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Top cat: Moranis as Elton John |
“SCTV has a lot of devotees,” marvels Rick Moranis about the cult TV show he cut his teeth on. “It has a degree of pent-up demand because it’s been out of circulation for so long.” Indeed, fans have been waiting impatiently to blast back into the Second City Television Network galaxy — and Shout! Factory has rewarded them handsomely with a five-disc box set of the first SCTV Network 90 season, which aired on NBC in the summer of 1981. (The second installment of the projected five-set series arrives in October.)
Moranis granted S&V an exclusive interview to talk about the wonders of SCTV and its pioneering spirit. An abbreviated version of our hour-long chat appeared in the September 2004 issue, but here Rick gets the room to fully expound on things like how downloading is passé, the infamous Michael McDonald sketch, and why he stopped making movies. Beauty, eh?
“Inventing” MTV
Before SCTV, you were a DJ at CHUM-FM in Toronto in the 1970s. On SCTV, you created the world’s first VJ, Gerry Todd. How did that come about?
I had spent years working in radio at different stations in Toronto; I wasn’t in the stage company of Second City. CHUM was an early progressive FM station, the kind that would play Side 2 of Abbey Road very frequently, but years before I'd worked as an operator at MOR, middle-of-the-road stations. Well, a lot of my sketches were technology based . . .
There were always a lot of monitors in your sketches.
Yeah, that’s what [SCTV cast member] Joe Flaherty said [in Joe voice]: “Another bank of monitors! Every sketch has monitors in it!”
Mark Giacomelli, the postproduction supervisor on SCTV who eventually became the producer of the McKenzie brothers album, [1981’s] Great White North [Anthem/Mercury], showed me a couple of early music videos. One was by the Plastics out of Japan, and another was a Talking Heads video, “Once in a Lifetime.” I remember thinking, “Wow, this is the future of music. Everybody is going to do this. And there will be VJs instead of DJs.” So I conceived this quasi-radio show on TV with promos and bumpers and jingles, and we even made some music videos of our own. It was pretty primitive, but [SCTV cast member] Catherine O’Hara always gave me credit for inventing MTV. [laughs]
The name came from two guys in radio whom I absolutely loved. One was Todd Russell, the other Gerry Herbert. I put their names together, and I did the little goatee because in those days, every DJ had one. And [affects radio-announcer voice] they were both radio guys who could fill all kinds of dead air basically saying absolutely nothing.
Four minutes to fill? No problem!
No problem!
I enjoyed the songs you “adapted” for another character of yours, Tom Monroe, to cover in his videos that aired on The Gerry Todd Show.
We did some cover versions there: some Petula Clark [“Downtown,” from Tom Monroe Sings Petula Clark in Episode 6 on DVD 3], and an early Police song [“De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da,” from Tom Monroe on a New Wavelength in Episode 2 on DVD 1].
I also loved all the little details on Gerry Todd. You’d pull up the levers, and the hue on the supers wouldn’t be quite right, and you’d say, “Well, we’ve gotta adjust this.”
Right. He was announce-opping. It was only in the bigger-market stations that a DJ would have his own operator.
Was all of that scripted, or did you improvise any of it?
Well, whether it’s on film or on TV, you don’t want to throw too many curves at your audio and video guys. You have to set what you’re going to do, and then, within those parameters, you can move around a little bit. It was pretty scripted. I might have improvised the dialogue around the line, “Well, let me adjust this here,” but my board wasn’t functional. When I was adjusting my knob, the guy in the booth was adjusting a knob to affect it onscreen.
How did you see what was going on around you? Did you see what was happening on a screen in front of you?
I had a monitor where I could see what was coming up. So when I moved the toggle forward, I could see the super coming up that said “The Gerry Todd Show.” And when I futzed with the little hue control, I wasn’t controlling it, but I could see that the color was being changed.
There were things done in postproduction that weren’t done at the time [of filming]. But that’s no different from acting with [a blue screen], something that isn’t there until three months later.
If Gerry Todd were to surface today, what would he be doing?
