#209 - Joesf Glaude - Musician/Professor

Unknown Speaker (0:06): Speaking of which, welcome YouTube and Twitchers. We got the great and powerful Joseph Cloud with us.

Unknown Speaker (0:58): I

Unknown Speaker (1:02): got too excited playing along, man. I forgot to stop the music. Chris will get a kick out of that.

Unknown Speaker (1:07): That's just a cool song, man. I love it.

Speaker 0 (1:09): Thank you so much. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. Chris is on vacation, and he trusted me to drive the ship. So I'm going to thank him if he's out there listening because he's having a good time. He might not be listening.

Speaker 0 (1:22): But if he is, thanks for, hooking us up with Joseph. This is, what, about a year since we talked to you last time, Joseph? It has been. Yeah. So fellow guitar player.

Speaker 0 (1:35): It's kinda cool that he hooked us up because I was just thinking when I was playing that song, it's simple, and somebody could sit down and figure that song out in two seconds. Right? Right. It was it was intended that way. But the cool thing is I used to try to get the most out of the least, right?

Speaker 0 (1:57): And it's simply because I wasn't very good. I mean, let's be honest. I'm always honest with myself. So at my limitation, I'm like, how good can I make it? Or how can I make it cool with my limited knowledge of what I can do?

Speaker 0 (2:11): So, like that first part of that riff is there's like a half step bend in there, right? You know that because you're a music teacher and you hear it. But the average person, if they were just learning the song, they're just gonna play that e g a and then back, and they'd be right. But it's that little half step bend in there that gave It Chris idea for the melody. Right?

Speaker 0 (2:38): Yeah. Yeah. And then the next time I do play it straight. So it's every other time you're gonna do that little half step bend in there, and it triggered his brain to sing a different way on each part of the you know, each measure is a different character, so to speak. Right.

Speaker 0 (2:57): You know, that's where the melody came from, which those are the things that I was proud of is even with my limited knowledge, I always tried to get the economy of motion. Right? How can I get the most out of the least?

Speaker 1 (3:11): Well, you know, think think think about David Gilmore. I mean, the guy has never played a fast riff in his life.

Unknown Speaker (3:18): And he'll admit because he can't.

Speaker 1 (3:21): As every note he plays is important, and it's awesome.

Speaker 0 (3:26): And truth be told, you can tell me if I'm wrong, but I think it's harder to fill those spaces at that tempo than it is to play fast.

Speaker 1 (3:37): I agree. It it is much harder because the notes are are more important. If you're playing flat fast, you know, number one, it's not memorable. People oh, dude. It was so fast.

Speaker 1 (3:49): Okay? It's like, I'm not running down Steve Vai, Joe Satriani. Okay? Great players. K?

Speaker 1 (3:56): But it gets tiring after a while. Agreed. Per album, Joe Saltran's got maybe two, three songs that I will listen to more consistently because they're the slower songs in which she takes time for a melody. Or think about one of the greatest solos of all time for me is still Here I Go Again, Adrian Vanderberg.

Unknown Speaker (4:16): That's a great solo, man. Forgot about that one.

Speaker 1 (4:19): Think about how slow he starts on that. Nice, strong. But, man, when he throws on that fire, boy and it means something when he throws it in.

Speaker 0 (4:32): You took the words right out of my mouth. Now that speed means something because you just sang that first part of that guitar solo just like a melody, which is if a guitar teacher's worth his salt, and mine was, thankfully, he's gonna tell you, when you're soloing, your job is to pick up where the vocal left off until that vocal picks up again, right? Your job is not to be the star of the show, it's not to be the main attraction, -PETER: it's simply to give the audience a mental break from the singer for just a second,

Unknown Speaker (5:07): Right. Yeah.

Speaker 0 (5:08): So if you make that solo just like the singer would sing, you do exactly what Joseph just did. You sing the solo instead of remember it in your mind or however else you wanna say it, you know? You can sing every note to comfortably know.

Unknown Speaker (5:25): Yeah. Oh, man. My favorite.

Speaker 0 (5:28): Yes. I think that's the greatest guitar solo ever written, hands down, across any genre. I just if you want an example of how you make a guitar convey motion to an entire planet, that's it.

Unknown Speaker (5:43): Yeah.

Speaker 0 (5:44): That solo's made me cry in the right moment, you know?

Speaker 1 (5:48): One of the things that I miss in a lot of modern music is thematic guitar playing, creating a theme.

Unknown Speaker (5:56): Thank you.

Speaker 1 (5:57): Yeah. Think think about like, oh, trying to say, Kansas.

Speaker 0 (6:20): And because we know the song, I can hear the rest of the band in my head, right? Yep. And that's where that came from, was they found their part within that riff. But you're right, it's everybody knows what's coming next on each phrase that you just played.

Unknown Speaker (6:38): -PETER: Yeah.

Speaker 0 (6:39): Yeah. Plus, you're not a fan of Kansas and you've never heard the song. I mean, you've probably been living under a rock, but that's a great example of what you just said about thematic guitar playing.

Unknown Speaker (6:47): -PETER: Right.

Speaker 0 (6:48): Eddie doesn't get enough credit in Van Halen for doing that as a rhythm guitar player. Was actually his forte. Yeah. And I think that he probably took offense to people not noticing that. His rhythms were outstanding.

Speaker 0 (7:04): Thank you.

Unknown Speaker (7:05): Yeah. I've told people that before that.

Unknown Speaker (7:11): Yeah.

Speaker 1 (7:21): Running with the devil, man. What a great, great but, you know, any great lead guitar player is gonna be a great rhythm guitar player.

Unknown Speaker (7:28): Jake E. Lee is another great example.

Speaker 1 (7:30): Oh, no kidding, man. That guy is phenomenal.

Speaker 0 (7:34): Can sing his you can't you can not only sing his solos, you can sing his riffs.

Unknown Speaker (7:38): Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 0 (7:40): You know, think of like, Shot in the Dark or The Ultimate Sand riff or Bark at the Moon. You know, those you can hear them as soon as you say the title.

Unknown Speaker (7:50): Oh, yeah.

Unknown Speaker (7:51): He didn't get enough credit.

Speaker 1 (7:53): No. No, he didn't. It's it's funny because I always talk about Nancy Wilson. Okay?

Speaker 0 (7:58): Oh, there's another badass guitar player.

Speaker 1 (8:00): I know, man. Her little,

Unknown Speaker (8:20): Yeah. That's outstanding, man. Very good.

Speaker 1 (8:23): Thank you. She was people were just starting to notice her. She's coming on the heels of Hendrix, Eric Clompton, Jeff Beck. And it was like, man, that Nancy Rosen goes, oh, Eddie Van Halen. It's like, they just missed her because Eddie pops on this phase with

Speaker 0 (8:45): Well, and check this out. She's a woman in the seventies. Yeah. She's a rhythm guitar player, not a lead guitar player. And she has to stand behind one of the greatest female front men to ever grace the stage.

Unknown Speaker (8:58): No kidding. That's a

Speaker 0 (9:00): lot to overcome. And I agree with you, Joseph. It took the world years to figure out that Nancy Wilson is a badass.

Speaker 1 (9:07): Yeah. Yeah. And it's sad. And she is a great league guitar player.

Unknown Speaker (9:11): She is.

Unknown Speaker (9:11): She gets overlooked for her skills.

Speaker 0 (9:13): I should have said she chose to play rhythm. She's not a rhythm guitar player. She chooses to play rhythm because that's what she enjoys for the most part. And like you said, if you go to a Hart concert, which I have, that's where I learned, holy shit, she tears it up too, because she plays a lot of lead guitar that you don't know about.

Speaker 1 (9:29): Right. I told her that I got to play with her once.

Unknown Speaker (9:34): Did we talk about that last time? I'm I don't know.

Speaker 1 (9:38): Did or not? Yeah. I was in the guitar store and I was playing this, you know, because George Harrison. And this chick walks in and she sits down. I look at her and thinking, I know who that is.

Speaker 1 (9:56): But I couldn't place it because it's out of context. And then she goes You know, just nailing the riffs. And so we messed around and started doing and Jesus and we're just walking riffs back and forth. Guy comes in and is like, hey, we got your stuff. And because, okay.

Speaker 1 (10:21): Hey, thanks for the jam. She walks out. I'm trying to think, I know who that is. But I wasn't thinking famous. As I was leaving, the guy, the guy behind the counter goes, hey, Nancy left something for you.

Speaker 1 (10:37): Really? And it was tickets to their show that night with a note that said, Hey, thanks for not being a creepy fan. I appreciate it.

Unknown Speaker (10:46): That's awesome.

Unknown Speaker (10:47): Had I noticed had I recognized her, I would have been a creepy fan.

Speaker 0 (10:52): And that's the crazy thing, man. You don't know how you would have reacted otherwise, you know? Yeah. You might have done just what you did because I'll tell you one thing that's really, and obviously, I never got to be at the level she was, but even at the microcosm that I got to experience when, you know, we were opening for national acts, you finally got to meet some of those people that, like when I met Jason Rainey from Sacred Reich, I walked in the Mason jar the first time, and that's the first person I saw. Was like, Hey, dude, had your poster on my wall.

Speaker 0 (11:22): Yeah. And he's like, Yeah. And here I am standing here talking to you at 02:00 on a Tuesday afternoon about booking your band for a gig now, right? So just don't get too excited. So I hope you really like playing music was we talked for probably, I don't know, two or three hours that day.

Speaker 0 (11:39): Couldn't have been a nicer guy, but his message was, I hope you really liked playing music because this is as glamorous as it gets for most people. Yeah. Which is why I'm wearing their shirt today. Rest in peace, Jason. Couldn't have been a nicer guy to me.

Speaker 0 (11:51): That was our end to Metal Blade Records. That was our end to every hard rock club in Phoenix, you know? I just dropped his name as, you know, he runs sound for us at the Mason jar, you know? We're good enough to jam there. We're probably good enough to jam at your club.

Unknown Speaker (12:07): Yeah.

Speaker 0 (12:07): You need people like that because you know the music business is more about who you know than how good you are. Everybody's good at Yeah. That

Speaker 1 (12:17): I was a hired gun back in the '80s, I told you that before, And most of the guys that I met were really, really cool. Most of them were really patient. They wanted professionalism. But they also recognized that you were human. You screwed up.

Unknown Speaker (12:33): Sure.

Speaker 1 (12:34): And, you know, it it it is interesting, you know, doing doing session work, you know, working in a studio. It was funny how many of these guys can play the song live but can't do it right in the studio.

Speaker 0 (12:46): I had that problem myself for a long time. I'm not gonna lie.

Unknown Speaker (12:49): Really? Yeah.

Speaker 0 (12:50): It it got to the point where I had and I have to do it for myself now because, you know, most of us are self producing, playing at I just have to hit record and start jamming and then cut it where I wanna actually start my playing, right? That's how I did it when I was recording to tape too. Song you heard I recorded in our first studio we built for Nemesis. I did all the production on that. So that was my first attempt.

