This is Vinyl Tap
Mining the layers of long players. We focus on great albums in their entirety and believe every album tells a story. We take a deep dive into the history of the artist and the album while discussing the merits of the music within the grooves. We are highly opinionated and outspoken and hope to provoke you into sharing your own opinions on albums. If you are serious about great music, this is your podcast. www.tappingvinyl.com
This is Vinyl Tap
SE 6, EP 8: Cotton Mather - Kontiki
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
On this week's episode, we discuss 1997's Kontiki, by Cotton Mather.
Produced by the band's songwriter and lead singer Robert Harrison and recorded on 4-track cassettes and ADAT, Kontiki is a low-fi sonic masterpiece that has garnered comparisons to the Beatles and Big Star. Originally released in 1997, Kontiki was not an initial commercial success. A re-release in the UK in 1999 breathed new life into the album and led to Noel Gallagher of Oasis to praise the album in the press as one he wished he'd recorded.
Kontiki is quite simply a brilliantly crafted album, one that channels the melodic brilliance of classic '60s pop while creating something that is fresh, unique, and deeply personal. Every track is packed with hooks, rich harmonies, and clever lyrical turns, making it an album that rewards repeated listens.
Visit us at www.tappingvinyl.com.
Tonight on this is vinyl tap. I gave my number to the world, but no one ever called. She made the bed three times today, each a masterpiece in its own way. This world's no dead end. It's a parking ride. In 1948, the Lebear Records introduced the 33 and a third RPM long player record. One year later, RCA Victor introduced the 45 RPM single. Listeners now had a choice only the hits or the full album. In the last half of the 60s, the best fans realized the potential of the longer format and began to build a cohesive body of music that must be heard unbroken. The arrival of downloadable music has increased the temptation to stay in the shallow end with the hits. This podcast believes every album tells a story. Tonight, we tell one of those stories. That's right, ladies and gentlemen. This is this is vinyl tap, and we are in the Vinegaroon Saloon in Wildwood, Texas. I am joined by our producer, Jonathan J. M. Rowe. Good late morning, Tapsters. And Power Pop T. Howdy, everybody. And if you don't know who picked this week's album, Contikey, by Cotton Mather, then welcome to our show. This, of course, is a PowerPop masterpiece brought to us by PowerPop Tony. And before I go on, I want to ask Jonathan JM Roe a trick question. Uh-oh. It's a trick because I didn't give these guys any uh ability to know this was coming. Originally we were going to record at Lake Travis at the time I made my notes. So I have something very important to ask you. T, you can jump in once JM starts struggling. Okay. Name the tributaries to Lake Travis.
SPEAKER_06The tributaries. Yes. Uh would we say the Perdinalis? There's one. The Colorado? There's two. Uh the Blanco.
SPEAKER_08Womp, womp. Tate, do you want to pick it up there? I have no idea. Well, we've got the Llano, Sandy Creek, Bull Creek, Lake Creek, Hurricane Creek, Arkansas Creek, Cypress Creek, Cal Creek, and Hearst Creek. Those are all tributaries that enter to the uh Lake Travis just north of Austin. Northwest of Austin. You disgraced yourself. Anyway, why did I go there?
SPEAKER_00Well why do you ever go anywhere, Doug?
SPEAKER_08If you've listened to the show, you know why I've gone there. Uh today's uh album is like Lake Travis, and I'm gonna ask JM Row to tell me what are the tributaries that feed this album, this Lake of Contiki.
SPEAKER_06Man, I I've got some of those in my notes. Definitely, I would say John Lennon uh Beatles songs would be probably that was one that jumped out at me. That would be like the Colorado, I think.
SPEAKER_08I would yes. Okay. Yeah. Same question to you.
SPEAKER_00No, well, I'm thinking because uh I want to play, so uh just so everybody knows, uh the this is gonna be a little bit different tonight, uh, because I actually got to interview Robert Harrison, who's the lead singer and main song, only songwriter here. And what he's trying to say is he cheated. With uh of of uh Cotton Mather. No, no, no, no, no. I'm just thinking because uh I'm trying to find the best time to play this particular sound bite from the interview, but uh tributary, uh the Beach Boys. Okay.
SPEAKER_08And no one wants to say Big Star? Well, Big Star, sure. Sure. Does anyone want to say jellyfish? Uh they were they were kind of contemporary. Contemporary. I don't think you don't think they rubbed off on them?
SPEAKER_00No. What about I bought a one XTC? Well, he yeah, I definitely he definitely listened to XTC. When when he was uh when Robert Harrison was recording this album, the two things he says he was listening to the most were guided by voices, and they might be giants.
SPEAKER_08Okay. That sounds right. Also, I want to I want to let people know uh in case they think that we've just picked this obscure band out of the blue, uh, I want you to hear what people have said about it. Mojo magazine. This album is just stunning. Dynamic Power Pop Delight. No Gallagher. Who's that, JM?
SPEAKER_06He's a guy from Oasis, didn't he?
SPEAKER_08Oh, he's a guy from Oasis. Not the uh largest restaurant in the United States, but positioned right by Lake Travis, but this is a band. And Tony uh sounds like a Tony band, but he's always hated him. I don't hate him, I'm just not into him. Okay, same thing. It's not the same thing. Noel Gallagher said he championed this band and he praised Contiki highly, helping it boost the album's reputation during its reissue. And reissue is kind of a cool story that we'll get to. Uh the Austin Chronicle, otherwise known as Doug Cooper's Voting Guide, called this the deluxe reissue, the album. Uh uh, they called the deluxe reissue of this album one of the best records to ever come out of Austin. And yeah, I I don't know how vocal they were when the initial album came out, though I think they probably had to be told what to do. Um but I appreciate them telling me who not to vote for every year. They uh Brett Daniel from Spoon uh cites this album as one of his chief uh uh um influences.
SPEAKER_00Do we want to say who Spoon is? I thought they were popular.
SPEAKER_08They are.
SPEAKER_00Where are they from?
SPEAKER_08They're from Austin. They're from Austin, yeah. Just want to make sure. And uh Tony, you've got the Shake Some Action, the Ultimate PowerPoint guide. I did. It's been updated and Contikey's gone from 26 to 10. It's in the top 10. Of all the PowerPop albums in the whole world, they're number 10. So you got to take that uh seriously. And a lot of people heard about this album from Ron Wood, who played it at a party and got everybody jazzed on it. That's a uh connection, Doug. That is a connection. So early. Well, let's do it anyway. And who was James and Tony Pies?
SPEAKER_00Why don't you say why Ron why Ron Wood's a connection?
SPEAKER_08Oh, Ron Wood is a connection because Ron Wood's been on several of our other albums. Uh Every Picture Tells a Story. He was on uh Beck uh Truth. Yeah. What else is he on?
SPEAKER_00I think that's it.
SPEAKER_06No, he's on well, no, he wasn't on the Rolling Stones, wasn't he?
SPEAKER_08No, he that was when he was using his talents for good. And not evil, exactly. Anyway, I I don't nothing about the Rolling Stones. Don't write in on that. I just think he's wasted in that band, just like I think Niels Lofren is wasted in the East Street band.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's a good point.
SPEAKER_08All right. Um too much talent to be in a band playing chords behind an inferior guitar player. That's all I'm saying. Right. All right. Uh Jim, how about a connection?
SPEAKER_06Well, I'm gonna go with uh one of our most recent podcasts, Beaver Nelson. Uh the late great George Reef plays bass on this album. And he played on several of the uh albums we talked about with Beaver, and uh he was also in his band for a very long time. Uh unfortunately he passed away, I guess I think he passed away the same day Jamie Lefgug did.
SPEAKER_00I'm gonna play something that uh, because this is kind of heartbreaking that about George that I just think is interesting. So this is gonna happen a lot tonight, ladies and gentlemen. This is from the interview, so hold on a second. This is what Robert Harrison had a story about George Reeve.
SPEAKER_05I got a call um from George. Because George and I hung out, you know, a couple times a week. But one night he called me. Seems like it was in the morning. I said, How you doing, man? He said, I'm depressed. This is 2012. I said, What's going on? He said, I just I heard a I heard a young bass player last night. Yeah, and he just kicked my ass. I don't know what I'm doing. I think I've just gone down the wrong path with everything I'm doing. So wow. I said, Yeah, are you digging what I'm playing on these days? Like, yeah, you sound great. And he said, Yeah. And I said, Who did you hear? And he said, George Reef in 1997. Oh, jeez. Wow.
SPEAKER_08Wow. Yeah. All right. So there's that. Wow. Tony, do you have a connection?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um Big Star.
SPEAKER_08And that's Ardent Studios.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, they recorded their album before the one we're talking about, Cotton is King in Ardent Studios in Memphis, which is where uh Big Star recorded, I think, all of their stuff.
SPEAKER_06And that's actually I think uh Beaver actually recorded uh their one. I think he did. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_08Yeah. Uh I've got a connection. Mine is Beaver Nelson. We already well JM didn't do all of it.
SPEAKER_06I didn't do all of it, no.
SPEAKER_08Beaver recorded in a home studio in uh Leander. Well, he was in it was Austin. Oh, that ruined everything. Well, this this album was largely recorded in Leander, which is where Jonathan J. M. Row used to live until he moved to Austin. And uh now he's as far in Austin North as he can be. Just put a toe into Austin.
SPEAKER_06Still be in Austin.
SPEAKER_08Okay, uh, I had other connections, but I'll I got we got one more beaver connection, don't we? What's that?
SPEAKER_00Dana Miser playser. Dana Miser, who plays uh bass on this album, or I'm sorry, drums on this album also played with Beaver. In fact, I think he mentioned him when we were talking.
