Have you ever wondered how music can guide us through life’s ups and downs? Meet our guest, David, whose story is a testament to the therapeutic power of music. Between battling kidney cancer, and spinal stenosis, and confronting his tumultuous past marked by wild adventures and a challenging relationship with psychedelic substances, David discovered solace and expression in music. His playlist mirrors his life's rollercoaster ride and reveals how he found a meditative escape in the hospital's confines during his health crisis.
Get ready for an exhilarating ride as David peels back the layers of his popular show, Discograffiti Podcast Here, musicians, filmmakers, and authors share their creative journeys, offering listeners a condensed glimpse into their artistry. Listen as David passionately talks about his favorite tracks, films, and musicians, including the unexpected joy he finds in Phil Collins' music. David also shares his unique interpretation of the Rolling Stones' lead-off track, 'Rocks Off'.
We'll also explore David's journey in filmmaking, the hardships he's faced in funding his projects, and how these experiences seep into the narratives of his films. David's story is a compelling tale of resilience and the transformative power of music. Don't miss out on this inspiring episode.
Watch the full episode on YouTube
Check out the Playlist on Spotify
Follow us Everywhere
Make sure to HIT that LIKE BUTTON and SUBSCRIBE to our Channel to be notified of new episodes!
We always have a new episode every Monday at 1 pm
Please share our page with your friends!
Rock on
Have you ever wondered how music can guide us through life’s ups and downs? Meet our guest, David, whose story is a testament to the therapeutic power of music. Between battling kidney cancer, and spinal stenosis, and confronting his tumultuous past marked by wild adventures and a challenging relationship with psychedelic substances, David discovered solace and expression in music. His playlist mirrors his life's rollercoaster ride and reveals how he found a meditative escape in the hospital's confines during his health crisis.
Get ready for an exhilarating ride as David peels back the layers of his popular show, Discograffiti Podcast Here, musicians, filmmakers, and authors share their creative journeys, offering listeners a condensed glimpse into their artistry. Listen as David passionately talks about his favorite tracks, films, and musicians, including the unexpected joy he finds in Phil Collins' music. David also shares his unique interpretation of the Rolling Stones' lead-off track, 'Rocks Off'.
We'll also explore David's journey in filmmaking, the hardships he's faced in funding his projects, and how these experiences seep into the narratives of his films. David's story is a compelling tale of resilience and the transformative power of music. Don't miss out on this inspiring episode.
Watch the full episode on YouTube
Check out the Playlist on Spotify
Follow us Everywhere
Make sure to HIT that LIKE BUTTON and SUBSCRIBE to our Channel to be notified of new episodes!
We always have a new episode every Monday at 1 pm
Please share our page with your friends!
Rock on
Welcome everyone to Music Junkies, a podcast about people sharing extraordinary stories about how music has impacted their lives. Alright, welcome everyone to Music Junkies. Our guest today has written, produced and directed two feature films today, which is awesome. He is a podcast host, producer, writer, you name it. He does it all right on his own.
Speaker 1:He's got a great biography which is Just got a graffiti.
Speaker 2:Yes, he was helping me with pronouncing that earlier, which is good, so I'm glad that he did it.
Speaker 1:I did it on purpose, because music is too easy to pronounce. I needed something that would mess people up.
Speaker 2:Globally, which is awesome. He's funny, he's witty, he's charming and his favorite album of all times is the Beach Boys unreleased masterpiece. Smile, Please welcome David. Oh see, I'm already lost again. Don't worry about it, Gebro, We'll get the editor to edit that.
Speaker 1:Gebro, the only person who's ever gotten it right. I married her.
Speaker 2:Oh see, that's a good thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And now you have a crazy four year old that keeps you busy all the time.
Speaker 1:He keeps me rocking. He sometimes tearfully asks me Dad, can I please listen to discography?
Speaker 2:Oh, that's so sweet. So before we jump into your playlist, I want to know what was your experience putting your playlist together.
Speaker 1:My experience was my life. I looked at it like you know. I mean, my life is not one that's bereft of incredible and crazy stories. I'm kind of a magnet for all kinds of not seeing as to have occurred throughout the years, and my playlist reflects that. So there's not a single anything that was not completely lunatic in terms of story. I deleted from the from the playlist and added a different one.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, let's get started on your crazy adventurous life. So first song you ready.
Speaker 1:Yeah, actually, let me close these doors here.
Speaker 2:Like a ship. That's your first song. All right, I'm excited to hear your stories with these.
Speaker 1:So like a ship. That one was. The was the song during the end credit crawl on the, the documentary Whoops, hold on one sec.
Speaker 2:We got a fire. Oh no, we got a fire.
Speaker 1:Okay, there we go. It was a song on the end. Credit crawl for the for the documentary Crip Camp. Crip Camp came out right when the pandemic started, basically, and when the pandemic went down.
Speaker 1:Everyone has you know crazy pandemic story but I had all these medical issues leading into the pandemic which dictated my experience of the pandemic. It made it so much crazier. Six months before the pandemic I got kidney cancer. I got that operated on, was immediately diagnosed with severe spinal stenosis, had an operation where they slipped my neck open, did a bunch of stuff here that I lost the use of my left arm, Wow.
Speaker 1:And then they went awry so they had to do it again 10 days later from the back and I spent. That was when they did it from the back. That was about six weeks before the pandemic started. So I was already in a in a neck brace on disability for a year. And that song when I think the entirety of the pandemic and my wife and my one year old at the time drove across country at the height of the pandemic, summer 2020, with our dog who had diarrhea at the time, and it was three days across country and it was lunacy and my son will never remember it, but it was one of the craziest experiences of my life.
Speaker 2:Wow. So how did you find out all of this was going on with your health?
Speaker 1:I just started falling apart, like like I guess I was meant to at that time I would. You know, I know ill health really to speak of for for a long time. Then I became a type one diabetic and I was one of these two things. And then the cancer, then then the two neck surgeries and in April I came very close to bleeding to death, which I recounted in a brief nine minute episode. I did.