Speaker 0 (13:18): I always thought it was pretty good for I had no idea what I was doing. Just a little bit of knowledge that I could find from people back then. There was no real Internet, you know? Right. I'm recording to an eight track reel to reel machine.

Speaker 0 (13:30): So I always knew what I wanted to hear. I just kept turning knobs and, you know, hitting the I had an idea you couldn't peak, you know, tape saturation was so much. I figured out what that was. And all of a sudden, you felt the song start to develop, but there is that red light syndrome for a lot of people, and I sympathize with them because it took me a while to get over it. I'm not sure I ever really got over it.

Unknown Speaker (13:58): I just figured out a way to record that worked for me.

Speaker 1 (14:01): Yeah. Yeah. That's probably true of a lot of people. You know, I have to just pretend, actually, one of the tricks I learned in the studio was, I remember Ellis Billups, who was one of the first engineers that I worked with, he didn't say, Look, just play the song, okay? I got everything turned off.

Speaker 1 (14:20): Just play the song. And I would relax and I'd play it, I'd play it, I'd play it. Goes, fooled you. I recorded it.

Speaker 0 (14:27): Chris has a great story about that. His last band he was in, they recorded I'll never remember where he recorded. One of them was Dolly Parton's studio, I know in Nashville. And I think that was the place where he was supposed to go in and just run through the songs as kind of like a run through, just like you just described. We're gonna just get our levels and we're gonna, you know, figure out what effects we're gonna put on your voice or whatever.

Speaker 0 (14:51): And he got done after, I don't know, typical eight hour day in the studio or something. And he's like, okay, I'll see you tomorrow. And the guy was like, Now you're done. Yeah. He had been recording all day long while he told him he was getting levels and setting EQ.

Speaker 0 (15:07): And like you said, that's a damn good producer that made the artist feel comfortable in the studio to the point where, you know, he thought this is what I'm doing and I'll be back tomorrow. Now he was done.

Speaker 1 (15:18): Yeah. What's funny is sometimes so and I'd always tell people, I released an album called Rescue to Refuge. Okay. It was it's for Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge. All proceeds go directly to support Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge.

Speaker 1 (15:34): They're an actual big cat, rescue. In fact, they got some of the Tiger King's cats. But I was in the studio with Louis Drap, and we were doing the mix stuff. And I had this song. It was just a little and I liked it, but I thought it should have been done on something else.

Speaker 1 (16:06): So I asked him, hey, can I try this on the piano? So I sat down on the piano. I played it out, and we went back and listened to it. Just, okay. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (16:16): I think it should be done on piano, but something's missing. So I grabbed the cello and I said, I don't And want to do I just I laid down a cello part. And Lewis said, that actually sounds like it's a background for something else. So I decided to pull my flute out and I laid in a, a flute part. You know, it was a guitar melody that I had an idea for, but I played it on the flute and we just kind of played through it and went back and listened to it.

Speaker 1 (16:47): Everything was done on the first take. Lewis said, I can mix this. This is, this is what you want. And the whole song was written and mixed and mastered in under thirty minutes.

Speaker 0 (16:59): Now you see ladies and gentlemen, why I am a humble guitar player, because however good you think I can do anything on a guitar, and for those people who think I can, bless you. This guy just told you he tried four or five different instruments for the same part just to find out which one worked the best. That's awesome, Joseph. It really is. And Chris is too, man.

Speaker 0 (17:21): That's why I want to harp on this just a little bit. We are just fascinated with multi instrumentalists who can not only come up with an idea like him and I can, you know, I can sit here and do the same thing, but I can only do it here. I can play the bass passable. I could do that in a band. So I can say I can play guitar and bass.

Speaker 0 (17:39): Right? That's it. As far as professionally where I could get away with it and people would believe that I was good enough to do it, I just find it fascinating. Guys like you, Prince, Phil Collins, you know, these people who can just say, I don't know. We need some woodwind here.

Speaker 0 (17:55): You know, let me just try it here. Maybe we, like you said, we need the flute or we need a triangle or my brain doesn't go there. It goes to the guitar and the beat and the melody. That's about as far as I can come up with, which is why we stuck with rock and roll.

Speaker 1 (18:13): But as long as it's cool, as long as it's fun, all Sure. That

Speaker 0 (18:18): That's why I started off. I'm not sure which part we recorded, but I know you and I started off talking about my own limitations, right? That's why I always stuck there songwriting wise too, because some of the best advice I got was from my guitar teacher about how to put a band together, you know, not playing beyond your limitations. That's why a lot of bands' first record are so good, not only because they had so much time to write it, which everybody touts and they're right, But it's also because there was an innocence there at the time. They didn't know they were good or how good Yeah.

Speaker 0 (18:51): They were, you

Speaker 1 (18:54): Well, there was a funny interview with Eric Clampton, and, there's no guitar magazine, and they're ask asking a lot of these musicians, What's your worst nightmare? And Eric Clapton said that one day they're gonna find out I'm a total fraud.

Speaker 0 (19:08): That's such a and I agree with him a 100%. Yeah. Because what do you say when somebody says, how do you do that? And you get that a lot. You, you know, rightfully so, you should have way more followers than you do.

Speaker 0 (19:20): You have a lot, but you your content is so positive and your music is outstanding. Right? Joseph has played with orchestras. He and we we'll talk about that, but you're looking at a professional musician, a guy who's been there, done that, toured. You would never know it because you're so humble.

Speaker 0 (19:40): And I agree with what you said earlier. Most of my interactions in the music industry were 99.999% positive.

Speaker 1 (19:48): Yeah. Yeah. Most of those guys are really good, and most of them are grateful and appreciative. One one of the stories I always tell is, you know, I worked with the band America.

Unknown Speaker (19:58): Awesome.

Speaker 1 (19:59): And yeah, I love those guys. Jerry and And were so we were done playing and we were all out having dinner and people were bothering Jerry and Dewey the whole time when they recognized him. We're trying to have dinner and Dewey goes, man, the next person that talks, I'm gonna cut their heart out with a spoon. And this guy walks up to him and goes, hey, I don't wanna bother you guys. But, and Joe- and Dewey turned around.

Speaker 1 (20:25): I thought he was gonna rip into him. And he's like, Oh, no, no, no. Hey, how you doing, man? Because- because, Yeah, I just saw your show. And- and I- and again, I don't wanna bother you.

Speaker 1 (20:35): He goes, No, no, no. Tell me, how was the show? And he's talking to him, just friendly as can be. And, you know, let his wife take a picture of the guy with the band and ask him about that later. Said, Man, I thought you were gonna tear into that guy.

Speaker 1 (20:47): He goes, Man, that guy gives me the freedom to do what I do right now.

Speaker 0 (20:51): Yep. So to your bandmates and your crew, you can have that, Oh, Jesus, do I really have to do this? Yeah. But when you turn around and you face the people that paid the money to see you play, you're smiling and thank you. Yeah.

Speaker 0 (21:07): And that's the way you should be, and that was my point of not only did I have a great guitar teacher, I had a great mentor who knew the business, and that was one of his golden rules, man. Yeah. No matter how good you get, there's always somebody better, Right. You know? I just encountered it right here.

Speaker 0 (21:22): Hooked up on a podcast with a guy who's a multi instrumentalist. I really am not. So had I been that egotistical, I'm the best guitar player ever attitude my whole life, I wouldn't have the appreciation for what you can do. Right? Right.

Speaker 0 (21:39): And most musicians that I've encountered are more exactly what you described. We all have an appreciation for what each other has in their own talent. I'm not a cover band guy, right? So when I hear you rip off your own interpretation on a guitar of a song that everybody knows and loves, and you make it your own, that's so cool. You know, Chris and I both have an appreciation for that too.

Speaker 0 (22:05): I know you play a lot of things straight, and I do too, the few cover songs that I do do, but most of your stuff, you have a really cool way of interpreting it yourself and still paying homage to the original melody and the chord structure because you have to do that, of course.

Speaker 1 (22:21): I'd probably owe that to the classical training.

Unknown Speaker (22:26): That's my question.

Speaker 1 (22:27): Yeah. They always, you know, you know, everyone should play the song as they feel it or they believe in it. You know, you have variations on a theme, you know, as long as you've got the essence of it down. And I'll I'll have my students listen to Christopher Parkman play a classical piece, then listen to John Williams play it, then listen to Elliot Fisk play it, then listen to Kazuya De Yamashita play it. And each one is different.

Speaker 1 (22:54): It's the same song. Or we're actually talking about radical differences. So Goby would play Romanza like, just very straight. Carlos Montoya does a version, he goes

Unknown Speaker (23:21): It's got a swing to it.

Speaker 1 (23:22): Yeah. Sabikas does it like this.

Speaker 0 (23:49): Is that a flamenco style then?

Unknown Speaker (23:51): Yeah. I love that sound, dude. Oh, me too. Me too.

Speaker 0 (23:56): I was just getting ready to say if anybody's ever seen the movie Crossroads, I'm Steve Vye right now, and Joseph is slaying me because I could never flamenco is something that I need to start practicing before my time runs out because I so appreciate that sound. And damn, do you make that sound good?

Speaker 1 (24:14): Yeah. That was spooky, I know some great Flamenco players. You know, my weakness is actually the pick because I started off, my first teacher was a jazz guy.

Speaker 0 (24:25): Oh, see, I wish we lived closer because I wanna get that finger style down, man. Yeah. I really do.

Speaker 1 (24:30): See, but this felt natural to me when I, when I started using a pick. And so my leads, and that's not as, it's never going to be as clean and nice. This

Speaker 0 (24:48): See now, once again, I became a fairly interesting lead player because I wasn't very good. Right? I had to stay.

Speaker 1 (24:58): Yeah. See, that's great. I love that man. Yeah. Great dynamic control.

Speaker 1 (25:05): That's just

Speaker 0 (25:10): Yeah. I owe that to my drummer. So this is a true story, Joseph, and you're gonna laugh your ass off and everybody does, but I I'm humble, man. I'll throw myself under the bus. I grew up in a small town.

Speaker 0 (25:24): I moved to Arizona when I was 19 with the same dream everybody has. I'm gonna start a band. I'm gonna tour the world. I'm gonna see the world for free, and I'm not gonna have to have a real job. Right?

Speaker 0 (25:35): Those were my two motivations. So I did that. You know, we got signed to a record label. Never got to tour the world, but we got to open up for a lot of great bands. I got to have a lot of fun.

Speaker 0 (25:47): But when I got there and I met Scott, when we got done jamming the first time, he just shook his head and he was like, I have never jammed with somebody who can play a guitar so well. And that's what he meant, dynamically and Yeah. Not hitting a lot of bad notes and not a lot of erroneous noises. And he says, they can't keep time to save their fucking life. He's like, do you do you even know where the one is?

Speaker 0 (26:16): I said, no. And here's why. Because I'm sure I'm not gonna throw Bob under the bus as a teacher. He probably told me to play with metronome every time I took a lesson, but I never did. I just wanted to know how to make this thing do what I wanted it to do.

