 I mean, I'm a Pearl Jam fanatic. Love them. And the thing that adds another layer to that band is that these solos were basically Jimi Hendrix solos. All right, it's time for another flashback episode. And this time we go back to November 4th, 2019. And right around there, the podcast had been on for about 10 years. I was living in New York and moved back to Los Angeles. And I was living in kind of a guest house and finally landed one of my dream guests, Mr. John Mayer. Now at the time we knew each other a little bit from talking at the comedy store or the comedy seller. But to have him on the podcast was an absolute dream. He hadn't really done an interview, I think in like seven years. And I'm telling you, man, at the time, it wasn't like we were tight or anything. So for him to do it was just another level of coolness. And since then we've become friends and I have become a humongous fan of all of his work, especially with Dead and Co and the record Born and Raised. So Born and Raised being a record I play every Sunday now, right in there with Carol King's tapestry. So it's a two-part episode, this is part one, and it was a very long conversation. And at one point, I think I told this story. I was so like, so into it and so excited that I felt like I was gonna pass out, not like from being starstruck or anything, but just like we were hitting it off so well in the podcast, like just playing a mad game of tennis back and forth, talking watches, guitars, music, comedy, life. And it was really a game changer for me. I could have ended the podcast right then. It was episode 501, I was thinking shit. Paul Stanley was 500, John Mayer, 501. Is it gonna get any better than that? And here we are in year 12, so obviously I kept going. Enjoy the bonus flashback today. Please subscribe to the podcast on YouTube and leave some reviews and little chats there in the comment section, it really helps. And hope to see you in Minneapolis this weekend. I'm headlining at Acme Comedy Co. Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Thank you guys, website dindlray.com for all the tour dates. And thank you for your support. Candles are lit, here it is, little John Mayer flashback. Hey, what's going on everybody? Welcome to another episode of Let Me Talk. Today is, what is it? November 4th, Monday, November 4th. Happy day after daylight savings day. Is that a holiday? I don't even know why we're still doing this. 2019, doing some kind of farmer's clock stuff. Makes no sense, the worst. You just fucking drive your car for another six, seven months until the time is right again on your dash clock or your microwave or whatever clocks you just don't know how to set. You never learned, you're like, fuck it. That's what time it is. I know it's an hour behind or an hour forward. But anyway, here we are. On this Monday, episode number 501. This episode is brought to you by my fantastic sponsor, CBD Lion. You guys need some CBD in your life. I'm telling you, you got some hard time sleeping. Maybe you got some joint ache, some neck ache, some anxiety, whatever it is. I've been rocking CBD Lion. I use the lotion. I use the 900 milligram lotion. Third party tested, vegan, non-GMO. No garbage here, no garage chemists just making some shit in their backyard. This is the real deal, third party tested. CBD Lion, clean CBD for you. Check out their lotions, their tinctures. They even got pet tinctures if your pet's going nutty. Just a barker. You got one of those Charles Barker dogs just barking at everything for no reason. Get it, CBD Lion, right now you're gonna get 20% off if you use the code DEAM, D-E-A-N. They also got gummies. Oh, not really, they taste good, but they make you feel good. No THC. So you don't have to worry about piss tests and all that shit at work. This is no THC CBD clean stuff. Use the code DEAM, CBDLion.com. All right, got that out of the way. Now let's get into what's going on today. An unbelievable guest. I know last week was Paul Stanley and I went crazy. This week it's just insane who's sitting down on the couch with me. Mr. John Mayer. John Mayer is here and I cannot even tell you how fired up I am. I've been trying to get him on for three years. This guy does not need to do podcasts. And mine, he could just easily do the biggest one in the world, stop by and be done with it. But after talking to him on and off over the few years, he reached out a couple weeks ago and said let's do the podcast and I absolutely lost my mind. I love this man and talking to him for three hours. I could have talked to him for easily nine hours. I'll even tell you a funny story that he doesn't know but I had done the David Spades show that day, the Lights Out and then I was going to interview John Mayer right after and I couldn't move the date because he was getting ready to start the deadenco tour and I had waited so long and I was like I got to do this and I'm coming off a weekend of shows with Joey Diaz in Jersey. I've got minimal sleep and he comes over and I'm fired up on adrenaline. I mean fired up because I've just so, I'm not star struck. I'm just so happy like look where this show has gotten to a dream guest is here and about two hours into the interview, this is no joke. The adrenaline was cooking so hard of me listening to him and being engaged that I started to feel like I was going to pass out. And as he was talking to me he's like yeah, you know and then when you plug in the guitar I was just looking I'm going uh-huh but meanwhile I was like fuck I'm going to pass out. I'm going to pass out. I'm going to look like a weirdo. I'm going to pass out mid interview. Like just so much adrenaline and so much work. You know just wanting this thing to be great that I was cooking man and I grabbed my water and just started pounding it down while he was talking and I fucking pulled myself out. Like Ollie man I just went into the extra rounds and made it through. So it's so crazy to think that that happened. That's never happened. I've never had a guest on where I was like oh shit I'm going to pass out but I was just so fired up. I think that when you get to like 53 your body can only take so much adrenaline. It's like I remember when I skydived you jumped out of the plane. You're actually black out for a very quick second because the adrenaline is overload. But that's how I felt. There was just so much emotion and energy going through my body. I was just overwhelmed but I don't know. I just want to thank John Mayer from the bottom of my heart man. I was I just was just when he left I was just I couldn't it was just fantastic. I've always wanted to talk to this man about watches, guitars, grateful dead, songwriting, recording, knife, rock star stuff. You know what that's about all that all everything. I wanted to ask him everything. And he was like come at me go at let's do it. Let's do a long form conversation. So thank you John and I'm heads up you guys. This is a two parter. This one is part one part two will be out next week. And the reason I'm doing that is I do not want people to you know how ADD is people just kind of like oh yeah, they get to the middle of something and they're not paying attention. I love this interview so much a lot like the Rawlins one that I really want you guys to hear both of them as separate pieces. Okay, before I do get into the episode real quick all the dead heads that are tuning in. If you live in Northern California I will be at Terrapin Crossroads during comedy. The first comedy show ever November 21st. I'm coming up there to do standup comedy and Phil Lash's room. Get your tickets right now. Also this week, of course I'm in Detroit with Joey Diaz on Thursday and then we're in Omaha at the funny bone on the eighth and ninth this week. The 12th I will be at La Jolla Comedy Store a Toys for Tots show. This is a great, great show every week, every year sorry. The 21st Vegas with Bill Burr, 27th of December Colusso and Sacramento and the 28th of December Joey Diaz and I, Palace of Fine Arts, January 4th Fresno just added and January 13th through the 19th Vegas Comedy Seller. I think that is about it. I don't want to miss anything real quick. Shout out to the new Patreoners and the old school super supporters, Brian Spink. Thank you for the stickers. I love you Chad Pollock. Thank you so much, man. And Mark Brunat, two of the King Dellraisers. Scott Nelson, thank you for your pledge on Patreon. Jeff Williams and Joe Soldezzo, all new Patreoners. Patreon.com slash Dean Delray. All right, I do want to say one last thing. I have absolutely fallen in love with John Mayer's record called Born and Raised. I have listened to this like a psycho. The neighbors probably think I'm a weirdo. I've listened to this record about 500 times this week and I highly recommend that you go listen to this record, Born and Raised. It's one of those albums that keeps giving. You fall in love with a new song every couple days and if you're a lunatic like me and love ballads, you play them over and over and over. So I wanted to recommend that, of course, and then the dead and co tour that's going on right now and the John Mayer trio record. That is insane also. So here we go. Thank you so much, John. Welcome to board John Mayer. Oh, this couch is, this couch can be a curse sometimes. Oh, this is great. Because you look over at the guest and they'll just be like, huh? No, this is a great way to coax answers. Oh, this is fantastic. I can't thank you enough for coming over today. John Mayer is here. I've been chasing this for three years. Really? Yeah. It just feels to me like every time I've seen you, you've just charmed me without like, you know, I saw you at the store a few times and just the conversation you launch into, I go, this guy is into all the same stuff I'm into. That was the whole reason I wanted to. Yeah. No, you were wearing the right, you would watch you were wearing the things you were talking about. You were talking about dumbbells. And I'm like, how does he know about dumbbells? Yeah. Yeah. He's amplifiers that there's probably 300 of in the last 40 years. I love all of the same stuff you love. It's like watches, dumbbells, vintage guitars, acoustic small bodies. Oh, I love it. Oh. How did we get there? You and I are very different in a lot of ways, but what do you think happened to us that made us take shelter in all of these different little material things that we actually take it further than it being material, but like, what do you think it is about the two of us in our lives that make us so consciously materialistic? I really believe to me that it's the thrill of the chase because of most of the stuff that we liked was easy to get. I wouldn't really care. I think that it's all about getting, it gets me out of bed each day. Right. It gets me out of just like, or else it could just be I'm in bed for life. I get it. I mean, I get out of the only, I didn't never really get out of my room on tour ever, especially overseas. And the thing that gets me out of my room is basically all the friendships that I made collecting watches. Right. You know, someone's got a store, someone's a dealer, someone wants to go to dinner. So that actually got me out of my room. That got me out of the curse of the Bolognese in every city. What would keep you in the room? It was a depression or, because when I toured for a long time playing music, I was just hung over or fried. But then once I'm now I'm a comedian and I don't party or I'm hitting the streets. Yeah. I quit drinking three years ago, which leveled my life out in 99% of a good way. And I find, like I used to travel with like a recording rig. It was all gadgetry. Yeah. Recording rig, you gotta have your interface and your microphone and your headphones and you're listening to it. And like I'd have Pelican cases. Like that's the other thing I'm a freak about. It's Pelican case. Oh, I love them. I love building a Pelican case. I think I'm the best at it. I think the best there ever was building Pelican cases. I love that. Oh my God. Double layer, triple layer stacks of things. And I used to bring all these gadgetry toys and now it's like aroma diffuser. Oh yeah. Candle. Yeah. White noise machine. Yeah. So it became like this culture of taking care of myself. And maybe that went a little too far and I'm a little addicted to alone time. So this is like what I try to explain to my friends is that when you come off tour, it's a little, your brain is mush because you begin to have a kind of a stock home syndrome with your hotel room. Yeah. So you ever done a gig where you were motivated by going back to your room? Oh, 100%. It's the weirdest thing in the world, right? Because here's the thing you gave your entire life to do. And all you're thinking about is I can't wait to get back into sweat pants and climb into bed and play on my phone and have another 18 hours to myself. I noticed that with you when I was backstage at the Boulder gigs, the Denco, you were gone the second the last note was played. And I was like, oh shit, your bus was already gone. