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Richard Feynman sat down for several hours of interviews in Altadena, California in June 1966. The conversations covered his life, thoughts on physics, and more. We uncovered this oral history at the American Institute of Physics. This interview used with permission of Melanie Jackson Agency, LLC.

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Charles Weiner was a historian of science focusing on the political, social and ethical dimensions of contemporary science and the responses of scientists to public controversies arising from their work.

My father, you see, interested me in patterns at the very beginning, and then later in things, like we would turn over stones and watch the ants carry the little white babies down deeper into the holes. We would look at worms. We’d go for walks and we’d look at things all the time: the stars, the way birds fly. He was always telling me interesting things.

I mean this story’s a rumor, as far as I’m concerned, but the story is that before I was born he told my mother that “If it’s a boy, he’ll be a scientist.”

My father used to sit me on his lap, and the one book we did use all the time was the Encyclopedia Britannica. He used to sit me on his lap when I was a kid and read out of the damned thing. There would be pictures of dinosaurs, and then he would read. You know the long words –- “the dinosaur” so and so “attains a length of so and so many feet.” He would always stop and he would say, “You know what that means? It means, if the dinosaur’s standing on our front yard, and your bedroom window, you know, is on the second floor, you’d see out the window his head standing looking at you. He would translate everything, and I learned to translate everything, so it’s the same disease. When I read something, I always translate it in the best I can into what does it really mean.

See I  can remember my father talking, talking, and talking. When you go into the museum, for example, there are great rocks which have long cuts, grooves in them, from glacier. I remember, the first time going there, when he stopped there and explained to me about the ice moving and grinding. I can hear the voice, practically. Then he would tell me, “How do you think anybody knows that there were glaciers in the past?” He’d point out, “Look at that. These rocks are found in New York. And so there must have been ice in New York.” He understood.

A thing that was very important about my father was not the facts but the process. How we find out. What is the consequence of finding such a rock. But that’s the kind of guy he was. I don’t think he ever successfully went to college. However, he did teach himself a great deal. He read a lot. He liked the rational mind, and liked those things which could be understood by thinking. So it’s not hard to understand I got interested in science.

I got a laboratory in my room. We also played a trick on my mother there. We put sodium ferrocyanide in the towels, and another substance, an iron salt, probably alum, in the soap. When they come together, they make blue ink. So we were supposed to fool my mother, you see. She would wash her hands, and then when she dried them, the towels… her hands would turn blue. But we didn’t think the towel would turn blue.

Anyway, she was horrified. The screams of “My good linen towels!” But she was always cooperative. She never was afraid of the experiments. The bridge partners, would tell her, “How can you let the child have a laboratory? And blow up the house!” — and all this kind of talk. She just said, “It’s worth it.” I mean, “ It’s worth the risk.”

I took later solid geometry and trigonometry. In solid geometry was the first time I ever had any mathematical difficulties. It was my only experience with how it must feel to the ordinary human being. Then I discovered what was wrong. The diagrams that were being drawn on the blackboard were three-dimensional, and I was thinking of them as plane diagrams, and I couldn’t understand what the hell was going on. It was a mistake in the orientation.

When he would draw pictures, and I would see a parallelogram, and he called it a square, because it was tilted out of the plane, you know. And I -– “Oh God, this thing doesn’t make any sense! What is he talking about?” It was a terrifying experience. Butterflies in my stomach kind of feeling. But it was just a dumb mistake. But I suspect that this kind of a dumb mistake is very common, to people learning mathematics. Part of the missing understanding is to mistake what it is you’re supposed to know.

It isn’t the question of learning anything precisely, but of learning that there’s something exciting over there. I think that the same thing happened with my father. My father never really knew anything in detail, but would tell me what’s interesting about the world, and where, if you look, you’ll find still more interests, so that later I’d say, “Well, this is going to be good, I know — this has got something to do with this, which is hot stuff”. This kind of feeling of what was important and that is the key. The key was somehow to know what was important and what was not important, what was exciting, because I can’t learn everything.

The thing that I loved was, everything that I read was serious — wasn’t written for a child. I didn’t like children’s things. Because, for one thing I was very very — and still am — sensitive and very worried about was that the thing to be dead honest; that it isn’t fixed up so it looks easy. Details purposely left out, or slightly erroneous explanations, in order to get away with it. This was intolerable.

I kind of try to imagine what would have happened to me if I’d lived in today’s era. I’m rather horrified. I think there are too many books, that the mind gets boggled. If I got interested, I would have so many things to look at, I would go crazy. It’s too easy.

“One time I was in the recreation hall, late at night, when there weren’t many people, and I picked up a wastebasket and started to beat the back end of it. Some guy from way downstairs came running all the way up and said, “Hey! You play drums!” It turned out he really knew how to play drums, and he taught me how to play bongos.” – from Feynman’s book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Meet the mind in this great explainer video

Of course Feynman was a master at cracking safes. Turns out when he needed a break from working on the atomic bomb during at Los Alamos during WWII, he taught himself how to pick combination locks on cabinets holding top secret nuclear secrets. Watch to find out how he cracked the codes..

Feynman began drawing in his 40s, shortly after developing the visual language for his famous Feynman diagrams, after a series of amicable arguments about art vs. science with his artist-friend Jirayr “Jerry” Zorthian. Brainpickings has more on the backstory. Feynman the artist went by the name “Ofey”

That’s right: Feynman turned a Dodge Tradesman Mexivan into the ultimate psychics project on wheels by painting his famous Feynman diagrams on the sides of his 70s van.

David Gerlach

Paul Ruttledge

Amy Drozdowska

Chris Zabriskie

“Air Hockey Saloon”

“Out of the Skies,

Under the Earth”

“Is That You or Are You You”

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This conversation originally aired in 2002 on Ira’s long running radio show, Science Friday.

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Ira Flatow is the host of  Science Friday® on Public Radio International. The show offers a lively, informative discussion on science, technology, health, space and the environment.

Now I know you do wonderful chimp calls.

Well I’m going to do the greeting. It’s the kind of sound you’d hear if you went to Gombe and you climbed up onto the ridge in the morning and if you’re lucky you hear the chimpanzee who’s calling out saying, “Here I am. It’s a wonderful day. Where are you?”. Woohwoohwoohwhoooahahahah.

Wow. That’s great.

Each one has his or her own individual voice so you know exactly who’s calling.

Caller: I wanted to know if you believed that there were any undiscovered, large ape species.

You’re talking about a yeti or bigfoot or Sasquatch.

Is that what’s he’s talking about?

Yes, yes he is.

I’m out of the loop. Go ahead.

Now you’ll be amazed when I tell you that I’m sure that they exist. I’ve talked to so many Native Americans who have all described the same sounds, two who have seen them. There was a little tiny snippet in the newspaper just last week which says that British scientists have found what they believe to be a yeti hair and that the scientist in the Natural History Museum in London couldn’t identify it as any known animal.