Speaker 0 (26:33): Wasn't concerned with playing other people's music, which is why I don't know a lot of cover songs. I simply wanted to make it do what I wanted it to do. To hear you say that as a teacher is a huge compliment because that means I achieved what I wanted to do. I wanna make it sound however I want. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (27:01): See, I, I love that. And I wish I had better control of the pentatonic scale because that's not my natural inclination. You know? When I hear a chord, like if I hear an E7 chord, my first thought, Mixolydian.

Speaker 0 (27:21): I know that name. I don't know how to play that scale.

Speaker 1 (27:25): Yeah. Or, you know, I know that if I'm playing an A7 or E7, I know I'm in the key of A. So or I think whole tone scales, but I always overlook the most obvious.

Speaker 0 (27:43): And there's I even break it down even simpler. So if I'm gonna play an E minor scale, I'm leaving about half of those now notes out that you just accounted for that I always forget I can play. I simply go open all the way down. Mhmm. So what I have just discovered, even in the last probably fifteen or twenty years is, like I just showed you before we started, I learned, like you've known all along, that I can make that go all the way down the neck, right?

Unknown Speaker (28:14): Right.

Speaker 0 (28:20): My pickup's screwed up, so can't hear those notes very well down there. But, yeah, I learned that I could move it down the neck, and that's something I always wanted to do. I could always do it in the key of a cause as we established, that's the first scale I learned. I got command of that pretty well. I actually can do that relative major and minor fairly well, which makes me really sound like I know what I'm doing when I'm playing within a song.

Speaker 0 (28:43): Mhmm. Because I'll switch it up between c major and a minor a lot.

Unknown Speaker (28:47): Right.

Speaker 0 (28:58): Then I'll try and sneak the blue scale in there. And every now and then you're like, Nope, can't do that. No.

Speaker 1 (29:03): It's actually one of the tricks that I tell my students. I show them to get space on the neck. You know, I teach them to play within the box. You know? Yep.

Unknown Speaker (29:15): K. But right here, have your a minor. So you can actually start here.

Speaker 0 (29:30): Yes. See, those first notes that you started with are the ones that I just found that are outside the box. Right? I found I probably played lead for an embarrassingly long time, twelve years maybe, before I ever realized how to get I always wanted to move, but every time I tried to move, I didn't realize that it was like you said, there's patterns outside that box, but they're not full patterns. Right?

Speaker 0 (29:58): I didn't realize it doesn't go all the way up and down the neck or up and down the strings is what I'm They're trying to just little boxes outside the full pentatonic box, which is how you watch watch Zach Wylde start at the top and end up down here at that screaming high note. Right? He understands how to keep shifting that down the neck, but it doesn't always start on the low E string as my point.

Speaker 1 (30:22): My brain wants pit control. That guy's a freak when it comes to pit control.

Speaker 0 (30:29): Isn't he? Oh my I've seen it from the second row in a club that only held 3,000 people. This is when Black Label Society had Rob Trujillo playing with him. Yeah. And Zach was still drinking like a fiend.

Speaker 0 (30:44): But he played his ass off, dude. If he missed a note, I never saw it. And that's the one thing I noticed was, man, for his speed, everything is so clean. I can hear every note, right? Yeah.

Speaker 0 (30:56): That's so hard to do.

Unknown Speaker (30:58): Yes, it is.

Speaker 0 (31:00): You know that? Making that tremolo picking sound clean was something that took me a long time to it's how you hold your pick. It really is. Nice. Thank you.

Speaker 0 (31:26): Chris and I just talked about that on the last show. That is one thing I can do is make the make the emotion convey what I want it to, you know? Yeah. It was funny. One of the girls I dated, she always said, even though you don't say how you feel, you give it away when you pick up your guitar.

Speaker 0 (31:44): You know? Right. Sometimes I'm playing slow blues and it's sad, and sometimes I'm playing things that are fast and happy, and you don't realize it. You just do it unconsciously.

Unknown Speaker (31:53): Right. Yeah.

Speaker 0 (31:57): So what have you mostly been up to since the last time we saw you, Joseph? Follow you I on know a lot of other people don't, but I see you've been playing some cool shows.

Speaker 1 (32:06): Yeah. Yeah. Doing a lot of a lot of shit. And the the sad tale of woe, Cheap Trick had to cancel some dates. Somebody got sick.

Speaker 1 (32:17): No. So guess who's not opening for Cheap Trick tonight?

Unknown Speaker (32:20): Oh, man.

Unknown Speaker (32:21): And I was so excited, man, because I knew I was gonna meet Rick Nielsen.

Speaker 0 (32:26): And we were so excited for you because I was born and raised in Illinois. Chris was born here. He lived here till he was four, if I remember, right? But, you know, he's still a native of Illinois, so we're obviously huge Cheap Trick fans. And when I saw your email, I was like, we're gonna do whatever it takes to make that happen for Joseph up to and including canceling the show till whenever, you know?

Unknown Speaker (32:50): That

Speaker 1 (32:50): reason My wife is bummed too, because she usually would trade me in for Robin Xander.

Speaker 0 (32:54): Well, I think everybody's supposed to have that one fantasy hall pass, as they say. Mine has been, still is, Jennifer Aniston, for sure. She doesn't age. I think she keeps getting cuter.

Speaker 1 (33:12): My first big crush was actually Lieutenant O'Hora.

Speaker 0 (33:18): Well, because she had some huge knockers, dude.

Speaker 1 (33:21): She's hot. And and this is gonna sound terrible, but it's like or not terrible, but, I also like Zoe Saldanha, man. She makes a she makes a great O'Hara too.

Unknown Speaker (33:31): Oh, for sure. Yeah. I agree.

Unknown Speaker (33:34): And anytime Gamora wants to kick my butt, I'll go for the green lady.

Unknown Speaker (33:42): Oh, that's hilarious, But,

Speaker 1 (33:44): yeah, still still, we're we're we're going back from the studio again, doing some work. I'm playing bass for a couple of different bands right now. I'm- I'm doing a lot of session work. I'm doing some session work down at church studios. So, you know, basically anything I can do to- to- to- to play because I just love playing.

Speaker 1 (34:05): Still working on it from the state. I got my Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge shirt on.

Speaker 0 (34:09): Yes. Everybody go follow that at all the social medias. Go to Spotify. Right? You can follow that.

Speaker 0 (34:18): You can listen to it every day for free. That You have them called

Unknown Speaker (34:22): Rescue to Refuge.

Speaker 0 (34:23): Yes, please go do that, ladies and gentlemen. Might cost you $0 Every time you listen to it, a donation goes to support the wild cats, right?

Speaker 1 (34:31): Yep. Yep. They're trying to get a bill passed. And this is gonna come as a shock to you, but politicians are a bunch of lying douchebags.

Unknown Speaker (34:40): No. Say it. No. How dare you?

Unknown Speaker (34:41): Yeah. I know. Hard to believe.

Speaker 0 (34:45): We're gonna end the show now because now he's talking things that just aren't true, ladies and gentlemen.

Speaker 1 (34:52): They tried to get a bill passed called the Day Cat Protection, and Safety Act. And you know, it was a nice clean bill. It took care of the problem. And it took them six years to get it passed, and they had to cram all this other garbage into it that didn't need to be there.

Speaker 0 (35:09): That's the part that right there. Why can't you just pass a law that's just for what it was intended for? Why does there have to be 90 pages of bullshit behind that one page? Right?

Speaker 1 (35:20): Yeah. Yeah. It it's like that that's not what you know, I generally tell people, I used to be libertarian. I'm really closer to political anarchist at this point.

Speaker 0 (35:30): I love that. I'm adopting that, and now I'm in your party, Joseph. Okay. It's me and you and whoever wants to join us because, real quick, not to interrupt you, I'll let you finish your story. But I wanna say, don't ever quit posting what you're posting online.

Speaker 0 (35:46): I know you get frustrated. I tend to believe that I am what I'd like to call above average intelligence. I've worked at that. I pride myself on that. I educated myself.

Speaker 0 (35:58): I get your humor. So the people who don't get your humor need to wake the fuck up. Right? Yeah. You know?

Speaker 0 (36:06): He's making people laugh. That's my intention too. Right? When I put stuff like that out there that's could be taken both ways, it's always intended to make people laugh. So I always take it that way.

Speaker 0 (36:19): That's why I'm always trying as much as I can when I see your stuff that could be controversial to laugh at it, put a laughy face on there, say, laugh out loud. Feel the same way. Just anyway.

Speaker 1 (36:31): Yeah. You know, know, there's no reason for people not getting along. Two of my best friends, I've known her since 1980. My friend Namir is a Jew from Israel. Okay.

Speaker 1 (36:42): Our mutual friend, Sadiq, is a Muslim from Afghanistan. K. The three of us have been friends for forty plus years.

Speaker 0 (36:52): And you said you told the story last time, but I love the story. You're Catholic. Right?

Unknown Speaker (36:56): Yep.

Unknown Speaker (36:57): So you have a Catholic, a Muslim, and a A Jew. And a Jew walk into a bar. Right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 (37:04): And it's like, we don't have to agree. You know? The important thing is, is that we enjoy each other's company. And we do talk politics, religion. We talk, social justice, you know, all kinds of things like that.

Speaker 0 (37:18): It sounds to me, Joseph, like you did the same thing in your world, and this is what I require of all my friends. I have levels of friends, the people that are near and dear to my heart that I call when I need help, they all have to have a, what I call a gallow sense of humor, right? Yeah. We have to be able to say, and we do horrible things to each other to just keep your brain active or whatever. You know, I think it's a sign of intelligence when people do stuff like that because I get bored.

Speaker 0 (37:48): Know? Yeah. The mundaneness of this society and this world are so foreign to the way I would have done things if people put me in charge. Probably good thing I didn't, but I think people be a lot happier. You know, we don't set life up for the average person to be able to enjoy it anymore, is why you get taken the wrong way.

Speaker 0 (38:10): Those people are so on edge that they have no humor left in their life. That's why I say don't ever quit doing it because that's their loss. The fact that they're so offended, like, over yourself, man. Sure there's some way you could improve your life other than denigrating your post.

Speaker 1 (38:27): Yeah. My my my philosophy on a lot of things, if what you believe doesn't hurt anyone else, what do I care?

Speaker 0 (38:35): We agree so much on that. I say that almost verbatim.

Speaker 1 (38:38): Yeah. Like I said, you know, Sadiq and I had had a difference of agreement on something. Okay, I'm gonna say it. Okay. Sadiq was happy that we had a Muslim president.

Unknown Speaker (38:49): Okay? I told him, well, Obama says he's a Christian. Goes, no, no, he wouldn't say Madras is my cousin so and so.

Unknown Speaker (38:54): Trump says he's a Christian too.

Speaker 1 (38:55): Trump says he's a Christian. Okay? All these people. Trump's religion is business. Obama's religion is politics.

Speaker 1 (39:02): Okay? If Sadiq wants to believe that Obama is a Muslim, hallelujah. Sure. May it doesn't Even if he is, who cares? Yeah.