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's, I've done things to streamline touring so that I'm able to do it all year. Right. It might look to other people like it's a little unfriendly but it's really not. It's just like the only way I can play this many shows is to get in and get out. Yeah. Is to really see, is to really basically shorten the time before the show and after the show and shorten the time in each city so that you can keep doing it and replicating every day, every day, every day, every day. There's the same show or the same feeling. But yeah, I mean, I'm, I think as soon as I'm done with a place, I'm done with a place. Yeah. Like one of my least favorite things to do is play a city and sleep there. Oh yeah? Are you, can you do that? Well, I have to because I'm, yeah, yeah, yeah, the way you travel. I'm not on a bus. If I was on a bus. Right, if you were on a bus, you'd be rolling that. Yeah, see, I miss the music touring of it where you step off, you get on the bus and the driver is driving and you just go to bed. You go to bed. Yeah. There's something hard for me. I never do aftershows in a city I've just played in. It just feels like the mission is accomplished and it's hard to find. Are you an only child? I'm a middle child. Middle child. Are you a middle child? I'm an only child. Oh, okay. That's why. I thought maybe that was the thread. I think a lot of my thing comes from only child. I have no problem being alone. Yeah. And sometimes when there's two, aftershows, a lot of back slapping, grabbing you, drunk. I don't drink and stuff. People don't realize how now they are, how aggressive. Yeah, you ever have someone's like, get a beer spittle on your lip? Oh, yeah. What are you talking about? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're talking and all that I'm thinking is that. It's just IPAs coming off and it's on your lip. It's just two or three of them on your lip as you're talking to somebody. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of psychological work that we have to do when we meet other people. Because if you think about it, we're trying to make it okay for other people to be meeting us. I find myself being really as helpful as I can to people who are meeting me. I think I understand the mindset now where I can be a little more idea than man. I know people are gonna meet and greet waiting. They don't just appear out of thin air. They're in a line for maybe 15 minutes. What do I say, what do I do? So a lot of what I do when I meet other people, you probably have this too, is putting other people at ease. Just helping people feel comfortable. And I think that takes a lot of energy. It's not just this quid pro quo of like, hey man, what's up? Yeah. You're responsible for other people's emotions. Yeah, and you don't wanna be a dick. No. But you get into this finesse game of like, all right, you got two minutes. All right, cool, yeah, you get the next person going. It's like, you have to find the sweet spot between not being a dick and not being phony either. You have to find a point of connection that doesn't make someone leave the room and go like, was he even there? Like, I've met people that were so famous and so bothered that I could tell they gave me 5% of their personality. Like, I'm like, that guy just gave me 5%. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, I've met some super, super big guys and I'm like, I really don't think he knows anything about what he just said to me. Yeah. I got 5% out of that guy. I think about that a lot because I just had Paul Stanley on and he's 67, he's talking to me on a podcast and I'm like, no, wait, I mean, it wasn't set up with a publicist or anything. It was set up like you and I. Yeah, no, nobody knows I'm here. I didn't tell anybody. Yeah, so it amazes me that somebody puts in that amount of time but I do think that some people realize this guy, I get it, let's go do something like this. Oh, for you, absolutely. I mean, look, people just want to be interested. People want to be intrigued. There are things you can say to a stranger to get them to talk. There are things, there are things someone can say to me at a table that would make me put my fork down and talk. Yeah. You know, we're all still accessible. Yeah. I think it's a matter of, you know, what's the thing that genuinely intrigues someone else you're talking to? And every time I ever ran into you, your topic of conversation was like, I can rock on that all day. Yeah. I think what you and I have in common is this love of being, well, of differentiating, right? Like if everybody was into the stuff you were into, you might migrate to something else. 100%. You know, you might migrate to something else. You and I have the same phone. Yeah. Most people already have the same phone and already have the same apps on their phones and already have the same point of view on things. And so for us, I think we're looking for these kind of outskirts of things, these little places to set up camp that no one's, with real tall grass that no one's run down yet. Yeah. And then what's interesting is that you and I had settled there for years and then it's interesting when you were the only person to be into something and then thousands of other people are into the thing you're into. And then it gives you kind of a seniority for a minute, right? Like with watches. I mean, how long have you been collecting or interested in watches? Well, since I saw James Bond probably in the sixth grade wearing the James Bond stuff. That's how I got into it. And so you were buying multiple watches 10 years ago when people were saying, why would you buy this many watches? Oh, I always hear people, you know, that amount of money for a watch, you're out of your mind. You don't hear it so much anymore though, right? No, no, no, no. Not that in guitars. I mean, what a lot of people don't, I've said this over and over, I'm not rich. I have no money, but I have good skills of eventually flipping. I call them parachutes to keep doing art. So early on I was buying blackface deluxes and super reverbs and pawn shops in the 90s when I was on the road. And I was selling those things at Hollywood Guitar Center for 10 times the money to keep going. To not work a job. Coleman, you know, Craigslist, all kinds of shit. Yeah, and that overlaps with what I have a serious like addiction to, which is like Googling specs. Oh, once I like something. Good Lord. Oh, shit, I know everything about it. Everything about it. And what's funny is if you told me when I was in middle school, and I was in a library in middle school and you said, see that card catalog over there? You are gonna flip your shit for that card catalog in 30 years. And I'd be like, what are you talking about? No, you're just gonna love looking things up. And you know the Dewey Decimal System? You're gonna love it. It's gonna be for watches. And you're gonna learn every reference number. What could be theoretically more boring than a reference number for a watch? And yet for us, they're like visual numbers. Yeah, oh yeah. I say 55, 13. You know what I mean. Yeah, 10, 16. See it, Explorer one. Yeah, yeah. You start saying these things. Who would have ever thought that I would be interested in this sort of mathematics? Yeah. And are you like me where you will buy something and you were pretty well informed the day you bought it. But once it's in hand, then you Google everything about it so that it. Oh, I do that out of paranoia. To make sure you got a correct one. Oh yeah. Well, that's interesting. Oh yeah, so I get it. And I realize I know pretty much 99% on it. And then I'll see something, I'll go, I don't think that's right. Then I grab books and then I find out, oh, this one particular year, they changed these two screws. I got the right one. Okay, so there is one that has a closed nine on the date wheel. Thank, yeah, yeah. Well, you look at it sort of like glass half empty. I look at it like, maybe there, I look at it like, I know the thing I have is real, but I want to get my money's worth. Oh yeah. The only way you can get your money's worth, especially when things are kind of like gross in terms of how much they cost, can my parents were educators. So I still have that as a point of reference. I have my parents annual salary as a point of reference that keeps me grounded. Yeah. And so when there's something I know would make, like, you know, would have made my parents sick to their stomach to see the number on, you know. It's like, I feel like I don't get the most out of the item unless I Google it to the very last spec, both on the spec sheet on the manufacturer's website. And then I go into forums. Yeah. And then I go into Instagram hashtags. Oh, shit. I want to see everyone wear it. What does it look like on each one? Did anybody, I will keep looking and looking and looking. And that's what a lot of Rolex collectors have done. Yeah. You ever get burned? Oh, I've gotten burned, yeah. Yeah, I got burned recently selling a watch to a guy. I suppose a friend, I sold it to him. He goes, I'll pay you the rest later. And just said, no, I'm not paying you. And he was supposedly supposed to be a friend. He's like, ah, you know. Oh, man. Yeah. And I'll fill you in on that person later. Sure. Oh, my God. I sold some. And it's funny because he was an instrument dealer, music instrument dealer. And he asked me, and I bought stuff from him before. And he asked me, did I have anything that I wanted to let go of? Because he had a bunch of buyers, a bunch of buyers. And I think he did for a time. And I started looking through what I had and I went, well, maybe it's time to start selling stuff off. I gave him a Dumbbell Overdrive Reverb. Because you didn't like that one? Because I know you will get into the Dumbbells. You got a bunch. I thought, you know, it's not the one I've fallen in love with the most. And I really worked hard to track it down and it involved a relationship and somebody trusting me and seeing that I was going to be the guy to own it. And I remember driving off this guy's, out of this guy's driveway with an Overdrive Reverb and a 410 EV cab. The thing was so preserved, they took the road case lid off and the foam crumbled out. It decomposed. The thing was absolutely perfect, you know? And I said, well, you know, I hadn't fallen in love with that one. And so I'm going to weed and seed, you know, make some room, make a little more money back and just sort of start doing what most normal people do, which is to don't own everything. Yeah, yeah. And a couple other things, and they were important things. They were really important things. And took him and ran. Took him and ran. He kept saying he would pay me, kept saying he would pay me, filed for bankruptcy, had to go to court, had to do all this stuff. And I think every musician at some point has to know that there's stuff out there that they got ripped off on. Keith Urban came across the Dumbbell Overdrive Reverb and I think he bought it. Oh, shit. And so it's not his fault. Yeah. Enjoy the amp. You bought it fair and square. You didn't get screwed, you know? Is it considered stolen? That's a really good question. It's not considered stolen. No, the money that was owed to me is considered stolen. The item itself. This is where it just gets unfun, right? Like, you know? Yeah, yeah. That's brutal, man. It's really weird when people... So here's the game of watches and here's what it was up until the sort of brand new game came into town, which is like buy it brand new and you can flip it the next day for 3X, right? Yeah. It was like... And this also goes to sort of the dawn of using the internet to create information, right? Like using the internet to spawn new information. So this is why like, somebody called the green Submariner the Hulk. One guy came up with this and it stuck. And it made him, he got his jollies and it's probably good for that watch because people now go, I want the Hulk. So if you own four of them, good for you. You're up thousands of dollars. And this is a war out there now of like, and it has been this way for 10 years, is like stare at the watch you already own, see if there's anything different about it and name it. And if you can name it like a rail dial, you know the rail dial? Oh yeah, oh absolutely. Somebody just realized that superlative chronometer officially certified lines up a certain way. Rolex didn't care, but it means you don't have to go out and buy another watch. You can just say, oh, there's a new speck in town. It's almost like astronomy. Like discovering a new star in the sky and getting to name it. The Rolex Valet, yeah. The Batman was originally called like the bruiser. Somebody tried to call it the bruiser. Someone tried to call it the, you