Did you always have this belief that they existed?

Well I’m a romantic so I always wanted them to exist.

Animals were my passion from even before I could speak apparently. Then when I was about 10, 11 I found the books about Tarzan of the Apes. Fell in love with Tarzan. He’s got that wife Jane, so I was terribly jealous of her. That was when my dream started. When I grew up, I would go to Africa, live with animals and write books about them. That’s how it all began.

I got the opportunity when a school friend invited me to go and stay on their farm in Kenya. I was 23 and I sort of said bye-bye to family, friends and country and off I went. That’s when I heard about the late Louis Leakey and somebody said, “Jane if you’re interested in animals, you must meet Louis.” Louis realized that I was the sort of person he said he had been looking for for about ten years who didn’t care about hairdressing and clothes and parties and boyfriends. I really wanted to be in the wild.

It took him a year. He searched for money and eventually found a wealthy American businessman that said, “Okay Louis here you are. Here’s enough money for six months. We’ll see how she does.” The chimpanzees ran away as soon as they saw me. They had not seen a white ape before and I knew if that six months money ran out before I had seen something really exciting everyone would have … I would have let Louis down.

Of course at that time we were defined as man the toolmaker. That was supposed to differentiate us more than anything else in the rest of the animal kingdom.

You discovered that chimps could make tools.

David Greybeard, bless his heart, I saw him crouched over a termite mound. The whole thing putting in the grass, picking the termites up, picking up a leafy twig and stripping off the leaves which is the beginning of tool making. I couldn’t actually believe it. I had to see it about four times before I let Louis Leakey know and then I sent a telegram and he sent back his famous, “Ha ha now we must redefine man, redefine tool or accept chimpanzees as humans.”

After a bit Louis said, “Jane you have to get a degree because otherwise you can’t get your own money and I won’t always be around to get money for you.” But he said, “we don’t have time to mess about with a BA so you’ll have to go straight for a PhD.” He managed to persuade Cambridge in England to accept me as a PhD student. When I got there, it was actually a very unpleasant and hostile reception that I had. I shouldn’t have named the chimps. It wasn’t scientific. I didn’t know. I knew nothing. And worse sin of all was that I was ascribing to them emotions like happiness, sadness and so forth.

They were just aghast at you?

Yeah they were.

Whippersnapper

I was even accused of teaching the chimps how to fish for termites which I mean that would have been such a brilliant coup. [laughter]

Caller: Do you think a primatologists gender influences how they conduct their work?

Well I think in many cases it actually does. Louis Leakey always thought women were better as observers. He felt that they were more patient. Certainly it’s very often true that women tend to be a bit quieter and more prepared to sit there and let the animal tell you things.

Would you rather be remembered for discovering the tool making abilities of the chimps or for your work in the environment today?

I think I’d like to be remembered as someone who really helped people to have a little humility and realize that we are part of the animal kingdom not separated from it. When I do go back to Gombe it’s to be in that timeless world where it’s soft and where life is entwined and you actually see the pattern of nature. I always feel this great spiritual power which I believe is around.

David Gerlach

Avi Ofer

Amy Drozdowska

Chris Zabriskie

“What True Self? Feels Bogus, Let’s Watch Jason X”

via APM

“Spiral Circles” Mark David  Allaway, Jeffrey Steven Lardner

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We discovered two interviews with Buckminster Fuller that Studs Terkel recorded in 1965 and 1970. They’re part of the Studs Terkel Radio Archive.

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Studs Terkel was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who interviewed thousands of everyday Americans and international notables during a 45-year stint at WFMT-FM in Chicago.

One of the most original spirits of our time. Buckminister Fuller sings of man’s potency. Everyone aware of his work agrees that Buckminster Fuller’s one of the original minds of our time.

I was born in the era of the specialist. I set about to be purposely comprehensive, just the opposite. And I made up my mind that you don’t just find out something to entertain yourself, you must find out things in order to be able to turn everything, not just in a philosophical statement, but into actually tools. I must reorganize the environment of man by which then greater numbers of men can prosper. That’s been my main undertaking.

We can turn this tape, there’s no problem. There’s so many questions to ask you, Mr. Fuller.

You can call me Bucky.

Bucky …

I was married in World War 1. Our first child was born and she caught this spinal meningitis and infantile paralysis and it was an awful struggle. This child lived to just before her fourth birthday and she died in November 1922 and so for 5 years I was feeling really horribly sad about this kid. I felt that if the kind of technology that went into making a battleship and an airplane and guns had gone into… I was sure this child had caught these things out of the environment and I was sure that there was something wrong about our environment. In the Navy I had learned how to navigate, I’ve used mathematics very powerfully. I learned how to calculate. I was sure things were just not being done in logical ways.

By 1927 our second child was born and I had suddenly a new child after 5 years of going without the girl we loved so much. I said I got a chance now to look out for this new life and I’m going to have to really re-think everything I have. I had absolutely no money and suddenly this new child and everybody tells you you got to earn a living. I said I think this is absolutely a blinding thing. I’m either going to say you go out to make money or you’re going to make sense.

I recall in Chicago wheeling my little child in her baby carriage in Lincoln Park. I was amazed, because a little biplane went over Lincoln Park. Air planes were not very common in those days. I said, “Isn’t it amazing. Here’s my child looking up at that airplane and that airplane in the sky is as natural to her as a bird.” Because when I was born, the airplane did not exist. It was really the start of the beginning of impossible things happening.

I began to feel for what really needs to be done in a very biggest way. Well I found that I couldn’t improve an airplane very much, I’m not going to improve electronics very much. There were a great many people preoccupied with that, but where man was living, he was really very ignorant. It’s where people live that needs attention and I saw that the way in which we built was very, very ignorant. When you build a boat it’s got to float. So you learn to do a whole lot with little. It’s got to be strong enough not to sink. It’s got to to carry a cargo. The world of building on the land was very different from the sea and the sky. I said, “why was it different?” Because man used to build fortresses and the heavier and higher and thicker the walls the more secure it felt.

Some people think of a house as a fortress rather than a place to live. 

Yes. So I’m going to see what happens If I will take the kind of technology that’s going with the sea and the sky and apply it over to the land.

So many things to ask you, Bucky, that you have foreseen. Thinking of your geodesic dome, do you see actually roofed cities ever?

We’re continually doing more with less, and my geodesic domes do a very great deal with very little but I think they’re only symptomatic, Studs, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we find ways to control that environment over the city without even seeing the roof there, there would be an electrical field control so forth. We could make the water go and dump over here, and pipe it there, and so forth, whatever it may be.

It seems that Buckminster Fuller speaks outrageously and, yet, you’ve come up with so many outrageous explanations that turn out to be right, and accurate, and true, and practical …

Time and again, I am asked, “who else do you know who thinks the way you do, or does what you do?” I find it very strange to have to answer, “I don’t know anybody else.” It’s not because I think of myself as unique, but simply because I did choose a very different grand strategy, and not because I think that I have capabilities that other human beings don’t have.