Speaker 1:But the medical stuff is crucial because for me, I for many years I've been sort of just blindly accepting my reality, thinking that was my way through reality, through my life, was the acceptance being the key. And then I realized with the medical stuff that rejecting it all was the key. So I had a career where you know I'm still licensed to hearing instrument specialist, fitting hearing aids and testing people for hearing problems and devices. But I took a hard left and you know how, to real career and threw it in the toilet because I knew this is what I was meant to do. And what can I say? My family is just very patient with me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's crazy when you hear that C word.
Speaker 1:Right, it's no, no, no, the C word was nothing. The stuff that came after the cancer was no big deal. It's only the word that had the import of doom to it. The rest of it, the next stuff, especially, and the other thing where I almost bled to death. The pain was inconceivable. The cancer didn't hurt. There was no pain with the cancer afterwards. The pain was fucking psychedelic. It was psychedelic in the traditional sense of actually leaving your body and, you know, just exuding out from your being, just out of shock.
Speaker 2:Yeah, did you listen to lots of music when you're in the hospital?
Speaker 1:Tons at high volume.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I think that kind of like released a lot of stuff. Do you feel like sitting there and like just being a? You know? Obviously you have to sit with your illness, right, which is for a lot of people it's it's a hard thing.
Speaker 1:There's something meditative for me, since I have now an unfortunate amount of experience in the hospital. Something meditative about being in the hospital because you have a singularity of purpose is just to get better.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's, and life is so complex that it's sometimes a relief to just have only one thing to focus on, and everyone is begging you to take everything else off your plate. You're never going to experience that as an adult at any other time.
Speaker 2:No, I agree I. I was diagnosed with cancer about five years ago and I, just on my birthday actually, I got a call. I I had a lump down on my lady bits and I was like, ah, I should probably get this check, yeah. So I went in, I went to a gynecologist and she's like you know what? I think we should just remove this. And I was like, okay. So it was like on the 26th I went for surgery, or like the 28th actually, I went for surgery, and then March 1st is my birthday, and I got a call at 10 o'clock in the morning saying hey, we're just calling you on the fucking phone to tell you that you have a rare cancer only 60 cases worldwide. Globally, we have 35 doctors working on your case. We need you to come in again have another surgery.
Speaker 2:I remember just like though I just remember like the whole world just kind of stopping, and my husband was at the office and it was like during training. So I'm like texting him, you need to call me back. And he's like I'm at training, I'm training the team, and I'm like I don't care what you're doing, you need to call me back. Like this is important. So I can't even imagine how his drive home was. But they were so fast, Like everything, everything to do with our, with my cancer, was so quick. They were on it, which I'm super grateful for. But it did make me take a step back and look at what was important to me, not just my job, but like friends, right, what relationships do I want to build more what you know, all of that kind of stuff. It just kind of put a lot of things in perspective.
Speaker 1:Yeah and there's no. You don't have any choice in the matter. Your perspective expands because when you're even just being told that this is now your reality, you change and you change forever. Yeah for sure.
Speaker 2:So thank you for sharing that. I think it's.
Speaker 1:No problem, no, I'm very focused on the show.
Speaker 1:You know, most of my fan base is around my age, so people have either experienced family members or themselves having to deal with this crap. So you know it's. It makes no sense to ignore it because to me, you know, and I say it in the intro to my show and discography in the intro the music is only a vessel to get us to a higher truth. Yeah, we're using I love music so much but ultimately rating stuff and doing deep dives and, you know, almost getting into a flow state of the process of listening to music is hopefully supposed to illuminate some higher truth and if it hasn't, then it's just a fail, the temp, but at least it's a reach.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love how you use the word flow. So for so long, like I feel like my whole entire life has been not like some things flow very easy, but it's like a constant fight, constant fight, constant fight. And then what I noticed after my cancer was I needed to go and create things that were flowing, not necessarily coming easy to me, but more like working towards the same thing that was flowing. So anything that is like really like face back at me, I just kind of go okay, it's the universe obviously telling me don't worry about it, forget that person, move on. And it's been like amazing to live in that flow environment. Like I just so appreciate it so much, even when I'm dealing with guests, like the other day I was dealing with. It's so funny. I could probably get the editor to edit this.
Speaker 2:But I had a lady that reached out to me and wanted to be a part of the show and I asked five times for not just her music. Five times. I asked five times and then, like the six times, she still sent me the same thing and I just said, hey, listen, I don't think this is going to be a fit. And she was like, oh, really. And I said, yeah, like I shouldn't have to ask you five times to put other people's songs on the playlist, like I'm going to promote the shit out of you regardless. But the point of my show is to dive deep into who you are as a person, not necessarily your music and what it means to you. Right, I want songs coming from your past. That's the point of my show, that's your format.
Speaker 1:Look, the format is the king or queen of the whole thing. To me that's what comes first, so sometimes I choose to. I think it's going to be a better show if I duck and weave from the format and I have just done a straight interview. But if somebody you know, I've had episodes that I haven't aired because the guest didn't take the format seriously. So to me it's a dead show. There's nothing I can do with that. That happened once. It was with Lorraine.
Speaker 2:Oh Bob.
Speaker 1:It's a band. It's a band. But she we did an important band too, we did Radiohead and she was very meta about the idea of star ratings, whereas it's a very concrete thing. It's sort of point fun at the idea of doing that means you shouldn't be a guest on the show. That's okay, you don't believe in it.
Speaker 2:I agree it just there's the empowering when you do that because you're like, okay, you're not saying no to them, you're saying no because this isn't a fit for you, and I feel like so many people in our world are constantly doing stuff for other people and they're the ones that suffer and they're the ones that get disease and they're the ones that all this stuff happens. So when you start living this flow life, I feel like other opportunities present themselves that are flowing, that you know this other thing was clogging up, so I love that word.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:All right, next song you ready April Crumbs. She will Simon and Garfunkel, incredible band.
