 Thank you very much, that's Mr. Clay Rose on the, perhaps the new Volocounty Tonight theme song. That's amazing. An unexpected pleasure. I shall now dive blushing. Welcome to the show. Any news? No news? Wonderful. Let's see. Tonight our guest is Mr. Clay Rose with the gasoline lollipops with a delightful character, of course. Nothing new going on in my life, I guess. Oh, if you're watching this, of course, when it airs on Longmont Public Television, like 10 p.m. or whatever, then you're probably, well, wake up, Grandma. Grandma. Hi, Grandma. Did you fall asleep in front of TV? Yeah. Well, it's time to go to bed. Turn off the TV and go to bed. You're up late. You're up too late, Grandma. Oh, it's a very common theme, I'm afraid, for Grandma. Stays up late. Not supposed to. Ah, let's see. What's new in my world? Oh, my God. My TikTok algorithm is very troublesome for me. At first it was really fun. Like a nice mix of, like, aliens and, like, you know, ladies dancing or whatever. But over the months that I was using it or whatever, the algorithm discovered that, like, my true darkness is, like, I need a lot of therapy advice. And so I started to get way more of that, way less of the dancing people, and I had lots of complaints about that. So I'm trying to, like, lean purposefully in the other direction. You know? I want the fucking robots in the future to think I'm boring. Yeah, what else is going on? Oh, our classic nemesis, the billionaires are back in the news again. Oh, hello. It's me, your friend and neighbor and fellow patriot, Donald Huberdew, owner of Huberdew Automotive Sales here in Longmont, Colorado. Now I'm not here today to remind you that you could be driving a brand new, fully equipped, state-of-the-art, very beautiful Toyota Camry right off the lot today for a very low, reasonable fee. No, sir. Instead today I'm here to announce my candidacy for Longmont City Council. I'm a business first Democrat. I'm a no-nonsense, long-time liberal, and I'm here to take care of business. And just like we do at Huberdew Automotive Sales here in Longmont, Colorado, we're going to get our deals Huberdone. So as we enter this election season, just remember, a vote for Huberdew is a vote for a lower taxes, a better economy, and a return to normalcy for American workers. I'm Donald Huberdew. I know everyone is hurting, and I want to take care of business. This ad was paid for by the committee to elect Donald Huberdew, Private Funding and the Toyota Camry. Hi, I'm Kevin Stillwell, and I'm running for Longmont City Council. As a modern Democrat, I know that it's important for me to be talking about the right things, because that is what being a modern Democrat is, talking about the right things. I think I'm a great candidate for Longmont City Council, because I'm already succeeding at one of the most difficult jobs in the world. I'm a parent. Hashtag Dad Boss. I have two beautiful children, and just the other day, I was having a conversation with my daughter, Equity, and she asked me, Dad, why do you want to be in the Longmont City Council? And I told her, darling, it's because Dad wants to use his talking to speak up for everyone in our community. And then my little two-year-old son came up and said, Dad, I'm proud of you. And I said, I'm proud of you too, Black Lives Matter. If you would like me to serve you on Longmont City Council, I know it'll be my job to speak up and speak out. So when it comes to the most important political and social issues of our day, like police brutality and equal rights, you can bet Kevin Stillwell will be talking. Democrats are talking. Kevin Stillwell is talking. This advertisement was entirely paid for by private funding. Hello again. It's Donald Huberdew, your friend, neighbor, and non-specific religious devil tag. I'm here with this ice-cold, delicious Pepsi-Cola to tell you about my candidacy for Longmont City Council. Right now, America needs solid, mature leadership with a laser focus on supporting our struggling millionaires and billionaires who are the lifeblood of this nation. Modern American heroes like Jeff Bezos and others who create millions of jobs every year should not be burdened by the state with oversight and regulations and taxes that keep him from growing his business and helping more Americans. By helping Jeff Bezos, we also help untold numbers of desperate, disenfranchised Americans. Desperate Americans in a struggling economy. Americans who just need one break, one single opportunity. Americans willing to do whatever it takes to achieve their version of the American dream. You see, that's the kind of American this great nation was built upon and that's who I'm running to represent on Longmont City Council. Americans who are willing to work any job at any pay because hard work and business are American values. Right now, America needs mature, laser focus on these issues. Right now, we need someone with experience, someone steady. Not some person who's only been a Democrat a few years. I'm the kind of steady Democrat that the Longmont community needs. I decided I was a Democrat back in 1980 and as the years have gone on and I've changed my life and grown I haven't even reconsidered the question. I don't flip flop. What we don't need is some naive millennial talking us to death. My friends, the stakes are high in this election and we cannot afford to be fighting social justice battles. I'm Donald Huberdew. I'm here to take care of business. And not just with talking, neither. This advertisement is paid for by the committee to elect Donald Huberdew private funding and an ice