My daughter, who I was wheeling the baby carriage, who had an airplane as normal in her sky, now has her daughter and that daughter was born in New York. They were right in the flight path for flights out of LaGuardia and Idlewild. This little child then, in her crib, would hear this roar of those airplanes, and she saw many thousands of airplanes before she ever saw a bird. I saw the children’s books that were sent to her, which were the traditional, what a children’s book would be. They’re the same children’s books that were sent to me when I was a child. They were farm yard. There was a barn and all the nice natural things. The child would see the horse, and the pig, and the cow, and the goat, sheep, rooster. My granddaughter, in New York City, looked out the window and saw the airplanes, and she saw the automobiles going by by the minute, but when they gave her this farm book, she didn’t had never seen a sheep or a cow. It was as if you gave her these imaginary pictures of dragons and things. She was very accommodating. She laughed about it, it was very amusing. They weren’t natural to her.

May 13, 1970

January 20, 1965

In April 1960, Bucky assembled the dome home in Carbondale [Illinois] and lived in it with his wife Anne until 1971. At the time Bucky was a professor in the Design Department at nearby Southern Illinois University. In the years that followed, Bucky’s home fell into disrepair.

But now it’s been preserved. Learn more about the effort to save Bucky’s home.

Go inside with Bucky and his wife.

David Gerlach

Patrick Smith

Jennifer Yoo

Amy Drozdowska

Johnny Ripper

“Opening Credits”

Oskar Schuster

“Sneeuwland”

Thad Heckman

The National Park Service

PBF Board NFP

The Henry Ford

Ian Mcwilliams

Tomm Pouce

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Lou Reed was interviewed by phone on March 20, 1987. At the time, Joe Smith was writing Off the Record–his oral history of rock and roll.

From 1986-88, Joe Smith interviewed more than 240 music artists and executives. Then in 2012, he donated a trove of 238 hours of interviews on cassette tapes to the Library of Congress. Listen to the full interview catalog.

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You know like sometimes, you’ve got to be in a place. You’re just another guy. You can just blend in. I live out in the wilds of nowhere, out in Jersey. Even there, there’s sometimes problems. College students like journey out there and show up at 11 o’clock at night, on my porch, looking into the door not saying anything. My wife and I are sitting there; it’s really creepy.

Are you …?

I’ve gone out with my shotgun. This is hunting country out there. You better run.

Do you ever regret that you were never totally in the mainstream, that you were out there left wing most of the time in your career?

No, I started out with that in mind. People didn’t know certain things about me, which… I was out of creative writing class in school, Syracuse University; had a B.A. in English and wanted to write the great American novel but I also loved rock and roll. I was in bar bands all through college, playing fraternities and have to know all the songs in the top 10. That kind of thing.

What are your recollections of that Velvet Underground time? You guys were avant garde, cutting edge, new stuff. When this record came out; all of a sudden, there’s this kind of recognition?

Well there wasn’t any recognition. What there was, was a lot of bad press. I got a little puzzled at how savage the reaction against us was, when we got it, especially when we performed live and left New York. Like you know, “how savage and decadent”, da da da da; “look at what these songs are about; ‘Venus in Furs’ is about all of this.”  They didn’t even know “Venus in Furs” was a book; I didn’t write it. I just said it would be interesting to take this book and put it in a song. I just wanted to cram everything into a record that these people had ignored, which left you everything.

The other thing that killed me was stuff like this had been in novels so long, it was like nothing. I write a song called “Heroin”, you would have thought that I murdered the Pope or something. It should have been, “now we can get a lot of people who have talent for writing and everything into rock and roll.  We’ll all write about really adult stuff.”  That was what I wanted to do, is write rock and roll that you could listen to as you got older, and it wouldn’t lose anything; it would be timeless, in the subject matter and the literacy of the lyrics.

We didn’t expect to sell records. That’s not what we were doing. It would have been great. It would have taken a lot of financial pressure off us. It’s not like we had money. What we had was ambition and a goal. That’s the thing you can do when you’re really young.

What was the ambition and the goal?

Oh. To elevate the rock and roll song, and take it where it hadn’t been taken before. I’m saying like from my point of view and I know this sounds pretentious but I just thought the other stuff couldn’t even come up to our ankles; not up to my kneecap, not up to my ankles, the level that we were on, compared to everybody else. They were just painfully stupid and pretentious. When they did try to get in quotes: “arty”, it  was worse than stupid rock and roll. What I mean by stupid, I mean like The Doors.

You never felt Lennon and the Beatles… did you feel that they were in a league at all?

No, I never liked the Beatles. I thought they were garbage. If you said, “who did you like?” I liked nobody.

In the old days, the Velvet Underground, we had engineers who would walk out on us. They would say, “It’s too Lou Reed, this is terrible. You know I’m going to turn the tape machine on, you guys call me when you’re finished.” I’ve spent a lot of years since then, trying to figure out a way to be able to do what I did then, without going deaf. I actually went and had my ears tested just to make sure. The guy who was testing me was a fan, which was nice, so he took the test a little further just to assuage any doubts I might have. He said, “no, you have the average high end loss for a New Yorker.”

God, it’s true.

Right; for a New Yorker. It was very funny.

I had a lot of problems in the studio because of my background with engineers, see. A lot of my records sound like they were recorded completely dry and no one did anything, and that in fact was what it was because they would go to touch a button and I’d go, “what are you doing, man?” I have faith in my own vision, and didn’t want them to tamper with it. I thought my thing coming out badly recorded this way, is better than if these people take my voice and try to make me sound like a 14-year-old. They thin it out. I would tell them it’s like you tell a photographer, “don’t retouch this too much.” These lines, they mean something, I’m an adult, man. Don’t thin my voice out and make it like that high shit. This is the way I sound.  You’ve got to get people to understand that because they take the nuance and character out that makes the lyric believable. It’s an important thing.

Lou died on October 27, 2o13. He was 71.

Generally resistant to authority and prone to mood swings, Mr. Reed troubled his parents enough that they assented to a doctor’s recommendation for weeks of electroshock therapy at Creedmoor State Psychiatric Hospital in Queens; in 1959, while beginning his music studies at New York University, he underwent further treatment. – New York Times obit

So, Lou could be salty. And, as you heard in this interview, he wasn’t afraid to comment on just about anything. Here are his thoughts on some other notables–unlike the Beatles–that he respected:

Kanye West

“The guy has a real wide palette to play with. That’s all over Yeezus.  There are moments of supreme beauty and greatness on this record, and then some of it is the same old shit.  But the guy really, really, really is talented.”

Jimi Hendrix

“His music to me was entertaining, as was his stage act. But the thing was, he was such a bitchin’ guitar player that, that was enough.”

David Bowie

“Satellite – that’s David. David is amazing at background vocal parts. The high note at the end, very few people could do that. I just love when he did that. I mean, what a move!”