Gerry would have crossed over to Web-based streaming, and he’d be involved with satellites and broadband. He might still be doing some TV, and hopefully he’d have a very lucrative contract with somebody like Samsung.
My favorite Gerry Todd bit, which isn’t on this box set, was the one where he talks about the importance of not watching too much video and getting out of the house. [“PSA: Video — Don’t Abuse It; sponsored by concerned parents of Melonville,” from Episode 95; first aired February 12, 1982.] He winds up going to an appliance store to look at the inner workings of a dishwasher that has a glass front. He goes to a pet store to look at an aquarium. He goes to a car wash and sits in a car going through it. And the whole sketch is all through glass. All of his descriptions about the experience are all television-related. When he’s in the pet store, he refers to Jacques Cousteau. I loved doing that one. It was so much fun.
Michael McDonald Is Everywhere
I love the Michael McDonald “video” bit at the end of Episode 6 in the box set, where you were driving fast and then running into the studio just in time to sing your lines. What was the inspiration for that?
Exactly what you would think. He was just everywhere. I don’t remember the group, but there was a song called “Stealing Away,” or something.
“Steal Away.” That was Robbie Dupree.
Yeah. He was omnipresent, so that people were ripping him off. He was everywhere. He was on Steely Dan albums, and by the time I heard him on [Christopher Cross’s] “Ride Like the Wind,” I thought, “Okay, we have to do something with this.”
But it was done out of reverence. I love the guy and really love his music. I think he took the Doobie Brothers to a whole other level. And I’m thrilled that he’s had the success with the Motown album.
It’s a nice return for him.
He’s a sweet guy. He’s got an amazing voice. I met him for the first time after [the sketch first aired] and he said [done in a Mike McDonald voice], “That was brutal, man. Brutal.” I told him it was out of reverence, out of admiration. He said, “No, I liked it, I liked it.”
I didn’t take it as being harsh. I thought it was funny.
I couldn’t believe how much I wound up lookin’ like the guy. But that’s to the credit of Bev Schechtman and Judi Cooper-Sealy, our makeup and hair people.
When you were running back and forth from singing in the studio to the control booth and talking to the engineers and signing the papers, were you listening to real-time playback?
Yeah, definitely, sure. And it’s clearly done with one camera.
Yeah, it was a straight-on shot, and there weren’t any cuts.
I didn’t do it with cuts, and it wound up looking real. Because if it had cuts in it, it could look like we fudged it. Here you can see he’s running in to get there just in time [to sing the next harmony line].
You could have really run yourself ragged, because besides the choruses [“such a long way to go”], he also doubled the “bop-bas” as well.
Oh, did he really?
Yeah, you would have had a heart attack trying to do all that.
Commentaries and Brother Bear
Were you asked to participate in the commentaries for the SCTV box set?
Yeah, I’m not a commentary guy, other than the one Dave [Thomas] and I did for Brother Bear. You know about that?
Golden throats: 5 Neat Guys harmonize for one and all (from left, John Candy, Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas, Moranis)
Yeah. I saw the TV commercials, and I remember thinking, “That really sounds like those guys are doing it!” So I had to buy it and check it out.
It goes further than that. But to answer your question first: I was asked to do commentary for Little Shop of Horrors [1986], Spaceballs [1987], and other movies, and I just didn’t like the idea of sitting around and talking about stuff we did years ago. It just didn’t make sense to me, didn’t really appeal to me.
Then Dave and I played these moose characters [Rutt and Tuke] in this Disney movie, Brother Bear, who were very similar to the McKenzies — although we don’t call them that — and we did a total of about a half-dozen scenes in the movie. And it came out really well. It was very easy for me to do: no makeup, no hair, no lighting; just me in a radio studio. We were linked up by satellite, because Dave lives in L.A., 3,000 miles away. We just got on the mike and improvised, and we had a great time.