cold Pepsi Cola. This is your friend and candidate for Longmont City Council. Kevin, still well. It's good to see you again, but I come today with heavy news. Recently, my opponent in this race released an advertisement which literally ended with him saying the N-word. And I quote, I'm Donald Huberdew. I'm taking care of business and not just with talking N-word. Obviously, this kind of language is disgusting and completely disqualifying from this race. Mr. Huberdew is an old white racist. He's gone now and we never have to speak of him again. He's gone now. He's gone now. He's gone now. He's gone now. He's gone now. He's gone now. I'm inspired by real American heroes like Elon Musk who pulled himself up by his bootstraps and just a few million dollars from his family. Now he runs one of the biggest, most successful companies in the world. That's a rags to riches story that I understand and I can get behind. Imagine the good that Elon Musk could have done with the money that he received from his family if the inheritance tax was fully abolished. That's the kind of change that makes all the difference in the life of a regular worker. America really is a place where dreams can come true and if we all just keep showing up to work and working as hard as we can, we will all be billionaires. So when it comes time to vote in this election cycle, I hope you'll remember, a vote for Kevin Stillwell is a vote for decency and for us all to be billionaires and I am the only choice for city council now. I'll see you soon, Longmont. This advertisement is paid for by private financing and the Committee for Dark Money in Politics. I'm Donald Herbert of Mentos of the Freshmaker. Now listen to me, you son of a bitch! I'm not a racist. You're a racist. I'm not cancelled. You're cancelled. I'm not a racist. It's impossible. I have been a Democrat since the 80s. I voted for Obama. There is an African-American man who works at my office. He cleans up around the place. We call him Jimmy's a great employee. I will not be called a racist or a bigot or old. I am not old, you little son of a bitch! That makes me so fucking mad! Kevin Stillwell running for Longmont City Council and I would very much like to read you this public statement. I know that things can get a little crazy during political season. I'd like to voluntarily apologize for any inappropriate... I would like to voluntarily apologize for any inappropriate behavior on my part. I just love this country so much and it's time to get back to the real issues like further tax relief for millionaires, better and more consistent public posturing on important issues while still maintaining the status quo and changing the corporate gains tax to better reflect the freedom of America. I'm Kevin Stillwell and I'm talking. This is, you know, I would like the opportunity now please to voluntarily read this public statement. I know that things can get a little crazy during political season and I'd like to voluntarily apologize for any inappropriate behavior on my part. I just love this country so much. I'm doing it. This is me doing it. This is me doing it. You don't have to threaten me. I'm doing it. And it's time to get back to the real issues like further tax relief for millionaires, better and more consistent public posturing on important issues while still maintaining the actual status quo and, of course, changing the corporate gains tax to better reflect the freedom of America. That was a challenge. I was Donald Hoverdure once. No, but I do appreciate you coming on the show and thank you very much. I feel like you're a great artist and I've been writing songs my whole life and I'd like to think I sort of like know from on some level. I feel like you're a great writer. So thank you for joining us. Thank you. Did you know anything about it when you were ahead of me? I feel like it did. I feel like rhyming's nice. I feel I don't know. Being able to do it again is a nice trick, too. No, I appreciate you coming on and I want to respect that you're a great artist. One thing you may not know about me is that I'm actually one of the world's great interviewers. Oh, awesome. Yes. Oh, I'm in luck. Yes, you are in luck. And so I've got like a few like really unique beautiful questions to ask you. And the first one I want to ask you is where do you get your... Where do you get your ideas for your songs? You ever get that question in interviews? Well, what I was hoping that you weren't going to ask is what comes first? I love the next thing I was going to say. I was like actually driving here in the car I was rehearsing ways to gently let you down if you asked me that question. Because I'm never answering that fucking question. What is the genre that you... It doesn't hurt your voice. How do you remember all those words? How do you remember all those words? Yeah, none of those questions. But I do want to like talk to you about being in the arts. Because like some episodes, you know, it seems like it's inappropriate to always have a politician to chat with. Let me ask you this. I think the arts is sort of like the politician's job and that it is a public service oriented job that is sometimes underappreciated. Certainly under-monetized. Why are you in the arts? Yes, right. Why would I hang my soul out like a wet rag to dry for public service? Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly what I mean. Only that I've tried not to and I have lost my mind. I know that it's in all kinds of ways it doesn't make sense at all. But the one way that it really does is and it's the reason why I got into music in the first place because I heard the Leonard Cohen record when I was like 12 or 13. Okay. And I really identified with how broken he was and it was the first time that I really saw for sure that you could take that brokenness and get something beautiful. There was any constructive use for it at all other than just being broken. And when I saw that, like, oh, there's worth in this. Like, you can do something with this. That's awesome. And that's what I'm going to save myself and to save my sanity was finding that. And so when we play live, I mean, there's a lot of crappy shows as you know. There's people that don't care or people watching football or whatever. But I haven't been an expert in that area. The crappy shows thing, if you need advice on it, I've done a lot of them. I had, like, a decade of paying my dues. But the good shows, when people are there and you can tell this communal exercise and emptiness, right? Yes. And that's what we're all doing together. And that's the real show. Like, that's the real, that's why I do it is for those shows. We used to play every Tuesday night at Waterloo and Marisco. It was there for nine years. We had that day. And the last one, I'd say four years, it was off the hook. Because everybody knew what to expect and they would come every Tuesday and we'd call the church. People would come to church and we'd sweat it out in a place where it was tiny and we'd get packed and we'd just be sweating profusely. I mean, it was loud. It was like one body shaking it off. I goddamn do know, actually. Yes, sir. When I was a younger person, I'm still very young. But when I was like 19 and shit, I was a professional worship leader at a church. What church was it? Down in Texas. Well, they call it non-denominational. They'll take a Baptist or a Methodist or whatever, they'll cast a check from anybody. Oh, we didn't put it like that. So, I was like, remembering, that's kind of how I developed my musical skill set. It was just like three chord songs and emotional content out the fucking wazoo. And they would all sing along and they'd all kind of have the like a concert effect like you have. It's the same, like you say, it's like church. It's like the burner community like a tribe, that's our tribe. I hear that's not the PC anymore. I hear that's not PC either. That's probably fair. As white guys, we're not allowed to say a lot. I think that's fair. We're very good language. I'm just letting you know you fucked up. No, no, I think they called that. I think the burner community does still call it that. And furthermore, the Burning Man. Yeah, the Burning Man. They're like, you know, they were like all kinds of like appropriated things like that's like half the things like the melting pot of ideas. I can't say I'm against it or for it. First amendment guy, but you're right. Whatever makes people happy. If you want to get naked and go out into the 120 degree desert and get sand blown up your crotch, that's your business. For me personally, I could not think of a more accurate description of hell. Fucking Burning Man. Alright, we're going to have to connect on this real quick because I have thoughts and now we have to talk about this. That's one of the reasons I like going on tour. I always felt like and I can never really feel like I'm clean sleeping in hotels or whatever. But Burning Man, I don't know. We bless the whatever artists have people but like, yeah, dirty is bad for me. I don't like dust. Especially if you're tripping on drugs and they all are. You go out there where there's not a bath for 100 miles and you're going to be out there sweating and covered in dirt for four days tripping. That's a problem. No way, I would lose my mind. I would literally be spitting on my body and with a toothbrush. Making mud. I recently went on to an art project in Utah to shoot an erotic film in like the salt flats out there. And you were the star. I was just helping make the mud or a grip. Yeah. Oh, I was a grip all right. But we were like shooting this like fire dancing thing out in the like salt flats. And then we showed up kind of early in the week and then later in the week there was supposed to be a big art festival like a Burning Man type thing in Utah on the salt flats. Right. And it is exactly as you describe it. It's windy, salty in this case. Right, it's worse. Is the sand being blown in your crotch at salt? I don't know. I prefer salt I think. I don't know. Yeah, yeah, if you were to walk around barefoot I think it would hurt your feet. If you were to walk around naked you're getting salt in your orifices. Oh, my dearest companion brought me these shoes just for that trip. I can slip them on and not walk too much in the dirty places. But I actually it was like we had a good time of course. We were talking to people or whatever and like allegedly a lot of drugs. And are these other people with drugs? No, they would never. So my friend actually brought like a camper thing full of like water and like a shower. So you could shower once a day and like there was good food and chef and stuff. But then like our whole camp blew the fuck down on like day two. And like that's how I hurt my hand. I stabbed myself in the back of my hand. Because the wind was blowing? Yeah, and it just frustrated me. We had to take down this big tarp and I was fucking just cutting it off the thing because it was a fucking emergency. And as I did it I fucking really hurt myself. And I had to have nerve surgery. Oh, you can't remember when your hand was all in the cast. Can't do it. I'll then play a guitar for a minute here. Are you