Andy Warhol

“I was next to the greatest artist of the 20th century. Not that I knew that at the time. But you’d have to be profoundly stupid to look at Andy and not say, ‘Wow. Look at that.’ … He was an astonishing person in every way.”

William Burroughs

“When I read Burroughs, it changed my vision of what you could write about, how you could write.”

The Village Voice didn’t take too kindly to this seminal record:

“The Velvet Underground is not an easy group to like. Some of the cuts on their album are blatant copies: I refer specifically to the progression lifted from the Rolling Stones “Hitchhike” in “There She Goes Again.” The lead vocal on other songs sound distressingly like early Dylan. Some of the material is dull and repetitive. And the last two cuts, “Black Angel’s Death Song” and “European Son” are pretentious to the point of misery.

But the Velvets are an important group, and this album has some major work behind that erect banana on the cover. “I’m Waiting for the Man” is an impressively understated vignette about scoring in Harlem. “Venus in Furs” is fine electronic mood-manifesting. “Femme Fatale” is an unearthly ballad subtly fuzzed-up to drive you mad fiddling with bass and treble switches. Nico’s voice is harrowing in its pallor, but chic, very chic.

Most important is the recorded version of “Heroin,” which is more compressed, more restrained than live performances I have seen. But it’s also a more realized work. The tempo fluctuates wildly and finally breaks into a series of utterly terrifying squeals, like the death rattle of a suffocating violin. “Heroin” is seven minutes of genuine 12-tone rock ‘n’ roll.” – Richard Goldstein, The Village Voice

Reed was almost as famous for his temperamental relationship with the press as he was for his music. Watch three quintessential examples:

Lou erupts in 1974 sporting bleach blond hair 

Lou talks about his mutating clones

Lou goes off on the interviewer

Lou Reed kicks off our episode talking about shotguns and scaring off fans. In 1982, he released “The Gun.”

Carrying a gun

carrying a gun

The animal dies with fear in his eyes

with a gun

Don’t touch him,

don’t touch him

stay away from him, he’s got a gun

David Gerlach

Patrick Smith

Amy Drozdowska

The Velvet Underground

“Venus in Furs”

“Heroin”

“Rock and Roll”

Lou Reed

“Perfect Day”

P. Tufts

Phil King

Syracuse University Archives

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Joe sat down with B.B. King in September 1986. He was writing Off the Record–his oral history of rock and roll. Smith interviewed more than 240 music artists and executives from 1986-88. Then in 2012, he donated more than 230 hours of interviews on cassette tapes to the Library of Congress. Listen to the full interview catalog.

I look at an audience kind of like meeting my in-laws for the first time. You want to be yourself, but you still want to be somebody that they like. When I go on the stage each night, I try my best to outguess my audience, I like to feel in most cases, like I’m a big guy with long rubber arms that I can reach around my audience and Swing and sway with them. Move them with me. Many nights I can’t. Many nights I can’t, but you do like a good manager do with a baseball team. You keep pulling pitchers …

Keep trying.

Yeah, keep trying. [laughter]

How did that guitar gets its name?

I used to play a place in Twist, Arkansas. Still there, Twist, Arkansas. They used to have a little nightclub there that we played quite often. It used to get quite cold in Twist. They used to take something looked like a big garbage pail and set it in the middle of the floor, half fill it with kerosene, and would light that fuel and that’s what we used for heat. Generally, the people would dance around it and they wouldn’t disturb this container. This particular night, two guys started to fighting and one of ’em knocked the other one over on this container.

When they did, it spilled on the floor. Now it was already burning, so when it spilled, it looked like a river of fire. Everybody ran for the front door including yours truly. But when I got on the outside, then I realized that I’d left my guitar inside. I went back for it. The building was a wooden building and it was burning so fast when I got my guitar, it started to collapse around me. So I almost lost my life trying to save the guitar. Well the next morning we found that these two guys was fighting about a lady. I never did meet the lady, I never did meet the lady, but I learned that her name was Lucille so I named my guitar Lucille to remind me not to do a thing like that again. [laughs]

The early years when I was starting, blues player, you wasn’t always welcome in a lot of the other places. People usually have preconceived ideas about blues music. They always feel that it’s depressing and that it’s just something that a guy sit out on a stool, grab a guitar, and just start singing or mumbling or whatever.

You came out of relatively hard times, a lot of blues players did. Is it necessary to have hard times to reflect that music? To…

No, it’s not. It helps though. [laughs]

Hard times don’t necessarily mean being poor all the time. I’ve known people that was a part of a family and always feel that the family likes everybody else but them. That hurts and that’s as deep a hurt as you can possibly get. I’ve known people that would have problems with their love life. This is kind of how blues began, out of feeling misused, mistreated, feeling like they had nobody to turn to. Blues don’t necessarily have to be sung by a person that came from Mississippi as I did because there are people having problems all over the world.

I don’t like to feel that I owe anything. I like to feel that I pay my own way, no free lunch. When people give me all these great compliments, I thank them, but still go back to my room and practice. A lot of times I say to myself, “I wished I could be worthy of all the compliments that people give me sometimes.” I’m not inventing anything that’s going to stop cancer or muscular dystrophy or anything, but I like to feel that my time and talent is always there for the people that need it. When someone do say something negative, most times I think about it, but it don’t bother me that much.

You know who you are.

I like to think that I do.

Some of my friends would tell me from time to time, Eric Clapton said this, or Jimi Hendrix said this. I spoke with John Lennon once after I had seen in, I believe it was Life Magazine, where people were asking questions, “say, what is it you would like to do?” One of his things was to play guitar like B.B. King. That’s when I started to find that a lot of the young musicians had been listening to me. I didn’t know and, for the life of me, sometimes still wonder why.I’ve had my feelings of doubt, I think, in music, but to think that there are people, that learned to play by listening to my music, those dark days wasn’t dark after all.

David Gerlach

Patrick Smith

Amy Drozdowska

B.B. King

“Lucille”

“Ghetto Woman”

“Catfish Blues (Fishing After Me)”

Heinrich Klaffs

Tom Beetz

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Barney sat down with Elliott Smith in New York City in 1998. This was shortly after Smith’s memorable performance at the Oscars. Hear the full 43-minute interview on RocksBackpages.com.

Barney Hoskyns is an author and is the editorial director of Rock’s Backpages, the online library of pop writing.

Oh, definitely. Yeah, there’s a bunch of Elvis Costello records that like… when I was in high school, just made all the difference between feeling like a total freak and feeling like … only a freak. A freak among other freaks.

Tell me how your very distinctive, soft vocal style kind of emerged.

I didn’t like how I sounded singing in my band, but it was hard to sing like how I wanted to because playing live I had to just be at the top of my lungs all the time, and it made me sound like I had a really bad cold or something. It sounds really hoarse and macho and weird. [laughs] I mean I’ve been doing four-track songs by myself since I was like a teenager, where I’d sing in a way that I … I just didn’t think other people would like it, so I didn’t play it for them but eventually I got over that, which I’m happy that I did, because it’s kind of a drag to be playing a kind of music that you don’t really like as much as another kind.

