Robert Burke Warren (or RBW) is quite possibly, one of the most interesting men I've ever had the pleasure of speaking to on this podcast. Between his exploits playing in RuPaul's (yes, THE RuPaul) band when RBW was just 18 years old to his latest book "Cash on Cash" about the man in black, Johnny Cash he has seen and experienced a lot!
To quote RBW "Music is the highest form of communication" and we utilize this podcast to communicate about an incredible story from an incredible storyteller.
Tune in to find out how RBW answers the questions essential to the essence of the podcast:
1. What does music mean to you?
2. How do you quantify success?
3. And what happens after the music fades?
After the Encore is a long-form, career retrospective podcast that takes you behind the music of some of your favorite artists. After the Encore is also a "2020 Music Podcast of the Year" award nominee over at PodcastAwards.com
'After the Encore' is powered by Roberts Media Group. For more programming and advertisement opportunities, please visit www.robertsmediagroup.co
About Robert Burke Warren
I arrive in the year of Rubber Soul, Highway 61 Revisited, and My Generation: 1965. My Journalism major mom and guitar-playing Marine dad divorce before I turn two. Mom retains custody of my elder brother, Britt, and me. We come of age in Atlanta, in the waning days of the hippie dream and the onset of disco; arts festivals, backwoods, communes, the golden age of Top 40 radio, and a house stocked with books and LPs.
My father dies driving drunk a couple weeks after my seventh birthday. Mom returns to school to study medicine. Maternal grandmother, Gammie, steps in to help raise my brother and me. Her husband, my grandfather, Sam F. Lucchese, is the retired entertainment editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a stringer for Variety. He still taps furiously on a manual typewriter in the basement of their home, the percussive clickety-clack-BING rising from below while we watch All in the Family and the Carol Burnett Show. My writing gene comes from the Lucchese line.
I pen stories and poems and co-edit a newspaper for teens, but in those early days, Dad’s musician genes hold sway, and I focus most of my energy on music. I pick up a bass at fourteen and devote myself to it. Within a couple years, I start a band with my longtime best friend, guitarist Todd Butler. Our singer is superstar-in-exile RuPaul. We call ourselves Wee Wee Pole. We write and perform Prince-inspired material. From Gammie’s kitchen, I book us a tour to Manhattan. I am eighteen.
As an interviewee, Cash was an exemplary communicator to an astonishingly broad spectrum of people: always open and articulate, part friend, part spiritual authority, part flawed hero. Throughout a decades-long career, as Cash took risks, embracing new technologies, formats, and attitudes, he cleaved to a simple, core message of unvarnished truth.