SPEAKER_08Yeah, he did. He mentioned everybody and uh sure did. And there's a connection with uh Jellyfish.
SPEAKER_00Oh god Jones. Yeah, there absolutely is. You want to say what it is?
SPEAKER_08Well, he co-produced Imperial Drag, which featured Robert Manning of Jellyfish.
SPEAKER_00Robert Manning Jr. and I believe Jr.
SPEAKER_08You see how quick I can correct you there, Jimmy.
SPEAKER_00I believe the uh Mellotron that he that Roger Manning used, or at least some of the tapes, I don't know how this works, uh, are on are used. I think it's used on this album as well.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, that was actually one of my connections. Uh the Mellotron, it makes an appearance on that, which has made an appearance on several albums that we've talked about. It's kind of the unofficial out uh instrument of this is vinyl tech.
SPEAKER_00So uh I'm going to mention one, which is Badfinger. Badfinger, because they were on a Badfinger tribute album. I'm going to play the song that they did. They did a version of Flying, which is a Badfinger song. Since we keep talking about PowerPoint, Doug, I'd also like to play a clip of Robert Harrison talking about being called that. Here we go. Let's see what you think, what you guys think of this. As I was gonna ask you about this, people categorize you as PowerPoint.
SPEAKER_05Sure. I can't do anything about that. It's a career destroying vision before it was at that time. I had not heard that term at that time. I did not hear that for a couple years, and when I heard it, I was like, what is that? To me, what I was listening to was the clash and they might be giants. Yeah. You know, and I was just trying to write the best songs I could do with the best melodies. I didn't know about this this whole subgenre, and there wasn't really that in in Austin.
SPEAKER_00No, like I said, there were I named the bands, you could name them on maybe one and a half hands.
SPEAKER_05I just thought we were rock and roll men.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_05And I still do. I mean, I think a a lot of what people call are I I think the the artists I like them like the term, like the DBs things like that. You know, they kind of grudging it. It was just rock and roll music and good melodies. And I to me, I think it just gives journalists a pigeonhole, a bucket to put people. And it's helpful for some people to say, well, if I like that, I might like this. Yes. The problem is when you start applying those tags to things, right? Is that you is that you create expectations because if you were to really look at what people think of as power pop, the majority of the music I make doesn't fall in that camp.
SPEAKER_08Well, I can I can uh think of another connection now. What's that? What's that? He's connected uh to Doug Cooper, the host of this program, in that he doesn't like these categorizations, categorization tons. And also, um, I had not heard the term power pop until I think we started this podcast was the first time I heard it. Even though Pete Townsend said it in 1968. Well, I know where it came from, but if he said that back then, I'd I probably didn't pay any attention to it. Um I I've uh and it's it's a genre of music that I uh generally don't listen to, so uh I'm I'm kind of with him on that, except he listens to stuff that's called power pop. How much of it is jangly guitars that gets him sucked into that?
SPEAKER_00Well, I think that's exactly I think I think he'd be okay with the term guitar pop. I don't think he's got a problem with the P word as much as he's got a power a problem with that category of power pop, because uh he writes pop songs, and I don't think he would argue with that at all, you know.
SPEAKER_08Um and he writes when I think of a pop song, I think of a song that's not long and is accessible. Yeah, and this album has 14 songs and 40 minutes is yeah, short songs, and uh they're immediately accessible. You don't have to dig on this one.
SPEAKER_00So we've talked about this before that the the sort of for most PowerPop fans, the springboard is the Beatles. And when you sound as much like John Lennon as as Robert Harrison does, I think he said an interview one time he sounded like John Lennon with a broken nose or something like that. When you sound as much like John Lennon, and and what's what I find fascinating about Cotton Mather is particularly this album, uh there are songs that if they were if this were a Beatles album, John Lennon wouldn't be singing lead on. McCartney would be singing lead on. It's just that his voice sounds like Lennon.
SPEAKER_08So there's um there's Beatlesque guitar playing, uh, and other other production uh I guess they have tape loops. Um Tony and I were talking about this earlier before you got here, Jonathan. Like we always talk about you while you're gone. And uh we one of the questions I wanted to ask, I can't ask Tony because I know he already knows the answer. Uh and by the answer, I mean he agrees with me. Um what Beatles album do you think this album reminds you of?
SPEAKER_06Uh I you know the first thing that came to my head was rubber soul and then a little bit of revolver, but I think the rubber soul era Beatles is where it where I think it belonged, would I would categorize it as most like the the end of the first era? The end of the first era, yeah.
SPEAKER_08What do you think, T? I I think most people would say revolver. Yeah, it's to me uh let me say a little bit about the voice, because I think that's important for new listeners, and I'm extremely new listener. I had not ever heard this band before uh T brought them up, and this was right in my dark ages in the 90s where I was not paying any attention to music, and I wasn't in Austin, so didn't have a didn't stand a chance. But anyway, um when I first heard this record I I was so distracted by everything that sounded beatly beatly and everything that and and the John Lennon voice, I the phrasing, I just couldn't it was hard for me to pay attention to what he was actually doing. Uh but on subs subsequent listenings, uh I stopped hearing that and started hearing the album. And now I can listen to it without even thinking about the Beatles very much at all.
SPEAKER_00But I don't Yeah, I don't think about the Beatles much.
SPEAKER_08Well, you've been listening to it for a very, very long time. I I'm talking about the first time I ever heard it. So I would encourage listeners if if that somehow makes you think it's derivative of the Beatles in a in a way that you can't appreciate, I would encourage you to keep listening and find out what's going on here. It's something very original. And uh it's not it's not a ripoff.
SPEAKER_06I do remember when this album came out, and I remember that a lot of my friends, you know, I was kind of like you, Doug, at that point. I I had quit playing music live, and I really just wasn't listening to a lot of rock music. I really wasn't listening to a lot of bands, even coming out of Austin. And but I did hear th there was a lot of buzz about this album, and I I don't really know why I never really bothered to get into it. I think I did hear it one time over at a friend's house, and I just but it was in passing, and then I didn't know anything I I just kind of forgot about Cotton Mather until 2012 when we went to go see them do I think they did the whole Kantipi album. Uh Tony took me to go see it, and it was I just remember really enjoying it, thinking the basic. Where was that?
SPEAKER_00Was that at the old Threadgills? Because I know they did it once at Outside and Threadgills. They did it a couple of times when they reassist.
SPEAKER_06It was an inside. I remember yeah. So yeah, that was a uh but I was just remembering that's this I really missed out on this band. And I don't, you know, I don't know why I didn't pursue them after that either.
SPEAKER_00Here's what's here's what's kind of interesting about how because I was when I was talking to them, I was trying to figure out how I discovered them. I I bought their first single, uh, which came out in '93. I moved from Austin to DC to go to grad school in '94. So I bought their first single in '93. I moved in July '94. I owned a copy of Cotton is King, their first album, which also came out in '94. I only saw them live once.
SPEAKER_04Really?
SPEAKER_00Um, yeah, I'll talk about that later because it's connected to something that he finds that he says is important. But um, I saw them at Ant at the Old Antones on the Drag once. They played there, and that was probably '93, '94, somewhere around there. They were part of that little scene that I was into with Javelin Boot and Jesus and the wannabes and the wayouts. Oh, yeah. All those guys kind of played played at the same time. Uh Magneto USA, you know, all these bands that were kind of they were guitar pop bands. And uh and it's funny when he's talking, he talks about how people view him in Austin, and he says that um basically Austin tolerates that kind of music. That it's not that it's it's not that it's negative, but Austin isn't a pop. And it's funny, I read an I read an article by, and I can't remember the lady's name, I'll post, I'll post it on the website, but a woman in the chronicle who um asked the my favorite question, Beatles or Stones, to her boss, and her boss said stones, and someone else came in and said stones. And then she wrote started writing about how Austin is is basically a stones town that no matter where it ventures off, by the end of the evening, it always climbs back into bed with the same twelve bars. Which I thought is a perfect description of this town, because it's true. It's blue there's a blues in country. Yeah. And so and so when you when you think about that, uh it's it's I think he's right. There's a there's a tolerance there's people like me who seek this music out, but um you're not gonna get rich playing this kind of music in Austin.
SPEAKER_08Uh I'm I'm glad you said that because if you told me this was a Liverpool band, I would go, oh of course. Even if you told me it was a pub rock uh but I would never. Maybe even south Southern California a little bit, I would guess. But if you told me this was an Austin band, I would say, yeah, right from where they just uh we we had a podcast with Doug Som, and I declare Doug Somme the most Texas sounding musician of the ball. Absolutely makes sense. And I I I think this is the least Texas sounding musician that we've covered.
SPEAKER_06Well, you David Back in the 80s and the the early 90s, you're right, there was a lot of the like you mentioned, the way out.
SPEAKER_00Well, you say a lot. I mean I mentioned six bands.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, well, but there was also bands that kind of had that real, I would almost put toy dog pondering in that grains of faith was those were precursors to that scene, though.
SPEAKER_00Those were all the new sincerity guys. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_06But it was that there was you could go out and hear jangly guitar really easily.
SPEAKER_00But it wasn't like, and he talks about this in the interview, it wasn't like being in Athens where that stuff was, you know.
SPEAKER_08This this if this came out of Athens, I'd say, of course. Yeah, yeah. That was And tell us about Athens. REM, B52s, who else?
SPEAKER_00Hylon. Well, I know, I mean, there's a lot of bands from the Georgia area that kind of got started there. The uh Gualcanal Diary, I think, was a was a big band. Uh they're from I believe from Atlanta, but they probably played there all the time. That was and then when you talk about the Austin New Sincerity movement, uh you know, those guys were all REM.