Obviously some people have given you some sort of folk music tag and it just seems to be to be pretty off the mark.

That really bothered me right at first, when I first started playing, people would be like, “Paul Simon.” I’d be like, “I don’t feel like I’m anything like Paul Simon.”

How much of your writing about, let’s not call them addicts, let’s call them dependents, how much of that is based on subjective experience and how much is just based on being an observer?

I’m definitely in them, but on the other hand it’s not like a diary or anything. But, yeah, it’s good to call them dependents, because that was the point, as opposed to them being songs strictly about drugs or… There’s lots of ways people can be dependent, on another person, or drugs, or… I think everybody has that… Those two irreconcilable …

Impulses.

Constant… Doing battle with themselves that way, every day, all the time and sometimes it sucks, but other times it results in people making sort of a dream comprehensible to someone else. People are so… seem so chaotic internally, but being filtered through some form, like making a record, sort of filters it down into something that can be understood. It’s hard to represent chaos, or like an absence of something. It’s much easier to represent the presence of something or a situation. People can be chaos but it’s hard to fit it into some creative piece that you made. It’s hard.

Listening to Either/Or, I was kind of struck by how well it does manage to juggle sweetness and pain. Is it too easy to say these songs are kind of melancholy, there’s a lot of sorrowful quality to Elliott Smith’s music?

Yeah, they don’t make me sad or feel sorrowful to me, but on the other hand I’m not… a lot of people are kind of depressed. I’m happy some of the time, and some of the time I’m not. But like when I see a movie, for example, that I really like, that moves me or whatever, it’s usually happy and sad at the same time. Certain songs just feel a way that’s hard to put into words and it’s not happy and it’s also not really sad but I couldn’t say what it is.

You lived in these very different parts of America. Dallas, Portland, Brooklyn, is a kind of interesting triangle, there.

Actually, I’ve been thinking about moving somewhere, out of the US, maybe, just to get out of here.

Whereabouts are you thinking of going?

I don’t know, I have no idea. Somewhere where people aren’t so mad would be nice, but I don’t know if there is anywhere like that. Who knows?

Jennifer Chiba [Smith’s girlfriend{ said she heard a scream on October 21, 2003. She went into the living room of the apartment and found Smith with a kitchen knife sticking out of his chest. Despite emergency surgery, Smith was pronounced dead 20 minutes after arriving at hospital.

Rumors swirled after Smith’s death that he hadn’t committed suicide–despite reports Chiba found a Post-It note from Smith that read, “I’m so sorry, love, Elliott. God forgive me”.

The coroner’s report helped fuel the fire:

While his history of depression is compatible with suicide… and the location and direction of the stab wounds are consistent with self-infliction, several aspects of the circumstances (as they are known at this time) are atypical of suicide and raise the possibility of homicide. More

The cover for “Figure 8,” the final album Smith released before his death, was shot outside Solutions Studios in Los Angeles.

After Smith died, fans turned the wall into a makeshift memorial/tribute to him, covering it with messages and graffiti, and leaving candles, notes, and other ephemera in remembrance. The wall has been at the center of controversy several times over disagreements in the community over how it should be maintained.

Director Paul Thomas Anderson directed this pilot for the ‘Jon Brion Show’ for VH1 back in the late 90’s. The show never actually aired, but we do have this footage of Elliott Smith covering John Lennon and Big Star, plus some of his own songs.

The Kinks – “Waterloo Sunset” 

The Beatles –  “Waterloo Sunset”

Bob Dylan –  “Little Maggie” 

Neil Young – “Harvest Moon”

Hank Williams – “Lost Highway”

From a Basement on the Hill was a 15-song collection released after Smith’s death. He was working on the album at the time of his death, and it was completed posthumously with oversight from his estate.

Listen to him play “King’s Crossing” live.

David Gerlach

Patrick Smith

Amy Drozdowska

Elliott Smith

“2:45 A.M.”

“Between the Bars”

“Either/Or”

Heaven Adores You

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The extended interview with Tom Robbins was originally recorded on camera in 1994 for a film that has yet to be made made.  The film is about a has-been novelist and his would-be muse. The plan is to include interviews with actual novelists–John Irving, Tom Robbins, etc.–talking about their work.

I think when I’m 80 years old, 85, hopefully, I’ll be pushed around in a wheelchair by a red-headed nurse with panty outline. She’ll make me little tequila sunrises and I’ll read my complete works then. Then, I’ll decide whether I think I’ve done something good or not. I’ll reserve my judgment until then.

Tell me how you write because I know Remingtons have played a focal point in some of your past books.

I owned an electric Remington, briefly, but we had a turbulent relationship. It made so much noise, it hummed all the time, it was like it was looking over your shoulder, egging you on, wanting you to work at a far faster pace than I am capable of working. Plus, it was ugly, some strange off-blue kind of teal color. Eventually, I just took a 2-by-4 and destroyed it. I work now with pen and paper. That’s my favorite way to write. I love the way the ink sinks into the wood, soaks into the wood pulp. There’s something about that process that’s so organic. I’d like to go back to the raven quill, actually, dipped in lizard blood or something. Write on orange butcher paper.

I started writing when I was 5 years old. I would dictate stories to my mother, and she would copy them in a scrapbook. If she changed anything to make it, in her opinion, better, I would throw a tantrum. I can’t remember exactly the first thing I wrote, but one of the stories, was about a pilot whose plane crashed on a desert island, and the only other life on the island was a brown cow with yellow spots. The cow had… to survive, had taught itself to eat and get nutriments from sand. I guess, I’ve always been interested in adaptability and taking whatever life hands you and running with it.

First I think I was interested in the stories, and later on, I became more interested in the language itself, so the stories became almost secondary, but it was kind of a background music for my life. I had a stick, and I used to go out in the backyard and fantasize, often aloud, and I would tell these stories. I would beat the ground with the stick. And then even today when I get excited about an idea when I’m writing, I often will pace the room, and I’ll slap my legs. I’ve always been too ashamed to talk about this bizarre behavior, but I was telling my paramour about it and she said, “Well, you were drumming,” and that hadn’t occurred to me before. That’s exactly what I was doing, was drumming out the story, setting up a rhythm behind the story.

There’s not a word in one of my books that hasn’t been gone over 25, 30, 35, 40 times. I read every sentence over and over again and rework it, not particularly looking for a more shining truth, but looking for the right rhythm. It’s like compulsive hand washing or something. Words on a page can hypnotize you if the rhythm is right.

I never outline. I don’t work from an outline. I have no idea where the book is going. I mean, even two-thirds of the way through, I don’t know how it’s going to end. If I knew how it was going to end, I probably wouldn’t write it. I finish the book so I can see how it’s going to end. I write that first sentence, and if it’s the right first sentence, it leads to the right second sentence and three years later you have a 500-page manuscript, but it really is like going on a trip, going on a journey. It’s a voyage.