The producer of the movie, Chuck Williams, had an idea for the DVD that, instead of doing a commentary, he wanted us to improvise while watching the movie. So we went and did this Mystery Science Theater 3000 type of thing — we watched the movie three or four times together over two days in Los Angeles on a big plasma screen, sitting in barcaloungers. They taped everything we did, and some of it got pretty raunchy; they cut out the worst parts. They wound up cutting it down to an original, 85-minute comedy album, basically. And the reviews have been amazing.
Would you consider doing commentaries like that in the future, then? Maybe when the next SCTV box set comes out, you do a commentary as Gerry Todd?
Well, I don’t think we would take potshots at SCTV. But as the McKenzie brothers, I’d love to do The Godfather or Taxi Driver: “Geez, eh, is he talkin’ to us? Is he talkin’ to us?”
I could see you doing Dick Cavett commenting on one of the Merv Griffin sketches, for example.
Yeah, yeah. It’s hard to improvise that kind of stuff, whereas the McKenzies are easy to improvise, because it’s the two of us, and the material is pretty basic. When you get into more challenging stuff, I’m more comfortable writing it. But that takes time, and no one is going to pay for that . . . yet.
Bob and Doug, Eh?
Do you expect to see a resurgence of the McKenzie brothers’ popularity because of the box set coming out?
The McKenzies have an audience apart from SCTV. They’re sort of perennials. The video stores, for the last 20 years, have rented and sold copies of Strange Brew [their 1983 movie].
And it’s on DVD.
I know. I was in a record store the other day, and it was front-racked, and that really shocked me. But it’s an evergreen title. There will always be another group of kids going to college, drinking beer, and discovering that movie. Many of them have never even heard of SCTV.
I don’t know that the phenomenon that surrounded the McKenzies in ’81 and ’82 could ever be recreated. I think they’re an entity unto themselves because of the album and the movie. There’s no other explanation for it being front-racked at a Tower Records here in New York.
How did you feel about making the Great White North album and having a Top 40 hit song, “Take Off”? How much of it was improvised, and how much was scripted?
When we were producing the Great White North comedy album, my experience in radio told me I needed two singles in order to get enough airplay. So we created a hit single, “Take Off,” a parody of what we thought was the perfect formula for a hit. It was 2 1/2 minutes in length, with an 11-second or so intro so that DJs could talk over it; it was uptempo, and it had a good chorus hook.
Two Toronto musicians, Kerry Crawford and Jonathan Goldsmith, who totally got the joke, created the very commercial jingle-sounding riff, and then Dave and I improv’ed our dialogue over the verse space.
We were being released by Anthem Records, where Rush had done all their albums to that point. I had gone to elementary school with Geddy Lee, and we’d heard he was a fan of the brothers. Anthem asked if he’d mind singing the chorus [“Take off/to the Great White North/Take off/It’s a beauty way to go”], and he said he’d love to. So he came in to the studio and blew us away.
The second single we had was “Twelve Days of Christmas.” Again, Dave and I improv’ed numerous takes over the tracks, and Marc Giacomelli, the producer, cut it down to what it is.
To Sketch or Not to Sketch
Do you miss doing sketch comedy at all?
I miss the kind of work we were able to do on SCTV because that was a unique time for all of us. We were young, we didn’t have any other kinds of distractions. We were all in Edmonton, where there was pretty much nothing else to do but work, and going over schedule or budget was common. And I don’t think that set of circumstances could ever intersect again.
It was unique to have that kind of time and money and passion and hunger. At the time, we had no idea we had an audience. We were winging it and making each other laugh. Then one day we found out people were watching. I mean, we were on 12:30 at night. As it turns out, we sold a lot of VCRs, because people found out about us and couldn’t stay up to see the show.
Not Ready for Prime Time
You also worked without an audience in the studio, so that played into what you were doing. You didn’t have to do the Saturday Night Live kind of thing where you deal with audience reactions.
Right. Which is why comparisons between the two shows are really not fair. That show has to be written in a finite amount of time and has to fit in with the amount of real estate they have on the stage they’re working on. And they have to try and derive laughs from a live audience, which is really gonna affect the kind of material you do, the manner of performance, and the way you block out your stuff.