Speaker 1 (39:13): You know? I mean, it it didn't hurt me at all. You know?

Speaker 0 (39:18): That's the thing that still fascinates me, Joseph. You live in Oklahoma now, right? Yeah. And I'm in Illinois, so we live in what America likes to call the heartland. Yeah.

Speaker 0 (39:26): It cracks me up at how you still hear that in a small to medium sized town that that mindset has still just been ingrained into the DNA, that if you mention the word Muslim and a guy sitting in the White House, they lose their fucking mind.

Unknown Speaker (39:43): Yeah. It's like

Speaker 0 (39:45): It's like, you know what? If you're standing in front of me and you have that attitude, here's what you're gonna hear. You know, you're a human being and he's a human being and you believe what you believe and he believes what he believes, and he's not asking you to not believe what you believe, but you're criticizing him for his belief. Do you see how crazy this is?

Unknown Speaker (40:02): Right.

Unknown Speaker (40:03): And you live in a country that you support that allows you to have that opinion. Yeah. Just missing the whole point.

Speaker 1 (40:11): Yep. Yeah. You know, I tell people all the time, and, you know, we don't live in a theocracy. No. And and truth truth is, even as a Catholic, I don't wanna live under a Catholic theocracy either.

Speaker 1 (40:24): No. Because that would limit my friends who believe differently than me. You know? My wife and I don't even believe. My wife is an agnostic.

Unknown Speaker (40:34): I am too.

Speaker 1 (40:35): Okay. She, you know, she absolutely supports, you know, me going to Mass on Sunday and doing doing my Catholic thing.

Unknown Speaker (40:42): I would do.

Speaker 1 (40:43): And I love the fact that she's just who she is. Yeah.

Speaker 0 (40:49): My mother is a devout Christian. She raised me to be a devout Christian. Chris will tell you, I probably know more about the Bible and Christianity than most Christians. Why? Because I read it and I studied it and I decided that it was just a story.

Speaker 0 (41:02): Right? Yeah. And that I wasn't able to live my life under those rules. And now that I don't believe that, and I look from the outward looking in now, it's like, wow, man, you do your best. And I've never seen an example of how you're not a Christian, Joseph.

Speaker 0 (41:20): But for most Christians, and I'm talking 85% plus, they talk the talk, but every day they prove that they're not gonna walk the walk. Right? And what I mean by that, and I say it on this show a lot, it's the judgment. If you're truly a Christian, you don't realize every day how much you judge people, even if it's, oh, the Liberals this and the Democrats that, and you're judging them. You're you're choosing a team.

Speaker 0 (41:50): You're choosing that your team is right, which they're not because nobody's right all the time, which is why I don't believe in any of that nonsense either. Can't we just do what you and I are doing right now? Can we not just have a debate? We've already agreed to disagree on Christianity and religion, I don't. I respect your opinion.

Speaker 0 (42:09): You're passionate about what you believe in. You should be. And I should not, as an another adult human being who's not hurting anybody else either, tell you what to do. Yeah. That took me a long time to wrap my head around that concept.

Speaker 0 (42:24): Right? I wasn't perfect at that, and I'm still not perfect at it. Nobody is.

Unknown Speaker (42:28): Right.

Speaker 0 (42:28): But I'm conscious of it. And when I met you and we had our first conversation, I you know, there's people that I key in on, especially because you're such a great musician. I started following more intently at what you were posting and what you were saying. We agree on so much more than we disagree on.

Speaker 1 (42:44): Right. And- and I- I think most people, if they would take the time to actually talk to each other, you know, I think most people have more in common. I mean, we have more same same goals. I honestly my conservative friends always get mad when I say this. I think that I mean, I'm gonna use politics again.

Speaker 1 (43:06): I think that Obama was doing what he thought was in the best interest of America.

Unknown Speaker (43:10): I do too, to be honest with You

Speaker 1 (43:12): know, whether I agree with him or not, you know, doesn't matter. You know, I think that, you know, most people, and like I said, W, you know, I'm not a big fan. I think he thought he was doing what was best. I think Bill

Speaker 0 (43:28): Clinton glad you said that because I was just getting ready to def because people were gonna say, Of course they're gonna say Obama did a good job. If you hadn't said it, I was just getting ready to say, I genuinely believe in my heart of hearts, and I didn't at the time, but I've come to terms with looking back, you know, hindsight's 2020.

Unknown Speaker (43:46): Yeah.

Speaker 0 (43:46): I agree with you a million percent, Joseph. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I got No. I got excited because I agree with you. I think he really thought he was doing the right thing.

Speaker 1 (43:54): Yeah. You know, idealists and ideologues I I didn't always understand this. An ideologue tends to see the end result but not the path to get there.

Unknown Speaker (44:06): Brilliant.

Speaker 1 (44:07): Okay? Speaking as a former history teacher, Hoover was a terrible president. K? Which doesn't make sense because he was one of the smartest guys on the planet, But he was an ideologue. He

Unknown Speaker (44:19): saw That's things in fact, Hoover was super IQ?

Unknown Speaker (44:22): He was super IQ.

Unknown Speaker (44:23): Didn't know that.

Speaker 1 (44:24): Yeah. He was also one of the first presidents to refuse presidential pay.

Unknown Speaker (44:28): Didn't know that either.

Unknown Speaker (44:29): Yep. That's awesome. He was already rich, rich in business.

Unknown Speaker (44:33): He said

Unknown Speaker (44:34): He said, I don't need

Unknown Speaker (44:35): it. Awesome.

Speaker 1 (44:37): You know? But it's because he was an ideal log, didn't know the path to get to the end result, He fumbled around. He messed things up. He exacerbated the problems. You know, Bill Clinton, you know, using someone from my lifetime because usually I like to talk about people who dead and gone.

Speaker 0 (44:56): That was the start of my adulthood. So I'm gonna be familiar with that too. I was in my early twenties when Bill was president.

Speaker 1 (45:02): Well, Bill is an idealist. Bill looked at what Reagan did and said, these were good ideas. I think I'll keep these. He looked at what Doug what HW did because these were bad ideas. I'm gonna dump these.

Speaker 1 (45:16): And he built on the things that worked.

Speaker 0 (45:19): And that's the last time we had a balanced budget.

Speaker 1 (45:21): Yeah. Theoretically, some of that balanced budget thing and I love hearing guys talk about this. If the Republicans want to claim it, they'll say, We worked with Bill Clinton. Okay? The balanced budget was based you know, I saved myself a million and a half dollars last year because I choose not to buy a a battleship.

Unknown Speaker (45:44): Okay.

Speaker 1 (45:44): So so it was a long term plan, that you know? He said, we're we're we're never gonna have that legitimate. The last time we had a legitimate balanced budget was Calvin Coolidge. Was that the gold standard then? We were we were on the gold standard.

Unknown Speaker (46:01): Okay.

Speaker 1 (46:02): But he was pre pre oh, what's the word? Pre Great Depression. He he told us that we were heading towards a recession because that's a cycle. That's just a cycle of things. Okay?

Speaker 1 (46:20): He said tighten your belts. Three years will be done. Well, we didn't tighten our belts. We started over printing currency. We started over investing.

Speaker 1 (46:29): We started doing created the, Wall Street Collapse, which led to the Great Depression.

Speaker 0 (46:36): Can I ask you a question real quick? Because now you piqued my curiosity and I know we're supposed to be talking music, but we don't we're not supposed to be doing anything on this podcast. Now I'm curious. So is a recession and I've always believed this. Is that truly a cycle that you can cannot control in capitalism?

Speaker 1 (46:54): You can't control it. Okay. Sim simply because it it's a thing about, you know, there we buy something until everyone's got it And then the market drops because we're not buying anymore. Then it comes back. Okay.

Speaker 1 (47:09): So, you know, it doesn't have to be a terrible thing, you know, small peaks. It's just like riding a wave.

Speaker 0 (47:19): Okay. So let me ask you another question because I've had this thought, and this is just theoretical. This was just Mike having a crazy brain and not being married and no kids. I got a lot of time on my hands, you know? I had to replace my air conditioner, which was 32 years old, which was amazing for an air conditioner.

Speaker 0 (47:35): Right. I live in an older house, right? It was built in 1963. But what's even more amazing, Joseph, is the original boiler was in this house from 1963 that I just replaced in March of this year. My brain almost went blank.

Speaker 0 (47:50): But I'm thinking there is no way in hell, and you're not going to expect it because we live in a different world than then. What would happen had we continued to kick ass and make things that just didn't break for sixty years?

Speaker 1 (48:06): Right. You know, we would still hit a recession, but again, it wouldn't be deep recession. So I I had

Unknown Speaker (48:15): That's my question. Do you think that would be better?

Speaker 1 (48:17): I think it would be better. Okay. My father has in his garage a Westinghouse refrigerator that was built in 1955. It was bought by my grandparents. They gave it to my father when he got married to my mom in 1960.

Speaker 1 (48:34): It still works. That's awesome. Okay. I love those stories. It's in his garage because the seal around it is broken and there's no way to replace it.

Unknown Speaker (48:45): Sure.

Speaker 1 (48:46): Okay. But it still works. And he puts, you know, things in there that need to be cool. And he just puts some plastic over the sides of it, you know, as as sort of a a buffer against too much, energy use. But but, yeah, there there is nothing wrong with and, again, I I honestly think that if you look at the recessions from the late 1880s, look at the recessions that occurred in the, early 1920s, you know, small dips.

Speaker 1 (49:16): And that's what they are. They're small dips. Sure. They don't have to be as severe, as, as we make them. And, and, and we're a not a nation of shopkeepers.

Speaker 1 (49:29): We're a nation of shoppers.

Speaker 0 (49:31): Oh, we're consumers for sure. That's what this nation became. We're a consumer nation because we really don't build. No. Like we were the manufacturing powerhouse of the planet until what, the 1980s maybe?

Speaker 1 (49:45): Yeah. Richard Nixon, okay, who had no sense of domestic policy. Again, like I said, I I was thinking about things from a historical perspective.

Speaker 0 (49:54): Thought the hippies were gonna take over too.

Speaker 1 (49:56): Yeah, he did. He was he was a little paranoid. Actually, he was a lot paranoid, but we'll get into that. But the old there there's an old Vulcan, proverb, only Nixon can go to China. Star Trek.

Speaker 1 (50:11): You know? But that was true. Okay? When LBJ LBJ kind of undermined our economy, Richard Nixon did sort of fix things. K?

Speaker 1 (50:23): He he went he went to The Middle East, and he formed the OPEC nations, put us on the petrodollar. Okay. He went to China for manufacture.

Unknown Speaker (50:33): He's responsible for the petrodollar?

Unknown Speaker (50:35): He is responsible for the petrodollar.

Unknown Speaker (50:37): I didn't know that either.

Speaker 1 (50:38): And that was supposed to be temporary. Whoops. Show me anything in government that's temporary.

Unknown Speaker (50:45): Still there, ladies and gentlemen.