When I finished my second book, I looked in the mirror, and I was all pale and wan and emaciated and bags under my eyes, and I said, “What you need, Tom, is a trip up the Amazon.” Three days later, I got an offer to take a trip up a river in Africa. It wasn’t the Amazon, but it was close. Ever since, whenever I finish a book, I go off and have some kind of adventure. Having had an adventure in my writing chair or on my writing sofa, an internal adventure, then I need to balance that off with an external adventure, so I’ll go tramping through Africa or whitewater rafting or float to Hawaii in a martini shaker or something.

David Gerlach

Patrick Smith

Amy Drozdowska

Music

Rafael Iriarte And Rosendo Pesoa”Libertad”

Cooper-moore “(H) Banjo Arba Minch Garden”

Fly Lazarus Fly “Street Lights”

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We put together this Blank on Blank using excerpts from two interviews Larry recorded on microcassette with Robin Williams in 1992. Read his related story that ran in Playboy.

Larry has a great collection of 50 celebrity profiles called Signing In available on Amazon.

Read More

Lawrence Grobel is a freelance writer who has written 22 books and for numerous national magazines and newspapers.

In the year 2020, you’ll be seventy years old.

Oh, my god.

Now what will the world be like, then?

It’ll be one giant film corporation. There’ll be no longer any government. It will be one nation, under God, indivisible, with circuits and VCRs for everyone. I don’t know. 2020. There’ll be cold fusion. We’ll actually be able to power our cars with our own feces. That’s right. The emissions problem will be a little intense, but just light a match.

Things that I see in the future. I see… it could be quite incredible if we can master a few problems, like the air and the water thing might be nice. I see governments dissolving these barriers are all falling down for economic reasons. They’re all so interbound. That’s why when one market crashes it’s almost like a world stock market. And this a very long economic explanation… something I haven’t got a fucking clue about.

Do you think that there’s a role of the artist in society?

Yeah. For a comic especially, to constantly never let it take itself seriously, to play with, to fuck with the parameters. The premise that comedy is there to basically show us we fart, we laugh. to make us realize we still are part animal. As intellectual as we think we are, you still trip, we still have human foibles, sexuality, all the different things to still make you aware of your humanity. That’s what we’re supposed to do. It’s just to keep us awake, cut through the shit, peel off the mask and go, “Oh, you got a big nose.” Or put on the big nose and make you realize, “Wait a minute, I don’t have a big nose.”  All that stuff. So you don’t take yourself seriously and destroy the species.

Do you ever worry about running out of material or ideas?

No, there’s a world out there. Open a window, and it’s there.

Sex…  if you view sex and just go, “you look pretty ridiculous.” Even the face. The face you make when you have an orgasm, is pretty much. No one looks… Probably even Warren Beatty, gets that kind of [shouts]. Everyone looks pretty fucking stupid, at the moment they fire the spoo. You get like the wind tunnel face. Baby, baby, baby, baby. Oh, baby, baby, baby, baby. Baby, baby, baby. Everything kind of goes [noise].

It’s nature going, “You look like an animal.” It’s that one thing you got to know. You look a little silly. I don’t care what type of lighting you use, whatever strap on attachments, you still, sometimes look like a poodle and someone’s going to get a fire hose. These are the things you wonder.

Let me ask you about birth as a topic. But you did do the birth of all 3 of your children?

I just remember it was like a magic act. All of a sudden they put this little tent and next thing I heard this [sound] and then … They don’t scream the first few seconds, they just kind of go, “Eh! Wait! It’s cold! It’s very cold!” Then they wash them off and they suture them and they put those little yarmulke on. The little teamster cap. The little longshoreman cap. “Yo, Dad! Yo! Excuse me! You want me to unload this ship?” Then they handed her to me.

I don’t think I asked you any about your faults, if you have any and what they are.

In comedy, not pursuing things, committing to an idea and taking it to its fullest extent because it started when I first started performing, it was all jumping around. Explore an idea until you’ve exhausted it, really go to all the different parameters of it. I think another one is not working so much. This is very interesting, “Look at what’s bad about you.”

What’s bad, yeah.

Look in the mirror, and go, “Nostril hair. The fact that I braid them.”  Sometimes, keeping track of people. It’s always a weird combination of worrying so much about the outside world, and not… you have to be more aware of the inner circle, the folks that matter. Because it comes from performing, you always want to make sure that everyone in the audience is all taken care of. That constant desire to please all the time. That can get you in some shit.

Do you have or ever make any New Year’s resolutions?

I haven’t in a while, I haven’t made any in, I think, since I was about a kid. I used to give up a lot of things for Lent, too, and then I still got hairy.

Here’s the best birth control in the whole world, if you really, if you have no pills, if you have no diaphragm, if you have no other form of contraception. Use it for ladies, if he comes at you with that little thing in his hand, just go [laughs]. Just laugh at it. They can’t deal with it, OK, it’ll be gone. The little thing will be out of there. Then it’s assault with the macaroni. Put it away.

In the wake of the death of Robin Williams on August 11, 2014, here’s what Lawrence Grobel remembered about interviewing the comedy legend:

Robin Williams made me laugh. He had a quick mind. Unlike most comedians I have interviewed, Williams was “on” more often than he was “off.”  Most comedians suffer from depression. I don’t exactly know why.  Rodney Dangerfield suffered from it until he turned 75 and found the right antidepressant that lessened his pain. You would never mistake Steve Martin for that “wild and crazy guy” he created; hanging with Steve can be like reading a book alone. Jim Carrey was pretty serious when we talked. Ray Romano even more so. Lucille Ball never cracked a smile. Bette Midler, too. Lily Tomlin took what she had to say very seriously. But Robin Williams?  He could twist serious into funny in an instant. He could make you laugh at the most offbeat things. The brains he would have liked to pick were Einstein’s and Stephen Hawking’s. If he could have chosen another profession, it would have been “quantum mechanics.”  His favorite movie was Dr. Strangelove, though the film he watched over and over again was Les Enfants de Paradise.  If he could commit one crime without being caught, it would have been “The destruction of all the nuclear secrets.”

When I asked him what made him cry?  He said, “Just the insane violence all over the world, that makes me cry. And it’s unrelenting. I was performing in a club in New York and afterwards there was a guy sitting down with an Iranian, a Palestinian and an Israeli, and they all acknowledged that they want peace but they don’t know how to get to it. How do you create a Palestinian homeland when there’s a large amount of Palestinians who want to obliterate Israel? How do you stop this insane cycle that just keeps going on and on?”  When I asked him how he dealt with such matters as a comedian, he said, “You try and find a way to address it. Some people are better at it than I am. I haven’t hit that one yet. I’m trying to find interesting things to talk about with it.”