serious? Jingle, I like that. Yeah, but like, yeah, I don't know. I'm not going to goddamn re-learn to play guitar. You know what I mean? Why not? What else are you going to do? I'm doing this. You know, I'm just doing something else. I sell paintings, I do watercolor stuff, make movies, whatever. You don't need to play guitar? I can still play piano a little bit. And once this gets a little more use, I'm sure I'm going to come back to playing guitar. But whatever, whatever. I don't mean to like talk about it, but being dirty in the desert, even though you're surrounded by beautiful art and beautiful people, I mean, it's skippable that the dirty desert part of it. It's not as bad as being dirty in a city though. Or in the forest. Well, not like city dirty is the worst. Have you ever been homeless in the city? No, sure. Yeah. No, I never have. I think it's gnarly. It's a different kind of gnarly. Oh my God, I don't have any experience at all. Yeah, that's gross. I think it's about that community often on this show. Because Boulder County is a little bit shanty. They're tough. In Boulder, it's fucking mean. Yes, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, it was down there throughout the winter. We were doing this, we called it Harvest for the Homeless. And we were down there on Tuesday at the band show. Really? Yeah. We get close together. Man, it was freezing cold. I was a little kid. Boulder City has gone and has fluctuated a little bit with how they treat the homeless. Right now, it's kind of as bad as it's ever been. Yeah, that was one of the main things we talked about. Yeah. And like, back when I was a kid, the Boulder homeless shelter, and I think this is still the case, if you don't blow zeros in a breathalyzer, you don't get in. And so on a night when it's 20 below zero and you come up and you blow, you can drink a whiskey trying to keep yourself warm, and then these dudes just freeze to death. Yeah. And there's a surprisingly low number of beds in Boulder as well. Well, they don't want a housing. They don't want them. No, they don't want them to like try and camp either. They have like an anti-camping ordinance, which basically just means if you're homeless and it's night and you're unconscious, it's illegal. It's crazy too, you know, like with COVID and all this. There's a lot of people that could not afford their rent. And when the moratorium on evictions was lifted, you know, I think the city council or whatever in Boulder likes to think of the homeless generally speaking as crackheads and mentally ill junkies. They want to try and stigmatize them. They feel like it's their problem and not like a community. But when the moratorium on evictions was lifted, all of a sudden we got a lot of normal people, normal family people out there and they're getting their tents just swept by the cops. And rent is fucking 1600, 1700 for like a one-bedroom or whatever. I don't know what people are supposed to do. No, and then they just try to push them out to Denver, which they do. And then Denver comes and bulldozes like a mile long camp along the way. And like who is that helping? No, I don't know. Does that help? I think it's helping the people that like to jog down the right path and see only pretty things. They're tired of seeing the problem. Yeah, well, here we are in like Boulder County. You would think like you know being like kind of a liberal place of course some of the stuff is just like a weird blind spot. Well I don't think it's helpful either. I think it's self-destructive like being blind or not seeing poverty or sickness or death, right? The more we hide those things from ourselves the bigger the small imperfections of life seem to be and we become focused on those and there's an itch there that we're trying to scratch and we don't know what it is and what it is is suffering we are used to being right next to suffering. That's the natural way of living. So when you take that out we need to find the source of suffering because we feel it intrinsically. It's like part of our DNA and if it's not poverty or sickness or death as it normally was for tens of thousands of years then it's that they didn't forgot to put lemon in my non-fat latte, you know what I mean? And then I'm gonna throw a fit about that or the Dow dropped 2% or whatever. And we get really crabby and isolated and miserable, but if you go to Delhi, right? out there in the slums and it's all right there. The poverty the sickness, the death. There's lepers on the street. And those people are the friendliest, most communal caring people they all know everybody knows it in me but it's because you've got to to survive, you know? And they live in these communities that are really interconnected and caring for each other. We don't have any of that. Yes, I agree. And I think like even normal people are more isolated than ever, of course, with all the COVID stuff that just came through, you know? I wonder, you know what is there to do that's kind of like slowly trying to change that emotional context in the kind of like social conversation so that like it wouldn't seem such an impossible task to sort of get back to relating to each other. Yeah, I think it's strange. I think that at some point we started thinking that evolution if we were a truly evolved species, we would no longer have poverty sickness or death. Right. And so we do our best to hide those things to make it look like we've evolved. But that's not the direct real direction of evolution. The direction of evolution is how do we relate to poverty sickness and death? Because we'll never