SPEAKER_08What about uh Which isn't a bad thing? We forgot something that we always talk about. Actually, it's appropriate this time. Uh Tony, why are we experts? They're from Austin. And you sat down with the guy for uh a good bit of time.
SPEAKER_00It was nice, it was nice that I I really appreciate him giving me the time to do that because we've talked about doing that before with band with people that live here, just reaching out to seeing if they'd be willing to talk. And I just finally said, what the hell, why not? And he was kind enough to sit down with me and talk to me about you know, answer my dumb questions.
SPEAKER_08Well, we're glad you found someone to do that with uh too. It's we've been carrying that burden a long time. Now, Karen, I want to start with some basics, all right. So uh Cotton Mathers was a Puritan minister and uh tied infamously to Well, he did a lot of things. Yes, a lot of positive things, but he's uh remembered because of the Salem Witch trials. Right. He was a religious student at the University of Virginia. Yeah, he was a divinity student there. And uh that that aided him in deciding to uh name the band.
SPEAKER_00His brother, who was seven years older than him and who had a very large influence on Robert Harrison, uh was the one who came up with that name. They were uh they were walking around Baltimore at the time of his his uncle's funeral, I think. You know, just trying to cheer each other up. And I think he was trying to come up with a band name, and his brother said, Why don't you call it Cotton Mather? And they both thought that was hilarious and so because it's such a ridiculous name to call a band, especially the band they were the kind of music they're making.
SPEAKER_08I know for a fact it's in uh one of his daily devotionals that he wrote, Cotton Mather, did mention that he didn't like power pop or jangler guitars. Anyway, but how about this album, Kantiki? Can you tell us the origin of that?
SPEAKER_00Uh yeah, I can. Uh Kantiki was um, his name is a raft, a Norwegian explorer, Thor Haydenthal. He navigated across the Pacific from South America to uh the Polynesian Islands in 1947 in this raft that he made. It's cool.
SPEAKER_06It is a pretty amazing book.
SPEAKER_08And who did he look like? Who did Thor look like? Not I'll give you a hint, it's not Thor. He looked like uh Marlon Perkins from a while ago. Oh, really? Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I remember that book, seeing that book in the library all the time. Of course, it's not spelled the same way. Um this is one one word, and Contiki is hyphenated, I think. That's right. Yeah. In the the Explorer.
SPEAKER_06It's a good book. I read it in when I was in elementary school.
SPEAKER_00It was written by Thor.
SPEAKER_06That's where I learned.
SPEAKER_00You know, the one question I didn't ask him is why he named it Contiki, but the speculation is because of the ramshackle way all this sort of came together.
SPEAKER_08Maybe he felt lost at sea at this period of time. Well, I it could also be but the the uh the exposition had a happy ending, and so did this album, unfortunately. We probably wouldn't be talking about it right now. Okay, so that's how we got the album, that's how we got the name. How did this guy become a musician? He went from the Divinity School at the University of Virginia.
SPEAKER_00He was well, he was born in Virginia and he grew up uh in Auburn. His father was a U.S. history professor at George Mason in Virginia, and then he moved the family to Auburn.
SPEAKER_08Where he's a professor at Auburn?
SPEAKER_00He's a U.S. U.S. history professor at Auburn.
SPEAKER_08I guess they weren't at the bottom of the SEC back then.
SPEAKER_00Uh so Robert Harrison is the second boy of five kids. The rest he's the only they're the only two boys, those are the three or daughters, but there's a family of five. Um again, like I said, I'm gonna kind of do something different, and you guys can write back write us and tell you what you what you think about this, but I'm gonna let I'm gonna let him talk about now. I'm gonna um I'm gonna let him sort of tell the story here. So how old were you when you guys moved to Alabama?
SPEAKER_05Three or four. This is the late 60s.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_05I mean, I I I vaguely foggier memory of Virginia. We have all our family's still up there. Stayed up there. What part of Virginia? Well, they were in Northern Virginia and Fairfax. My parents both come from Richmond. Okay. My mother's uncle had been the governor back in China. Okay. My father's family was more um, they were in the tobacco business, you know. Yeah, makes sense, right?
SPEAKER_00Virginia. Did you live, did you live in Alabama till you went to school, after school? Yeah. UVA?
SPEAKER_05And and there was always this feeling in our household, this very academic, um, sort of aristocratic Virginia household. It wasn't snobby. Right. No, I get it. They were very liberal parents, unlike the rest of their families. They were very liberal, figured in the Democratic Party in Auburn, and and they were um really cool older parents, much older. So my dad was born in 1920. Oh, okay, wow. And my my actually have a uh two uh his his two grandfathers. My great-grandfathers were both wounded in the Civil War. Oh wow. So my grandfather was I have a great-grandfather who was wounded in Gettysburg and won at Chancellorsville. So we had these huge generational leaps, uh-huh, which which kind of gave this weightiness to the the vibe that I think my brother and I reacted against a bit. Although it was a very it was a very beautiful, fun room to grow up in, yeah, with these dinners that were five kids, and these dinners were just kind of wild roly-poly conversations usually led by my my parents, but um you know it was all it was a it was a really stimulating family and and a lot of fun.
SPEAKER_00So uh the other thing I I asked him about was obviously because I was interested in it, was um like what kind of music he grew up listening to. This is there's actually a funny, a funny bit in uh in this little bit here. Well, but did they listen to much music growing up?
SPEAKER_05Well, so the the the they my father could hear any piece of classical music and it could tell you exactly what it was, not surprisingly. Oh, it's Schubert's fifth, you know. Uh huh. He had listened to a lot of music when he was in graduate school. Apparently, he had a housemate that did. They had a pretty big collection of classical music which was all destroyed by placating my brother as a toddler. They let him play with the records in the dirt or something, you know. So they had mostly Broadway music and they had a little bit of jazz, but not much. As older parents in Fairfax or uh and in Alabama, they tended to uh it seems like they had a bunch of folk records that were the the flavor of the day, like the Brothers Four and Singing None and shit like that. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. And then I I I have a memory of well at some point there was the the Beatle Swan single of She Loves You. And that would have been in Fairfax, but I don't remember.
SPEAKER_00So the story about that that I read, and I don't know if it's right or not, that some student of your mom's had decided a beetle lyric. That's exactly and so she ran out and bought that.
SPEAKER_05She she went out and bought the swan symbol because she was substituting, and a student said, Miss Harrison, I have a big surprise for you. Can I read my poem last? We were supposed to read my mother said the child stood up and read a most peculiar little poem.
SPEAKER_00And it was a Beatles story.
SPEAKER_05It's John Lennon, and my mother said, Who's John Lennon? And all the kids laughed. Uh-huh. So this, I'm guessing this would have been probably 1965 or something.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_05So she dutifully, oh, I gotta buy this. My brother and sister remember seeing the Ed Sullivan show, because they were older than me. Um but um she would buy Beatles records at the Piggly Wiggly, you know. Yeah. I still have those records in my little house down here. Uh they're scratched to hell. And of course, we didn't have any sense of what the chronology was or who these guys were, except our primary knowledge of them came from the cartoon. Oh, yeah, the cartoon's great then, right? But it it also um is how you knew whose voice was who.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, because it would be the animated person singing it, right?
SPEAKER_05So I was John, how do you know? It's like, well, that's how we sound, right? That's hilarious. So at some point, my older brother, he he really got into he got a my dad's uh dictaphone tape recorder, yeah, and we began recording the television theme songs off the TV. Okay. That was our we had all the television theme songs like we loved Adam 12, you know, and we had those to listen to. It's fun. And then, I mean, you did what you had to do, right? And then as he got a little older, uh, he began just bringing all these records in. And he was really into the stones, he was into Cross B still snatching young, he was into me. We had tie-dye, we grew our hair, we he was what you said six years?
SPEAKER_00Six years older than you. So I'm sure that had an influence on me, right? An older brother bringing it.
SPEAKER_05And and and it was he's the oldest, so it was like if we were the Beatles, he was John, and we were all Ringo. You know, so he had all the power, and he was a very big personality, uh in not just in our household, but in the neighborhood, and he was brilliant. Uh, and he loved to play uh any kind of game where he got to be the sort of the wizard of oz. Okay. So you got to go into his room and listen to a new record by invitation. Uh so you had to treat him well. This is kind of Trumpish. Yeah. And then we would take these big family trips in our station wagon, and he got somehow he managed to have the whole back. Right? And like he had the back with his purple quilt and his box, two boxes of cassette tapes at this point. So he handled all the music in the car. Much of which we liked, and then you know, as time went on, you know, prog rock was in there. And so it was all just this melange of rock music.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Oh, we were at a coffee shop outside.
SPEAKER_08I know it's a little noisy, I apologize, but it gives it an ambience and made me feel right at home. Uh how long is he in Alabama?
SPEAKER_00So he's there until he goes off to school and uh goes off to University of Virginia. Uh one of the things he does his senior year is he finds a um a guitar in his brother's his brother's a six-year, I think I said seven, but his brother's six years older than him. Goes off to college. He sneak, you know, he used to sneak in his room, look for records, look for herbiage, if you know what I mean, to see what was around. And he's in there his senior year and he sees his guitar. Um that was his uh that I think it was his sister's guitar, but his acoustic guitar. And he started playing playing around on it and get interested in doing stuff with that. Um and he realized that his sister's piano book had tablatures in it, so he could play with that. And the first song I think he said he learned was uh some Crosby Souls and Ash song. And then uh and then his mom for Christmas got him a fender acoustic. So he had a fender acoustic when he went off to college, I think, or at least uh after the first semester of college, he had a fender acoustic that he played on. But he goes off to University of Virginia, and as we mentioned, he's a religious studies um and theology student. But um the summer before he leaves school, he has a near-death experience.