know, and Batman stuck. Steve McQueen 1655 Explorer II. You never wore that watch. Somebody managed to follow suit with the Paul Newman naming and went, ah, there's a Steve McQueen and it worked. It worked. So it's this game of like manipulating the information which I'm not into doing. I'm not even into people flipping things for 3X. I think it's bad for everybody. We didn't buy these watches brand new because we wanted to flip them. Not at all. Not at all. I want a 15202 right now, AP. Yeah, it'll be impossible. Yeah, and the big bummer, the big bummer to me, John, is if I got a, you know, I get on the list for a 5711. Now if I got it, I really couldn't even, cause it's worth like $70,000. Now, and you're like, oh, bummer. I just want a steel watch. I think that you should wear it like you just bought it and you can get it again anywhere. The only way to really be a true watch guy is to just rip it out of the packaging and just start banging it up. That's the only way to prove your loyalty to the watch gods is to just start wearing it and forget about the secondary market thing, which is it's so dirty for people who, you know, for people who've been doing this for a decade and longer, there's kind of just a grossness to it. A steel nautilus is an entry level Patek Philippe that should be fun to buy. You should throw it on and you should beat the hell out of it. Right. And you, and I don't think they look good until you beat the hell out of it. Yeah. You're like a beat up one. You just should beat it up. Those watches are not supposed to be babyed. Yeah, yeah. That's why they made them out of steel. I know, right? I have a 5164A. It's so beat up. You turn it to the, first of all, those bezels are made to be chewed up. Anything that has a flush bezel to me. Yeah. It's ready for dance. You're just asking for it, you know? So it's just weird to like see this, this spike in enthusiasm for a thing that you and I had been enthusiastic about in our own way. Yep. You know, I'm wearing a peace unique aquanaut that I bought 10 years ago for fun off a guy. He goes, yeah, this person ordered one of each color, blue, white, like maroon and green. I've got the green one. I went, yeah, I'm in the green one. It's green and it's cool. I don't know what it's worth now to have a peace unique aquanaut that's green and has a red second. And I don't care. It's insane. Isn't that from Dubai? Did they make that for India or Dubai? That color, the green one? It depends. I think it could have been Asia. It doesn't. Right, yeah. No, but they do a lot of stuff for the Arab market with emeralds. That thing is insane. Isn't it fun and small and it's not trying to be? I know. I know. But I've had it for 10 years and I just pulled it out the other day and I went, oh, that's a fun little thing now that everybody's wearing the green. It's funny. I think one of the, first of all, I want to lay this out here. When you came on in the scene, I guess it was like 2001. I was still playing music. And I got to say, me being a fan of you or enjoy what you do has changed my life in a way of, when you came out, I was like, God, fuck that guy. I played music. I was like, this guy, and it was just a jealousy thing. And I realized that over the years, that's all it was because I played kind of Americana music and somebody comes out, boom, they're big, they're everywhere. And I realized over the last, I would say six years or so, I changed and it made me for the better as far as I just judged you and how people judge me when I walk up there, look at this fucking rock and roll dude, this 80s rock guy or whatever. And I realized, fuck, I don't like when people do that to me. And so as I dug into more and more about you, I was just like, this guy's amazing. And now I shout it out hard, man. Well, you know, thank you. And I understand what you're saying. And I would also take a little off your shoulders and say that I changed too. And when I first started out, see, I don't think people really understand what it takes to break out of your town, what it takes to, the force that you must take or must put out to break out of your family, to break out of your house, to break out of your town, to sleep on your friend's couch in the basement, to make it through that, to not give up. You probably need about four times as much force than most people would expect. You have to really drive through a steel wall. And what happens is once you, you don't know you're through and you're still going hard. If I had to do it over again, and I truly had the perspective to know that I was gonna make it and I did make, meaning like, okay, your first record is out, people love it, you're good, you're good to go. Pull back the throttle, drop the booster rockets, you're good to go. I would have behaved completely differently. But looking back on it from that perspective, looking out like I was still pushing, it was only two years removed from me living it in my parents' house. And it took me so much force to break out of that for people to tell you, your friend's parents telling you you're not gonna make it. Saying you wanna be a musician and you're gonna be a rock star or a guitar player or whatever. And at that time it was me saying I'm gonna be a blues player. I'm gonna play the blues, I wanna go away and play blues music. Yeah, like blues. You know, it sounds crazy when you say it in Fairfield, Connecticut. But then you make it and that's why I have so much grace for other people. If you're still in the, if you're still in the first few years of making it, you're in the rocket ride and nobody can tell you you're good. Nobody can tell you you don't have to worry. You just keep pounding, pounding, pounding. So my point is that I didn't make it all that easy to see someone like myself who to a certain degree things came easy to and for, also be kind of aggressive, kind of intellectually show offy, kind of overly sarcastic. I mean, the only thing I could have done to really not rub people wrong would have been to have low self-esteem. Right. That would have been really good for me if I had crippling self-esteem issues. Like a Cobain style. Yeah, I mean, that makes it really easy on people. And it would have been easier for me. And I probably did, but not in a conventional way. And so I just looked at it like, I want to be great and I'll tell you when I'm not, and I'll tell you when I am. Yeah. Right? And I'll tell you when I'm not, I have no problem. People have no idea how many songs I throw away, but the ones that I think are great, I've always thought were great. Yeah. You can't change my mind on it. You can kind of tell when you have a great song. It really just starts to stick in your own head. Yeah. It plays like a radio in your head. Yeah. If I get home from writing a song in the studio, I play a little game. I go, sing it. Can you sing it? And if you can't sing it to yourself, after you worked on it all day? Oh, yeah. If you can't sing the song when you're brushing your teeth? Trashed. It's trashed. Yeah. It's trashed. Right? If you have to press play to remind yourself how it goes, and you just wrote it three hours ago? Yeah. And you're never going to stay. It ain't good. You're never going to stay. But when you get that one lightning boy, I mean, like, let's just say body is a wonderland. I don't think that's a lightning song. Really? No, I don't think it is. I think it's a novelty song in the sense that, like, if you think about what makes a hit song from a new artist, it's a novelty song. Well, it's got a monster hook, though. Sort of, but sort of not. Yeah. It sort of doesn't. I mean, this is where I'm really honest, right? Like, I'll tell you, you bring up a song that I think is great. I'll talk about it like someone else wrote it. I'll go, now, that's a great song. Because I've always been divorced from that. I don't, I think that's what rubbed people wrong. Right. I'm divorced from the fact I made it. You never rubbed me wrong. It was my own fucking asshole-ness of life. But I'm telling you, I think it was a joint effort. Well, well, I really do. When you're like me and you grow up and you look and you go, this guy looks great. He plays great. He sings great. Yeah, I understand what you're saying. How did he get all that? Yeah, it's like, well, but then, you know. But then, I would just say to that, well, just wait, because corrections take place. Everybody, this is where I wish that young people could have the empathy that older people have because your empathy is directly related to your experience. And it's only after you realize the gray area in life where you can try your hardest and still be an asshole, where it just takes time to realize how to communicate with the world. And that by the time you realize how to cooperate and communicate with the world, you've burned some bridges. And that's okay. That that's just part of the, sometimes you get in a fight with your significant other and you're like, this fight should be happening. This is not an out of nowhere fight. This is a good fight. This is supposed to take place. And sometimes I see other people be so extreme in their black and whiteness and taking other people down and this guy's can't let go. One day something will happen to you where you'll realize you said something you didn't mean or behaved the way you didn't mean to behave or how to hear where you were drunk. And then you'll forgive other people in the midst of their doing thing. I watch people online all day and I go, come on, man, you can do it, even if they're being a total asshole. I root for people because I know how hard it is. Oh yeah, I do too. I know what's going on with them. Their evilness is just really kind of- It's an invention. It's like, David Geffen in the American Master, I forgot what they called this, that PBS series of documentaries and like American masters, I think it was called. The very first thing David Geffen says is something to the effect of all artists to some degree are an invention that they made up. And this is a horrible paraphrasing but that's the takeaway from it. And I still look at people, everybody's a dumb idiot who just made choices to invent themselves. And some people have better taste in their invention. And some people just don't. But no matter how big your name is, you're still a little human-sized person inside the robot. And I just look at people's robots and I go, you're doing your robot wrong. Right? You go, you programmed your robot. I hope you figure it, but I never personalize it because I know how hard it is out there. So I think you're kind of saying the same thing. Whatever your empathy level is for how you felt about me, it's probably directly related to your experience since then. I just think empathy and experience are related. Very few people, maybe like the Dalai Lama, can have empathy for a thing he's never experienced. But you pretty much in life have to go through it to get it. You do. And also I think it was just, for me, once I stopped playing music, I became a serious music fan again because you're out of the business. So I stepped out of the business and I stepped out of the grind. I'm in a different grind now, comedy, but once I got out of it, I was like, oh, this is, and it wasn't competition or anything to me, but it gets into that thing of your life of like, how come it's not happening? I'm out here 25 years. I got a great record. I got a different, you know, and I was never doing it to be famous or rich or anything, but I did want to be able to keep doing it. And that's why. I understand. And I feel the same way. Yeah. And I have to say the difference between it. Like I've never experienced the ground hitting me when it came to putting music out. So I can't ever really say that I know how I would deal. And I have a feeling I wouldn't have taken it well. Right. I really think that if I hadn't hit the ground running, I think the ground would have kicked the shit out of me. And I think it's important to remember that as things continue to sort of still stay in orbit for me career-wise, that I have a feeling that I would have been a complete and total fuck-up if things didn't go my way. I don't think I would have tolerated it super well. I think I would have always done it, but I think it might have eaten me alive. I'm not sure. Right. But I think it's a good, healthy thing to always hold out this little idea that you're never quite sure how good a person you would have been if it didn't go your way. And of course, things have come along the way that have been challenging. And now for me, it's like you said, I'm not really gonna be able to judge my future work based on commercial success because the world's just different. Oh, absolutely. Both age-wise, I'm just different than young people. And you could say that the terrain is so different now that it's just so hard to understand if something's working or something's not