Speaker 1 (50:46): Yeah. But if you go back, Truman how I play this song? Truman and then Eisenhower, in their attempts to rebuild Europe, created trade deals that were not in the best interest of America. Okay? The idea was to rebuild Europe because we were the strongest economy in the world, and it was pretty easy for us to do that.

Speaker 1 (51:15): K? But, again, these things were supposed to be temporary. Kennedy realized Europe is rebuilt. It's time to change this. He also wanted to put us back on a valued currency.

Speaker 0 (51:27): And dismantle the CIA and the federal reserve.

Speaker 1 (51:29): That's right. You know, again, valued currency, currency that has value in and of itself. He had so many good ideas.

Speaker 0 (51:38): So there's a guy who truly and he's beloved. I want this to be clear too because this is always important to me. It took me a while to realize why the Beatles were so beloved. Yeah. Why Kennedy was so beloved.

Speaker 0 (51:53): Right? It's simply what you just said. I think he really wanted to return America to what it was intended for, that really it wasn't founded. That's the other thing is America was not founded the way we were taught, you know? No.

Speaker 0 (52:07): It was founded by a bunch of savages who, you know, they say it's a America is a free nation founded by people who wanted religious freedom. As long as you believe the way they believed, if you didn't, they'd hang you or burn you or

Speaker 1 (52:23): There were some states that you had to be a particular religion and they wouldn't let you. Now, the constitution did undermine a lot of that. Okay? They set us on a right path.

Speaker 0 (52:34): But I think that he wanted to make this the utopia that it was intended to be Right. Originally. Don't you?

Speaker 1 (52:40): Yeah. I do. Thomas Jefferson fell way more into a libertarian camp. And and, again, you know, peep people never understand, what he intended, you know, when he wrote things. He was a forward thinker.

Speaker 1 (52:57): I love that term. Yeah. You know, why did he change his mind on freeing of the slaves? Well, he didn't. He believed that it needed to be a progressive thing.

Speaker 1 (53:11): Okay? Because slaves were not educated. And you take an educated man he he said he looked historically. Every time abolition came to most nations, the Africans always became thieves, beggars, murderers because they were brought from a hunter gatherer society. Sure.

Speaker 1 (53:30): And they were never trained how to they were used for their strengths.

Speaker 0 (53:34): Right. No matter how savage the people who left England were, they were still part of a society. Right?

Speaker 1 (53:40): Right. Yes. So, so, you know, Jefferson wrote into the constitution a path road for freedom for the slaves because, again, he wanted abolition. He believed it was morally correct. And so when people say, Well, he didn't free his slaves.

Speaker 1 (53:57): Yeah, but he did give them money. He took good care of them.

Speaker 0 (54:00): Which he didn't have to do at the time, right? So he fed them and paid them and gave them room and board and, you know, all the things that he was probably only required to do one of those things, which is probably make sure they didn't starve to death. Right?

Speaker 1 (54:12): That's right. And he educated them. And as president, he made education of slaves mandatory.

Unknown Speaker (54:18): We were never taught any of that in school. I can tell you that.

Speaker 1 (54:21): No educated man wants to be a slave. This is why Andrew Jackson repealed the education of slaves.

Speaker 0 (54:27): You're always taught that Lincoln was responsible a 100% for freeing the slaves, right? You don't get taught that Thomas Jefferson started that process that many years before that. Yeah. I'm learning that again for the second time. I actually heard it on a TED Talk years ago.

Speaker 0 (54:44): It was the first time I had ever heard that word. The guy just What caught my attention was he said what you said. You know Thomas Jefferson is actually responsible for the start of abolition, right?

Speaker 1 (54:55): That's right. He actually changed life, liberty, and the pursuit of property to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, seeing the pursuit of property as a defense of slavery. That's why I changed it.

Unknown Speaker (55:08): Those guys were geniuses.

Speaker 1 (55:10): They really were, man. You don't always see genius like that. And you need to look up John Tyler. He's one of my other favorite presidents.

Speaker 0 (55:17): Okay. I've heard the name, but I know zero about him.

Speaker 1 (55:19): Yeah. He was kicked out of his own party because he wouldn't carry water for this for his party. Nobody wanted to be his vice president.

Unknown Speaker (55:27): And by carry water, you mean say what they wanted?

Speaker 1 (55:30): That's right. He did what he thought was constitutional. And that was it. Is it in the best interest of the American people? Is it a breach of my authority?

Speaker 1 (55:39): And is it constitutional?

Speaker 0 (55:41): So that's my problem with the current situation right now. Right? Like him or hate him, it doesn't matter to me. Do you really believe that that's what this administration is doing? Are they doing in your best interest and my best interest?

Speaker 0 (55:53): I

Speaker 1 (55:54): Yeah. I know. I don't know. You know, I know that, for if if you like him, Trump is a narcissist.

Unknown Speaker (56:01): A million percent.

Unknown Speaker (56:02): Okay. So for him

Speaker 0 (56:04): I can't stand the guy, but I'm trying to figure out why people like him. And I get in trouble every time I say that because they're like, I realize very quickly, Joseph, it's a cult, and I get in trouble for saying that But that's the only way I can explain someone liking

Speaker 1 (56:17): There's a culting mentality to some degree. But he wants to win because, number one, his future is not politics. His children's future is not politics. But he wants he wants after he's gone for people to still praise Donald J. Trump.

Unknown Speaker (56:35): And that's so unchristian If

Speaker 1 (56:38): I know. But if he succeeds in the things that he believes he's doing, you know, then he'll go down in history and people say, oh, Donald one of my other favorite presidents, Grover Cleveland, he was Donald Trump circa 1885. Okay. You never really hear about him. He was a complete asshole.

Speaker 0 (57:01): Really? Now I know that name just because he's a funny it's a funny name. Everybody remembers it. I don't know a lot about him either, but you always remember that name, Grover Cleveland.

Speaker 1 (57:10): But but he was, I mean, he was a blowhard. He was a businessman. He actually when he walked into the White House for his second term, one of his detractors was yelling something at him. Grover picked up a rock and threw it at him. Like, aren't you five years old?

Speaker 1 (57:30): But again, he was a great president. People were like,

Speaker 0 (57:35): Dude, literally that's what I ask myself every time he opens his mouth. I just saw an example of it on The Daily There Show on was some poor girl from CBS News, right or wrong, I don't care what she was asking him. I would never talk to a woman that way. And I was brought up that that's the way my You dad raised

Unknown Speaker (57:52): don't talk to women that way.

Speaker 0 (57:53): I wouldn't talk to anybody that way either, but I would never talk to a woman that way. A guy could piss me off that bad, but if a woman pisses me off that bad, you just gotta kind of swallow your pride and say, Okay, we're going to agree to disagree on this one, right? No freaking filter. No, he called her stupid and crooked and If you're gonna do that, I better see examples. That's always my if I'm gonna eviscerate you with words, there's gonna be examples with every evisceration.

Speaker 0 (58:26): Right? Yeah. I'm going to say you suck and here's why. I'm not just gonna say you suck because then that makes me look stupid. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (58:36): Like I said, love him or hate him, he's a petulant five year old on the playground. And that's the way he acts. And I think that he would have more support if he could stop being a petulant five year old. Yeah.

Speaker 0 (58:57): Oh, Jesus. I just saw we had some comments. That's I was listening to you, but somebody asked, can you explain triads on a guitar, please? Joseph can. I can't.

Speaker 0 (59:08): Oh, are three notes.

Speaker 1 (59:09): That's all it is. You know what? So any anytime you put a triad is basically it's just an arpeggio. C chord. K?

Speaker 1 (59:17): You got the c or c c e g. There's your triad. C e g. That's it.

Unknown Speaker (59:34): But they're individual. Right?

Speaker 1 (59:36): They're just individual. Yeah. Or, you know, like I said, if I strum it, it's a chord, but it's still a triad. It's just those three notes.

Unknown Speaker (59:44): It's just that there's three notes there. It's not how you pick it. That was always

Unknown Speaker (59:48): Okay. My

Speaker 0 (59:49): So me strumming that C chord is still a triad.

Speaker 1 (59:52): It's still a triad. And even if I'm playing a full bar chord, it's still C, E, G, C, E, G. If I'm playing a d suspended chord, it's just d g a, still a triad.

Speaker 0 (1:00:06): Well, d chord would be a triad too then. Right? Because you have an octave in there.

Unknown Speaker (1:00:10): Yep.

Speaker 0 (1:00:11): There's two D notes in there if I play the open. Yep.

Speaker 1 (1:00:16): That's all it is. It's kind of funny, you know, that I wrote a book on guitar theory that is available for sale. But the, more teachers Mike's my experience of teachers, you've got the guy who can strum a few chords. Suddenly, thinks he can teach. Okay?

Speaker 1 (1:00:38): Then you got the guy who just wants to show you how good he is. And then you've got the guy who just needs the money, so he's gonna extend everything out.

Speaker 0 (1:00:49): That wasn't me. I was honest with people in that you're going to tell them you're a degreed teacher. I just was honest with them and told them, I can take you from not knowing anything to explaining what a guitar is, all the parts of the guitar, what they do, how to tune it, simple, you know, open chords, simple pentatonic scales, minor scales, major scales, right? I know all that. Right.

Speaker 0 (1:01:15): When you get to the intermediate level and advanced, all the things you see me do on stage, I can't tell you how I do it. It just, like, I gave up on learning the theory because my brain was outproducing my brain and my hands were outproducing my patients with looking at the study material, right? For lack of a better term.

Speaker 1 (1:01:36): I took a master class with John Schofield.

Unknown Speaker (1:01:40): I know the name.

Speaker 1 (1:01:41): Okay. He said the three most important things in becoming a great guitar player. Solid technique, know your theory, and forgetting them both.

Speaker 0 (1:01:52): I agree with that so much. Because you know as soon as you start thinking about what you're doing, the train falls off the tracks.

Speaker 1 (1:02:00): That's right. George Benson sings his riffs. George Benson's You know?

Speaker 0 (1:02:09): I guess I kinda do too because a lot of them start off with that rake, you know? Yeah. I like that a lot of it was I was the only guitar player in the band. You I couldn't just get away with that single note a lot. Mhmm.

Speaker 0 (1:02:24): It always had to be, what do they call those? Double stops?

Unknown Speaker (1:02:27): Yeah. Double stops.

Speaker 0 (1:02:30): I love those. Yeah. There's the other thing I got credit for a lot because my teacher beat it into my head. If you're gonna bend a note, you better know how to fucking bend it. That's exactly what he said.

Speaker 0 (1:02:46): It wasn't when you're bending notes, Mike, be careful that you're bending. It was always, if you're gonna bend a note on a guitar, you better know how to fucking bend it. Yeah. There's a million ways to bend it, and you have to know which one you're choosing. Right?

Speaker 0 (1:02:59): Are we choosing vibrato?

Unknown Speaker (1:03:02): Right.

Speaker 0 (1:03:02): Are we choosing a half step? Are we choosing a whole step? So I would sit there night after night going up and down the neck on the G string and make sure that last one was perfect every time, you know?