Speaker 1:One of my favorite songs of all time and reminiscent for me of my favorite movie of all time, which is the graduate, and there's an entire sequence devoted to this song that both advances the plot and stands stark still and allows itself just to be. And there's a piece that comes with it for me that, even just thinking about it, it makes me emotional. I've seen the movie and I'm not exaggerating, I've seen it over 150 times, wow, and every time I get something new out of it and I love the everything about it.
Speaker 2:Wow, is that your favorite movie? Huh, is that your favorite movie? Yeah?
Speaker 1:My favorite movie, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so do you have a favorite movie soundtrack?
Speaker 1:Yes, I do, it's Bruce Langford's the Hired Hand. So Bruce Langford was a mid-60s accompanist of Bob Dylan and is the actual titular character of Mr Tamberine man. It's based on Bruce Langhorn and then in the early 70s, right after Easy Rider, peter Fonda directed a western called the Hired Hand and Bruce Langford was hired to do the soundtrack for it. Wow, about 30 minutes long. There's a. There's actually a tribute album where the entire thing is covered by different artists and it's the most meditative piece of music I think I've ever heard in my life, especially the last track, which is called the Ending. And if you want to hear an insanely good song that is just beyond beautiful, listen to Ending from the Hired Hand.
Speaker 2:I will. I will for sure. So I want to bring you back to maybe when you were younger. This might be a thinking question for you, but is there a song that used to love growing up that your parents were like oh my god, please, dave, stop playing this song. I want you to never play this song anymore in your room. I don't think so. No, no, I don't think so.
Speaker 1:You never listen to any kind of heavy metal, or maybe not didn't have to be heavy metal, but by the time I was listening to heavy metal, and I didn't listen to a lot of heavy metal, but I listened to a little bit of metal like Def Leppard, iron Maiden. Even Judas Priest was too much for me. I wasn't that metal. I was listening to a Walkman all the time, so it was no longer a turn that down because everything was headphones at that point Did you have a yellow Walkman, or what color was your Walkman Of?
Speaker 1:course I had a sports Walkman. You clamp the clasp shut and then you're good to go. You could bring that sucker under a fucking in a pool, under the water.
Speaker 2:I love the yellow Walkman. I even had well, and then obviously it evolved and I remember having like a CD Walkman after that and I just totally despised it. I just wanted to go back to the yellow Walkman because it was like a delicate. Yeah.
Speaker 1:The thing was too delicate for that.
Speaker 2:This next band. I'm reading his book right now. I'm in Sounds called Rocks Off the Rolling Stones.
Speaker 1:The reason I chose this one, and definitely, if you don't know, if that doesn't ring any bells and you don't know what Rocks Off is, then I would recommend you pause this podcast and go look up. First of all, read about the background of Exile of Main Street and what the Stones were up to at that point. That's a whole other story in itself that needs to be digested. And this is the leadoff track of the record and a very welcome keyhole into the sound and feel of the record, and I put it on the playlist because it is a really appropriately rockist song.
Speaker 1:To have a car accident too and I had a particularly insane one so Rocks Off was playing in my friend's convertible when we were on the way back from Long Beach Island to New Jersey and he swung on to an exit ramp too quickly and we were, first of all, neither of us had seatbelts on, we had the top down and it was a convertible and an 18-wheeler plowed into us. And then what I saw next, I can't believe I lived to have this memory, but the back end of the 18 wheeler swung all the way around the road and jackknifed and hit us again, and we were okay. We walked away from the accident without a scratch and in a weird way, the complete insanity of Rocks Off, I feel acted as some kind of a force field against death for us.
Speaker 2:Wow, how old were you when this happened?
Speaker 1:I had to have been like 19.
Speaker 2:Wow, so you guys just walked away. We're like holy crap, that was insane.
Speaker 1:We were shaking, but you know we were okay.
Speaker 2:What were you like as a teenager?
Speaker 1:I was too much. I feel bad. Now I really do. Now that I have perspective, now that I have a child, I'm so guilt ridden I don't even know how to best give back.
Speaker 2:Were you just bad, or what?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I didn't mean to be. I wasn't bad towards other people. That's one crucial thing. I was not breaking into people's houses or doing anything crazy like that. It was more just the wildness of ways of living that I chose. So it wasn't about harming other people, but I was arrested four times by the time I was 21. So all for different offenses.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So what do you think now you look back at that age? What do you think was going on for you that was causing all of this hardship?
Speaker 1:Just who I am. I really don't know. I can't tell you, except I was a star for experience, so that led me into certain situations, but I was dumb in the way that I chose to live. Looking back, I'm glad that I have the life experience, but I'm also I feel guilty with regard to my parents.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what kind of parents were your mom and?
Speaker 1:dad, they were great they were great Portive and nothing bad to say there. I was, just I was crazy. So I feel guilty, even getting mad at my son when he gets crazy, because I was so much worse.
Speaker 2:I think it's good to be crazy. I think it's good that you had a teen angst in you. I think it's important. It shows, I feel, like the teenagers we're raising now, like you got to be. You have to go through that in order to become the person that you're in. So I don't think that you should feel guilty. I think you should feel proud. It's made you who you are today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I am. I just feel bad for my parents and, to be quite frank with you, my sister was a lot worse than me.
Speaker 2:So what's the worst thing that you did growing up?