working. I think everybody just takes a smaller piece of the pie. That's all. More pieces to go out to people. And that's cool, right? Like I enjoy the quality of that in art right now that everybody can get a slice of the pie. The problem is that the slice keeps getting smaller for each person. And every Thursday night on Instagram, there's 200 songs coming out. Wow. There's more songs coming out per week than there are minutes to listen to songs. That's crazy. And it's wild. And I think for me, the only judge of whether I'm making it or not is are my ideas safe in the sense that they will be made if I want to make them? That's what we're talking about. It's like, can I have job security so that if I have an idea, I can still make it? I wouldn't want to be fighting for the opportunity to make music and alongside fighting to make great music. That's already a fight in itself, right? Like going to the studio and trying to hash out this idea you have in your head for the song and come out with the best version of what you had in mind. But also figure out how you're gonna do that. That would be, as long as I don't have to do that, as long as I'm safe emotionally in the shower having a song idea going, we can do that. Yep. We can make a phone call. You want a string section? We can get a string section. That to me is making it. And it sounds like it's corny, but making it for me is if I'm in the shower and I have an idea for a song, I don't have to worry about how can I get it done? Well, you created that kind of safe space. I mean, you had some hits, you got daughter, all these hits, but then you go, oh, here's the blues. Yeah. The blues band. It's always been a mess. Yeah, but what's great about that is you didn't box yourself into I'm just this radio guy. True. And then getting into dead and co later is a complete freedom landscape. I think it took 15 years for people to understand me and the thing that had to take place was 15 years of decisions had to sort of come to light. So you could see that really what it is is this inability to sit still. It's actually just pure curiosity. Well, that's what you and I DM about. That's what we talk about. It's pure curiosity. Absolutely. And I think if you're just making one record, you can't see the pictures. Making two records, you can't see the picture, but then you go off and do this other thing you want to do that you're curious about, which is the power blues trio, which is me and Steve Jordan and Pino Paladino. I remember that was a war with the record company. That had to be. That was quick. That had to be. Daughters was the last thing I had done before I went out to do John Mertrie. You know how mad they must have been. It's right up there when Neil Young signed with Geffen and then turned in the electronic record. Was that on the people with trans? Trans. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, and then they're suing them. Yeah. That is the lockdown right there. I think that is where John Mayer branched off and it was like, you don't own me and I'm not a pop guy. I had to. You had to. Don't even think of it as much. I had to go and do this particular thing. It was, I have to not do this again. Right. I can't. And I remember talking about being triangulated. Like, okay, your body as a Wonderland was a hit and daughters had just been a hit. And I mean, it's on the record. I didn't want daughters to be a single for the very reason that I didn't want to be pigeonholed as this super sensitive guy. But once daughters was a hit, and God bless everyone at Columbia for sneaking it on the radio and showing me that it really could be that big and I wouldn't take it back now. But I remember going, the next thing I do if it's a soft rock ballad is going to lock me in for life as that guy. And the trio thing came out of breaking out of that box. That was the genius move. I mean, cause look at what was going on. Jack Johnson, you know, David, they were really trying to record companies. They'll be like, oh shit, we got some kind of formula going. Yeah, that's true. I mean, there was a thing that worked, which was this kind of sensitive, sweet, thoughtful, acoustic based thing, you know? Absolutely. And then I just went, well, remember, this isn't what I wanted to do. I wrote these songs and it's difficult to talk about these songs that are so meaningful to people and I love them. So when I talk about them, I talk about them like my kids, I hate that analogy, but let's look at it like that. Like you write these things because you're alone with a guitar. Nobody sits alone with a guitar and writes a rock song. Oh, I say that. I can write a thousand ballads, write in a rock song on an acoustic, almost impossible. You sound like a crazy person. Yeah, you'd be in here playing. Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na. Just playing an acoustic, people would walk by and go, what's going on in that house? Yeah. If someone overheard you singing a ballad with an acoustic guitar, you play what an acoustic guitar can support. It's what comes out of it too. 85 beats per minute, man. Yeah. You know? And so these songs came from me not having a band, from me wanting to reach this other place as a lyricist, but it wasn't the whole picture. And my point is the whole picture doesn't come out for 15 years when you realize, oh, he's kind of a crazy person in the sense that you've got to zoom all the way out to see the picture. Which is genius. I love that. You got to zoom all the way out. Yeah, that's what I love about you. Now that I've, I went backwards with you. So I go from dead and co. Right. And you know, when I get the, I get a text secretly from a guy at Paul Reed Smith. And he says, look at this, making this guitar. John Mayer is going to be in dead. He had a grateful day. He said, and I was like, fuck you. I'll show you that I was like. No, no, sure. I was like, no. And then they made the announcement and I went and I was, I was floored. And from there I started peeling backwards. Oh, that's cool. It was really cool because I'm a huge John Hyatt guy. I'm an alt country guy. I love listening to Williams. And then I get to these records, these Montana records. Oh yeah. You get to like Born and Raised and it's all right there. Yeah. And I'm going like, hey man. Yeah. I didn't listen to any of this stuff. This is great. Yeah, thank you. And so I'm going backwards. And then of course I knew the hits from a long time ago, but then I went and dug into those records anyway. Like, wow. And then I started getting into the songwriting, then the voice and then the production, everything I was like, all this shit is great. It's almost like savings bonds. And they weren't worth all that much when I got them. Yeah. And if you just stick with it and keep playing and you're true of heart, you know, then it means something years later, you look down and you go, oh, these are different because they don't make these anymore. It's kind of what we're talking about. Like, these things have been discontinued. They're also, to some extent, have been discontinued from me in the sense that I'm not the same person who could ever write those. I don't know. And you know, I brought this up to a few people and they go, no, that's not true because they don't want to think that it's true, but it might be true that I might no longer possess the kind of psychic energy necessary to write something like Stop This Train. I'm not sure that I would sit in a room alone and write 12 verses for a song with that much intention, with that much need to create, with that much fire. As you get older, you don't write 12 verses and pick the best one. No, I mean, you know. Young people. Sometimes I think that I've been thinking to myself and then I'm walking through the time and then potato, potato, and now I got to write another part of this verse just to keep it going and I'm potato, potato. I'm going to write some more and I go, this is gonna kill me. I can't, when I was younger, welcome to the real, what you said to me, condescendingly, take a seat, take a life, blot it out in black and white. We're halfway through. Yeah, yeah. And at this point, as I get older, I go, I don't know that I could ever summon that much energy to go da-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. It's almost like joke writing. Oh, is that true? Well, you, you know, when you're first writing jokes, that's set up city. There's all this, yeah, dance, dance, dance. And then boom, and later on you realize, ba-ba-boom, yeah. That's right. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Ba-ba-boom, that's right. And that's a great song, also formula, you know? Yeah, oh, listen. You couldn't be, I think, okay. So the song that is, for me now, the benchmark of songwriting is Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain. Oh, yeah. And I drew it out, I'll sometimes map a song. I'll listen back to it, and I'll just wanna understand it genetically, and I'll like write the song out. I listened to Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain, and I took a blue pen when it was not the hook. I took a red pen when it was the hook. I counted the number of lines. The thing you could fit, you could fit it on a cocktail napkin. The whole song. And Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain comes when you least expect it, and it just keeps resolving, and you get a bridge in the first 40 seconds, and it's perfect. And if I could have ever written Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain, I would have, to me, that's just the most genius thing ever written because it's ba-ba-boom. That's it. Ba-ba-boom, ba-ba-boom. It's weird when you listen to like New Country Now, they don't even have pre-chorus anymore. Right. That's really bizarre. The pre-chorus is gone. That's a lot of the ADD, I think, too. It's just kind of like, driving down the road here we go, big time on the mountain, you're like, wow, ready? Yeah, it was also, I think taking away B sections and bridges takes a layer of a song away. The bridge, to me, was always the but also, and additionally, but conversely, I've got to also say, if you're talking about, if you're writing a song that is screw you, the bridge should always be like, but it's probably me, too. Absolutely. That's a wonderful place to expound on your thought and when the bridge is gone, I love bridges. I do, too. No one writes a bridge like Sting. That's the king of bridges to me. Yeah, he's, you know, all this time that song? Oh, absolutely. That bridge. Teacher's told us, the wrong is built with the bridges. He's the bridge master. I don't understand a lot of the references. Yeah. A lot of ships and ponies. I'm a huge police guy. Ghost in the machine to me. I know every police song. I know it through the box set. I'm one of these kids who like don't know what song's on what record. Oh yeah. I just know, it was like, the box set was the original playlist. It really was. I don't know what record it's from. Yeah. I can't tell you what Brimstone and Trierkel is on, but I know how the song goes. I think it's disc four of the box set. I don't know. Are you a Zeppelin guy? Good question. I happen not to be a Zeppelin guy. That's all right. I, it never caught me. It still could though. It's still very much. Right. I hated the dead. There you go. My entire life. The vocabulary isn't my vocabulary. Jimmy Page playing a basically a Gibson, whether it's an SG or Les Paul. That's a different sound for me. I'm a Strat guy. Everyone I love comes from the Strat sound. I also am a melody geek. Now there's certain, like I think going to California, is that what it's called? Beautiful, yeah. That song is outstanding. Smoking. Outstanding. I mean, Blind Faith probably wishes they wrote that song. You know, it sounds like a, anybody would have killed for that song. And you know, anything that has melody in it, I can dig, but when it gets into like, bluesy Led Zeppelin, genetically just a little outside of my zone. Just by a little bit. Were you, of course, I'm 53. How old are you? 42. 