Speaker 1 (1:03:20): Because I'm a classical and jazz player, I don't do a lot of bending.

Unknown Speaker (1:03:25): That's my favorite. Yeah. That makes me sound good. I'm not, but it makes me sound good.

Unknown Speaker (1:03:30): And you do it well.

Unknown Speaker (1:03:32): Thank

Speaker 1 (1:03:32): you. Even when Raven is this girl that I play music with, and we do Stairway to Heaven.

Unknown Speaker (1:03:38): She has a beautiful voice.

Speaker 1 (1:03:39): Yeah. Doesn't she? Yes. Well, when we do Stairway to Heaven, do the

Unknown Speaker (1:03:46): I love the way you do that song.

Unknown Speaker (1:03:51): You know, I'm not I

Unknown Speaker (1:03:55): No. But your version works because you sell it. Yeah. Play that again. I love that.

Unknown Speaker (1:04:21): That's beautiful, man.

Unknown Speaker (1:04:22): Yeah. I was gonna tell

Speaker 0 (1:04:23): you something that'll make you laugh. We started talking about music, so I think this is my buddy, Trevor. But anyway, on YouTube or wherever he's chiming in at, he's traversi. Traversi? Anyway, when we started talking about politics, we broke his brain.

Unknown Speaker (1:04:44): Tell him I'm sorry.

Speaker 0 (1:04:46): I'm sorry too. He said religion and government should be separate. Maybe I don't know this person. And I agree.

Unknown Speaker (1:04:53): I agree too.

Speaker 0 (1:04:55): Economic student here, it's always a cycle, but it generally has an upward trend. I'll agree with that too. That's why the stock market's always

Speaker 1 (1:05:04): Tell the guy I said, thank you, because I'm not good at explaining, the economics.

Speaker 0 (1:05:10): Yes. Thank you very much for that explanation because I agree with that. And how could we argue with it because you're an economic student and we're not. Yeah. But I do agree with that logic for sure.

Speaker 0 (1:05:20): That makes total sense. That's why the stock market started at zero and now we're, you know, hovering at 50,000 all the time or above it continues to keep going up. If it doesn't, capitalism doesn't work. And he said consumerism for sure. And then he said, I am back and we're finally talking about music.

Unknown Speaker (1:05:37): So there you go. If that's why you showed up, we're here, buddy.

Speaker 1 (1:05:41): And again, I tell people this. Walter Cronkite said once that if you can guess my politics from my news, then I failed as a journalist. Okay? If someone can guess my politics from anything that I post or say, then I failed as an artist.

Speaker 0 (1:06:01): Agreed. A million percent. That's brilliantly said, and I I agree with that. And I'll second it for sure.

Unknown Speaker (1:06:07): Yeah. Cause all I want to do, man, I want to bring happiness and joy into the world. I want people to get along, you know?

Speaker 0 (1:06:13): Yeah. I always described to Chris, I want the whole world to be like after band practice. Yeah. So do you remember when we sat and talked about everything? Not just life and where are we going and deep things.

Speaker 0 (1:06:25): It was, You think there's aliens out there, man? You know? And then that conversation would go for two hours about why there could or couldn't be, and I I just had so much fun, man, because like you said, it was innocent, and it was fun, and it wasn't, You're wrong because you believe this. It's, Yeah, man, I see what you're saying there. I think you're full of shit, but And everybody would laugh just like you and I did, man.

Unknown Speaker (1:06:51): That's how the world should be. I agree with you.

Speaker 1 (1:06:54): Yeah. And, you know, here's the thing, you know, as human beings, you know, we should be able to have different opinions, different ideas. You know, we should not be divided. You know, I always get back to, we probably have more in common if we would just talk to each other reasonably and not emotionally.

Speaker 0 (1:07:18): Yeah. Know how I end the religious comment When people get too hot under the collar when they just find out that I am not going to agree with what they're saying? I'm like, You don't know what happens when we die. And neither do I. And thank goodness for that for today, Right?

Speaker 0 (1:07:36): Can we agree on that? And that always makes people smile.

Speaker 1 (1:07:39): All our theology. And it's funny because I had some guy working on my car the other day. And so I'm in the waiting room with two other guys, and we're discussing all kinds of things about, you know, I'm quoting Martin Luther, Erasmus, you know, all these guys, and these guys are talking. And this guy finally goes, so, so do you mind if I ask you where you go to church? I said, I don't mind.

Speaker 1 (1:08:04): And I just sat there and he finally goes, so where do you go to church? He goes, you know what? We're getting along so well right now. I don't wanna add anything into the confusion. And

Unknown Speaker (1:08:15): That's awesome. I love that story.

Speaker 1 (1:08:18): Yeah. You can ask. But again, I'd rather have this conversation than get distracted by what franchise of church or religion.

Speaker 0 (1:08:32): Yeah. If I had if you had found out I was agnostic, and if I had found out that you were Catholic and that had been the stopping point of our conversation, we would've never had the conversation about music. You would have never found out that even though I tell you I'm a horrible guitar player, apparently you think I'm not, right? Most people- I think

Unknown Speaker (1:08:54): you're awesome.

Speaker 0 (1:08:54): Most people think they say the same thing. I am humble because I don't have the knowledge to back it up that you do, right? I have to be careful how much I say, Yeah, I'm a great guitar player. And then somebody like you who is not as humble says, Yeah, well, you don't know what a A7 augmented fourth is. Even though he's jealous because I just played one and I used it in context with the song, right?

Speaker 0 (1:09:21): That's what pisses people off is they can't figure out how I understand it simply because I'm stubborn. And when I was in my teens and twenties, I was playing professionally, and I had a lot of time to just sit there and figure out what worked together. That was my passion. Which chords will work together? How can I play the most and sound like I'm playing the least?

Speaker 0 (1:09:42): Because I'd get bored too. You know? You don't wanna just play even ACDC anytime someone dissed ACDC, I'd be like, your band learned two ACDC songs and let me come watch you play them. I don't know how I got balloons. If

Unknown Speaker (1:09:59): you don't play ACDC.

Speaker 0 (1:10:01): If you don't play it like they play it, I'm gonna dish you till the cows come home because it is not as easy as it looks. It isn't. There's a swing There to

Speaker 1 (1:10:12): is, And it's awesome. By the way, was gonna tell you a cool trick that my teacher taught me. If you ever hear a chord that you don't know, like, D 13 flat to fifth flat to ninth chord got thrown out at me once. K? That's all it is.

Speaker 1 (1:10:28): My teacher said, you know what? Do the in anything, just do the primary triad. So if I'm doing like, If I don't know that D30, just it'll cover it.

Unknown Speaker (1:10:52): That's probably

Speaker 1 (1:10:52): And you can figure the rest of the stuff out later.

Speaker 0 (1:10:55): We just got asked that question. He said, Did you learn music theory? Yes, Joseph understands music theory at a level that'll blow your mind. I did not. I learned what I would like to call the garage band version of music theory.

Speaker 0 (1:11:11): It was enough to be able to play in a rock band in the eighties, which, you know, we both grew up in the same era, Joseph, for black how old are you?

Unknown Speaker (1:11:22): I was born in 1962.

Speaker 0 (1:11:24): So you got me by ten years. We're in the same we're basically almost in the same decade. You're in the same decade as Chris. I believe he's 54, he said, 56, whatever. I always get him wrong.

Speaker 0 (1:11:37): But back then, MTV had just come out, and I don't know about you, but we all wanted to be rock stars. So didn't even know I

Unknown Speaker (1:11:47): wanted to be a rock star. -DAVID: What's that? It It was the Beatles that made me wanna be a rock star.

Speaker 0 (1:11:52): And I see why, you know? I don't it when I said it I wanted to study why people went berserk over those two subjects, it didn't take me long to figure out why, right?

Unknown Speaker (1:12:03): Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 0 (1:12:04): The Beatles wrote the blueprint for my buddy Ray Stone always said, if you wanna be a songwriter, the Beatles already wrote the blueprint. Yeah. And if you don't study it, that's your problem.

Speaker 1 (1:12:14): And do you know how different the Beatles were from everything else that was out there at the time? The top three songs when the Beatles came on the scene were Sugar Shack, Last Kiss, and Bobby's

Unknown Speaker (1:12:27): Girl. Really?

Unknown Speaker (1:12:30): Yeah. And you got those, and that's all I got. She loves you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 0 (1:12:36): Man, that puts that into perspective.

Speaker 1 (1:12:38): Yeah. People say, oh, the Beatles sound kind of dated. It's like, no, no. They were so far ahead of their time. You know?

Speaker 1 (1:12:47): Listen to what was going on then.

Speaker 0 (1:12:51): You know? I'll agree okay. So now that I know that, I agree with what you're saying, but I'm gonna give you an example that I hope is going to supersede where your argument's going. Okay. Led Zeppelin.

Speaker 0 (1:13:05): Oh, yeah. To me, that is perfection because the Beatles do sound to us now like some of it, that it was recorded in 1960.

Unknown Speaker (1:13:18): Right.

Speaker 0 (1:13:18): And part of it's not their fault. They only had four tracks to work with, and they barely had those four tracks. Right? They kept bouncing things down to what you lose. People that don't understand tape saturation and tape loss and all that, this is not going to make a lot of sense.

Speaker 0 (1:13:34): But when you're in the studio and you keep using that same tape and playing it over and over again, it's a physical piece and it degrades over time. So Led Zeppelin had a lot more tracks to

Unknown Speaker (1:13:45): work with.

Unknown Speaker (1:13:45): Right. So there's

Speaker 1 (1:13:46): g you know what Jimmy Paine said about the Beatles?

Unknown Speaker (1:13:49): Please tell me.

Speaker 1 (1:13:50): He said they suck. No. I'm kidding. He didn't. He said, were it not for the Beatles showing us that the studio could be an instrument itself, you never would have gotten Led Zeppelin.

Unknown Speaker (1:14:02): Say that again.

Speaker 1 (1:14:03): Said that if the Beatles had not shown us that we could use the studio as an instrument itself.

Unknown Speaker (1:14:10): Okay.

Speaker 1 (1:14:11): We never would have gotten Led Zeppelin.

Unknown Speaker (1:14:13): Okay. I thought I heard you right. I just, I wanted you to say it again.

Speaker 1 (1:14:16): Yeah. Again, you know, it's everything is building off something else.

Unknown Speaker (1:14:20): Correct.

Speaker 1 (1:14:21): You know, Tony Imey talked about, man, when he heard, Helter Skelter, he said, I wanted to be a rock star.

Speaker 0 (1:14:29): Oh, yeah, man. That's a great example of one that doesn't sound dated. Right? That one comes on the radio, I still crank it up. To this day, it can't get loud enough.

Speaker 0 (1:14:39): There's certain songs that that's what you'll always hear from me. Yeah. That one can't get loud enough.

Unknown Speaker (1:14:43): Yeah. And it was Paul McCartney who wrote that.