Speaker 1:It would depend on what your conception of worst was. I don't know you pick the worst. I mean, I have billions of stories. It depends on the kind of story. I mean seriously, it's a vast array of experience that I've had. It's not all bad stuff. Do you know the writer William Burroughs? What book he wrote? Naked Lunch, oh, yep. The legendary beat writer around the time of Kerouac by doing much more surrealistic stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I set up at his doorstep one night at 10 PM as a 20 year old because I just was dead set on meeting him and he'd say come back tomorrow. And I sat with really a legend and I mean anyone. I tell that I did. You know, at the time I had no self consciousness. You know later it's amazing as somebody who's older and you are conscious of the moves you make through life. And yet at a certain point I wasn't, I was just, it was. I mean, it was beyond flow state, it was just pure now, and so I was never nervous about doing any of this stuff. But that's not bad, that's more. Just the energy that would lead me into bad channels guided me into plenty of great ones too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's what I mean. I think it's. I think that none of us should be upset with the choices that we made. We were given and those are the choices that we made, and I could go on forever. I was a bad kid growing up too what would describe as a bad kid?
Speaker 1:But I would. Your choices are regrettable If they're against other people. I believe that they're definitively regrettable, but I never intentionally did anything against anyone else. Yeah, I know people who have and you know I can't really say I'm friends with any of them.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, that's a good thing, all right. Next song, song. Got a feeling Mama and Papa's.
Speaker 1:That is the greatest example of contrapuntal energy that's ever occurred in my life, because I got into a much more impactful car accident later on Much more so than the 18-wheeler, believe it or not and I was shouldered off of a highway and was in a forest adjacent to the highway knocking down trees at 70 miles an hour, and I hit a final tree that came down on the car and somehow it still wasn't killed. This was playing, so the energy of this song, which is almost this meditatively slowed down molasses, like you know, a trance state thing. I was flying through the forest while this was playing, so I'll never forget the associations with this song. I, once the car hit the tree, my first thought was every, every car that hits a tree in a movie explodes. I got to get out of here and I made my way out of the car. I couldn't walk. I was just calming down the embankment with on my hands and, you know, just shouldering my way down, and I looked back and the car exploded.
Speaker 2:Wow Rosie.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So how did you survive that? Did you break any arms and legs or?
Speaker 1:No lung contusion, no broken bones, a lot of pain. But yeah, I mean I made it through, but I had severe spinal stenosis later because probably the car accidents, plus I've run three marathons, so that's and it's genetic.
Speaker 2:So my dad has it. Wow, crazy. Sounds like you've had a lot of trauma.
Speaker 1:I have a lot of unprocessed trauma.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's processed on my show.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's good. Tell me a little bit about your show.
Speaker 1:The show is generally. The traditional format is I ask a celebrity musician, author, filmmaker onto the show and we talk about, we agree on a pick either a solo artist or a band and we rate everything they've ever done and I fill in all the historical details. I'm telling the story of a band, whether or not you give a shit about their music. The idea is that if you tune in, you will be engaged, because this is the best of human drama. It really is almost any band. The story is insane. If you find it, tease it out and properly showcase it, the story will carry it through, even though you're talking specifically about music and music rating.
Speaker 1:But the people who are are true, what I call soldiers of sound, which is my fan base, that's the Patreon community. It's a thriving community. It's also a Facebook group and there are three to four shows a week that I post. There's the free show on Friday and then the idea is just like a music obsessive who thrives on rabbit holes and deep dives, you just dive as deep as you possibly can. Monday is a Patreon show, wednesday is a Patreon show. Sometimes Thursday is another show and then Friday again, every Friday, the main show. I've never missed a week in the almost two years that I've been doing it. So there's over a hundred what I call main shows and then almost a hundred Patreon shows.
Speaker 2:At this point, Wow, where did the idea come from?
Speaker 1:The idea was just how I lived my life. This is how I was listening to music For many years before the show. For example, john Coltrane was one I did. I'd never really heard him, except for the famous ones, so I listened to everything he ever did in order, put together a compiled list and then made a playlist in my iTunes and read about the music as I went, tried to gain a full and, most importantly, compact understanding. When I say that, what I mean is it needs to be concentrated so that by the end of it you could potentially reach a higher understanding about the entire process of that artist's life that maybe they don't even get, because usually they don't go back and listen to their records. Maybe you gain some kind of understanding and when that lightning bolt hits, I sit down and I just write a quick thing and that becomes part of the format, but never self-indulgingly so it's more about getting a connection with the guest. That's the entire.
Speaker 2:Is there a favorite episode that you would recommend to somebody if they were just cut?
Speaker 1:out Episode 95. I did a five episode series with David Paho, who's in Slint and worked with Billy Corgan and Zwan Ganga Four, interpol, stereolab, the yeah, yeah, yes, and it is an incredible episode. It's called the Zwan aside, it's nothing to do with me, just about the natural swing of the topics. We go the first half of the episode. We're talking about him being in a Billy Corgan supergroup and how hysterically surreal it was and it's genuinely funny and the stories are awesome. And then it turns on a dime into his suicide attempt and then the difficulty of getting through life without some kind of crutch or assistance and it becomes intensely profound and it's a punch in the face because of what comes before it. And so, just in the sense of how that flowed, that's my favorite is number 95. I love it. The most popular is number 49, which is the first pavement episode. Bob Nistanyevich from pavement rating the entirety of pavements output that's been listened to thousands of times and shows no signs of slowing.
Speaker 2:What's your favorite part about doing your podcast?
Speaker 1:Doing the show.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I never remember what I do, because I only remember it when I listen to the tapes afterward. Because I'm so prepared I have, you know, I've had upwards of 90 pages of notes so that when I let go I can, I know I can let go because I always have the motherfucking train tracks to come back to. So I'm not worried about letting go. Yeah, so I find out, just not really remembering what I'm doing.
Speaker 2:How do you pick your guests for your show?
Speaker 1:Based on a process of personal interest, slash demand from an audience because I'm not doing this as a fucking hobby. If I'm not eventually making a lot of money doing this, then this whole thing has just been a massive joke, and the joke's been on me.
Speaker 2:So do you get a lot of feedback from your audience and they recommend hey, it'd be awesome if you have so and so on the podcast, it's feedback.