42, so I was deep into that when what I called the Strat and Hat era. Where Stevie comes. I love it. Yeah, Strat and Hat. Then everybody went and bought a Strat and Hat. That's right. The most famous and successful being Mike McCready from Pearl Jam. Absolutely. Who was basically Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughn off to the side of the stage wearing the hat and the Strat. And it was awesome to me. I mean, I'm a Pearl Jam fanatic. Love him. And the thing that adds another layer to that band is that these solos were basically Jimi Hendrix solos. It's funny too that he was able to do that because Eddie, you think of Eddie would maybe lay down the law on that. But I think that Eddie definitely knew we do need some rock here. That's what made it great. And you got Eddie Vedder who is like probably existentially torn for life between the melody he loves and the rock gods he admires. Absolutely. Right? Absolutely. So any moment he wanted to be the most melodic person in the world, you know he can. Yeah. You know he can open the can of whoop ass when it comes to melodies. But it's like his fugazi brain. He just can't leave, spin the black circle. Yeah. And hail, hail, it has to be ugly. And I get into this all the time, right? Like people feel right now, and it's a different way in pop music, but people have always felt like things couldn't be too pretty. And I never had that problem. Yeah. I think it can't be pretty enough. Well, I worse the prince, you know? So that's all beautiful the whole time. I can't get enough pretty. And I'm a ballad freak. You can't be too pretty with music. Yeah. You can't be. And look, I've never been cool in any one year that I had my record out. Maybe continue them for a second. But the rest of the time it was like, no, no, no, these people we think are cool, you're not. But then, because the songs were too pretty. They go, no, no, no, we want whatever the dynamic, interesting, futuristic version of today's music is. But then like, now I'm playing on stage in front of more people than I've ever played in front of playing really pretty stuff. And I feel like, oh, it was good to invest in pretty. You just wear it. You wear all of it. Your first record, your second record, all the record. You just, you know, it's like, it's hard to explain. I'm one guy. I'm not eight records. I'm just one guy. I've made records. This is what changed in my life, is I used to try to be a star, thinking that was my job or that was my role. And I was horrible at it. You're playing the fucking guy. Well, you should try. Yeah. God knows if you get it, if it lands in your lap, give it a run. Yeah, oh, you got it. You got it. You got, I believe in that. Give it a run. I had to shitload the drugs. Yeah. You're just riding. And for me, dude, it was never going to be drugs. Yeah. It was never going to be a DUI. It was never going to be me wrapping my tree around a car. Had it been, would it been maybe an easier next few years for me? Well, people can understand that too. Because there's protocol for them. They're like, oh, he's a rockstar. He crashed his car. He got a cop. You thank the cop that arrested you. Yeah. You thank people for helping you get help. Yep. And it's on a calendar. You're back in two months. Yep. You're a changed man. But that was never going to happen to me. I was always going to pick the more abstract way to do it. Because nobody was going to tell me what to do. And the problem is, when you're right about 80%, nobody can tell you about the other 20. Because you've been right most of the time. So other people go, I don't think you should swear so much on stage. You go, fuck you. Now when I swear, it feels terrible. It just feels wrong. When I was younger, you'd swear while you're tuning. Swares were funny when you were playing to your crowd. That's another thing too, is I was playing to my crowd. Oh, yeah. When you say stuff while you're tuning, you always get a laugh. They love you. They're also uncomfortable while you're tuning as well. You should be playing. But you're watching. You're going, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And you're just watching this light try to go from red to green. And you get insecure a little bit. So you go, you're fucking dead. And you get a laugh. And they laugh. And you're still trying to tune. It's getting caught up in the nut. You're like, what the fuck? And it's funny. You don't expect to hear the guy say the F word. Anyway, that was my particular. That was the way that phase one ended in my career. Do you go out to Montana? You may go out to Montana. You get some rehab. Well, yeah. I mean, I didn't have a drinking problem. I didn't have it. My only problem was that I swam way out past the Buies. My eyes were closed. And I was just swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming. And I got a whistle. And I turned around and the lifeguard was a mile away. Wow. And I was like, oh, I really thought I was behind the Buie. And it just so happened at the end of a summer tour of 2010, I discovered No Direction Home, the Bob Dylan documentary. Maybe the very first, the very first modern digital documentary that blew my mind. That thing, ballot of thin man on that movie is a game changer. It's the whole thing. Look, I got goosebumps. No. For me, it's him doing Forever Young on the Last Waltz. He changed my life again. And I was at the end of the battle studies tour. It was 2010. I was laying in a hotel bed. Maybe I was in Philly or something. I'll never forget it. My feet started going under the covers. I was watching Bob Dylan and I went, I'm done. I'm done. I have to know what this music is. I have to know what this music is. I can't believe I have to keep touring right now. I can't believe it. This is it. This is it for me. I watched him play all these songs. And I just went, this is for me. This is my future. This is where I want to live. There's honesty here. This person is not interested in the things I've been interested in. Not at all. I have to go here. I have to go here. And that's why as soon as I got off the road, in September of 10, I was in the studio. I was an electric lady. Started writing song after song. I mean, a song a day, Dean. I was writing a song a day. And I was drinking a lot because I was working my shit out because I had gone through it. And I had stopped the bleeding. I had stayed on tour. And I knew, OK, John. And maybe this is what, maybe I had synthesized not making it. And I didn't mean to. Maybe I did mean to, but that would be super psycho deep. I had a couple of years where I walked around New York City and nobody knew who I was. No shit. Because I was 20 pounds heavier. I had long hair. I had a hat on. I was layered up because I was so heavy. I just layered. If you see me in a t-shirt and jeans, I feel good about myself. If you see me in a t-shirt, vest, undershirt, a button-up shirt underneath and a jacket and a scarf, I don't feel good about myself. I love that, honestly. Yeah, I hear you. If you can just wear a t-shirt and jeans, you're looking good. And I remember I had this year where I never drank growing up. And I had the year like I was in college, man. I drank every night. I drank most of the day. And I wrote these songs at the same time because I had to work it all out. I had hit the wall. And everybody hits the wall no matter what that wall is. You've been an asshole. You have a drink problem. You have a drug problem. You've got to admit to yourself that you're never going to make it in this or no, no, no, no, no. Or everybody hits a wall. This person you're with, you have to leave them. You're in a relationship that's doing you no good. You've got to give up. You've got to surrender. And when you surrender, that takes a minute. So people think that I went from LA kind of battle studies to Montana, but I actually was in New York. I didn't even know that. Yeah, I thought you just cut out. I thought you just cut out. I thought you just cut out. Oh, yeah. I know that. But I thought you were like, I'm out of here and just went to Montana. I said I'm out of here and I went to Lafayette and Spring. So I was right there, but nobody really cared, which I was like, OK, this is a market correction and I'm ready for it. Like I took it. I remember taking it. Like, all right, look, we're in this for the long run. Let's just go back to music. Let's just go all. Because I remember doing comedy going like, well, music's locked down. Yeah, I got this. What now? No, no, no, no, no, no. That's it for the rest of your life. That's where the joy is. And I just went back to it and I remember discovering the therapeutic. Did you used to drink? Oh, yeah. Did you ever have a year where it was good for you, where it was therapeutic? You worked shit out while you were drunk? Absolutely. I mean, there were times like after I saw bar flying, I got into that whole bucowsky thing of like, I'm going to be a day drinker. And you get into this different frame of mine of drinking till 6 p.m. and then going home. And it's a total different world. It's an adventure though, right? Yeah, I needed that. It's like, I feel that all the phases of the drugs and the booze that I did, and that I got out, you know, that I look back on them and I go, oh, yeah. I've got stuff now in my mind that I learned from that time. Yeah, yeah. And that's sort of the test of any drug, is do you get anything out of it? The answer is no. It's like, leave it alone. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for me, it's like, can you take anything from it? And for a while, I took so much out of drinking. I found drinking was the only way to sit next to myself and look at myself from the outside. And I used to say drinking is a good way to sit across from yourself at the table. That's got to be wild to start drinking and the guys around you, are they like, hey, what? You drink now? Yeah, I didn't really drink till I was 27 or 28. That's got to be wild. And then I discovered like, Lagavulin 16. And that was it for me. And I would do Lagavulin 16 on stage and pretty good. But it would maybe sloppy towards the end of the show. I played some guitar solos at the end of shows that were pretty insanely stupid. But I would go to the studio and I'd wear like a Breone suit. I remember I got into Breone suits and I just wanted to go to the studio in a suit. And right around six o'clock, the Sierra Nevada would come out. No, I love it. That's great. You put a Sierra Nevada right down the microphone stand and you just start going in your own head and writing and different songs would come out. Then I go to dinner and it's like three margaritas. And sometimes I go back to the studio because I'd be excited. I'd walk right back into the electric lady and I'd just go back. I got it, I got it and it would come. And, but I would stay out till four. Yeah. In the New York style. Four? Yeah, drink till four in New York. And I'd come home and I would watch a movie and not really pay attention to it like four skinny cow ice cream cones. Oh shit. And I would look up, this is where it intersects with Montana. Ready? I'd lay on my couch drunk having been berated by downtown women. Yeah. Young women who saw me as the guy from the internet. Oh yeah. And didn't realize. Yeah. They didn't realize that I was a real person. Right. And that I was really going through it and they would rip me apart. Just rip me apart. Just saying shit to you? Why are you drinking that? Like, I know you're John Mayer but like just coming up to me and acting like I came up to them. Yeah. The same treatment. You ain't shit. So I always thought, oh, you've never come up to a guy before. That this is what happened and it's over for me now, right? Like there's other names that people would want to talk to at a bar. I'm more just sort of off in my own little world. But I remember like, oh, your legs brought you here but you think that I walked up to you. So there's a part of you that went, I've got to engage. And everybody's drinking by the way. Everybody's drinking. So I can't just go up to this guy and say I like your work because I've never done that before. Yeah. Guys come up to me. So it was this twisted thing where people come up to me and start making fun of my drink or my hat or my hair. And they'd roast me. They would just roast. It's their thing, their insecurity to get into the conversation which is bizarre, right? Something happened every time between the moment they went, that's John Mayer, I got to meet him to the moment they got up to me. And I think if I can guess, somewhere around halfway to me, they went, wait, don't tell him you love his music. Everyone tells him you love his music. You will disappear in front of him. He will pay you no attention. Give him shit instead. And he will never forget the one person who gave him shit. Little did they know that everybody chose to put the number on black. That's crazy that that would affect you though. Oh God, it broke my heart. That's bizarre because they just kind of strangers I don't know, to me, I'd be like, get out of here. No, I didn't have, but I never had that in me. And I think they thought I did. They thought I was much more rugged than I was. And so I'd go home drunk and I'd lay on my couch and I'd watch 30 Rock. And for anybody keeping score at 30 Rock goes by way too fast if you're drunk. You don't get the joke. It's just too fast. But I would let it play in the background and I would go on like realtor.com and I would just look at places in Montana. What made you pick Montana? I was in Salt Lake City playing a gig in 2010 and we had the day off and I was at the hotel bar and I sat next to a guy who said he was from somewhere in Montana and said the most beautiful town in the world is