SPEAKER_05I go off to college, and I was really more inclined to be an athlete than anything else. I wasn't particularly good at school. Okay. Um the only thing I was good at was I would always if it was a poetry assignment, I could write a poem. Okay, it wouldn't rhyme and the teacher would go, Oh what a clever boy you are. It would be clever little stupid little poems, but uh for a you know 12-year-old or whatever, they were impressive. And uh so when I uh my my senior year of high school after I graduated. I I'm um I I guess I decided to go to University of Virginia. Um you know, back then my my kids were both went to college and they were so clear on where they were going, they visited and knew all about it. I was some mismatch, you know, like nobody's basically Virginia. I I wasn't a preppy kid. I was it was a huge place, I was from a tiny town, I was very lonely. And um June after I graduated, I had a terrible car accident where I almost was killed. I had this car I got this scar on my face here. Just come back from the beach from being at a counselor at a summer camp and riding as a passenger in my girlfriend's car, and she hit a bridge, and the creosote pole came from the windshield and hit my face. And I was told that uh if it had been uh a centimeter deeper, I would have been blind, and and a half inch deeper I would have been dead. So it was and I'd had no seatbelt, and so if I'd had a seatbelt, I also would have been dead. Uh so it was a disfiguring action. Uh and I was 17, you know, when I went to college.
SPEAKER_04And that's like I had this big huge scar message.
SPEAKER_05And I never been away from home except for like camp for a weekend. Um shockingly, you know, and I and I didn't know everyone in Auburn. Hi, Robert, you know, I had been a pretty popular kid in high school and did really good at sports, and the girls liked me, and I was having I was living uh, you know, I was in a really happy place, and I was in the school place. I w I wanted to do theater. That was my you want to be an actor. Yeah, and that's what I was really gifted at. Okay. And I had to been in university productions, uh-huh. And I don't say gifted lightly, I was told that's like that's that's what you're gonna do. Oh wow. So that was my that was my thought. And then when I got to Virginia, where people didn't know me, the first thing is like, oh my god, what happened to you? I didn't see myself that way, right? But in that vulnerable place of being seventeen. And like self-esteem is shaky anyway. Right. And your first impression in the new grown-up world is um that you're disfigured. It it really did some damage. It's a terrible time. Um but across the hall was a radio station called WTJU. Like the uh college station? Okay. It was the college station. WTJU was across the hall. So I could hear their music piping out of the hall. Oh, wow. And I would see these cool-looking hipsters, you know, and I would say, What is what is that you're playing? And it's like, that's that's London. You don't know London calling? I had to know that record. So I was hearing this music and and getting really intrigued. And sometime that summer prior to college, someone at that AM station put on Elvis Dostello green shirt. But when I heard that song, yeah, I remember pulling off the road and and just starting to cry. Wow. It was thrill and then emotion, and I think the emotion was just probably was was after the accident, now that I think about it, it would make much sense that that would have been the reaction. Um just kind of overwhelmed with how beautiful and melodic and daring and and new wave music was just something.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, but it's like you didn't have a couple of things.
SPEAKER_05And Angular is punk was off-putting, and Angular, but I heard like melody. And I didn't know that anyone was gonna make melodies against me. Yeah.
SPEAKER_08So he had to be kind of smart to get into the University of Virginia, Tony.
SPEAKER_00Well, I'm I'm assuming being a uh being a professor's kid, it's gonna make me a professor's kid, I still wouldn't have been able to get in. His roommate at the time is an accordion player. So he's in a dungeon trapped with an accordion player. But he said he's a really fantastic accordion player, and they used to jam together. The rest of the guys on the dorm were all bodybuilders, like professional or not professional, competitive bodybuilders from Virginia.
SPEAKER_08Were they accused of using steroids?
SPEAKER_00I don't know. Um Doug asked that because he's got wearing a shirt that says, No, I'm not on steroids. Thanks for asking. Because it's it's not clear whether he's juicing or not. But anyway, um, what he said was remarkable about these bulked up guys is they all had great voices. The bodybuilder guys? Yeah, and so they would they would come and hang out and they would hang out in a room while they're while he's playing acoustic guitar, the other guy's playing the accordion, and they would sing songs. And one of their other people in the dorm was a ballet dancer. So they got this somebody had a copy of American Graffiti, the album, and they pulled a song off of it, and they made a routine out of this, and these guys played around UVA with these big bulk of dance and sing. He said they wanted a university talent show at one point. Um that's the kind of stuff you can't plan. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so music because you know, you heard how awkward he was because the accent and everything, music becomes this kind of social outlet for him. And he starts going to see bands on the local scene. One of the bands he talked glowingly about was this band called Rude Buddha that was composed mostly of other people in the religious studies department. He says that they were one of the most daring live bands he's ever seen, but he said they were amazing, great hooks, great charisma. He was like, he said, the talking heads, but way more interesting.
SPEAKER_08That sounds so much like what period of time?
SPEAKER_06Nineteen eighty it sounds to me like early mid eighties. It sounds to me like B fifty twos meets early eighties rush. Rush rush. That sounded guitar.
SPEAKER_08Oh uh guitar what's those guys uh wore members only jackets? That that guitar at the beginning reminded me of Durant. Reminded me of 80s. Of course, our windows rush. You're talking to a guy that ran like he was being chased every time Duran Durant came out. We're gonna do that Rio album.
SPEAKER_00It's a fantastic album. I'm gonna pick it one. Anyway, the other band he said uh was big for him was this band called the Monarchs. And when they which is a much better name than Rude Buddha. Yeah. And the Monarchs were guys that wore turtlenecks and Beetle Boots, and he according to him, they played the Hamburg Beatles set. So no Beatles songs, but all the songs the Beatles played when they were playing Hamburg. And he got obsessed with that music and started going out and buying and getting to know all the all the people they played. But I'm gonna play you uh, I think this is a later monarch song. Um, so I don't I because I don't really necessarily hear the what the Beatles I maybe, I don't know. I'll play it for you.
SPEAKER_08The monarchs and they didn't have a hit? I don't think so.
SPEAKER_00Sounds like they would. Yeah, that's a great, great sounding song. It was tough to find a sound soundbite of it. We appreciate your efforts, though. But uh, I really dig that, dig that a little bit more than the rude Buddha, but I never saw them live, so who knows uh what that was like. But he used to go see the monarchs all the time. The fourth time he saw the monarchs, he went up to them and asked if he could be in the band. And they said, What do you play? He goes, guitar. He goes, You got an amp? He goes, No, I've got an acoustic guitar. He didn't he said he didn't really understand the difference, and of course they said no, but um he was just fascinated, fascinated by them. So after college, he moves to Atlanta with his girlfriend because his girlfriend hated uh hated Charlottesville, where the UVA was. Um he sold encyclopedias door to door for a while. He uh goes to visit uh nearby Athens, uh, because he's uh the his uh a girl he's living with as um has somebody she knows somebody there anyway. They go to Athens and the city's thriving music scene convinces him to move there. And uh so he moves to Athens um and uh on the night he's there visiting, he he goes and he sees I think he goes to see some music. Um he says he found it difficult to connect with people in Athens because once he arrived after he arrived there, because they were all a little um full of themselves, he'd ask people to get together and play, and they'd say no, not really they don't want to do it. Um and he made his mind up, you'll love this, Doug. He made his mind up where to go next because of a random encounter at a coffee shop next to this cookie bakery he was working at. He's hanging out at the coffee shop one day, and this girl with cat eye glasses comes in and she's got super hipster clothing, and he says she's going on and on about this dreadful, abysmal place she just left, and it's she's just saying how awful it was. And he thinks to himself, if this person doesn't like it, it must be pretty good. He um asks her where she's from, and she says, I'm from Austin. Um she said she was gonna move to Athens to be part of the intelligentsia. What's thinking to himself, great, I'll take your place. And his girlfriend at the time was thinking about going to grad school in either uh Philadelphia or or um Austin. And so he goes home and he says to his girlfriend, if you go to Austin, I think I'll I'll I think I want to go with you. And he goes online to do a little research, he sees a Rolling Stone article about the new sincerity movement, and then it just so happens one of the three jobs he's working at, which is this Chinese restaurant, uh one of the uh wait staff there asks him to go see some music one night, and he goes, and it happens to be Doctor's Mob, the Reavers, and the Wild Seeds playing. Wow and so he's like, Oh, this is all these are Austin's bands. So he decides he's gonna move to Austin, and he's thinks they've got the pop rock scene covered, so he's going to do this.
SPEAKER_05I first thought I'll come out and I'll do rockabilly, because they don't have that probably. You know. That must have been a cold when he got here and went, oh, wait a minute. It's like, wait a minute, that's taken. I'm gonna go with 180 degrees in Almond Garden. It was definitely taken.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, he was gonna be a rockabilly guy in Austin because they didn't have any rockabilly here. I don't even know what that means. What is that? So if they have it in Lubbert. Um so he he comes here with that idea, and and like he said at the end of that clip, he decides, well, they've got that in spades. I'm just gonna go ex do do the experimental thing.
SPEAKER_08Well, they did find a space that's not heavily occupied here.
SPEAKER_00Well, before that, he was in a he was in an avant-garde band with uh he said that and I don't know, you probably know who this is, JM. He said he decided to do something like Fred Firth.
SPEAKER_06So Fred Firth was a uh frequent collaborator with Guess Who?
SPEAKER_00You're a guy? I love the guess who Brian Eno.