It really affects the way you write, the way you stage, the way you block, the way you perform, the way you edit. Everything is different in that kind of work. It’s apples and oranges.
And we had the perhaps unfair advantage of not having to worry about what an audience was gonna think. We were in a vacuum. We were making little short films, really.
I’ve been to the 2-hour-long rehearsals of Saturday Night Live where they play it out in front of the audience and then go back and decide what makes the show and what gets cut just an hour later that night.
There have been two things that have been driving the selection and placement of material on shows like Saturday Night Live. One is the reaction that you get in the dress rehearsal. And the other is the specific self-interests of the show and the producer. You know, it wasn’t necessarily because something was good that it got front-placed — it had something to do with its recognition value, with the idea that the audience wanted to see recurring characters.
I’m not saying these weren’t good sketches, I’m just saying there was a reason you kept seeing Church Lady and Wayne and Garth and stuff like that. We didn’t have that operating for us until we got on NBC and they started suggesting to us that we might want to start developing recurring characters. It was the tail wagging the dog, which we never subscribed to.
Cuts Above
I liked that you didn’t know who was going to be on week to week or even sketch to sketch since there was such a galaxy of SCTV “stars.” You might even see a character in the audience of another show, like when you sat in as Guy Friday . . .
I remember what that was. Robin Duke wrote a sketch where Dave played Phil Donahue [Episode 58; first aired October 24, 1980] . . .
It was an all-female audience.
It was an all-female audience, and I had just finished taping Guy Friday, and I was still in makeup — and had quite the hair — and I said, “It would be hilarious if this guy was in the audience.” And so she said, “Great; come on.”
You couldn’t do that on most shows.
What I remember most about going over budget is that the pigs . . .
Carl and Fred Scutz.
Right, Carl and Fred. And the very first Carl’s Cuts [Episode 91; first aired November 6, 1981], which was this thing with me ranting about head cheese, was a real short bit I wrote one night at dinner in a restaurant in Edmonton. I was slated to tape it first up at 7 o’clock in the morning, and the makeup call was for 6:30. I couldn’t sleep that night. I was just tossing and turning, and it occurred to me that I wanted to look like a pig. I went in. Bev Schechtman was in the makeup room at 6:30, and I asked her, “Can you make me look like a pig?” She said, “Let me look around and see if I can’t find some pictures of pigs.” And she went upstairs at ITV in Edmonton, looking through some books — in those days, you just couldn’t go to a laptop and find a jpeg of a pig — and she found some pictures of pigs, taped them onto my chest, and started working.
Meantime, the studio was empty until 9:30. It took her about 2 1/2 hours to get that nose, soap out the eyebrows, get the pig makeup. And I taped from 9:30 to 10 o’clock, so basically it took 3 hours to get a 30-second bit. Now that would never happen in any tightly produced television show.
Now they’d have to get at least 5 minutes out of you to justify it.
Exactly. Of course, the next time I did the character, there was a 2-hour makeup call. Now, was it worth it? I don’t know.
Endurance Factor
So, the loaded question: What makes SCTV endure?
First, let me say that I have nothing but fond memories of the show. I had a blast. I had to pinch myself in the morning. I could not believe I was working with those people. I couldn’t believe I was getting paid to do that stuff. It was one of the great periods of my career for me, if not the best.
We did what we thought was funny without other people interfering in the creative process. We had seven writer/performers and a handful of really great writers working together in a vacuum, making short films — and making each other laugh. We really believed that if we were laughing, other people would find us funny.
That’s how Monty Python did it. If a sketch didn’t make them laugh, it didn’t make it. They were their own arbiters of what was funny or not.
Right. That’s the main thing. If you just do what’s funny without anybody interfering, I think that’s the secret. I think that’s true of SCTV and, as you say, of Python, and it’s probably true of just about any art form. Everybody needs an editor. Everybody has to read their stuff to somebody and get legitimate feedback. But if a group of people think something’s good, even if there are a group of people who aren’t going to like it, you know there are going to be people out there who will.