Livingston, Montana. He gave me his card and wrote Livingston, Montana on the back and God knows I still wish I had that card but I don't. And from then on I kept googling Livingston, Montana. This guy said this was the most beautiful place. And as a catharsis when I was drunk and my heart was broken for whatever reason I would go I'm out of here. And I remember the world's worst catch 22 was that the same drink that made me wanna leave made it impossible to drive. Wow. Do you remember that? I mean, the things that you would have done had you had the mobility and the right to do you would have woken up 800 miles away. Yeah. And I remember laying on a couch going, I have to go, I have to get out of here but I'm too drunk. And I know I'm gonna wake up tomorrow and I won't be drunk and I'll wanna stay. Oh, that's the worst. Right? The yo-yo. I wish somebody would come and pick me up right now and drive me 800 miles. Oh, I had the same effect with Livingston in San Francisco but not with booze but with the dot com, the first wave of the dot com coming in and just wiping out the music scene. You know, each night I'd be like, I'm out of here. But you were too drunk to fly. And then the next day you're like, where am I gonna go? I was just here. And then you get mad at yourself for knowing that that guy's a wimp the next day. Absolutely. And you start bifurcating the tough guy who wants to make the change and the wimp who wakes up hung over and goes, I can't. And then eventually you just go, I'm fucking out of here. I'm out of here. And I sold my apartment and I moved out to Montana. Did you go out there? You saw something online and was like, this is it? I called a realtor. Well, I had had a vocal surgery so I was on voice rest. Did you have notes? No, I had a granuloma, which is worse. And it's a benign thing that is a terror on somebody because where it grows is where your vocal cords hit. And there's acid reflux coming up from the bottom. And there's vocal cords hitting and this flesh doesn't get a chance to heal. Oh, shit. And it's this almost like a feedback loop of flesh that keeps building up and then your vocal cords won't close. Oddly enough, my vocal cords were fine. It was that they wouldn't close because this granulated tissue would just keep growing. And the first thing I had done to it was I had it removed which creates a scar that I'll always have and I'll always deal with. But who did it? Like Sugar Man or somebody? No, it was a guy on the East Coast. Wow. There was a real, real sharpshooter. Oh, shit. But he didn't get it done right. He did it right, but it didn't take because it's such a tricky thing to have. If you ever tell a doctor everything and they go, oh boy. Oh, never heard that sound before in my life. Oh no. And they go, I have a granuloma. Oh boy. Oh. They'll all tell you it's from three or four different causes, very difficult to pinpoint the cause. So I was in it. Yeah. And look, I just felt like a basketball player who had to get his knee fixed, whatever it takes. They put things up my nose, down my throat. I wore a monitor that went up my nose and down my sinuses and down my throat for a day. Oh, shit. And when I swallowed food, it pulled my sinus. It was like, it was disgusting. Oh my God. But I did it because I want to sing again. Oh, well, nodes were my whole nightmare. Oh, you had nodes? Oh, well, I had some coming on. And then he said, you got to quit drinking, don't talk and stop singing for like three months. And then I had to relearn how to talk. I got the nodes not from singing, it was from talking. I was like so lazy talker, I'd be like, yeah, you know. I was talking all, no chest, no belly, nothing, just all in the throwdown. A lot of speakers get granulomas. People who do a lot of talking get granulomas. It's, it's. It's the scariest. It's just, it was such a strange time. And, but I moved out there. We were driving through Bozeman on a trip just to keep me kind of happy and up and out and occupied. And I grabbed a realtor book, a magazine outside of Big Sky at some restaurant in Big Sky and started flipping through it and called a realtor. And I said, hey, maybe I left a voice message. And I gave her keywords. Neil Young, acoustic guitar, folk music, 70s, cozy. And she called me back and she said, I've only got one place that's a pocket listing. It's not even on the market. I can only think of one place. She drove me out to it. While the sun was setting, I could hardly see it. And I went, yeah, I'll take it. Really? Yeah. And actually what I did was I put a bid in on it. And I'm such a dangerous negotiator because I kind of don't care. Yeah, yeah. Either way. Oh, yeah. And I remember going like, if they take the bid, and I got to go to Montana. And if they don't take the bid, like I was like, if they don't take the bid, I don't have to go. That's what it was. If they don't take the bid, I don't have to go to Montana. If they do take the bid, I get to go to Montana. I didn't care. I was sort of like, let the universe surprise me. Right. And the other guy accepted the bid and I was like, okay, I'm going. From New York to Montana, that's got to be a fucking complete change. I mean, the first week you're sleeping there, you're like, what the fuck? But I was ready to get out. Yeah. And just lived in my little guest house. The main house was empty. Yeah. It was empty for months. And I lived in this little tiny guest house, little tiny room. It was like living in your grandparents' house. And the whole winter went by, man. And I just, and actually that's when I tried to go back out on tour and I couldn't. Because of your voice? Because of the thing had come back. Raging back. Because it was a scar. I mean, the guy created injury down there and that just made it worse. And that's when I went out there and I couldn't have my dog because I couldn't yell to my dog. Oh fuck. Someone else took my dog and I'm out there and that's where I just kind of shed everything. And I listened to Grateful Dad. And I couldn't play. I couldn't sing. I mean, I didn't really know the music that well. But the fact that I wasn't a musician anymore. I mean, this is Superman too shit. This is Superman, not Superman anymore. Right. Remember when Clark Kent loses his powers? Absolutely. He gets thrown into the pinball machine. It's like, this is where I am. I can bleed. I don't have my powers anymore. And that's, I think why when I listened to Grateful Dead back then and I wasn't performing, it saved me. It wasn't me trying to listen to music going like, I know what they're doing. Yeah. I could do it if I wanted to do it. Number one, I couldn't. Number two, I wasn't able to because I was injured. Right. So I was just listening to this music and it was lifting me up and taking me away to these places I never thought music could. And I would, I watch Grateful Dead music. I watch it go by. Remember the water games in dentist's office? The press a little button and it would blow the ball around. That's Grateful Dead music to me. Phil Lash is one of the little gears that moves around and Bob Weir is a little thing that holds the ball and Jerry's the bubbles or whatever. And I just stopped thinking about music as, well, I do that too. Let me break down what they're doing. And I didn't break it down. Right, that's crazy. Just listen to it. I heard you were in a hardware store in Montana and heard Althina. No, I had a pool. I was, this is when I couldn't talk at all. Right. And I guess Don was gave me working man's dad back when I was making Born and Raised but I didn't really pay attention to it. Right. I paid attention to wooden ships by Crosby Stills and Nash. And then I got on a Crosby Stills and Nash kick. Those two records are just insane. Insane. And then I think I had Neil Young radio on or something and Althea came on. And I was in Palm Springs. Again, I think I was doing things to not be depressed. It was a real, I was on Depression Watch, you know? And I heard Bum, bum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum. And I had never heard anybody do that and I couldn't, and it's a very rare thing before I heard Jerry Garcia play the guitar. I couldn't tell what he was doing. Whoa. I couldn't tell. I just knew that it sounded like the most fun thing in the world to play. Like, it's the most jaunty thing that's ever been played on a guitar. Bum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, one more chord, dum, dum, dum. His inability to write something that repeated makes it difficult to learn and so much fun to play. Wow. The fact that things happen three times, not twice. Right here happens five times. Next time only happens one. You're like, okay, this is, how do I learn all this? But once you learn it, you'll never get bored of it. The first half of Althea ends with an A. The second half of Althea ends with an E. So you gotta now, every time you play Althea, make sure you hit that A. I played music all my life and I don't even think, I would take years for me to get my head wrapped around it. Oh, because I mean, yeah, it was the ultimate way to take what I knew and adapt it to figure out a new problem. So it was really cool on the sort of polymath level, which is what you and I are, is teach ourselves as we go about things. Right, so if I don't know something, I know I don't know it and I know what it takes to know it after I don't know it and I love that search. And this just started, I heard Althea and I went, oh my God, these Grateful Dead songs are, there should be a fake book of all great, like the way when I was coming up at Berkeley, people would have ornithology, autumn leaves, right? Right. Days of wine and roses. These were forms for musicians to play on that gave everybody a synchronized place to play music. They knew the forms. If you know the forms, you can play over them. Grateful Dead music is like an empty amusement park and each song is a different amusement park or each song is a different ride. It's crazy. Yeah, let's see these fantasies of like kids breaking into an amusement park or breaking into a mall and like running around. It's like, that's what it's like. Ramble on Rose is like to me, this beautiful MC Escher drawing where you get to climb down the stairs but go up and up the stairs but go down. The song is a Charleston sort of. It's like, you're playing over a D. You got to play in D. Ding, ba-ba-da-dee-dee, ba-ba-ba. But now it moves to an E, which is technically a modulation. You can't play in D anymore. You'll be done. Yeah. These aren't jams. They do modulate that. Absolutely. You now have to play an E for the next part. And then the next chord is an F sharp minor. Now you can play in D again if you want to but you should play an F sharp minor. It's, once you learn these forms. Yeah. Everything else feels like watered down Kool-Aid. It's like, once you get Grateful Dead in your system and I think to a certain extent you don't have to play the music to have that same feeling. No, not at all. You just don't know why. Yeah. You just don't know why it feels like it feels. I also I think I understand genetically kind of why it is what it is underneath it musically. I go, well, that's also. And I still sit and listen. I heard Eyes of the World from 1974 yesterday. And Jerry's solo was so slow. We often think about Eyes of the World as do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. Yeah, yeah. Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. And he was like, bo-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. Bo-do-do-do-do-do-do. Bo-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. Bo-do-do-do-do-do-do. and it was beautiful. And it freaked me out again. Like, oh, I don't have to play that fast. And then you'll hear one from 81. Oh, 81 cooking. So, it's like the thing about it for me as a guitar player is that it's an ever elusive rulebook. Just when you think you figured it out, there's a version from 1970X that comes out and you go, you can do it that way. And I was thinking on the way over here, oh, you know what I was thinking the other day? I'll say two things. Jerry just, Jerry's only, I'll feel like it's weird saying Jerry. Jerry Garcia's only way of thinking was like play the chords, but you could play the chords any way you want. So just as long as you play the letter of that chord, you could play it any inversion, any weapon down the neck. So I'll just keep hearing ways of playing songs. It was like, oh, he never had a set way of playing any song. That's wild. Sometimes he would just play like Fire on the Mountain, the way a beginner guitar player would play an A chord and a B chord instead of some inversion up the neck. What that day made him go, I'm just going to play this like a, like a Mel Bay book B chord and an A chord. And I listened to it and I go, that's right. You could be that simple if you wanted to be. I trip out, I trip out on Terrapin Station. Like when you guys played it, the first time I saw you guys play it, I go, how do you even remember this? Yeah. It's just keeps building and building. The inspiration part of the Terrapin Station is a little bit of a math problem. It's bizarre to me. And there's Bob Weir remembering it, no problem. Oh, it's, it's, it is in his bones. Yeah. It is, it is, he, remember, these guys didn't have teleprompters. No. We have prompters up on stage for lyrics because I'm, I'm not an alien. I'm not an alien. Yeah. I mean, I can learn music pretty fast. I wouldn't know how to sing 150 songs lyrically. Yeah. But these guys, the Grateful Dead were touring without teleprompters. That's nuts. And you'd only occasionally hear someone, the fact that you hear someone mess up a lyric at the frequency, the relatively low frequency you do in the history of Grateful Dead live shows. Right. It's astonishing given how many songs and how many verses there were. And drugs. And drugs. Yeah. But I always think if you were on them while you wrote it, you can be on them while you play it. Yeah. Right. When you start to dive in and, and learn this stuff, are you this like all sudden a whole new life to you? And, and at what point can you start singing again to where you're like, all right, I want to try to learn this stuff. Oh, I started singing again. So I had another surge. I had a procedure where they injected Botox into my vocal cords. Wow. Which killed the nerves the way Botox does. Yeah. And so my, I had chemical voice rest. I couldn't talk if I wanted to. It was a, it was a genius way of fixing my voice to, to, to for the, for the most part fixed my voice. Your voice is, first of all, before you go any further, it's fucking fantastic right now. It's, it's, I am a monk to keep it this way. My voice needs 12 hours of voice rest, no drinking, no acid reflux, sleeping on a wedge pillow. This is why I love music because I got one bullet left in the gun. Wow. And you better aim every time. And you haven't had any problems since that? I have moments where I have to back up. Like nothing's been as, I don't think it'll ever get as bad as it was because I monitor it. Right. But I get a sore. I get sore from singing. My vocal cords get swollen. And when my vocal cords get swollen, there's already some stuff down there that's not perfectly symmetrical because of what's happened and that's life. One of your knees is always going to be a little bit. Oh, my neck right now. I got herniated discs, dude. So I have a voice that I'm out of extra chances with and there's a beautiful spirit to that which is I don't have any room left to look at this thing as anything other than a gift. I'm out of lives. I had nine lives. I got one left. And that means we go back to our hotel room and we're silent for at least 12 hours. Wow. We sleep on a wedge pillow. We, I travel. Nobody knows this. And you're going to be into this. Yeah. You're the guy. You're the right guy to tell you. I love this. I travel with my own scope. I scope myself. I travel with a medical vocal scope. So you put something down there. I put it down my own throat. And you can look at it? I take my own pictures and I text it to my doctor. Really? I never have to go to an ENT again. Wow. So I can be, I was in Amsterdam. Yeah. My voice was feeling sore. And I took a look at it and I went, and I know how to look at it now because I know what to look for. That's right. I know everything about my condition. My curious mind. Googling. What are retinoids? What is abducted? What is abducted? What is a granuloma? What is epithelium? Oh, shit. So I can look at it and actually kind of go, well, it looks a little worse. I see a little acid reflux. Let me send this off to my doctor. And then I also travel with like a pharmacy so that he can prescribe me something and I already have it. Wow. So I got a drawer on the road. I think every singer should have this. Absolutely. You should build a relationship with your doctor where he trusts that you're not an animal. Yeah. He trusts you to take care of yourself on the road. I don't want to go... ENTs, I think more than any other doctor, are the hardest to find a great one. Oh, God, yeah. It's very difficult to understand the life of a singer, right? So I have a great one at UCLA and no matter where I am, I travel with a Pelican case that has a scope in it. Oh, that is insane. I set up the scope. I swap it down, plug in the fiber optic light, start a new file for myself, scope myself, and I go, eh, it's not as bad as I thought. And I send it off to my doctor and I would take this and that and that and I have this and that and that. Yeah. So it really is remote medicine. The other thing I was going to say for those who are completists and were listening to me talk, oh, what's the second thing you were going to say after Jerry? Yeah. I had this idea and I'm going to do it. I want to listen to a whole show and just listen to Bobby play the guitar. Oh, yeah. It's so interesting. I've never done it. It's the most fascinating guitar playing. I've never understood it, even when I watched the other one. It's gorgeous. I had to find places to stick in there. It was crazy. And I actually liked the other one more than the Grateful Dead documentary because it was so deep on this one guy. What was it like to be this guy with the giant dude next to you? Key in on Bobby for a whole show and a life will change. I just realized it. I was on the way somewhere yesterday, two days ago, and I heard, I forgot what song I was listening to. And I started listening to Bobby. Who could figure that out? Yeah. Like, who makes those choices? And his inversions are upside down. I know. That's what I heard. And the hammer on he's hitting. So you and I would go, he's hammering on something else underneath. Oh, man. So almost like Weather Report Suite is kind of his playing, but it's just backwards, but so necessary to let everyone else do what they're doing. He's just Jerry's trampoline, like, boing. He just catapults him with that guitar playing. He just catapults him, you know. When you start the dead and co. And you sit down and you think, all right, what gear do I want to do? Because when you're out with John Mayer, your gear is so different. I watched a gear breakdown on YouTube from, I think, 13 or 16. But then, you know, last run, it was, I mean, when you first were in dead and co, you had that Paul Reed Smith amp and the guitar. Then you just, it's so simple. It's just bump, dumblehead. What is it, two twigs? Oh, I ended up with a Dumble Overdrive Special 50 Watt that I adore. And just like three pedals. And that's it. Yeah, the, the, the inspiration is a fixed gear bike. A fixed gear bike. You ever seen a Fixie? Oh yeah, absolutely. That's what I'm trying to be now is it's part of a deeper thing that might sound artsy-fartsy when I get into it. But I want to only focus on my playing. I want to put the guitar out of the equation. So all you got to do is get the flavor, the tone of, say, the auto wall. Right. That's all I need. An octave thing and a little overdrive. Right. And the rest of it is up to me. The rest of it's my intention. That's the gear. I can't stress this enough. The technology, the innovation, the, you know, I used to love getting a new pedal, plugging it up. This one's green. This one, I got a true tone. Oh, y'all's a boutique pedal. Oh, you just sit at soundcheck. You just sit at soundcheck Indian style in front of a pedal board. Yeah. It lead in forward, still Indian style. The back of the pedal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just obsessed. I got a Klon. And then I got the fucking multi-wall here. And now the technology is, what do you have in mind to play? All of the energy is now in, are you in your right mind to play these notes? So I have one guitar. I might take out, there's a few surprises, I think. Yeah, when you first went out, you had that custom-made Paul Reed Smith, and it had a tremolo, but you never used tremolo. No, but I use tremolo as a shock, as like a, like a shock in a car. Oh, I got to. I use it so it's softer. It's softer. Yeah, yeah. When you bend a note, it comes up. It pulls a little bit. The slightest bit. Right. It's like an air ride. For me, it's like a big, but, but the Paul Reed Smith. So the guitars kind of follow my understanding of Jerry's playing. Right. And I think it's one of the hardest to nail down sounds because it's so complex and it gets misconstrued and miss in its replication. It's so broad and interesting and vast that if you start listening to other people play it, it gets, it loses something in translation immediately because it's impossible to clone it. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Right. Like Kim Ock doing his death thing. It's Trey doing his, all the different guys. If you asked me what I thought Jerry's playing was like listening to the same versions of songs, I would have told you, well, it's playing, playing, playing, playing, playing. And then as I got more into it, I'm like, it's actually kind of a Gibson PAF and a lot of that. Right. And a lot of times we thought he was playing the bridge because it was because it was really bright sounding. No, it was the neck. That's wild. I noticed on your first tour, your guitar was pretty bright. Yeah. On this last tour, you went, I talked to your tech or not, not Renee, but the other guy said, you just grabbed this time, a stock Paul Reed Smith at the shop. Yes. This is the one. Yeah. And that fucking guitar and that it's really great. It was the best tone I've heard in years. And let me tell you this and not to blow smoke up your ass. I've been to thousands of shows. I've seen everyone and I thought it was some of the best guitar playing I've ever seen at the two Hollywood Bowl gigs. Those were special shows. The city, city field and both Boulder shows, particularly the rain night. Yes. And I was like, this tone and this plane and the third, I guess we're in the third fourth year I've gone to all the yeah, we're in the fourth now. Fourth. So I was like, this could be some of the greatest music I've ever seen. Well, thank you. And it's me figuring out what these notes really mean, what they really are. And on first pass, you're like, oh, I think I know how to do this. So a lot of the first few tours were out of phase positions. Oh, wow. That's what I thought they were. Yeah. Well, OK, I thought I thought he must be playing out of phase. Wow. So there was the two in the four positions. So but that's actually too quacky. Yeah. So a lot of those early dead in company shows I'm playing like the I had just I'm the worst at this stuff, middle bridge. It's it was pretty high in between the middle and the bridge. And I've got a preamp on because I thought he had a preamp. Well, he's got a unity gain buffer, not really a preamp. Well, we had to learn that we had to figure that out. Yeah. And I'm also not trying to like copy it. No, I get it. But what I need to get, right, is a tone enough so that I don't have to overplay. And that I can play that much without people fatiguing. Right. The question, the only question that I have that continues to elude me as an answer is how was Jerry Garcia able to play that much guitar for throngs of people who didn't play a guitar and have them join him for every second of that ride? Yeah. Well, a big part of it is that he wasn't playing in a muscular way. Yeah, playing in a very. It's not an Angus. You know, I think he looked at it like a pedal steel. I started going, oh, I think he thought of it like a pedal steel because he played pedal steel. And he was into bluegrass. He was looking to get an electric guitar to be like a pedal steel. Right. And he was playing it with a certain pressure that wasn't like a guitar player. You and I play guitar. We squeeze it. Big time. We squeeze it like a grip on a baseball bat. Absolutely. Choke up. Especially with the adrenaline. Yes, man. Get out there. You squeeze it out of tune. I had to show I was on prednisone because for my throat, not long ago. And my right hand was Thor's hammer, not a good thing because my strings are a certain gauge in my left hand. A bad night of guitar playing is where your left hand doesn't agree with your right hand. No. When your right hand picks too hard and the left hand isn't there or the strings are too. And that was a nightmare for me to play the guitar because I was like jacked. But Jerry Garcia played the guitar in this lighter way that wasn't. It wasn't fiery. It was beautiful bird like like little bird bones. Yeah, absolutely. Bird bones of playing the guitar. Yeah, bird bones. Right. Like little bird bones, right. And that's something to do. That has something to do with wanting to hear it all the time. Yeah, because it's not adrenalized. That's a great way to look at it. And so that was one of the things I had to look at. I had to look at like, oh, a lot of these tones are quite pure. They're