SPEAKER_06Uh he played guitar on one of my favorite Brian Eno albums before and after science, and uh he's played with a bunch of other people since then. He's a multi-instrumentalist, but mainly known for his uh kind of unusual guitar solos and the treatments that he puts on him. He he's played with the softboys, other other boys, other guys like that. Other boys like that.
SPEAKER_08I like the softboys. If uh ladies and gentlemen, if you don't know our show very well, then you might not know why Tony and I left. That is because JM never gets very far from Brian Eno. That's true.
SPEAKER_00That's true. So he puts when he gets to Austin, he puts an ad in the paper in the Chronicle, and he wants to get uh you know get musicians to play.
SPEAKER_05How'd you guys meet? So I had ads that I would run in the Chronicle. Okay. And I ran I ran an ad and it I wish I had had a hidden camera for all the musicians I auditioned. There was just person after person. And then this guy called me, and he was his name was Brett or Brett, I'm not sure which. And we talked a long time. He seemed really cool. He had been in the band Scratch Ass. Uh-huh. And we planned to get together. Okay. And there were messages that went back and forth, and left messages and called them back. And this guy named Brett, at some point, it took forever for us to work it out. Or Nikomo. This guy's really tall, gangly, unusual looking. Doesn't look very punk rock at all. Looks more like, you know, Pacific Northwest, fanny pack, flannel. Can he play, and his base is handmade. He's made his base himself, and he can play his ass off. And he's weird and cool. And it's like, well, yeah, this guy, this guy's good. Well, it wasn't for a few months when I asked him something about scratch ass. He said, I don't know anything about scratch ass. Somehow messages got tangled up. I had the wrong Oh wow. But he told me at some point he'd been in a band called Furniture. Okay. And the band had been a four-piece. It was an art band. My ads were definitely in the Buddha thing, you know. I'm I started doing some more avant-garde, odd, instrumental stuff with him. Woodshedding on that while I'm in this relationship. And then uh he said, you know, I've got my a really good friend who was in furniture with me named Nat Shelton. He's a cool cellist. And let's get him in if you want. So I went and met Nat. And Brett ended up moving to Seattle. But Nat and I, we got tight. And he was the first person since back in college days where I had this. I mean, going all the way back to that roommate of mine, right? He was this, he was a real uh connecting piece, somebody that really uh filled that space in my life of not just a mentor, not just a not a girlfriend, but somebody who we were gonna be the engine of something together. So over the course of about probably two years, we would go out to where he lives, and they and we practice on their porch, we'd practice at my house. We we called ourselves Shape's Horse. Shape's Horse. Like Shape Plural. Shape's horse. And we would do coffee house things and cactus cafe, open mic.
SPEAKER_00So while while he's playing with with uh Nat um Shelton, he uh and it's just the two of them, and what and he's in that band. This is not Cotton Matter yet, he meets Joe McDermott from Grams of Faith. And Harrison ends up breaking up with that girlfriend, that longtime girlfriend he has, and Joe McDermott ends up breaking up with his wife, and so they move in together. And Joe starts sort of helping him along the way, and he's important in his musical history because A, he convinces him to sing, because he said he was catawalling up to that point. Joe McDermott's like, you probably never even heard yourself with a real mic before. You look you got an interesting voice, you can sing, and he ends up helping him along the way various times. I mean, producing uh demos, he he helped him. I mean, that's the place out in Leander, the house out in Leander was Joe McDermott's house where he was working on Contiki. So he's playing this avant-garde music, and uh one day he gets he actually gets um a rhythm section, and so they start calling themselves Cotton Matter. The cellist is still playing there, they're still playing these kind of weird avant-garde tunes. One day he said he's sitting at the end of his bed and he picks up a guitar and he starts plucking out a song in the beginning of Say It Again, Jim. I think it's Georges Bazay. Okay, anyway, and he turns it into a pop song with hooks, and he thinks, where did this come from? And he plays an opera that turned into a pop song. I guess so. And he and he plays it for the band, and the band loves it, and he says things start to gel when the sound when the sound came together, and that's when this started happening. He starts doing more and more of that stuff. Up to that point, he was all over the map. They play their first official gig at anybody Liberty Lunch. Cannibal Club. Remember that place? Yeah, I've played that place in February of 1990 on a Tuesday night, and the lineup is Owen McMahon on bass, Nat Shelton on cello, Wendy March on drums, and Robert Harrison and Volcanic. Is that sixth street? Uh-huh. So after a night out, he writes, he spends uh the rest of the night, he's out partying, he gets home, and he ends up writing this song, which he plays for the band the next day, and of course, they dig it.
SPEAKER_03Obviously, it sounds good. But it else is not bad.
SPEAKER_00So you can see there the melody coming through the weirdness. But the weirdness is still there. Weirdness is there that's called pillbox hat making. And he's got a cello player. There's an early connection collection of demos from that era called uh Early Sermons. That's good. Uh and that song is on it, and these are recorded at Sound Horizons, if you know where that was in Austin. I remember that. I do remember the name, I don't know where it was. And it's the same lineup I just mentioned. It's been torn down, and there's a condo there now, so um, it's engineered by Joe McDermott and is produced by Joe McDermott and Cotton Mather. And Harrison realizes that his most natural expression is making melodic tuneful music. So he starts writing more songs like that. They go and play the CMJ conference in New York, and he's uh got a new drummer, Tim McMillan, because Wendy um Wendy March wasn't really working out. What's the CNJ conference? It's a it's a music conference up in New York. Oh, okay. Yeah. That I guess was big at that point, you know, kind of maybe sort of like South by Southwest. I don't know. Um he meets Brian Martin up there who comes up to him and says they played the best songs of the entire conference. Brian Martin is the guy who produces that Petrol Motion, and uh the reason Robert Harrison liked him is because he knew he could get stuff done. He flies down to Austin and then and records with them in '91 at Austin Tracks. At that point, the band's not really together to get yet, but he's got some uh got some people together, and they record um three songs, one of which is this song called Ship Shape.
SPEAKER_03I am Titanic, and she's losing up. I am the best mark, and she's done a remote.
SPEAKER_00Listening to that song gives you an idea of kind of where he was at the time, which was his lyrics were very literary. They were very sort of kind of like Al Stewart. Maybe. Anyway, and um, and so that's what he was focusing on doing. He still hadn't found his songwriting voice yet. So he meets up with David Garza, who's another local sort of Austin, Texas musician. Very good, writes him an amazing song, and they play each other their music, what they're working on at the time, and he said he's a little uh upset because David doesn't praise these songs, he's put a lot of effort into. But what David does tell him is he's like, you need to go back and you need to listen to the interplay between McCartney and Ringo. He goes, You like the British invasion stuff, that's your starting point, but you've got all you've got the icing, you don't have the foundational stuff yet. So he's a little offended by that, but after a couple of days, he decides he's gonna go back and listen to it, and he pulls out, I think, revolver and listens to it, and he has an epiphany and he realizes oh, you know what? He's right. I am sort of writing from the top down instead of the bottom up, and so he starts picking out things, bass lines and stuff on his own.
SPEAKER_08Well, let's hold it right there, because that's interesting to me. When he's talking about the the the basement or the bottom end of the what is he talking about that Ringo and Paul got going with the bass and the drum? How synced they are together, I think.
SPEAKER_06I think that's an important part of the Beatles does that does not that gets overlooked. They talk about the melodies quite a bit.
SPEAKER_08And the and the later the album gets the more important that part gets. It really is. And I think of Abbey Road, and I think of the bass runs and the drumming on Abbey Road. I could I think I could listen to that album without vocals or guitars. I could listen to Come Together without vocals. I could listen to nothing without Come Together. I could too.
SPEAKER_00I just think the one song that always jumps out to me when I think about the Beatles rhythm section. That's a really I really rain.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Harrison says uh based on that information that Davi Garza gives him or that advice, he sits down and he writes a dozen or more songs in four days, and um and he starts working on these songs for this demo tape called Crafty Fow Flower Arrangers. Um at that point, the um the lineup is Susan Otten, Kevin Whitley, or um they are singing back up. Nat Shelton's on cello, Tim McMillan is on drums. This is uh produced by Rod McLeod and Um and Joe McDormott and also Brian Martin. Um it's funny, evidently he sold copies of that CD at a gig only to discover later the cases didn't have the actual CDs in them. One of the people who bought it was Mitch Easter, who thought it was just some sort of publicity stunt. It was not a publicity stunt.
SPEAKER_06He just forgot to put the C. And Mitch Easter was a producer, famously, I guess most famously was the RM album. First two RM albums. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00He's Harrison starts writing more traditional pop structured songs, and Nat Shelton, because he's less central to the overall sound of the band, he starts to feel left out. He says that uh Harrison's just putting in places for the cello to be rather than the cello being an integral part of the sound. And so he leaves. Um Harrison realizes he needs a new band to handle this new direction. Matt Hovis joins on bass. Greg Thibodeau, Thibot, yeah, Thibodeau that plays drums, and they look for a second guitarist. Um Matt Hovis tries to recruit a guitarist by the name of um Andrea Perry. Perry. She's a guitarist and keyboardist for a local act called Wax Elephant. And she's this person that makes these fantastically intricate home recordings that sound, according to what I read, like they're from distant, some get distant galaxy of pop music. Anyway, she says no, but she's the one who gets them to contact Witt Williams, who is gonna be the second guitarist on their upcoming single, which they released in 1993 on Bifco Records, which was April's Fool.
SPEAKER_03I'm staying myself, I told you so.