We didn’t have anybody saying, “Don’t do this, move this here, bring back these characters, put this upfront here.” We didn’t have anybody telling us there was an audience out there that wasn’t going to think exactly the way we thought they were going to think.
Look at the way network sitcoms are produced. You have executives come in and give notes on readthroughs, I mean . . .
I can’t imagine you’d have wanted to work in that environment.
I never did, and that’s probably why. I’d love to hear what somebody who knows how to write comedy has to say. I mean, I’m interested in any idea. When I got to filmmaking, the most democratic of environments where anybody could say anything, those were the best environments, but what you don’t want to assume is that you know what the audience is thinking. And that’s what always bothered me about the network interference. They were either kowtowing to the sponsors because they were afraid they’d alienate them, or they were just second-guessing their audience. I just never bought that notion that they were that accurate, within a couple thousand Nielsen boxes, about what audiences thought was funny. It just doesn’t work that way.
Film Flam
I know I’d feel stifled creatively if I had to deal with that kind of input. As you got into lead roles in movies, did that happen to you?
That’s pretty much why I stopped.
Are you doing any work now?
Well, I took a sabbatical. I walked away from shooting movies because I couldn’t handle the travel. I’m a single parent. I had young kids, and I found that keeping in touch with them from hotel rooms and airports wasn’t working for me. So I stopped. And I discovered after a couple years that I really didn’t miss making movies. So I started doing a little more writing, and I said no to pretty much everything except voice work. I’m a couple years away from both kids going to college, and, at that point, I might go back to something, but at this point, I don’t miss the on-camera work. I got very burnt out on the process.
On the last couple of movies I made — big-budget Hollywood movies — I really missed being able to create my own material. In the early movies I did, I was brought in to basically rewrite my stuff, whether it was Ghostbusters or Spaceballs. By the time I got to the point where I was “starring” in movies, and I had executives telling me what lines to say, that wasn’t for me. I’m really not an actor. I’m a guy who comes out of comedy, and my impetus was always to rewrite the line to make it funnier, not to try to make somebody’s precious words work.
Radio Request Line
As a former DJ, do you listen to much radio these days, or do you stick to CDs?
Even though I have a lot of CDs, I tend to listen to the radio. All day long, the classical station WQXR in New York City is on in my house. The only problem is commercials, but whaddya gonna do?
Are you familiar with satellite radio? None of their music channels have commercials.
Yeah, but I haven’t gotten around to it. I like the intimacy of live community radio. The news comes on, the weather comes on, and the business updates are right there.
XM satellite radio, with Sirius soon to follow, is now offering instant traffic and weather updates for cities like Boston and New York.
That’s good. I actually still like radio. When I was a DJ, AM was still playing Top 40, and radio wasn’t as fragmented as it is now. FM was really just starting to come on, and it would evolve into AOR, album-oriented rock. But in those days, they just called it FM radio.
Back in 1976, I had a conversation with a listener that taught me more about listeners and listening habits than anything else I came across in radio. The most requested song was “Stairway to Heaven.” And every time I answered the request line, it seemed, the request would always be “Stairway to Heaven.” [As a nod to this, Moranis had Catherine O’Hara’s character request “Stairway” by videophone in the very first Gerry Todd sketch, in Episode 80.]
One day, I was actually playing it on the radio, and I picked up the request line and said, “CHUM-FM.” And the guy on the line said, “Yeah, can you play ‘Stairway to Heaven’?”
I said, “I’m playing it.”
And he said, “I know. Can you play it again?”
[MM laughs]
I said, “Let me ask you a question. You love ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ right?”
“Yeah, it’s my favorite song.”
“And I bet you own a copy of it, don’tcha?”
And he said, “Of course I own a copy.”
So I said, “Well, why don’t you just put it on and listen to it?”
And he said, “Because I want to hear it on the radio.”