When I asked him what he would like to invent, he came up with, “Cold fusion. That would be the big one.”  This was the same guy who danced around the stage doing an entire hilarious routine with a silk scarf; who brought one to tears with his sidesplitting take on the history of golf.   “Most animals have a defense mechanism,” he said to me. Making people laugh is mine. That’s my offense and defense.”

I interviewed Robin Williams forPlayboy in 1992, for Rolling Stone in 2002, and for Autograph in 2009. The last time we spoke, I asked him what he would like to be known for?  He answered, “The benevolent fool.”

And when I asked him his worst fear, he answered, “Losing your mind, your memory, your ability to think.”

I don’t know if Robin committed suicide or not, I only know that he was found dead early Monday morning, August 11, and that he had been depressed.  Of all the people I’ve interviewed or spent time with, I can’t think of anyone less likely to take his own life than Robin Williams. He had the fastest mind, the most spontaneous way of thinking, and he was a genuinely nice guy. Perhaps, like Hemingway, he was losing his ability to think.  That would surely have led to depression. But it’s just so hard to imagine he’s gone. He was such a bright light in such a darkening world.

Had he been a circus performer, he said he’d be “the last clown out of that little car.”

That’s how I see him right now, the news of his death still so raw.  As the last clown following a long line of comedians squeezing out of a very small car.

David Gerlach

Patrick Smith

Amy Drozdowska

Josh Woodward

“The Bottom – Instrumental”

Paramount Televison/ABC

Twentieth Century Fox

Miramax Pictures

Sesame Street

U.S. Navy

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Jennifer interviewed Wayne Coyne in 2002 for the CBC. “When I picked up the phone to interview Wayne Coyne, the last thing I expected was a conversation about death, ” she said.

Read More

Jennifer Van Evra is an award-winning journalist who has been writing about music for over 15 years.

You know we’ve always said as long as we can make more money being in the band than we could, say, working at McDonald’s or Target, then we’ll choose being in the band.

Right.

Only because that’s what would be left for us if we weren’t doing this. That’s the kind of skill level of any contribution to society that we would have. Simply because we’ve spent our whole adult lives pursuing this.

I worked at this fast food restaurant in Oklahoma City, Long John Silver’s. Fried fish and french fries and stuff. I worked there for 11 years from the time I was 16 to the time I was 27 or so. I’d be working late at night and it was a reasonably bad area of town and we got robbed a couple of times. Especially in the late 1970’s because the economy and everything really got horrible.

The first time we got robbed I was the only… I’m not saying this because I’m racist or anything, I’m just being pragmatic about it. I was the only white guy. I was working with a bunch of black women. The guys who came in were black and they were pissed off and they had biggest gun I’ve ever seen in my life. Only because it’s pointed at me did it seem so big.

We all laid on the ground. I thought, “fuck, this is… this is it. Here I am, I’m 17 and this is how it ends. You’re just working one second and the next second you’re laying on the ground and some guy puts a bullet in your head.” Obviously they robbed us and left and didn’t kill me. But I remember the elation of just… We all cried. We couldn’t stop crying and laughing and jumping up and down. We were celebrating like we had just won a million dollars. The idea of we are alive and isn’t it a fucking great thing? I think it changed me.

I think the idea of sort of confronting this always present idea that people around you are going to die or you’re going to die or… I think it makes living better, it really does. To me, I hate this notion that I would ever forget of how temporary this whole thing is. You know life is worth celebrating and worth living even though we’re all headed to the same hole at the end of the day. Without sort of coming to terms with it you’re not coming to terms with some of the joys of life at the same time.

I don’t know. I think somewhere along the way music allows you to sing and talk and think about those things, and it can be beautiful instead of being horrible. I remember when my father was dying, I remember listening to Bjork, and listening to John Coltrane, and these things, and I don’t know why but music has the power to transcend your physical being and take you up just a little bit. Because music has a metaphysical quality it gets up there in these things and it really makes your life beautiful.

It’s the same thing for virtually every human that’s ever going to be alive. Things that make them sad are going to be love, loss of love, death, fear of isolation. It’s a really small little corner. So I think any time you sing about those you’re probably going to have a crowd that knows exactly what you’re talking about. But when you’re sing about things that make you happy, which I like to do that as well, you know, you never know if you’re going to hit the mark. That’s why when I sing a song like

She Don’t Use Jelly, people go, oh that’s crazy, what are you talking about, you know? Even though they enjoy it, they don’t understand it. Stuff like when I sing about the Spoonful Weighs a Ton and people understand this is about death and meaning in your life. They go, “oh, I know what you’re talking about.”

So when I go in there and I’m singing about things that seem to be personal, they can be my own exact personal experience, yet if I’m doing the job right I can make it seem like it’s your story at the same time. I’m not just simply pouring my guts out. I’m pouring my guts out so they can feel like your guts at the same time.

Well I should let you go.

All right, well thanks a bunch. I’m sitting in the lobby where the elevators come out. People have all been looking at me in my bare feet, talking existential bullshit with you as they get in and out of the elevators.

Hilarious, that was the odd ding I was hearing in the background.

Yeah.

Well thanks again and I really appreciate you taking out the time on a Saturday.

Well I’m glad you called. Okay.

Okay, cheers.

Alright, bye.

Bye.

When we were putting together the storyboard for this episode, Patrick Smith (the animator/director extraordinare), had an idea: what if we used some of Wayne Coyne’s comicbook as backgrounds for the episode?

A few emails later and Wayne graciously gave us the thumbs up. Here are some of his illustrations. See more here.

“A lot of times I’ll doodle on something while I’m doing interviews, because sometimes I’m on the phone for three or four hours and I want to get something going. I’ll just start from a scribble, or something that someone else already put on the page. Sometimes I think those are the most original. It gets away from the central reoccurring theme that I don’t seem to be aware of. But maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe there’s some unquenchable question that I keep asking the universe that I can’t get an answer to.” – Wayne Coyne

By Jennifer Van Evra

When I picked up the phone to interview Wayne Coyne, the last thing I expected was a conversation about death.

The Flaming Lips had developed a cult following for their single “She Don’t Use Jelly”, and for their critically acclaimed album The Soft Bulletin — which did tackle life’s unavoidable dead end, and far more gracefully than most.

But at the time, the Oklahoma natives had just released their gleeful album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots — a brilliantly quirky sci-fi soundtrack for a movie that didn’t exist — and had become known for their rapturously happy live shows, which featured dancing animals, Coyne crowd surfing in a giant plastic ball, and a seemingly endless supply of confetti and sparkles.

This was not a guy who seemed trapped in a snare of existential angst.

Still, underneath all of that glow, there were still hints of darkness — reminders that you had better enjoy the big lights because one day that switch would be flicked off. Even their life-affirming, darkness-be-damned hit “Do You Realize,” which has since gone on to become one of their biggest hits, reminds us that everyone we know someday will die.

