that the artist's role is to say in his refusal to accept his final the limitations imposed upon freedom and happiness by society in its refusal to forget what can be lies the critical function of the artist if if the artist is saying what can be is corruption and nihilism and terrible stuff i'm not sure that's the right thing to do that's making me think of two things one is at the end of your book you talk about how visual artists seem to have dug more deeply into their place in time than musicians you can talk about caro walker you talk about ed richet talk about other people and then you mention a couple of musicians who seem to you to have a spirit that doesn't have limits that is about possibility one of them is ryan and giddens um and i'd like to know like you like to hear what you talk what you think about her in particular why did she has she struck you why has she come across to you so i'm on the board of something called the americana music association so every year i mean americana is a kind of container for roots music you know and and to me it's you take the basement tapes and then you add in music from big pink and the brown album and that's kind of becomes americana which then at some point morphs into mumford and sons and morphs into sturgill simpson and ryan and giddens and william bell and it's black music and white music but it's all basically roots music um so i go down to this thing called americana fest in september every year and two years ago ryan and got up there with an old banjo i mean not i mean an old banjo a wood banjo with a thing and and just she got up there and just sang these almost gucci songs from south carolina with and and you you could feel yourself that the roots from africa were coming through her and yet it was so beautiful and it was it was just astonishing and it was so brave because here was an event where everyone else was using a big band and she was just herself and this banjo and uh it was it just blew my mind and since then you know we've been trying to figure out you know what would what would alan lomax do today if he was still around in other words is there still a role i mean the library of congress no longer thinks about preserving musical culture anymore and is there something to preserve or is it all just on youtube and you have to find it yourself and is there a role for somebody to say no this is the really good stuff this is the this is the best and and you know our children and our grandchildren should know this that from this period this was the best stuff so i mean ryan and is one of many people i mean t bomb bernette constantly amazes me with his kind of curation his ability to find people his ability to make extraordinary interesting music and so um you know i i enjoy what he does too i mean it's not like i don't think that the music business won't constantly reinvent itself because i think that's the nature of the business but i also think it goes through periods where it's just it's commercialized it's you know i mean you and i both have remarked that just before or maybe at the very moment when bob dillon is starting to make music with his first album and his second album what was really on the radio was frankie avalon and fabian that's what was popular bob dillon was not popular he his first album i think sold four thousand copies right you know so i mean it's not always what's popular what will last what what will last is something that has something a little dirt under your fingernails and and that's what i'm hoping that comes out of this world of americana because it's it's it's very much music that's not big hat cowboy music and country music you know it's it's it's something that's attempting to be kind of in the the grain of the carter family more than anything else what was your reaction to hearing bob dillon's murder most foul last year i thought it was extraordinary because i think for me the assassination of john f kennedy is is the the break point in the last century it's it's the point where everything changes because if if you no longer believe that your government is telling you the truth and that maybe even your government might have had something to do with the assassination of your president then the nothing is true and and so then you get to the place where you go from a conspiracy of such astonishment to a place where conspiracy just becomes something that happens every day and of course that's where we live right now i mean you know obviously if facebook had been around in 1955 we'd probably still have polio uh because right now you know the reason 30 percent of the people are not vaccinated is because of the conspiracies they read on facebook we're both old enough to remember going to school around 1955 and drinking our little cup of polio vaccine and the world actually changing when the people that you knew families that you knew people dying people crippled right all around you it's not happening anymore right and you know i was only a kid and i wasn't necessarily aware of the greater discourse but i don't recall there being a movement to stop people from taking polio vaccine no there wasn't it was civic duty it was something you did as an american something you did as a as a person living in the world i got it in second grade in my classroom right we were given the little thing that you drank every kid in the classroom was vaccinated i mean so i mean of course not i mean look we live in a very strange time you know and you know i've i've often thought about gromsche's notion of the interregnum he said the old is dying and the new cannot be born in this interregnum many morbid symptoms appear and it seems to me that we are in this breakpoint between an old system that believed in you know digging up oil and coal and doing that and but yet we can't get into a new system the new cannot really be born yet where we live in a world of solar energy and wind we live in an old world where we thought that military power was everything and we can't trying to get into this new world where maybe you know