Speaker 1:So I have over 1000 people in my Facebook group, so I'll say, hey, I really want to do like it was Skinner's debut album's 50th anniversary a couple days ago or yesterday, and I made a post who would be great to cover this? And I always get great fucking responses and name musicians. I mean Jennifer Harama from Royal Trucks, black Bananas. She was recommending people. You never know who's going to kind of show up in a thread, so there's that. But there's also there's ways of tracking data and seeing how people respond that if you just keep doing the same things all the time, it just means you're not ignorant but ignorant of the process.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that was me for a while. I was just doing things purely by instinct.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sounds like you're very prepared. You love what you do and obviously you produced an incredible show, so I love it. It's awesome.
Speaker 1:You do. That's why I gravitate toward yours.
Speaker 2:I know, okay, phil Collins, who doesn't love Phil.
Speaker 1:You're gonna be kind of love, all right. So I just want to say anyone that knows my show knows that's a completely unexpected choice for me. But I'm also at this stage, with all the medical maladies I've endured, I'm not. I don't consider it a guilty pleasure anymore. Nothing is a guilty pleasure If I like it, it's just a pleasure. But that association is with driving to the hospital to see my grandfather pass away, and that was the first major death I ever endured at 16. So I just wanted to throw that in there as a curveball, just because my show is not really Phil Collins-centric.
Speaker 2:Well, that's a great story. What is one thing that your grandfather told you growing up?
Speaker 1:Go to the movies.
Speaker 1:Yeah, whenever I go to the movies, I think about them and we used to my grandfather and grandmother I used to. I used to movie hop with them, go to different movies. They wouldn't even know what they were taking me to. Sometimes it was a completely inappropriate film. I remember specifically the world according to Garp in 1982, as a 10 year old, my grandfather we just you know he was like let's go see what this is. He's not doing research about any of this shit is. And you know there's like you know his wife is having an affair and you know bites off a guy's dick in the driveway because a car crashes into the rear bumper, all kinds of lunatic shit, nudity, and he demands that we leave. And I'm not going because I'm a film lover. It's not that I like the raunchy stuff, I'm a filmmaker. That's like the main thing that I've done in my life. But they instilled in me an early love of, you know just, the insatiable devouring of film. I love it.
Speaker 2:It's insane what your grandparents teach you. You know, we this was years ago, our kids were really young, but we were staying at a fairmont near Crip for Christmas time and my husband's dad was like, oh, let's all watch a movie together. And he put stepbrothers on and like we've never seen it either. And I was just like this is a lot for our eight and, you know, 10 year old. This is how long.
Speaker 1:I think that's entirely appropriate. I have a. I would show that to my four year old I would. But you know, I grew up, you know, watching all kinds of fucked up shit at all kinds of fucked up ages, both against my parents' wishes and with my parents.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's just always a little bit uncomfortable right when you watch some of that stuff with your kids. Even now we we watch a lot of like during Christmas time. We play this game. Well, it's not just during Christmas time, but we'll do like a movie night on the way end or something like that, where we'll pick like a B movie and then we pick characters, right, whoever's going to die first. They're kind of out, and we've been doing that for years and it doesn't matter what movie we pick.
Speaker 2:I'm always sleeping with my brother's or with my husband's brother, no matter what. We always pick completely different characters, no matter what. So it's always like super awkward. It's like oh, there we go again and then we're sleeping together again, and this is another movie, right, so it's still comical. So talk about a little bit about directing. You know your films. Maybe share the names of your feature films for a week and all go and watch them.
Speaker 1:The first one is called the homeboy. Okay, it was very low budget but but shot on 35. It came out through Hollywood video, which of course is no longer in existence. There's no Hollywood video stores or any video stores except for the last remaining blockbuster. But then the second one, which is more widely available, that was picked up by Showtime, is called zombie honeymoon and that has had a very healthy life. That's it played in the theater. It's gotten an 82% on rotten tomatoes, got well reviewed by the major media when it was in playing theatrically. It's on cable all the time and it's in over 50 countries.
Speaker 2:So are you working on another project right now?
Speaker 1:I was for a while and then I couldn't get the money for it. Even working with Elijah Wood, he couldn't get the money for it, which, if you look up bad vibes Elijah Wood you'll see plenty of stuff on the on the web about that. But that has not died, that has just sort of been ingested into the body. That is discog graffiti because it's a music related psychedelic rock band horror film.
Speaker 2:Oh cool.
Speaker 1:It's entirely in with what I'm pursuing now. So the whole thing has just kind of been swept through. It's with another producer right now, but it's sort of kind of in the wings right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what's your favorite horror movie?
Speaker 1:X's Chainsaw Massacre. Nice good choice. Not any of the remakes or sequels.
Speaker 2:I absolutely used to love horror movies. I'm kind of fading out of them a little bit, but I love a good zombie movie for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, Zombie Honeymoon was.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm gonna go check it out.
Speaker 1:And it's a. The idea was a romantic horror movie for women. Yeah okay. Based on my sister's life. My sister, Denise, was married to a guy named Danny, and Denise and Danny are the main characters of the movie, and he died in a surfing accident. He dies in this film and obviously the zombie part is made up, but all the details of the film are very personal, so it has both the feeling of a personal story and, you know, crazy horror movies, so it's unique in that way.
Speaker 2:I'm looking forward to downloading it. That's awesome, all right. Still nice as well. Drifting, Jimi Hendrix drifting.
Speaker 1:Probably my favorite song is. That's From the Cry of Love, which is late in the game, but that song I heard during a very important, very formative LSD trip that I had in college. That was the night before my very first class of film school and I stayed up all night and came up with the first idea for my first film and then showed up and made a tape called Finnegan's Trash screen. That was kind of based on the idea of Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce. And I remember sitting at the Boston University fountain waiting for my first film class to begin, with the fading embers of the glow of the previous night's journey. That wound up being actually a really important experience of my life and that song was part of the journey. That song was there at night and in the morning.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow. What's the hardest part about putting a film together?
Speaker 1:The money, the money.
Speaker 2:If you had all the money, you could put whatever film around.