At the time, I had already had my share of close scrapes. Nothing grand or romantic — just bee stings, peanuts and shellfish, combined with an immune system that can’t tell good from bad, had landed me on a host of hospital gurneys in anaphylactic shock, looking up at doctors who looked worriedly back. I had also become intimately familiar with how surviving a brush with death can turn life Technicolor, at least for a time.

So when Coyne started talking about how, coming out of The Soft Bulletin — inspired in large part by the death of his father and the downward spiral of a heroin-addicted bandmate — the group wanted to create an album that leapt back into the sunshine, I could relate.

“We purposefully veered into a more colourful, cartoony, philosophical, still death-oriented but I think a very colourful, sunshiny kind of death type songwriting,” said Coyne with a laugh. “That’s the best I can describe it.”

I asked him what he thought drew him to those themes. He said he was older, 41 at the time – which did actually seem old – and that being aware of death makes living better, because it reminds us that life is worth celebrating, even though we’re all headed to the same hole at the end of the day. Music allows us to sing and talk about those things, he said, and it can be beautiful.

“Still, there are still so many people who can’t talk about it,” I offered. “They can’t,” he answered. “They do that thing where they plug up their ears and go ‘La la la la. I don’t want to hear it.’ And I think they’re missing out on the value it gives to being alive. Without coming to terms with it, you’re not coming to term with some of the joys of life at the same time.”

Now, when you interview a musician, or just about anyone, the last thing you want to do is talk about yourself. It’s not why you’re there, time is limited, and usually the stories they have are far better than yours. But in that moment it made sense to tell Coyne about the time I was sailing off the British Columbia coast on a picture-perfect summer day, and a wasp came out of nowhere and stung me on the wrist.

Because there was little chance I could get help in time, my first thought was, “I’m going to die.” But then a wave of calm washed over me, and my second thought appeared: “And this is a pretty great place to go.” (Thanks to a nearby Coast Guard station, a fast-moving Zodiac, a couple of incredible EMTs, some savvy emergency docs and modern medicine I made it through in one piece.)

At the time, I had no idea that Coyne had almost died as a teenager working at a Long John Silver’s, or that he, too, had felt that same sense of calm and later elation for being given a free pass; it was not a story he had told widely, if at all publicly. But when he told it, sitting in a Los Angeles hotel lobby in bare feet and a big hat he used to control his unruly curls, somehow it all made sense — how he could mix the macabre with almost ecstatic joy, and not only get away with it, but get millions to join the parade.

When the Flaming Lips came through Vancouver shortly after, they were opening for Beck at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, a plush, elegant hall that’s normally home to large opera and ballet productions. At some point in the show, amid a blur of dancing pandas and glitter explosions, Coyne asked everyone who had a birthday that day to stand up.

It happened to be my birthday, December 1, so I stood nervously, unsure of what the small handful of us dotting the concert hall would be asked to do. But Coyne didn’t ask to come up on stage or dance in the aisles or sing into a microphone. (Whew.)

Instead, he led the band, and the entire sold-out crowd, in an incredible rendition of “Happy Birthday” — and in that moment, with over 2,500 people singing along, I couldn’t have felt more alive.

David Gerlach

Patrick Smith

Amy Drozdowska

The Flaming Lips

“She Don’t Use Jelly”

“A Spoonful Weighs a Ton”

“Do You Realize”

George Salisbury

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Studs had Maya Angelou on his radio show on WFMT-FM in Chicago on March 13, 1970. Angelou had just released her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Studs Terkel was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who interviewed thousands of everyday Americans and international notables during a 45-year stint on the radio.

The one thing that con men will tell you; the only way you can be a mark is if you want something for nothing. If you’re greedy, you’re set up. Perfect.

Daddy Clidell was your stepfather.

Yes.

And Daddy Clidell lived by his wits.

Daddy Clidell owned pool halls and gambling houses. Daddy Clidell knew the racket. So he taught me how to look at cards and see if they were marked, how to weigh dice and know if they’re loaded. Then he brought in a lot of con men. Professional con men, who maybe take 2 marks a year.

We should point out a mark is someone who is taken.

My dad, daddy… He’d call the guys in and, “y’all, come on in here, fellows. I want you to tell my baby here how you sold that supermarket in Dallas.” [laughs] “I’m raising this girl. I got to educate her.” So they told me not only the supermarket, but they sold a bridge in Oklahoma. Yes. One man said that, “you see, you use the white man’s bigotry against him.”

There was a white man in the town…

It was Tulsa.

In Tulsa. Who had just exploited all the Indians and the blacks and if he hated anybody more than Indians, it was blacks.

These two con men went down. They checked him out and decided to play him against the store. In long con that’s when you set it up for two months, maybe, and spend a few thousand dollars. You have cards made, a telephone taken in, a secretary, everything, the whole front.

One of the guys played very, very ignorant and very shuffling and went up to the man and said, “look here. I got a friend who own a piece of land, you know. See he got it because he’s part Indian.” [laughs] “Some white man, some Yankee want to buy that land because it’s got a toll bridge on it.” Well my father’s two friends, they sent for a white con man from New York who came down as the big real estate agent from the north, who was interested in buying this land. The white southerner, the Oklahoman, went to the office to talk to this northern real estate man, realtor. The northerner said, “now, listen: I’m going to get this land for maybe $70,000 or something like that because the guy is ignorant. I’ve checked it out. My office has checked it out. He’s got the title of clear. When he signs, it’s mine. But if you check it out or you raise any kind of dust, the state will become aware of that land and that he really owns the property and they’ll move in and confiscate it. So just leave it alone. I’ll … well, you and I can work together.”

Well, this white cracker, the southerner, the Oklahoman said, “he knows niggers.” That’s his attitude. So if this northerner is going to buy it for $70,000, he can buy it for less than that. Get the whole thing.” [laughs]. So they made the deal. At first he was brought to this Indian black American. He went to him and he explained that he’d better have that land and how bad the northern whites were. He talked about the damn Yankees and so the shuffling Indian Negro said, “well, you know boss, I’d rather you have this land than that white man, that Yankee.” So it took some time and he bought it.

For about 50,000.

That’s right. Cash.

Cash.

And that is not a rare… that is not rare. I mean, when I was growing up, I used to know men, very intelligent men, who lived on maybe 2 marks a year.

Basically you’re talking about the stupidity of racism.

That’s right.

In a way, it’s almost a metaphor.

Of course because these men were born before the turn of the century. What a black man could be by 1915, his inability to function was crystallized. He simply had no way to move. Yet, here are men who lived by that intelligence. Suppose, imagine, if that intelligence had been able to be used constructively, that is more constructively for the common good.

Maya Angelou, our guest. Thank you very much.

Thank you Studs. It’s wonderful to see you again, to see you keep on keeping on.

I’ll stay on the case.

That’s it.

David Gerlach

Patrick Smith

Amy Drozdowska

JAHZZAR “Airship Fury”

The Studs Terkel Radio Archive

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