SPEAKER_00That's off their first album, Cotton is King. Alright, so they the band gets chopped around, and and none of the labels really have any interest in them until this fledgling label, short-lived label out of LA called Elm Records signs them. They sign them, and they're and that's the label that releases their first album, Cotton is King, in 1994. April's Fool and Misinformation from the single are both on it, but my favorite song is a song called Saving Myself. I'm just gonna play a little bit of that.
SPEAKER_03And if you're heaven need Heaven's Bridegroom, I might be.
SPEAKER_00So that's saving myself off of their debut album. The album's a critical success, but not a commercial one. Uh Hovis and Thilbo, the uh drummer, leave the group after they go on tour. Harrison's uh talked about his dissatisfaction with that album in later years, his feeling that his performances sound self-conscious, that the lyrics are overly clever, that the record lacked any emotional depth, and that he was just he's just doing what the industry told him to do. I asked him about how he felt felt about the album because he had said some stuff like he said one time he said listening to it made him sound like he had the flu. And I read that to him, and he's like, Boy, that's overly negative, isn't it? He goes, I don't feel I don't feel that way anymore. He he says it's just uh it is it was where I needed to be at the time, so he's kind of philosophical about it now. Anyway, so the two band members left are are Robert Harrison and Witt Williams, and they start working together off and on in new tune new tunes. Um while they were touring for Cotton as King, uh Robert Harrison's mom passes away. He's now dealing with the loss of his mom, and he's got this band that's sort of in limbo because the rhythm sections left. And uh and the death of his mom profoundly impacts his songwriting. And he says, you know. When something that significant happens and you're that that um you know tied into that experience that being clever in your lyrics no longer holds any appeal. And uh as I said, he and Wit start working together, and this is when Wit starts coming out of his shell and becoming this guitarist that before he was just playing the parts that Robert Harrison had written for him. Now he's got the freedom to kind of go in and interweave things that he wants to do and put his own parts in, and he grows as a guitarist. Uh what I forgot to mention was when I saw him at that Antone show, he told me his brother was at that show. And his brother asks him after the show if he can talk to the band at the rehearse, next rehearsal. So his brother goes to the next rehearsal and starts giving him notes. And one of the notes he gives him, outside of wit, you need to let yourself be a little freer, is he goes, You guys dress like you're fans. There's no distinction between what you're doing and what they're doing. And you're playing sort of intellectual music and you're playing, he goes, You're on a stage that had muddy waters on it, and these people, you know, he goes, You guys ought to wear suits. So for the longest time, they wore shark skin suits when they performed. So uh so they they did they did play in suits for a long time. Uh when the band broke, after the band broke up and the new rhythm section came in, which was uh George Reef and Dan Miser, the first thing they said to um Robert Harrison was, We're not wearing those suits. He thought it was initially a mistake, but he gets it. Um anyway, uh they traveled to Japan and they um they have a pretty successful little tour over there. He goes to Ireland with his wife. His wife was working for Dell, and I guess if you were over uh overseas long enough, they would let your spouse come and stay on the company's dime. And so he was uh he was over there with her in Ireland and he's looking out. They were in some suburb uh outside of Dublin on the ocean. He's looking out in the ocean, he's looking out at the birds flying around, and he writes Autumn's birds based on that, because he's you know going through the grieving process of his mom, a grieving process of his own. Well, it was about it's a it's about grief, so it's about his mom's death and the death of this album he'd worked on for such a long time. That's why it has Cotton Cotton's king was by all accounts just a complete flop. Yeah. I have a copy of it. You know, what did the critics say about it? It was a critical success. Yeah. I mean, it's hard. I mean, listen to it, it's hard not to love that album. But um, I mean, outside of what Robert Harrison says about what where his voice he hadn't found his voice yet, but you know, he said you spend 10 years working on your first album, you put all his hard sweat in it, and it doesn't go anywhere. It's heartbreaking, it's an absolute, it's devastating. He starts working on his next album, and he's working with David McNair as a producer, and he's frustrated by it because it sounds it there's just something about it, it sounds so clean. And David McNair says to him, You know what? I can't produce you anymore. You're making this completely difficult. He goes, I bet I could lock you up in that clock broom closet over there with your rudimentary knowledge of music, and you'd come up with something you like better than what I'm doing. It wasn't that he was doing a bad job, it just wasn't what he wanted to hear. And so he says, You you got to produce yourself.
SPEAKER_08If you were to describe the difference between Cotton is King and this album, strictly based on the production and the sound, how would how would you describe the difference?
SPEAKER_00Well, Continus King is pristine sounding, absolutely pristine sounding. This just has a lot more going on, you know, and it's um There's a lot of layers in this. There's a lot of layers. I said something to him when I was interviewing him and I felt bad about it because I I didn't I didn't I didn't say the right thing. I didn't mean for it to come out. I said something like it's um it's not a sonic masterpiece. But what I meant by that was it's not it's the way it was recorded is very lo-fi. It doesn't sound lo-fi at all. It is actually very sonically. That's what's weird about it. It is lo-fi, but it people compare it to something that comes out of Abbey Road. Because it sounds that way. That's right. You know? Um, and when you hear about all the stuff that went into making this album and all the happy little mistakes that happened, uh, it's it's remarkable. He's still not happy with the songs he's working on, and he's going out to Joe McDermott's house and he's working on these tunes, and he's and he wants to play, he wants to go. I think he's going to see Matt Hovis and he wants to play him some music, music that he's working on. And he is particularly wants to play him Autumn's Birds. That's the first, like the first that that was I think the first song on this sort of Contique thing that he wrote. He wants to play that. He goes out to Joe McDermott's house, and there's um so he's using the cakewalk program. Um, and what he's using that for is to build the skeleton of the song. He's putting down the drum tracks and all this other stuff, and so he wants to play Autumn's Bird Um for some of his friends. He wants them to hear it. And he goes out to Joe McDermott's house and he can't get the computer to work, he can't get cakewalk kick on. And um and he hits it somehow, and all of a sudden, all the other components of Autumn's Bird starts playing without any of the foundational stuff that he built, and he has this epiphany moment. He's like, Holy cow, that's it. That's exactly what I'm looking for. And so he puts it on tape real quick and he plays it and uh for some friends, and they're like, Yeah, that that makes sense. You this is what you need to do. And so he goes to Wit and he says, I know who's gonna produce the album, which's like who? He's like me. He's like, Okay, whatever, sure. And so um they go out to Joe McDermott's uh house out in Leander and they're working on it, and he and Wit Williams are working on it, and that they're you know recording stuff on four-track on ADAT, they're doing drum loops, reduction mixes, they're borrowing equipment um, you know, uh for long periods of time and playing on that and doing all this trial and error stuff. And uh while they were working on it, the original working title was called Shooting Accident, because they're just you know he said it reflected the band's chaotic recording methods. Um, and the thing that he would do with the with the rhythm section and with wit was he wouldn't let them hear the songs until right there, right before they were going to record them because he wanted them to be fresh, he wanted them to be live. He didn't want these musicians, they were so good he didn't want them to have the ability of taking all the freshness out of the song by getting that's like the uh that's like our requirement number 13. Yes, where we don't talk about we don't talk about the album until we record so that it's fresh. And he said this was the most fun he's ever had recording of any album. Anyway, so Wit finds his voice, as we mentioned. Um Harrison talks about this, what he says is a force multiplier, and he uses this the the uh he uses Zeppelin as an example. You had Bonham and Plant, who were friends, who knew each other, and they they worked well together. And then you had Page and John Paul Jones, who knew each other. And so these two teams kind of working together became a floor force multipliers and made something greater, even greater than the four parts that they were. And he said that's what happened here because him and Witt and Dana and George were these force multipliers on Contiki. Um, anyway, he gets all these things together and he goes and he um meets Brad Jones, who's this producer in Nashville. So Brad Jones is the one who takes this mess of tapes where there's things all over. In fact, I was watching Robert Harrison because I'm a patron of his and he was talking about some of these songs, and there'll be a vocal track where it starts with him singing on it, and then and then the other track starts with Wit singing Harmony, and then they switch on the they're not on the same track. So these these were all a mess. So it's Harrison, Wit, Harrison Witt. He's trying to see this. Brad Jones is the one that sorts this out. He's the one who gets this and puts it all together. His brother was the one, Robert Harrison's brother was the one who came up with the sequencing order of it, just by him. He said, Describe to me how the songs fit. And he did, and he said, Okay, this is the order they should be in. He didn't hear any of the music. He just said, Yeah, they should be in this order based on what you did. But Brad Jones, um, who does a lot of work to get this album in order, enough to where on the initial release um Robert Harrison gives him co-producing credit. He uh, this is interesting here.
SPEAKER_05And then $500 or something like that for Brad to mix the whole record. That's all it costs for Brad. Yeah. Wow. Something like that. It was cheap because Brad heard it. It's like he knew I didn't have any money. I think maybe I put in 600 bucks and Darrow five, you know, nine, ten days. And and Brad was poor Brad. I mean, I showed up at his place, and I didn't know how the tapes were gonna put together. It was crazy.
SPEAKER_00Brad Jones also, just to throw this out, has an album that he produced himself of music that he wrote in the 90s called Guilt Flake, that is a PowerPop masterpiece. It's a wonderful album. Contikey ends up getting released on this little bitty label out of Houston called Copper Records. They're the same label that did the Bad Finger Come and Get It tribute. The guy presses 1,000 copies of the CD. So as the CD starts getting airplay in some markets, there's no product to sell. And so the radio station stopped playing it because of that. They end up getting a deal with Rainbow Quartz, and that's who what releases it in the UK. And that's where it explodes in the UK. Yeah. Well, you got the hottest band in the UK at the time saying it was an album that Oasis is saying that's a great. They're not only saying they're great, uh, I think Liam or Noel, one of them said he wanted that he wish he would made this album. This is the album I wish I'd made. Yeah.