Speaker 0 (1:14:49): Get Back? That's another one I can't ever Nice. Get loud

Speaker 1 (1:15:04): Yeah. And any great song should be able to cross genres. You know, you can do that. And I've never heard a bad version of Come Together.

Speaker 0 (1:15:17): That's the one that I'm gonna get in trouble because always say Aerosmith is my favorite version. And if you're a Beatles head, like some people are Bob Dylan heads, they will eat your face off.

Unknown Speaker (1:15:29): But man, it's a great version. It is. Gods Max version was awesome.

Speaker 0 (1:15:34): It was. But the reason I choose Aerosmith Joseph is because, and this is gonna I'm very comfortable with my sexuality. Steven Tyler's version is sexy, man. It just It

Unknown Speaker (1:15:45): is sexy.

Speaker 0 (1:15:46): You are. Makes you wanna move, you know?

Speaker 1 (1:15:52): It does. You're right. So but yeah, you know, getting all these people to, you know, who've done it, I've just never heard a bad version.

Speaker 0 (1:16:02): Here's another example, All Along the Watchtower. Lot of people don't know that Bob Dylan wrote that song because Jimmy Page owned it. I think even Bob, who is pretty narcissistic, would admit that he made that song his own.

Speaker 1 (1:16:13): Oh yeah. Man, no one could touch it like Jimmy. He next leveled it like nobody's business. So and, wasn't Mason? Didn't he play on that too?

Speaker 0 (1:16:30): You would know better than I would. Just love that version for sure.

Unknown Speaker (1:16:35): Oh, me too, man.

Speaker 0 (1:16:43): It's a riff you when you play that, it's a riff you feel in your bones. I always say there's some that's in your blood. It's flowing through your blood. Some of it goes all the way down, and it penetrates your bones. Jimmy made you feel what he that's why I always describe that was my mission on a guitar because my favorite guitar players made you wanna made you not made you wanna they made you feel what the song was, right?

Speaker 0 (1:17:07): Right. The lyricist might be painting a picture and he's telling the story, and you can see that story like a movie. The musicians are laying the backdrop, right? They're making that story come to life. And those are the riffs that I feel in my bones.

Speaker 0 (1:17:21): Dance the Night Away by Van Halen makes you wanna go dance the night away. Mean, it's because of the way he played it, not just because of the way David sung it. Right. That it's the two together working in tandem. Music is magic, man.

Speaker 0 (1:17:36): People say, How do you four or five guys get up there and play in perfect time and make it happen? I think that's one thing that we all have to admit to ourselves, Joseph, even we're kind of amazed that it actually works.

Speaker 1 (1:17:47): Yeah. Anytime, anytime I, I Vane walks away and people say, man, you guys sounded awesome. I'm like, Phew. You got away with it.

Speaker 0 (1:17:56): And they don't know that you feel that way. They're thinking, Yeah, he knows he's good, and that's awesome. I'm so glad I got to see him. And you're just going, I did it again.

Speaker 1 (1:18:09): So but by the way, like I said, the guy who asked about music theory.

Unknown Speaker (1:18:15): Yes.

Speaker 1 (1:18:16): I do have a music book called Creative Guitar. It's on my band camp. Okay. You go to band camp. And I'm I'm proud of this book because, again, my goal in teaching is I want people to know music.

Speaker 1 (1:18:31): Okay? And music is so much simpler than everyone makes it out to be.

Unknown Speaker (1:18:36): I will agree with you on that.

Speaker 1 (1:18:38): You know, I've picked up a book where a guy has Modes Made Easy, and he's using these It's like, Dude, I know what you're saying. I went to fricking college. Okay? But he was trying to show how smart he was.

Speaker 0 (1:18:53): A lot of it's just simple tricks like you and I were talking about at the beginning of the show, you know, just like I told you, the little bends that make things sound greasy. I like, I think Rich Robinson says that he likes those riffs that are greasy, you know? And that's what he means by that. It's not just it's You know?

Unknown Speaker (1:19:15): Or harmonies.

Unknown Speaker (1:19:23): What key are you in?

Unknown Speaker (1:19:33): Do that face

Unknown Speaker (1:19:33): Dance with me.

Speaker 1 (1:19:54): Yeah. And like I said, this book covers all this. It explains where the mode where the scales come from, the modes, how to use them, you know, even go into chords. It just it breaks down everything in simple fashion. And it doesn't have to be difficult.

Speaker 0 (1:20:12): I'm not used to this. We picked up some a lot of new listeners, so we got all we got two more comments that he wants to one of them is just he said jazz was ahead of its time. I agree with that too. Jazz was like very frowned upon, know, the the clubs were yeah. Thank you.

Speaker 0 (1:20:31): I'm glad you said that word because it was in my brain and I wasn't gonna be able to say it. Those were very underground clubs in their day. He's right.

Speaker 1 (1:20:38): Yes, they were. Yeah. And it's funny because Duke Ellington was asked about jazz in the '50s when it was becoming more popular. More people were listening to it. And he said that jazz is the voice of freedom.

Speaker 0 (1:20:51): Man, that's a brilliant statement. Never thought about it that way.

Unknown Speaker (1:20:54): But

Speaker 0 (1:20:54): now you can picture what that music is for sure.

Unknown Speaker (1:20:58): Yeah. So

Speaker 0 (1:21:00): And then his next, comment is a well, it's a question. What do we think about Frank Zappa?

Unknown Speaker (1:21:05): I have a pagan altar at home to Frank Zappa. Don't tell my priest.

Speaker 0 (1:21:11): I think that covers that, and I'm going to second that. Frank Zappa is just a genius. No matter what you think about his music, I think he would go into the category with he was like what we can what we just talked about with Steve Vai and Satriani. He was at a level that was hard for people to understand. Yeah.

Speaker 0 (1:21:36): You know? It's it's even hard for musicians to listen to his music simply because you're trying to figure out what he was doing. You know? It's like

Unknown Speaker (1:21:43): Oh, yeah. But he crossed so many genres, man.

Unknown Speaker (1:21:45): Oh, for sure.

Speaker 1 (1:21:46): Jazz from hell, the guitar album, Joe's Garage, you know, Go Go All the Way Back to Weasels Rip My Face. I mean, it's like, it's like, so much great music and such a great sense of humor.

Speaker 0 (1:21:59): Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, I love those records too, man. Like I said, we all bow down to Frank Zappa just because he's one of those guys that Joseph just said about the Beatles and Led Zeppelin. They were so far ahead of their time that we still haven't caught up yet.

Speaker 0 (1:22:15): Yeah. And that's a true statement. That's why Zeppelin doesn't sound dated. That's why the Beatles That's right. A lot of their later stuff, for sure, when they were able to record in a bigger studio, those later albums are just as timeless as anything Zeppelin did.

Speaker 0 (1:22:30): Yeah. Some of the early Stones records are the same way. You you hear those songs and it's like you said with the studio magic, they didn't go in there and use effects as studio magic. They used timing and the way that they recorded it, you know, with the microphone placement and the room that they chose and the amplifier that they chose. One of the things that blew me away, I didn't know that almost Jimmy says he ventures to guess more than 90% of every Led Zeppelin track was recorded with 15 watt amplifier or less.

Unknown Speaker (1:23:03): Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 0 (1:23:04): You know, he says, I wasn't people always thought I was in there with these gigantic Marshall stacks, he's like, this simply because they don't understand how recording works. You can do that for some songs, and some songs that works, but you don't realize how big of a room you need to make that happen or a controlled tight environment. Like the studio we built, we built a room for those like a room within a room for the cabinets. Yeah. But it requires things like that because, especially if you have neighbors, cranking up a 100 watt Marshall in the studio is I just made this statement yesterday.

Speaker 0 (1:23:39): This is how parallel the universes are sometimes. A lot of people understand because they think they went to a concert, they understand what loud is. If you stand in front of a 100 watt Marshall amplifier that's cranked up to 10, then you will understand what loud is.

Unknown Speaker (1:23:58): Oh, yeah.

Speaker 0 (1:23:58): Now stand in front of eight of those cabinets and four of those heads. Right? It'll hold you forward. The air coming at you will literally hold you up on stage if you're about 10 feet away. That's now that's loud.

Unknown Speaker (1:24:12): Yeah. So I always make the joke. You don't even know what loud is.

Unknown Speaker (1:24:18): Yeah.

Speaker 0 (1:24:20): Princeton Reverb was the one to rule them all. Right? I've heard of Princeton Reverb.

Unknown Speaker (1:24:31): I like those. I do

Unknown Speaker (1:24:33): too. I never had one. I would simply because I was poor. I used the Yamaha DBX 90.

Speaker 1 (1:24:43): When I could afford a Vox though, I was a big fan of the Vox and I played a Roland jazz chorus for a long time. And of all things, I still have a, my crate hashtag that I bought back in the eighties, the toured with me. Can't believe I've used it that long.

Speaker 0 (1:25:01): Duh, he's talking amplifiers. I'm so sorry. I started off playing a PV Renown. Yeah? And I got a hell of a sound out of it, man.

Unknown Speaker (1:25:09): You'll laugh, Joseph. I turned it around so no one I was embarrassed that it was a solid state amplifier. But I knew how to make it sound like I wanted That's it what taught me, even before I ever heard Eddie and Stevie Ray say it, it taught me how much of your tone comes from your hands.

Speaker 1 (1:25:26): Right. I was at Eddie Eddie Van Halen. I was at Les Paul's 70 birthday. They were Gene Lupe III, Eddie Van Halen.

Unknown Speaker (1:25:34): You were at that concert?

Speaker 1 (1:25:36): I was at that concert.

Speaker 0 (1:25:37): I'm so jealous.

Speaker 1 (1:25:38): And all these guys were playing Les Pauls through Dumble Lamps, going direct. Sweet. If you closed your eyes, you knew exactly who was playing. Yep. You know?

Speaker 1 (1:25:51): So, yeah, it comes from you.

Speaker 0 (1:25:53): And you know the example I give to the layman? If you like the blues, go listen to the Family Style album by Stevie Ray and Jimmy Vaughan.

Unknown Speaker (1:26:01): Man, is that not funny?

Speaker 0 (1:26:02): You know right away who's doing what. Oh, And no disrespect to Jimmy. He's a hell of a player, he wrote some songs that really make me wanna move too. I love the fabulous Thunderbirds. But Stevie, and Jimmy would admit this, was in another dimension and on another planet and playing on another level that none of us still understand.

Speaker 1 (1:26:20): Right. Right. Man, I still love watching Steve Ray Vaughn Unplugged. And I saw Stevie twice. Once when he was stoned off his ass and he was phenomenal.

Speaker 1 (1:26:33): And it was, I consider it, a moral outrage that he was 10 times better sober. It's like, you don't go from great to super great. That's not right. No.

Speaker 0 (1:26:47): And that's the funny thing is every story I've ever heard, he was so and any of us would be. I was too when I got sober. Can I ever play again? Will music be fun again? He had the same concerns, trepidations, and questions.