Speaker 1:I would put Bad Vibes, which is the one I'm trying to get together.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but that's the hardest part is just coming up with the money.
Speaker 1:Whenever I looked for money, I got it. Whenever I entrusted somebody else to do it, they never were able to do it. So I know what that shows me and what that tells me. But the problem is, if I am the guy who gets the money and I'm the filmmaker, I know what kind of how many years that takes off one's life. So to impose that on a family is it's just too much. I wouldn't be able to do that. I need to entrust somebody to do that part of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's obvious that there's lots of films out there. What would be a film that you think is underrated didn't get the recognition that it should have got.
Speaker 1:My first film, the Homeboy. The Homeboy is cool. It's not a perfect film. There's parts in it that definitely lag. It's definitely a first feature, but there are sections of it that are very inspired and the idea behind it is very funny. I think, which is a white rapper who tries to do gangsta rap but lives in the suburbs, and this is all the scenes that would be cut from a normal hip hop movie. It's all the stuff in between the big action sequences they go out and get Chinese food for launch. It's like a Woody Allen film about a white hip hop guy and I thought it was. I still it's. I recognize it's glaring imperfections, but about a half to two thirds in like that section there, plus a bunch of other moments Downtown Julie Brown's in it from early MTV. I was able to do a lot. I shot it on 35 millimeter, produced it, directed it and was able to get downtown Julie Brown in it for $55,000.
Speaker 2:Wow, good for you, it's awesome. So do you remember the first concert you went to?
Speaker 1:Yes, it's unfortunate, but it was Brian Adams.
Speaker 2:Canadian guy, Canadian guy.
Speaker 1:No, I know, but not the Canadian that I'd want to reference.
Speaker 2:What about your favorite concert of all time?
Speaker 1:That would be a tie between Brian Wilson performing Smile, because it was such a buildup. For me that was like a 24 year wait, 25 year, wait, 25 years, yeah. And then, as far as pure rock and roll, I saw Slater Kenny on the Dig Me Out tour and that was ferocious. I've never seen and that was all women. I've never seen anybody rock so hard in my life.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. Do you have a band shirt still, like of any concert, or did you get rid of them when you were all young?
Speaker 1:No, no, no, no. I have tons. I have a whole bunch of stuff. I have five shirts that are signed by Sonic Youth, a shirt that's signed by Spike Lee yeah, but I don't wear those shirts anymore, but I still have them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, do you keep all your ticket stubs anytime you go to a show? Do you do all that kind of stuff as well?
Speaker 1:I didn't even know. They still gave me ticket stubs, so that's news to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm going. It's funny because I'm going to. What is it? It's a festival of something in Las Vegas and it's from 11 till 11, so it's probably 100 bands. One of them would be Offspring, green Day, good Charlotte a whole bunch of bands. I'm waiting for them to deliver the actual ticket, which is kind of cool. I'm excited about that. Yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 1:That's the way it should be For me, the idea that concert prices have not only gone up, but you don't even get a fucking keepsake. I know that's the final slap in the face.
Speaker 2:I know and I hate printing it off. I just took the kids to Chasing Summers last weekend and I have it in my trunk. I have two trunks full of all of that kind of stuff and I was like, oh, I'll still print it, but it's not the same. I love going to the old books and looking at the old tickets yeah we deserve it, like 30 years old, for crying out loud. It's like awesome.
Speaker 1:We deserve that.
Speaker 2:I know I agree, all right. Next song Like most of your songs, have like this deep trance intro and that song is called yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, what I tried to do is not, I wasn't going for sound, I was going more for the experience. That would be yeah.
Speaker 1:I love it, but it's interesting that that well rocks off. Certainly is not like that, but a lot of them have that. This one, okay. So the moment is so seared into my mind, but I will make a long story short, which is that I was suspended from college and I immediately, almost immediately, drove out to San Francisco to live a life no connections, no, nothing to go make a film which was called Jesus too. So I went out there, started writing the feature, got out there, lived in an apartment on H Street the famous H Street with three other guys. The four of us paid a total of 600 bucks a month, so that was 150 each. And what ensued? And this is from September to November of 93.
Speaker 1:And it was the most chaotic period of my life.
Speaker 1:People would climb through the fire, escape through the window with acid in the middle of the afternoon and the day would take a left turn and it was like a crack neighborhood.
Speaker 1:So here are these clueless guys in their early 20s and lullabyed to sleep by gunshots every night and the thing. I could go on and on about stories, but the thing was destined not to last, and on the day where I realized it was over, it was raining outside that song was playing and my friend Casey, who wound up selling his drum set for crack cocaine after I left which something, by the way, I've never done but and had no interest and I can tell I'm being honest about drug usage, but that held no appeal to me. So he brought out these baguettes with melted American cheese and tomato slices on it and I was looking out at the rain falling on the San Francisco rooftops, into the fog and shrouded distance as this song played, realizing that this incredible, short but intense period of my life, which still is the most intense period of living I've ever done, the most experimental whole period of my life, came to an end. Wow.
Speaker 2:Insane.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So did you do acid again after that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, but it's been a long time. I mean with that particular substance, if you keep doing it past the point where you realize that, okay, I've reached the end of the road in my relationship with this thing, it becomes just opening a door. You just keep opening the same door and so it becomes an exercise in door opening. It's because it's not a recreational substance.