SPEAKER_08You know, you can't beat that. Yeah. So anyway. And then also they're big in Japan. Well, Japan, the Japanese love pop, power pop. And you know what really made them take off like a skyrocket in Japan? This is one of my favorite tidbits that we've ever come up with.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_08It was on the regular rotation at Denny's restaurant. I put a song off of Kansaki. But a song off of here was being played all over Japan at Denny's. I didn't even know they had Denny's in Japan. But I've never heard of somebody reaching success because of a restaurant's playlist.
SPEAKER_00But well, guys, I know that was a long, long road to haul, but here we are. We're talking about the album now.
SPEAKER_08I have an a new rating system. It's called the Doug Cooper rating system. That's original. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06Named after Doug Cooper? Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_08Big fan of his. It goes from one to twenty. And it's based on how many times you have to hear the song before you dig it, before you get it. And so one is the best score. Well, I don't say it's best because that song yummy, yummy, yummy, I got love in my tummy. Uh that's a one. I get that immediately. I know everything about that song that I need to know. Um, no, I don't, I've never put it on on purpose. So 20 would be very difficult to get into. One would be so like uh trout mask replica is a 20. Maybe. I've never gotten into it. But I'll I'll I'll give you an example of one that I think is a very hard one to get into would be Astral Weeks. That that album took me a long time to appreciate. Whereas now you can't shut up about it. Yeah, Moondance is almost immediate.
SPEAKER_00So interesting.
SPEAKER_08That's so this is between one and five. Um I I uh and the first song is uh Camp Hill Rail Operator. It's a great way to start the album. It is, and it's uh great way to be introduced to the artist because it's uh there's no on-ramp. You're just there all of a sudden you're going 65 miles an hour.
SPEAKER_00I know we're gonna play it, but I feel like this song is the perfect combination of the songs that are I know you said this is instant, but songs that are more sort of traditional song craft and the ones that are a little odd because there's some odd songs on this album. We can't say that. I think this is the perfect middle middle of those two.
SPEAKER_08And it may be that I've been prepared for the odd things before, maybe uh from other bands that are similar, but I I had no trouble um swallowing any of this. I didn't have to hide any vegetables under my plate or anything like that.
SPEAKER_00Here you go. Do you know what the backward masking is in the song?
SPEAKER_06No, but I I'm gonna play it for you. Okay.
SPEAKER_00My before and after.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, so that was one of the Wow.
SPEAKER_00It was on the other side of the tape. It was a different mix of the song that's on the album on the other side of the tape. It just bled through, and he's like, why not?
SPEAKER_06Well, I thought it was well when I started listening to this, I went, wait a minute, did I just absolutely that accidentally fit very well? Yeah.
SPEAKER_08Well, what he does on this song in particular it was on the other side of the tape, or is this a previous track?
SPEAKER_00No, it's on the other side of the tape.
SPEAKER_08Because I've got something to talk about.
SPEAKER_00What he does though is he plays that throughout if throughout this song, he turns that down and up, that backward masking. So it's in other parts of the song. If you listen to it at the end of the bridge, it slides in there. So he's sitting there playing it like another instrument to add add some sound to it. Oh, it does. It does.
SPEAKER_08This sounds very Beatles. I he I hear that and I think of Revover and uh Sergeant Pepper's right away. That but it is I think he uses it better than anyone else I can think of.
SPEAKER_06With it, I thought the song was going to bleed into the next song before.
SPEAKER_00Is she's only cool.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, she's only cool, doesn't it? Yeah. And so I like you're so I'm listening to She's Only Cool. I'm like, wait, and I just heard this, didn't I? And then oh no, I didn't. Yeah, I agree. It's a good way to start off the album, it's a good way to introduce the band. It's uh introduce the album.
SPEAKER_00The original track is a live track recording of Robert Harrison, Dana Meisner, and George Reeve at the Hit Shack. They didn't put those that amazing guitar riff on it until four or five months afterwards. Really?
SPEAKER_06That's yeah.
SPEAKER_00So the bass bass track is the same thing they recorded at the Hit Shack, and then they come in and they're Wit is Wit Williams. Yeah. The song also has a bunch of sort of double double meanings to the lyrics. Oh, this album has a bunch of those. Yeah, but it's like the uh, you know, it's the can't Camp Hill Rail Operator, so there's all these trail things, but they're also music related too. Next we have home front cameo. Another immediately accessible song. I I don't want to I don't want to beat the Lenin horse to do. I was about to say this is the most But the slower songs is when he sounds particularly Lenin-asque.
SPEAKER_08Well no, this when it starts off, it's the vowels with the nose.
SPEAKER_06Remember that when uh the Beatles made that um documentary, that multi-part documentary, I think it was on ABC, and they released those albums with it and they put Yeah, yeah, yeah. The uh um anthology. Yeah, the anthology. If to me, that the the start of this, if you had told me this was Yoko Ono giving a uh demo of John Lennon singing a song to Jeff Lynn, this would have been what it would have sounded like.
SPEAKER_00Well, here's an interesting story about the why why the beginning of it sounds the way it does. So um Brad Jones, the guy, the guy from Nashville we're talking about, who who helped put the scene together and helped with the production a little bit. One night he says to Robert Harrison that he thinks they should start this song with the chorus. He goes, I think it'll be stronger if you start with a chorus. And Robert Harrison's like, Yeah, I don't think that's the case, but let me sleep on it. And so the next morning he he gets up and he says, Well, what do you think? And he goes, uh Robert Harrison goes, I'll do it, but only if we record the chorus as as a solo acoustic performance and we capture it on a mini cassette. And so Brad said, Okay, let's try it. And so before they did anything, coffee or whatever, they got got that out and cut that little part and tacked it onto the uh it works, it does, it does work, and the uh the drumming on it's kind of interesting too because the rhythm track was created by getting Darren Murphy. If you guys know who that is, you remember Trishan Murphy? He's he's oh it's not Trishan Murphy, Trish Murphy and Darren Murphy, Trish and Darren.
SPEAKER_08Yeah, the band uh Skyrocket. There's a band named Skyrocket. He's he's the drummer on this. It's ridiculous how talented he is. He can do he can pick up a guitar and he turned into uh I'm all out of love. Without taking himself seriously, which is very ridiculous.
SPEAKER_00He's he's played last night when I saw Future Clouds and Rider. He was playing that he was a drummer, yeah. Yeah, um he's been playing else. He's been playing drums with Robert Harrison for a long time. And that band can be anybody they want to be. Anyway, the rhythm track was created by getting him to play a signature beat along with a loop that Robert Harrison had created on his four-track from an old Tunisian field recording. And they said he says they grabbed the uh best few bars of it and then they built a loop around those, blending them with the Tunisian guy, and that became the foundation. And so the opening bars are those two loops run through a ring modulator. This is the first post-Cotton as King song that he wrote that made it onto Contiki.
SPEAKER_06Ring modulators are used in a lot of uh digital synthesizers these days.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the other thing about this song is it just on first listen doesn't sound very complicated, but it's very layered. There's layers and all sorts of stuff.
SPEAKER_06With a bass on it. This if you want to know what a bass is for, listen to this song. It it's one of the coolest he one of the things that George Reef did very, very well was he would not hit, he would not always hit the one when you on the bass. Usually when you're playing bass, you just want to hit the one of the note. So if you have a chord like C, C, E, G, the one would be the C. If you're playing, you know, and the next chord is F, you would, you know, F F A C, he would hit, you know, you would hit the F. What George does is he finds a way to go up the scale without actually hitting the one through that thing.
SPEAKER_08Just hits the he'll hit the Does that make you uh long for a return that you never get?
SPEAKER_06Well, maybe so because he never really yeah, because Georgia doesn't hit a lot of the the uh yeah, he didn't hit the one a lot on that.
SPEAKER_08What is this song about, Tony? We got a relationship that maybe not what it's supposed to be. Yeah. And her life is uh boring, maybe pointless, uh making the bed three times a day. That's uh very interesting line to me. That that implies that she has time to make the bed three times a day, and that it's getting messed up three times a day, which it sounds like depression if someone's getting back in bed in the daytime, but I don't want to put too much into it. You don't? I I'm I mean it's too late now, but yeah. I'm in I'm I uh I should state right now I'm in very intrigued by his lyrics. Well, they're definitely smart. They're yes. We're if these were poems without music, they would the lyrics would stand on their own, which is a test for great lyrics. So, all right, I dig it. I I said so. I dig the two songs we've had so far very much. So all right. Next and then we have Spin My Wheels.
SPEAKER_03What's imaginable is real for you.
SPEAKER_00I was going to play the coda of this song because it's remarkable. And uh and Robert Harrison says about that that he says he doesn't usually uh go back and revisit his songs right away. It usually takes a couple of weeks or months. But on this song, he woke up the next morning and he couldn't wait. And he listened to the earliest version of it and quickly wrote the coda on a plane. And he said he remembers walking around his house feeling pretty lucky. And it is, I think, achingly beautiful, the coda.
SPEAKER_08Ladies and gentlemen, the coda.
SPEAKER_06Two things about it. This is where the album really starts getting interesting to me. Like there's just and one of the reasons why, and this leads into the second part, this is where I think the album becomes unique. Like that there you can't necessarily say that oh they're deriving this from this, they're deriving it from that. This is where, like, to me, there's not a lot of songs like this in the world. And the way that he sings it, the way that the chord progression is weird, um, the instrumentation is so sparse, but it still seems so full.
SPEAKER_08And the harmonies.