economic and cultural power have more say and and so i think in that strange place you have characters like donald trump that that arise and you have people who can use this thing called social media to completely confuse the world and and it's it's scary i don't know if we're set up for questions from i think i think i'm sure i actually have a good one that's in line with what you were just speaking on which is what do you make of van morrison's anti-vaccine and antisocial distancing campaign um has examined his life or has he gone insane van was always fairly unhinged i will tell you that on more than one occasion when he oftentimes van would open for the band in the early 70s and he would often consume a little bit too much irish whiskey before he would go on stage and and would say remarkably crazy stuff so i mean i'm not that shocked and and why anyone should think van morrison is an expert on anything other than singing astral weeks is is a shock to me good one yes um how about um what's your favorite scorsese film i i guess uh other than mean streets good fellas i think i think you know he just somehow pulled all the pieces together in terms of the way he moved the camera the way i thought bobby was at the height of his power um you know i mean i i guess that's my favorite i would go for raging bull okay there's everything in that movie is violent and scary including people just walking down the street yes those are both great movies both movies um how about this one for you jonathan how much of your success is timing insight or just luck uh i'd say it's about 50 50 between uh a little overconfidence and a lot of luck in other words you know there's there's a lot of times in my life where i made a jump from one world to another and i wasn't necessarily completely prepared to do the next work in other words going from producing concerts or producing movies but i had enough confidence and enough gut feeling that i i had picked a good partner in scorsese to do it that it worked and and other things later on in my career you know i had maybe too much confidence i i started the first streaming video on demand company in 1996 so like 10 years before youtube and you know i it didn't in the end work out because a lot of forces were raid against us and broadband didn't come as fast as i believed it would and as fast as the telecom executives told me it would but but it's still you know it was an interesting adventure and i don't regret doing it you know um i would say you know luck though it's a lot having to do with it meeting the right people thank you and i have a question from youtube from for both of you if you have any anecdotes about warren zevon to share and speaking of scorsese warren zevon dedicated songs to at live shows grill do you do you have any warren zevon inside i have one you know i i loved his music i still love his music and i once interviewed him on the phone for a piece i was writing and what i remember was we talked for two or three minutes and he said this is interesting let me go get a drink and we'll talk and it you know it was clear he was someone who could not move from one room to another without a drink and um and that was upsetting and i you know that stayed with me throughout our conversation um otherwise you know i saw him play i listened to his records over and over again i can just hear um so many songs right now but you know we never met so i don't have much to add i could tell you much more about van morrison who's the kind of guy who's going to piss you off that's in that's in his nature it's going to happen right and i would say also that in tribute to van that if you look at the last waltz that van's performance there is probably one of the great moments in the whole film i mean and he just he just took it to another level and and he's a competitive little son of a gun you know and and he knew that and he knew the cameras were on and he went for it and it was it was truly remarkable so there's an interesting question is does you know that type of behavior make you dislike their music anymore or does it make you not listen to their music any any less anymore well look i i wrote a book about van morrison and at one point i was i seemed to have disappeared but i hope not at one point i was um on a book tour and people were asking me questions one person said how can you write a book you know celebrating the music of such an awful person and i said well i don't know that he's such an awful person i spent time with him he certainly wasn't awful to me um you know and he has demands on his time and somebody else said well you know i remember i went to see van morrison and we went to the show the show was really really good and um we all hung around for a while talking about it and really you know how happy we were that we'd been there that night and we went to a bar next door and in that bar is van morrison and he's sitting at the bar by himself and we thought you know god we're gonna go up and we're gonna be right here with van morrison and and i went up to him and i said you know mr morrison your music has meant so much to me i'm your biggest fan and he just turned to me and he said why do people feel they have to tell me these things that is a good human response not everybody's gonna like it but that's in his music that's fair it's in his music that's why we listen right it's fantastic i mean i i know we're almost out of town but i i do have to say that you know there there are lots of musicians who who have personality problems and uh you know you somehow have to separate their music from the person sometimes even someone like frank sinatra you probably have to separate the person from their music i have to go yeah it's been wonderful um jonathan it's just so good to be talking with you thank you grill thank you both we really appreciate it it and jonathan grill it was so great and library community you can pick up all of their books at your favorite library or through heyday books and we appreciate you all being here tonight jonathan grill thank you so much