Now, what else do you have to know? I’m the same way. I like to listen to things on the radio. Maybe it’s a way of feeling connected to community, maybe it’s a sense that if you’re listening to it in your own collection, you’re missing something else on the radio. I’ve never completely figured it out, but I relate to it, and I think a lot of people do, too.
The Videosseurs
What are your thoughts on DVD?
I think it’s interesting what CD, DVD, and videocassette collections say about people. Take the guy who’s really organized, who has bought blank tapes and taped things off the air and has them all in alphabetical order. You gotta wonder how often he puts on North by Northwest. Or does he have people over and says, “Look, look, I have every Hitchcock movie!”
I think that there are collectors, watchers, lenders, and educators. I have a friend who actually just bought her first television. She’s a 45-year-old doctor, a single woman busy as hell in her life, and she finally got around to buying a monitor so she can watch movies. She’s not even going to get cable. She’s out all the time, and when she comes home, she reads. I asked her, “What movies are you going to rent?” And she says she has a friend who’s going to educate her. So here’s a guy who has a huge collection of movies and he’s going to start educating her.
Point is, there are a million different scenarios out there. And everybody, in a world where there are so many things competing for our eyeballs, has a different way of managing this stuff. I’ve got a lot of videocassettes here that I’ve collected through the years that I either bought or was given through the studios or whatnot, and every few years I have to clean ’em out. As my kids get older and older, there are some that you keep and some that you don’t. But I’m not sure how often my kids will go back and watch a movie they saw three or four times five years ago. Now they rent the movies.
I guess it’s the box-set world now: The complete, three Godfathers. When The Lord of the Rings comes out in its final incarnation with all of the bells and whistles for however many hundreds of dollars, it’ll be an expensive stocking stuffer.
Some movies actually come out with two different versions, a “regular” and an “expanded” set, the latter often just in time for Christmas. But some people will buy everything.
Right. What it’s created are so many different options for the owners and distributors of these properties to repurpose them in different forms that they’ve created several alternatives for consumers. I think that’s what dictates the relative success of them.
One of my favorite things is when you go into somebody’s house and you see they’ve still got some LPs, some 8-tracks, and some videocassettes. It’s interesting to see the evolution of audio and video technology and how different formats have rendered certain products useless.
My grandfather was an audiophile in his day. He’s long since passed away, but my grandmother still has his Akai open-reel tape machine in the dining room. It’s an interesting curio. Nowadays, it’s like, you blink, and we’re on to the next format.
Well, people still have VCRs that are functioning, and you look at the workings of a cassette with moving tape and all those parts and levers, and it’s ridiculous compared with stamping out a little platter of digital music or visual images.
Several years ago — I can’t remember exactly when, but it’s gotta be 10 or 12 years ago — the doorbell rang, and there were two enormous boxes of videocassettes with every SCTV episode on them. And I’ve never opened them. They’re still sitting in my locker downstairs in my building. I guess I can finally get rid of them because it’s all coming out on DVD.
Or you can transfer all that videotape to DVD.
The problem is, there aren’t enough hours in the day.
Web Headed
I’d put myself in two of the camps you mentioned earlier: I’m both a collector and an educator. I like to have the stuff, but I also like telling people — or showing them, or having them listen to stuff I think is cool — so they can get interested in it.
I do a lot of time killing by reading on the Internet. I’ve found the ability to move around quickly from research tool to search engine to blog to been-published periodicals. It’s just amazing how much information I can read in a short amount of time. The only hard copy I subscribe to is The New York Times daily and a couple of magazines like The New Yorker. I still like to get a newspaper coming in.
Ah, you gotta get that newsprint on your fingers.
Gotta get a little newsprint on your fingers every day, I think. And I like to look at the ads, the whole thing. But I kill a good couple of hours daily just reading all over the place, and I’m one of these guys who will cut and paste and link something, or send a piece along that reminds me of somebody. If there’s something that I think is a must-read for somebody, I’ll send it to them and really piss them off.