Speaker 2:No, I agree, I had my stint with acid and then I kept on having the same like God trip over and over again and I was like that's it, I'm done with this. I'm not no interest in going down that weird warpy road. I have no idea where this is going to take me and I don't think that I'm prepared at 16, 17 years old to go on any more God trips. But thank you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I mean for a time in my life I would say from like 1989 to 1993, we're glorious years of utilizing that. I never I don't feel like I ever abused it. And then from 93 to 98, the times where it happened, which was more sporadic, we're just not as revelatory or fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's when you got to say no, we're good. Thanks, yeah, it's good that you recognize that most people don't. That it's all whatever. I'll just kind of continue down that. I saw people go insane.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I saw one guy who was a close friend lose his shit and took a left turn forever more in his life after one weekend.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, lousagenics, I don't know. I don't even know if I know mushrooms are starting to come back quite a bit. I don't even know if I could even do mushrooms. It would have to be a very controlled environment for me, where it would have to be people that I feel that are very close to me that I could go down that road again.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would not be able to be coerced. I don't think. I absolutely know I would not have fun on it anymore.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because I have too many adult anxieties to introduce into that. That world has no need to introduce that into the psychedelic realm. You're asking for trouble.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree, I'm good. I'm good. Let's have a glass of wine, I'll be fine. I'll still be fine.
Speaker 1:I don't even do that anymore. It's been. Not that I don't, you know, I don't really have a problem with that I just I never understood it and so I just said, fuck that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Why do you something you don't want?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:All right, next song. I'm really sorry, dave, I don't know what is going on. What is going on? All right, this is a band I've never heard of before.
Speaker 1:This band has released a lot of material and they're one of the best bands of the 90s that still is in existence. They broke up for a little while, but StereoLab is amazing and most people know them after this time, when they were more centered sonically around their synthesizers. But this is the early guitar stuff and this song especially, which was supposed to be the end titles, crawl for my first feature, which never got completed. So here's a story and I'll keep it compact.
Speaker 1:I was suspended from college and wrote a feature about Jesus involved doing a second coming in a sort of Fellini-esque easy rider road trip, midnight movie extravaganza sort of a thing.
Speaker 1:That was kind of the idea and we're the adventures of Bucca Roo Bonsai, like a thing like that, where it was just a psychedelic mind fuck of a movie. And at the time I was running on inspiration I was still a kid. I was like I was 21 years old and I raised 60,000 in cash and got together enough credit cards to have a $40,000 limit, maxed, everything, and then the production fell apart halfway through and all these people I mean 20, 25 people who'd flown out from Boston where I went to school, they graduated, they made their way out to San Francisco on their own. I wasn't able to and did not pay for transportation, and then they all slowly dispersed back and it was my first experience of pure failure, which has made me so good at everything else for the rest of my life, because, even though I don't necessarily feel like a massive success, I can absolutely never allow myself to feel like that again.
Speaker 2:I love that story. I think it's so important that obviously we'd go through failures. Sometimes we hear lots of stories we probably have friends like this, or did have friends like this where it's like constant. They're running into the same issue over and over and over again. It's like how many times do you have to go through that same issue before you learn the lesson that's been put in front of you? We see that all the time. It sounds like you learned the lesson pretty quickly. It's like I never want to be broke again. Right, I always feel that we grew up so poor. It was horrific. Our environment was awful. My mom was a heroin addict. It was just like. That is just not a situation that I'll ever be able to-.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry. Is your mom okay from that? She's still an addict, yeah she's still oh man, but now because of Let me ask you how old is your mom?
Speaker 2:She is well, I'm 49. I'm 48, she's 17 years older than me, so that is wild.
Speaker 1:So I mean, that's pushing the boundaries. Do you mind me asking you a few questions about that? For sure, absolutely. She was a needle.
Speaker 2:She was more hardcore alcoholic until I was she was probably dabbling Her and my real dad broke up when they were just 18. And I never really knew my real dad. And then she met another guy who passed away two, three years into the relationship of a speed overdose, so I know that she was doing lots of speed back then. And then she met my stepdad, who she's still with, and became I don't think he was really into drugs. So she became more of an alcoholic until I was 17. And at 17, we opened a business together and I went to the store that we owned together and she was sleeping there. So she was having an affair on my dad with a junkie right.
Speaker 1:So she- Is that the derivation of the name of your podcast?
Speaker 2:No, but kinda in a sense right.
Speaker 1:You were thinking of that, weren't you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. So then she was, I moved away, right, I didn't want any-.
Speaker 1:Let me ask you then Did you either struggled with drugs or struggled with drugs, or are they in the anti-drug? It's one of those things.
Speaker 2:No, I didn't. I never really I did drugs, but I never struggled with drugs. As soon as I made a decision to not do those drugs, I wouldn't do drugs, but I moved-.
Speaker 1:I'll tell you flat out I struggled with drugs because I found, you know, in. You know, I've never used a needle.
Speaker 2:Neither.
Speaker 1:I don't think I would ever get to that place. I'm really scared of needles. I have a low pain tolerance and I think that's what saved me. But yeah, I have tried, you know, I've tried it otherwise.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've tried it too. I've smoked it, I've snorted it.
Speaker 1:But you know I like to not feel anxiety and stress. So I get the appeal. Yeah, people are, you know, without doing it, you under, you know to see from the outside, looking in it looks disgusting, sleazy, awful and it is. But to you know I, for whatever reason, I carry just a lot of maelstrom inside me. So that was, I get the appeal and I understand the struggle.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it is difficult for that reason.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so she did it for years and I was moved. I already moved out of BC to Calgary so I had not seen my stepdad for 27 years. I went back last year. I had not seen my stepdad for 27 years, seen my mom. Did she try to get it clean? She is. When I seen her because I just seen her for the first time again she seemed clean, but the signs are still there. I don't know if she's using a needle, but I would definitely say methadone would be probably high priority in her life. Still for sure. Just the erraticness is still there. Like I'll get a call at like two in the morning, hey, I just wanted to let you know that. It's like the craziest fucking story, as I was a child, you know, an innocent child and this potentially could have happened to me, and then she just like, hey, have a good day, kind of thing. It's always very organic, so I've had to just kind of like learn to just love her and not have any addictions.
Speaker 1:Have you been to Elinon?