not in between two pickups. It's I'm telling you, it's the way he played the guitar. That's why I don't even think if you're a good guitar player, you don't you don't even really need a good sounding guitar. You'll find the one millimeter on the string over the pickup where Billy Gibbons. Yeah, you don't he played those shit plastic guitars like five years ago. He sounded just like he's playing pearly games. Oh, it's great. Now, me, I'm not that way. Oh, I don't believe I need to sound like me. I need to sound like me or else I'm lost. What was it like to two things? Wolf comes to City Field. You said a great thing. You said I wasn't ready to play until I was ready. It wasn't. Yeah, it wasn't time until it was time. I love that. It made it made me so happy. When the guitar shows up, I know somebody else owns it now, of course, it was sold. And what was it like when you grabbed it? Was the action all because I know Jerry used to play the action like way high, I guess. And but did you I know your tech set it up that day. But was it a weird guitar to play? Yeah, like I played the guitar for a second at my house. Right. Because I wanted to make sure that it was worth bringing out because we're going to have to take it out of the mat. Yeah, you got to play it for three hours, you know. It was right before they brought it to the mat and I played it and I, of course, lost my mind. I played it through a deluxe in my house and I lost my mind. Just a Tweed deluxe or a Blackface deluxe and a deluxe reverb. And I was I was I just started playing. I was playing Wolf in my house. And I was playing sugary and and something happens when you play the same instrument. The question was, is it the guy or is it the guitar? Right. And a lot of it's the guitar. And I was surprised to break that down. And I started playing sugary. I started playing as many songs. So excited. Couldn't remember all the songs. Oh, there's this song and there's this song and there's this song. And here's what changed me forever. Was the tone of this guitar was so good. Obviously, it's the one that's married to those songs. Of course. We you don't even know if an EMI console sounds good or not. The Beatles recorded on it. It sounds good. Yeah. We don't know. We don't know. Because that board made Abbey Road. So it sounds good because it sounds like Abbey Road. So this guitar sounds good because it sounds like Jerry. Right. Right. And all of a sudden, all I have to do is go boom, bop, boom, bop, bop, do, do, do, do, single notes. And I'm in heaven and I realized, oh, you got to get a guitar where the single notes make you happy. Wow. Because if you get a guitar that single notes make you happy, you don't have to play that much at all. I mean, I've heard versions of Jerry playing Tennessee Jet. He's playing one note for comping. He's playing just the F string, just one note. Bong, Tennessee, bong, the rain. Oh, just one note. Yeah. And it's a tuba. And so I was like, oh, this is it was difficult. It was difficult to understand that this was going to go away. Oh, man, difficult. We're in your mind where you go, what could I offer him to buy it? Who owns that? The good questions deserve good answers. And the answer is yes. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. But I was I was my feet came off the ground. Yeah. And I'm not saying in any way this is a claim. This isn't sword in the stone stuff. I'm not saying like I am the but but how do you not go? Like that was that's what I've been shooting for. Of course, it's like it's like saying your wife is really pretty. I need to meet a woman like your wife and then being like, actually, it's your wife, you know, like you can't do that. You know what I mean? Yeah. You got to find someone like a person's wife. So I had to give the guitar back and I went, this is beautiful. This is great. Let's do it. And then I got it at City Field. And here's the here's the skinny on that guitar. The guitar needs upkeep, right, hasn't had. Yeah, but Fred dress. Oh, it needs a fret. It needs a refret. Yeah, refret clean. There's a short in the probably a bunch of old mold on the pots. The neck pickup is disconnected. Oh, shit. There's two cables that should go to the neck pickup and there's only one. Right. And so it's it's about a quarter of the volume of a neck pickup. And that's how you played it. I couldn't use the neck pickup. Oh, shit. Well, so then we start getting into the question and it's a real age old collector's question. Oh, what is more important to keep the guitar in its like DNA perfect form? Yeah. Or do you do you keep the guitar in good health? A lot like watches. Yeah, sure. Right. Sure. Yeah. You know, do you like, you know, Rolex would say that the loom is cracked. Yeah, we're going to put new. We're going to put new money. You go, don't you dare. Yeah. So but to Rolex, well, you want the hands to light up, right? Yeah, yeah. So for me, I go, well, it'd be a lot easier to play if the if the frets were redone. But that's not up for me. That's not up to me to say that you should redo the frets because I think the guitar is meant to it means something to people in its complete one hundred percent. As I stared at it at the met, you know, you're just looking at it. I I don't know. I mean, that's up to the owner, right? You know, that's the owner gets the right to do what they want with it. And I think if you own that guitar and the world knew it and you felt a certain stewardship, it'd be really hard. I mean, you could solder the neck pickup back. That'd be nice. But yeah, I don't think it's right now. I know I'm not sure the guitar is meant to be played by a bunch of people. And that makes it more of an honor. And so here's what happens. I get the guitar and it's quite tricky to play because the frets are just worn down. Right. So you're going to be bad on it. I battled it for half the night. And I think by the end of the night, I got it to move the way I wanted it to move. Yeah. But it was tricky, right? Because I also have this PRS 594 that plays like a mall. All year, it plays like a Ferrari. Right behind you. Yeah, right behind you. So this thing plays like a Ferrari. I'm playing Wolf, which. It it it was a molecular honor. Like down to the molecule, it was an honor. I mean, the day was around this guitar was animated. It was anthropomorphized, you know, and I sort of played. It was it was it was the lead singer and I was the guitar. It kind of we kind of switched roles for one night, you know, I was the operator, but it was the thing. And by the end of it, I had made friends with it. I had figured it out. But that's the thing. I mean, the guitar, I mean, if if you brought it to a guitar, a luthier who didn't know what it was, you go, well, this thing needs a refrat. And the question going forward is how much is someone going to play it and should it have a refrat? Just keep it how it is, I think. Yeah, I mean, but you're asking a guitar player, though. Did you make him an offer? No, no, no. I wouldn't do that. Yeah. I wouldn't do that. But theoretically, I would would I give a year's salary? Yeah. Wow. Wow. When you walked out with it, I was fucking floored because as well. I also don't want to own it. I'll tell you why. Yeah. It's too close for comfort. Yeah, it's too close for comfort. It should be owned by somebody who wants to really think of it as a piece for everybody. And I'm not sure, Dean Delray, that I could own it and continue the stewardship of it as well. This is if you wanted to think I was an asshole again. Yeah. I think I could get you to do that again if it turned out that I owned that guitar. That's too close for comfort. Right. That should be owned by an independent, sovereign collector who can loan it to people every once in a while to play it. It should not be owned by a player for fear that it would become. No one man should have all that power. Yeah. Yeah. If a fear that it would be a sort of brand on someone that they are of next in the bloodline and I don't think that's true. I think I'd have a really hard time relating to the rest of the world if they were like, oh, yeah, he has Wolf. I don't think I want that in my mind. Yeah. But when I played it, yeah. Obviously, the the the reasonable thought at that moment was, well, I mean, how do I how do I get it? How do I get this? But it doesn't take long to think about it. You go, I don't want. I don't think that's a good. I'd look at it this way. If I really needed it, I could probably get my hands on it. And who could say that? I mean, that's beautiful. Yeah. But I believe an independent, sovereign nation should own that guitar and it should never be owned. But no player in the Yankees gets the World Series trophy. Right? No, no organization gets the World Series trophy. It just travels. And what would happen to a baseball team if one of the players on the Yankees owned the World Series trophy? What would that have? What would happen between the relationship between that player and the other players on the Yankees? Oh, man, right? Yeah, this is mine. I don't want the World Series trophy. I want an exact replica that looks like a Heisman trophy. You know what I liked was that I like that you'd never play it again because to me it's a solid, I agree, solid memory. I agree. And especially when you did Morning Do, there was a part on that Morning Do. And I wanted to ask you this, where you're doing the solo out and it's almost you go into it. Do you feel like I do Peter Frampton thing? Do you know? Do you notice that? I'm gone when. Oh, yeah, I get it. I get it. But no, I'm listening. I go, this is amazing. I go, well, it did a little nod to Peter Frampton. No, no, no. That's that's luck. Or or that's so deep embedded in me. Right. I think about singers a lot when I play solos like that. Is that right? I think about Michael Jackson a lot when I play the guitar. Yeah. I love you. Yeah. Yeah. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. You ever see that video of Michael Jackson in Prince? Oh, yeah. New Year's Gig and Prince shows up high as a kite and knocks over the lamppost. Yeah, they're doing a battle. Yeah, it's James Brown. And James Brown says, Michael Jackson's here. Let's Michael Jackson up and Michael Jackson gets up and all of a sudden they go into like this sort of it's a man's world groove, this halftime thing. Yeah. And Michael Jackson, all he says is I love you. And he goes, I love you. And he starts going into now a double time James Brown thing. And it's one of the greatest things I ever heard. I ever heard in my life. Oh, the other the other thing I think about is at the end of always lady in my life. That's on off the wall. At the end, he's like, I love you, girl. I love you, girl. I love you. I love you. He's on the outro. Yeah. I love you. I'm like, that is a great riff on a guitar. I love you. I love you. I love you. I don't like playing guitar parts on the guitar anymore. I like sort of like, what would you sing and then play that sort of. But yeah, man, those records. Oh, if you if you put on Thriller and you pretend that it was your record and you had to say in the mix, what a lesson because you'd change everything about it. Like listen to Thriller and pretend it's your record and you can make mix notes. You would have changed everything about that record. But that's the lesson is that that mix is everything is upfront. Are you a prince guy? Not a completist, but I appreciate it. Wow. I mean, the stuff I love, I love. Yeah. The stuff I love. I think the time is one of the greatest records ever. I know that song. I know that song very well. Again, I'm a playlist baby on that, so I don't know what right from what record. But I love that sound of the times record. That solo is great. But the that B section on that side of the time, that that chords do a thing. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. In France, skinny man died of a big disease. But it's the next thing where this thing is over the court. My city bone and the raucous bone. Oh, and everybody wants to die. And then it comes back down. I love when things fly up in the air. Oh, yeah. Some say a man ain't truly happy. That's it. Until a man truly dies. Oh, why? Do you know who that is? So great. But you know the person who's kicking my ass the most right now is Springsteen. OK, so there it is. That's the end of part one. Thank you so much for tuning in. Check out part two next week and listen to where we go. It's Bruce Springsteen talk. It's some heavy duty, Dumble guitar amp talk, some more life talk, all kinds of great stuff in part two. And I hope you enjoyed part one. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a review on iTunes. You leave that review on iTunes. It helps big time. And don't forget CBDlion.com for all your CBD needs. Use the code DEAN for 20% off everything all the time. CBDlion.com. Keep the candles lit, everybody. See you next week.