Speaker 0 (1:27:00): And not only could he play again, Joseph is a million percent right, he was playing at a higher level than the level he was playing at when he was all coked out of his mind. It's like, how good can this guy get? And how good could he have been? I get excited talking about Stevie Ray because I always cite him as a guitar tone that if I had to be stuck with one sound the rest of my life to listen to, I automatically choose Stevie Ray.

Speaker 1 (1:27:25): Great tone. Now here's a funny story, and I wish I knew where to give you a reference on this. You know, he does, his song Chitlin's Cancana. It's a Kenny Burrell song. Kenny Burrell is one of my guitar heroes.

Speaker 1 (1:27:38): Okay? Well, the story is, is that Stevie was in Texas. Kenny Burrell was doing a show, went to see Stevie and asked to meet him backstage. Stevie said, I was so scared. I thought he was coming there to kick my ass for butchering his song.

Speaker 1 (1:27:55): And Kenny came in, introduced himself, and goes, man, I didn't realize the song could be done that beautifully.

Speaker 0 (1:28:01): That's what a and to Stevie, this ladies and gentlemen, for you know, everybody knows Stevie Ray Vaughan because, obviously, he passed away, unfortunately. And he was one of the greatest, not just blues guitar players, but greatest guitar players ever. Yeah. This man, at that moment in time, was standing in front of the man that Joseph was talking about, and he was the student, and he was wiping his brow going, I'm so glad the guy that wrote the song likes what I did. Right?

Speaker 0 (1:28:31): That was his feeling. He wasn't, Oh, Stevie Ray Vaughan, I'll give a fuck what you think.

Unknown Speaker (1:28:34): -DAVID:

Unknown Speaker (1:28:35): Yeah. You don't get to be that good with the I don't give a fuck what you think attitude. You get to be that good by saying, Thank you, sir. That's an honor for you to come in here and say that. I thought you were gonna punch me in the face.

Unknown Speaker (1:28:46): You know?

Speaker 0 (1:28:51): Oh, this guy is a this particular person is a Kenny Burrell fan. Joseph, he says Midnight Blue is an amazing album by Kenny Burrell.

Speaker 1 (1:29:00): That is still one of my go to albums, man.

Speaker 0 (1:29:03): I'm gonna go turn it up as soon as we get off here, ladies and gentlemen. I do I'm not familiar with it, so I'll Joseph is excited for me, and so are you that I'm going to hear it for the first time. Yeah. That's awesome. He also asked if we can do a triad guitar lesson.

Speaker 0 (1:29:18): He kinda did earlier, but I'm sure Joseph will show you again.

Speaker 1 (1:29:21): Yeah. You know, like I say, know, first off, again, a triad is just three notes, no matter how you play them. You can go G, B, D, A, C, E, B, D, F sharp, C, E, G, D, F sharp, A. You know, just take any string, however you wanna do it, and just play them back to back like that. It'll open up so many opportunities and so much.

Speaker 0 (1:29:49): And it does, because the one thing that I will add from the dummy's perspective, and that's what I'm always gonna label myself as, and it helps people to hear this. Because now that I hear you say that as the subject matter expert, that helps so much with your phrasing. Because what you don't want to do as a lead guitar player, that we all fall in that trap in the beginning because we don't understand phrasing.

Unknown Speaker (1:30:11): Right.

Speaker 0 (1:30:11): We start playing solos all the time that sound like this. When you start breaking them up into three notes at a time, you get away from that scale sound, Then you get what you saw or what you said you liked earlier in that blues sound that I played. Basically, that is a triad.

Speaker 1 (1:30:36): I actually tell my students when we're working on improvisation, so don't play more than four notes. Yep. You have something going on?

Speaker 0 (1:30:47): Here's how Bob would say it, Joseph. I would start jamming and he'd be like, that's too many notes, dude.

Unknown Speaker (1:30:53): Four notes?

Unknown Speaker (1:30:54): No. He would say, that's too many notes, dude.

Unknown Speaker (1:30:56): Oh. Then what I would

Speaker 0 (1:30:58): do this was always a running joke in Nemesis, and if Chris is listening or if he listens to this later, he'll laugh when I say this because I told this story a million times in the band. He made me start off playing lead up here. So I would get used to stretching my finger and using my pinky, right? Yeah. He's like, don't wanna become a three finger guitar player.

Speaker 0 (1:31:19): So then I would do I figured out that you could go 12 notes up right away. Right? So if you start on the fifth fret, you can go 12 notes up and there you are. Well, I would do that and he'd say, you got no business up there, dude. You're not ready for that.

Speaker 1 (1:31:36): Hey, here's another cool trick. Okay. Learn your primary chord shapes as they exist in the scale. Like D, E minor, F sharp minor, G major, A major, B minor, C sharp minor flat to five, D.

Unknown Speaker (1:31:51): Okay.

Speaker 1 (1:31:51): Okay. Go to your C C D minor E minor F G a minor B minor flat five. Okay.

Unknown Speaker (1:31:58): I'm gonna start working.

Speaker 1 (1:31:59): I like It's a great way to learn your triads, you know, get that same thing. Do you know the song?

Unknown Speaker (1:32:13): Oh, yeah. Wanted Dead or Alive.

Unknown Speaker (1:32:16): It's a chord scale.

Speaker 0 (1:32:20): Okay. So that's another thing I do in my own world to convince people I know what I'm doing. I'm doing the same thing. It's just I'm not playing his song. I figured out you could invert a lot of things, and they were beautiful, right?

Speaker 0 (1:32:32): So I'll do something like and then bring it all the way down to you know, just move that thing around all over the place. That's all I'm I'm just doing exactly what you just did. People are like, Wow, man. He really knows what he's doing. I'm not really.

Speaker 1 (1:32:57): There's only four primary chord shapes. D form, the C form, A form, and E form. Aren't those as they exist in the scale?

Speaker 0 (1:33:05): It's funny you say that. Eddie Van Halen, it's funny you say that because you're right. There's four chord shapes. Yeah. And the thing that gave me confidence that I could become a lead guitar player is my hero in that generation was Eddie, of course.

Speaker 0 (1:33:18): Yeah. And he said, You got seven notes in the major scale. How you mix them up is your business, right? That's all there is, you know? He's like, It's no more hard than you got seven notes in an octave and how you mix it up is your business.

Speaker 0 (1:33:30): Yeah. Western music says you have to follow at least that rule.

Speaker 1 (1:33:33): Right. But I play sitar, so I've got more notes.

Speaker 0 (1:33:38): Yeah. When you get into Indian and Middle Eastern, for sure, that's the cradle of civilization. That music's been around for a thousand years, and they have their own scales. And that's why Jimmy and Robert wanted to go there and study because it is an entirely different kind of music.

Unknown Speaker (1:34:00): Yeah.

Speaker 0 (1:34:00): See, that's beautiful, man. I love that kind of stuff. But when it comes to music, I always make people laugh because they say, what kind of music do you like? I say, I play rock and roll and the blues, but I listen to anything that doesn't suck because I get ex when I heard you play that progression right there, my brain got excited. My body got excited because it feels good.

Speaker 0 (1:34:20): It sounds good. It makes me wanna do what you're doing or at least accompany it, you know? So,

Speaker 1 (1:34:30): I'm in my office here at the music store, I just realized they're starting to turn off all the lights.

Unknown Speaker (1:34:34): Oh, yeah. We've been on here for an hour and a half.

Unknown Speaker (1:34:36): I know. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to mean to carry you over time, man.

Speaker 0 (1:34:39): I just No. No. No. I was worried about your time, and I didn't know they canceled the show. So I mean, we that that's not an issue.

Speaker 0 (1:34:46): I just we were both Chris and I were just trying to accommodate you because we dig you. You've been on here before. Obviously, you weren't trying to get out of coming on the podcast. We were just trying to make it work. I'm glad that it worked out for both of us.

Unknown Speaker (1:35:00): I just decided to take the day off. Yeah. You gotta shred on some banjo for me. Here you go. What key am I in when you're doing that?

Unknown Speaker (1:35:29): I don't know. I just picked it up, started messing around. Sounds like a G. Sorry, I need to

Unknown Speaker (1:35:39): do some

Unknown Speaker (1:35:40): work on my thumbnail. So but But yeah, I know I know the boss is is one to lock up Well, the shop and

Speaker 0 (1:35:54): I have to at least I forgot in the beginning. We gotta thank Riverside for sponsoring the show for sure. Thank you. Anybody that wants to do a podcast should definitely do it with Riverside. They're upgrading all the time.

Speaker 0 (1:36:07): They just changed their layout, added a lot of new editing features. Everything is worth the money in my opinion, for sure that you get what you pay for. And I don't hand that out lightly. So thank you to them. And as Chris always says, if you're contemplating suicide, please don't do it.

Speaker 0 (1:36:27): Yeah. Reach out to Sunflower Sober or Zobie AI. Those are both great resources if you're feeling sad, suicidal, or depressed. Only people who are going to suffer is the people you leave behind. You know, I've had those thoughts.

Speaker 0 (1:36:42): I've been there. That's why this is important to me. I've been touched by it in my life. Chris has been touched by it. We don't say it often enough, but that's why we end the show that way.

Speaker 0 (1:36:50): You know, Chris, unfortunately has been through it multiple times and so have I. Through my addiction, there was many times I didn't want to be here and there's nobody happier. They're still here talking to Joseph about music for an hour and a half today than I am.

Speaker 1 (1:37:04): And I'm happy to be talking to you, man. Cause it was fun.

Unknown Speaker (1:37:07): Hey man, brother. This was a blast. We didn't realize almost an hour and forty minutes went by.

Unknown Speaker (1:37:11): I know.

Speaker 0 (1:37:13): So thank you again for doing this. Please come back when Chris is here again. I know he was bummed that he was going to be on vacation, but thanks to him again for hooking me up with such a cool dude. I always like talking to Joseph. You're welcome here anytime, man.

Unknown Speaker (1:37:25): And I know he'll wanna have you back when he's here too.

Speaker 1 (1:37:28): Awesome. I love talking to you guys.

Speaker 0 (1:37:30): We're gonna leave you with George Harrison. Also learned how to play Indian music. That was from our friend who was following along the whole time. Thank you for tuning in and all your great

Speaker 1 (1:37:39): why I play slide guitar, ukulele, and the sitar.

Unknown Speaker (1:37:42): There you have.

Speaker 1 (1:37:42): And my sitar was built by the same guy that built, George's, Anushka, and Ravi Shankar's.

Unknown Speaker (1:37:50): Dude, that's so cool, man. Yep. We will talk about that next time. Okay. Until next time.

Unknown Speaker (1:37:55): Love you, brother. Thanks for coming on, man.

Unknown Speaker (1:37:57): You too. Thank you, man. Have a great day.

Unknown Speaker (1:37:59): You too. Peace. Don't log off just yet.

Unknown Speaker (1:38:02): Don't log off.

Unknown Speaker (1:38:05): Give me oh, shoot. There it goes. Give me one second.

Unknown Speaker (1:38:10): Okay.