Now, the audio version of that is that somebody gives you a mix of songs, or whatever. And when video gets to that — when somebody can send some files to my TV with 3 minutes from Conan O’Brien and a sketch they saw here and a song they saw there — when the files and the clips start moving around as easily as they are with MP3 files, I think that’s when it’ll take on a whole other level.
At this point, it’s a matter of compression rates, since videoclips take up so much space. It’s still difficult to download an hour’s worth of a TV show or movie quickly and efficiently.
People are doing other things with their time and their money. Some people are downloading music, and things are really fragmented. But back when I was working in radio and growing up and listening to music, people were still buying singles, buying 45s. Teenage girls were buying Top 10 records, and people were buying albums. And, undoubtedly, you’d wind up disappointed because an album would come up with two good songs and eight bad ones. Now, not dissimilar to that, you can watch an hour-long television show, and there’s one good sketch in it, so why invest the hour for one good sketch when you can bypass the whole thing and just get the file on the good sketch? But what you need is the discerning critic and the aggregate and the point of dissemination.
You don’t watch much TV, do you?
News and sports, mainly. And I surf like everyone else does. But AOL has this thing called TV’s Top 5. It’s a great 2-minute way of watching some of the best moments of the 4 hours of TV you didn’t want to sit through the night before. Now if there were some sort of video aggregator, a sort of a Drudge Report for TV, where a collective of people could take the very best of everything and repurpose it, then that would take video to the next level.
I think E! had Talk Soup, which sort of served the same function . . .
That’s a good point. E! originally had that, yes. Talk Soup is a perfect example of that.
I think they had started to broaden the scope from just recapping talk shows. Soap Net has a show like that for soap operas, too — Soap Talk, co-hosted by Lisa Rinna.
You’re right.
Well, it’s a big job for somebody.
Tom Shales. For somebody who sits on the sofa all day and watches television shows.
You mean, somebody else has got to do it.
Right.
Down on Download
As I sit here, I’m surrounded by at least 500 CDs, and I still buy a lot of stuff, whereas a lot of other people are more inclined to want to download things for free, and I want to feel I’m giving the money to people who deserve it.
What’s interesting is that my kids went through the download thing, and they don’t do it anymore — not because it’s illegal, but because it’s sort of redundant.
Actually, the music that they’re interested in are bands like Phish, who have free downloads or sell their CDs at their concerts. They’ve sort of circumvented the whole problem by catering to a market that’s outside of that world and loyal to them.
A lot of bands go on tour all summer, and they’ll let you purchase and download all the shows you want. It’s acceptable now.
Not too many people had a problem with selling blank tape. The unit that I still have in my kitchen — the one that’s always tuned to QXR — is a Denon stereo system that has a three-CD changer and dual cassette decks. Now why are they selling me two cassette decks if not for me to do some dubbing? [laughs] So whether I’m dubbing from CD or tape to tape, I’ve got a factory here if I want to use it.
The real die-hard Phish Heads that go to my kids’ school will burn their friends copies of concerts that they’ve bought directly from Phish. And nobody’s got a problem of selling CDs. The argument is a little more complex than just “no downloading.” So they cultivate their fanbase, who will buy their merchandise and their tickets, and they’re in a different business than rock & roll stars used to be in.
Do you still listen to much popular music at all?
I listen to either classical or jazz. Occasionally when I’m in my car — which, living in New York City, isn’t that often — if I’m in the mood, I’ll scan around to look for some contemporary, for lack of a better word, music. But I often wind up disappointed and will end up on a classic rock station for a song or two. And then I’ll hear something I recognize from having played it a thousand times when I was a DJ and don’t want to hear it again. Or maybe I’ll listen to it and it’ll bring back memories. But I don’t love the music that’s out there now, I have to say.
Actually, one of the most recent things I’ve done — I’ve always written songs. And about a year ago, out of the blue, I just wrote a bunch of songs. For lack of a better explanation, they’re more country than anything. And I actually demo’ed four or five of them, and I’m not sure at this point what I’m going to do with them — whether I’m going to fold them into a full-length video or a movie. But, boy, I had a good time doing that.