Speaker 2:No, but I've learned a lot. I've spent probably over $100,000 on personal development, so that stuff doesn't really affect me anymore. I just accept who she is right. I keep my kids very aware of the situation, so they're very aware of that. They know that they're not gonna have any relationship with their grandmother and that was by my choice. I didn't wanna expose them to that. But they are very aware of what drugs can do. Both my kids do not drink at all or do any type of drug, which is kind of crazy. Considering how I grew up, they are really kind of you know I've changed the trajectory of our families so they are just starting that to more of an extreme that I would like them not to be.
Speaker 1:But you know, I can say you know and I don't know if this would be impactful to you at all, but any bad decision that I've ever made as a parent, I did it despite my son, not because of my son. So anything that your mom has done, it has nothing to do with you, which I'm sure you already know. You know to a great extent, but it must be hard to feel that. It's easy to know that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's hard to watch her because I know that she probably does not wanna live this life. I'm the only child so I know that she wants to have a better relationship with me. I know that she wants all of these things, but there's still that wall that she is gonna have to overcome because I just won't allow that chaos into my life again. It just will not happen. So I have to be very cautious when I am.
Speaker 2:You know, when I went and like it was very emotional going back to that town that I've been gone for for 26 years, that I was like I am done with this whole entire. I picked my kids up, we're gone, we're never gonna deal with any of that kind of chaos ever. So going back and even being in, like in Nanaimo, like it was like a lot for me, like my husband had never witnessed that. I showed him like you know where we lived and all this stuff, and he was just like this is a lot, like I knew, like he's heard me tell stories, but not to the extent of what he witnessed when we were there. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:Like we're having a conversation with my mom and there's like literally a junkie, like if I was facing you on this side. There's literally a junkie passed out in a fucking chair right there and Tyler's like what the fuck is going on. And to me it's just, I'm just not going to entertain it, so I'm not gonna give it any energy so I can deal with what I'm already dealing with. So it's so crazy. That's why I love when people tell stories about drugs or they cause. Then I have obviously some relatability to it. But it also makes me feel like I'm not the only one right.
Speaker 1:I love this story. No, I mean, you know, it's one of the great and terrible things that life has to offer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure, and you learn a lot from it. Right, you really do so.
Speaker 1:I'm like just a huge believer in I'm gonna drug. You can't learn a thing from cocaine.
Speaker 2:I think, it's more.
Speaker 2:what I mean is more being in that environment you can choose to learn a lot of not just who you are, but who you don't want to be, who you don't want to need to be in your life. It's okay to not have them, to let go of that. You know a lot of people you know that still are like my old friends, still have an attachment to that area and I was really the only one that have no attachments at all, like my best friend still has attachments to that place, still talks to some of those old people where I just cut all ties, you know, and a lot of people were like, wow, that's pretty hardcore. But for me it was like it wasn't hardcore. Why do I wanna fucking continue Like this is not my environment, I don't want this life.
Speaker 2:If you wanna have this life, you can have this life. It's just I don't want that life. In my influx of attachment I break all those rules shown that they're even there. So that was a lot of things that I think is important when you're in that environment, because it could take you that way or it could take you totally, like the victim role oh, I'm a junkie because my mom was a junkie. It's like, oh fuck you have a choice.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Right, you always have a choice. So yeah, that's true. All right, last song.
Speaker 1:You ready? I?
Speaker 2:love this song. This really reminds me of my dad drinking and listening to this song and this crazy lady named Anna singing it, drunk, in our living room.
Speaker 1:Believe it or not, this is on the end title crawl for zombie honeymoon. No way, it cost me a lot of money. I didn't get Tammy's performance because that would have been cost prohibitive for me, but what I did was the Anara, George Lowell, George's daughter. She sang a version which is incredible. The publishing alone she did. Anara did it out of the goodness of her heart, but the publishing was 20 grand. Wow. So that was a lot of money for me. To you know, zombie honeymoon was an independent film. That was a lot of money for me. But when you see it in the context of the film, there is no other song that could be there, None. It's about the extents, the extent that somebody will go to enact commitment. There's no further. One can go.
Speaker 2:I'm excited about watching the movie and then hearing that song where I can feel what you are just saying You'll see it's great when it comes in.
Speaker 1:It really is great and worth every dollar.
Speaker 2:I love it. Well, thank you so much, dave, for joining me on Music Junkies today, but before I let you go, I would love for you to obviously not only share all your socials, but leave us with some words of wisdom as well, please.
Speaker 1:Words of wisdom is to follow your heart with your music taste To. You know, now, with one of the good things about you know, if anything, about the streaming and you know I don't stream because I know what I like, so I don't need to really do that but I see the rabbit holes and the you know the what opens up when somebody keeps their mind open. And now, with everything interwoven and everything blend together, there's no dividing walls. So on Discografiti, we really leapfrog. I mean, I could go from Black Sabbath one week into a 13 hour interview with the association. Who did Cherish? And I have I've done episodes on. I've done those episodes. So keep your mind open and the world opens up along with your taste.
Speaker 1:And then, as far as Discografiti you can find anywhere it comes out Friday 4 am, eastern Standard Time, every single week, without fail. This upcoming week is Jim Gordon, part two, the best drummer, whoever was, who killed his mother, unfortunately. And then five weeks of the association, then Bob Mastanage for two weeks, deertick for two weeks, laund the schedule is booked until November. It's where every listen to podcast, youtube, apple, spotify I'm like you guys know. And then socials Discografiti, soldiers of Sound on Facebook. Discografiti Pod on Instagram, discografiti on Twitter, if that's still even a thing, and I'm not on threads, I'm holding my ground.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't see the point of threads. I'm on there and I don't even know what's happening, so I agree. Thank you again. So much, Dave, for joining us today on Music Junkies. Thank you for sharing all of your stories. I know we didn't get through your whole playlist, so I want to have you again for we can go. Yeah, I would love that and I just appreciate you being honest and real and raw Exactly the type of thing.
Speaker 1:I mean. To me it's all about the connection. That's what this is all founded on, and anyone you know listening to just information without the connection is lacking the fire to the spark. So thank you.
Speaker 2:You're welcome.