eradicate that. You know what I mean? Well, that's a fucking brilliant point. And so to not relate at all is not evolution. It's just delusion, you know? Yes. I hear when I talk about this issue basically every week. And the notes that I hear basically are we're not sure what else to do other than what we're already doing or how to provide more economic juice toward those programs. And then also I hear this idea of like if we provide those programs, it will attract more homeless people to our community. So like it's this sort of like self-defeating way of approaching the problem. Every city in our county seems afraid to provide too many services. When really, they could just sort of coordinate the services they do, they could all sort of be at the same level together doing more. And you could also, I mean, there would be a model for every other city in America because they're all suffering this problem, right? And if one of the wealthiest cities in America, Boulder, had a really integrated system of dealing with homeless and mentally ill to where the community is actually relating to them and you know, and they're healing and we're getting along as a society and there's compassion and people feel woke on a real level because they're actually fucking doing something. I think that it could be a model for a lot of cities. I don't know, what are they afraid is going to happen? That all of a sudden Boulder is going to become shantytown? Like it's not really seems unlikely. They're afraid that they're going to have to spend that fucking 17% sugar tax on feeding the homeless, you know? Instead of what? I don't know. No, there are some ideas kind of bubbling up in our community. I'm not sure what a lot of them are sort of like projects that we're doing but like there are some ideas for just like businesses themselves to start getting involved in like feeding these homeless folks and that's something that any community can do across the, there's like we're working on something. Yeah, we were doing that and you know, like the cops never got kicked out when we were doing the Harvestful Homeless but we had plenty of cops let us know that they were not stoked about us being there and supporting and encouraging the homeless. Like I said, this is like you know, zero degree day and people out there are wearing wet socks, you know and that's what we're doing is getting them dry socks and feet, warmers and sleeping bags so they don't freeze to death and the cops are saying that we're encouraging them by what? By not killing them with neglect? Yeah, I don't like that because the cops of course have been asked by the city council to like show up to the person that's like camping under a bridge or something and like take their shit and like politely ask them at gunpoint to stop existing You know what I mean? Because I think there's like even a church or a collection of churches here in Longmont that are outperforming what we're doing in Boulder. That's embarrassing, like that's incredibly embarrassing and encouraging whatever, we bless the Christians doing the nice work, that's nice and helpful for the community and helpful in a way that the community sometimes itself is a little too selfish to provide. Yeah, absolutely. So that is a nice thing. We're appreciative of the kind folks in the community but it's, I think, embarrassing on the level that like a few small organizations that really are just small businesses you know, are able to outperform what we all do together Yeah, that's bullshit. Yeah, that doesn't seem right. I get the appeal when, you know, when COVID was happening I mean, you know, last year and we're all on lockdown and I was losing my mind. I hadn't played a show in front of people in record breaking time and I get the appeal of just wanting to like slip into something comfortable like a warm bath and a Netflix binge and forget that anything's going on outside in a while during the pandemic and I started getting really miserable and crazy and borderline suicidal and it was one day that I was at the corner of Canyon and Broadway and I was like so self-obsessed and self-pitying and depressed and I looked out the window and saw all those dudes in front of the band shell there and a freeze in their asses off and I was like oh yeah how do you stop like feeling miserable and hating yourself you help somebody dummy so I started doing that purely for my own selfish reasons to try to save my sanity but that's how brains work it's not like some manipulative tactic in the world it's just like, you know there are things that you can trigger and one of them is this yeah that's a beautiful of course idea thank you so much for coming on my stupid show yeah thanks for having me it's been a blast I really like your theme song thank you very much I do have the weirdest feeling at the beginning of the show I always tell grandma to go to bed or whatever sometimes, you know, grandma's on the bed and like whatever she stays up I don't know and sometimes she says that when she stays up late she gets scared of late night TV of your show? in general I guess well TV in general is scary I understand that and if you're up late at night and on drugs and perhaps you're a little infirm she's a delightful lady but I'm gonna maybe call and check on her grandma you better be asleep anyway, Clay, thank you so much for coming on this show the gasoline lollipops wonderful music you find that in the world on the internet which get this, you're already on so it's really just a different click click a different thing and all of a sudden it tunes thanks for watching