SPEAKER_06The harmonies are just remind me of uh Abbey Road. This song floats, if that makes any sense. It's another one where they don't stay on the one very long.
SPEAKER_00The thing I love about that that ending is when the guitar kicks in, I'm a sucker for a guitar tone that sounds like Brian May. Yeah. And that's got that Brian May.
SPEAKER_06But it starts off with that that Mellotron, then it goes into the Brian May.
SPEAKER_00But that Brian May, that real I don't know what that tone is, but when you get that, it's like it's it gets me everywhere. It's heavily compressed. And then I love I love what happens at the end because it's the just the vocals, and then it cuts off, and it sounds like they just unplug the guitar and get up off the chair and walk off. It's it's just it's a it's a remarkable song.
SPEAKER_06I love this this uh if it's not my favorite song on the album. I go I went through several favorite songs on the album, but right now this is my favorite song on the album.
SPEAKER_08We we haven't talked about the Mellotron in a long time. That's a machine that predated the synthesizer that took samples, put them on tape, and the machine actually was a giant tape player. And you played the tape by pushing a key on a keyboard like a piano, and it would play a sample from instruments or the tapes were on a loop, too, right?
SPEAKER_06Well, they and but you could only play them for eight seconds. And so if you actually look at it. The eight second loops? So the tape would only last eight seconds. Yeah, you would actually watch it a play, and then it would like when you drop when you let go of the key, the spring would bring it back.
SPEAKER_08Was it the moody blues uh where you put the picture and the so if you want to know more about the Mellotron, which is fascinating, it's on the Moody Blues episode. Go to the Moody Blues episode, it's probably the website. There's a video about how it was created. One of the first ones I ever picked, which was a great choice. Uh so we got a a guy's in a relationship and it's good and bad, and he's and he likes it a little bit and he doesn't like it a little bit. It's a lot, a lot of ambivalence. That's because the girl spins his wheels. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I can't imagine what that's like. I think I think um I don't know if we mentioned this or not, but the one thing that is significantly different outside of the way the album sound between the debut and this is that Robert Harrison, not only are there songs that come from a personal place, which we've talked a little bit about, but he's also he w he said he would when he would tour for Cottonus King, he'd look at the crowd and they'd be looking at him like he was an alien because the lyrics were all these sort of real highbrow literary lyrics. And now he's like, you know what? I want to just kind of I don't want to necessarily not have some interpretation, but I want to get to I want to just be simple and get to the point. Yeah, you know, and so that's what he's writing from, is that point of view.
SPEAKER_08All right. Well, that's a great tune. Uh it's a very Beatly tune, and I think I would pluck a Beatles song off of one of their albums and stick that one in there and improve it, but that's just me. Oh, and he uh came out with another song after that, my before and after.
SPEAKER_06It's like on the beat, but it doesn't sound like it's like a I think that's the snare, just having a a a big gate on it that uh makes it quit right after the they probably had two mics on it, one had a gate and one gave it a like a pop, and one gave it a uh gave it a little more reverb afterward.
SPEAKER_00So the nice thing about the deluxe reissue is he goes Robert Harrison goes through each song, kind of talks a little bit about it, and that's where I'm getting some of these notes. And he says that this song uh he was specifically trying to capture this uprising of joy that he associated with hearing uh just out of reach, I'll be there by the four tops the first time on the AM radio. Really? Yeah, that he wanted to write something that felt that way to him. Not that it sound necessarily sounds that way, but felt like this uprising of joy, and this was his attempt. I do love that. That that's a great song, too.
SPEAKER_08This sounds straight off a revolver.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, I agree with it, agree with you on that because I actually have in my notes the piano sounds like something right out of drive my car. It's not like the piano part sounds like bad. That sounds like baby you can drive my car. It's a great song. But the beginning of it to me sounds like XDC. I could earn enough for us off of uh Skylarking. I don't know if anybody else got that. I I don't think Doug got that.
SPEAKER_08I still have nightmares about that album. I don't know. So pick me out a million thumbing through the OED. What is that?
SPEAKER_06You tell me. That's the Oxford English Dictionary. Oh, there you go.
SPEAKER_08And then she has the Rosetta Stone, and I love you go through all the trouble of getting the Rosetta Stone and you find out alone is alone. And if you don't know, ladies and gentlemen, Rosetta Stone was written in three different languages that allowed them to uh crack the English. Um not the we knew English already. Allowed them to crack the Egyptians. Phoenicians and much to the downfall of anyone who thought they interpreted the stone of many of my uh stone of great value or whatever it was.
SPEAKER_06It used to be like the very first thing you saw when you walked into the British Museum. Oh, yeah? Yeah.
SPEAKER_00This is a song that has the reference to the Manchurian candidate. And for the longest time there was a fan run Cottonweather Cotton Mather website, I think it was fan run, called The Manchurian. And it was just a because of this song.
SPEAKER_08So the Manchurian candidate is a great film from six.
SPEAKER_06If you ever want to see the murder she wrote woman in her before she uh before knob bed knobs and broomsticks or whatever.
SPEAKER_08Yeah. What's uh had uh Frank Sinatra in the lead and uh basically uh POWs who were uh brainwashed, so when they came back to the United States, they would say that this particular person was the most dependable and the reliable person or greatest man I've ever met, and they'd all repeat the same thing because they've been brainwashed.
SPEAKER_00But they also were programmed to assassinate.
SPEAKER_08And then she gets hurt with some muppets. We don't approve of here, ladies and gentlemen. No, we're against assassinations. So my favorite line on the whole album is the this world is no dead end. It's a parking ride. That I guess he's a believer. Well, he always went to theological schools. Yeah, most of the people that go to liberal uh theology schools aren't believers, but that's a great line. I don't know if he's still as proud about it as he should be, but that's a great line. Anyway, anyway. Great song. Irresistible, and I hope everybody can sit back while they're listening to this and say, you know what? Doug is so right, this is an immediately accessible album.
SPEAKER_00So, I mean, think about the think about the sequencing here. You had a song right out of the gate that's a rocker. Then you have Homefront Cameo and Spin My Wheels are both very mellow songs, and you go right into my before and after, and then where do you go next? To another mellow song. Private Ruth. Yeah, this is an odd little tune.
SPEAKER_03And that was the go. And make it fine, and lift the study on that, and as a right.
SPEAKER_08It sounds like Chinese New Year too, with those cymbals and the funky uh percussion.
SPEAKER_00I think I don't know if that's the same. They had a Fisher Prize toy that they use for percussion on stuff, and that sounds like that might be it. But I I could I know they definitely use it on one other song, but I don't know if it's this one, but it kind of sounds like a like if you you know, or maybe if you ever uh wind a music box, but you hold the metal so it doesn't ring, it sounds like that weird kind of that's what it kind of sounds like.
SPEAKER_06Well there's a gurgling, there's a gurgling synthesizer going on.
SPEAKER_00It's like it makes him sound like he under he's underwater when he's singing it.
SPEAKER_08Um I think this is a song where he sounds the most like Lena.
SPEAKER_06I I think that's I got that same thing in my notes. It's the most linen song in the in the canvas.
SPEAKER_00The thing that's the most remarkable to me about this song is again, like I said, it's an odd little song, but he's he manages to point uh pull off it being a little strange, but extremely tuneful at the same time.
SPEAKER_06Like it's not you don't listen to the song go, oh well the and the drums are just weird. Did you just even what we did heard, the drums come in, then they just they drop out, and then they come in, and it'll they almost sound like they don't come in at the right time.
SPEAKER_08I see a dragon in Chinese New Year when I hear those drums. Just saying. Uh ladies and gentlemen, just reminding you, you can say whatever you want as long as you say it.
SPEAKER_00He says they recorded it in one evening starting with him on drums. Really? And Witt on Will on Witch. So that's why he gets a drum credit on then they each added guitars, vocals, and finally his uh penny whistle right at the end. Um and this is the this is my favorite thing about him talking about the song. He goes, he goes, at night's end we were overwhelmed by a sense that we'd done something deeply profound. We drove back to Austin in silence. The next day we brought the track up and laughed until we cried. How common is that? He goes, if it's solemnity you're looking for, I refer you to the acoustic version. Because it's just funny that they thought they did this. And then they played it like, oh wow.
SPEAKER_06I would listen back to it when I played like we oh my god, we sucked. That was completely horrible. And then we would listen back to it, oh, that wasn't so bad. But then we would play something we thought we were just was completely incredible, like the best we'd ever done. And we'd listen back to it and go, you know, it really wasn't so good. You know, it's funny.
SPEAKER_08Getting sober is a dangerous thing for me. All right, we got Vegetable Roe coming up next. This is I love this song. One of the highlights on the stuff. Yeah, I would say that's a definite highlight of this song. It's better than Vegetables.
SPEAKER_00I know, it's a hard song.
SPEAKER_06He should listen to more Dylan. This is the most Tom Petty sounding song to me. Oh, it's definitely Dylan. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I mean the title is, yeah. Yeah. I mean, the title he said he took the title straight off of um Desolation. Desolation Row. Yeah. And the way he does that run-on.
SPEAKER_08Yeah, where he the hell with the meter. I'm gonna finish saying what I have to say. I love it.
SPEAKER_00And uh, that ham and organic. That ham and organ's amazing.
SPEAKER_08Which is uh that's the Hal Cooper. That's uh Al not Al Cooper. Um what's his it is Al Cooper, which but he spells his name wrong. And uh on uh on Desolation Row. Or or uh Highway 6100.
SPEAKER_00This was the uh this was written a year before Contikey, and it's the drummer on it is the drummer from Cotton is King, and uh and he says, you know, great performance. John Croslin recorded this. You know who John Croslin is? No, yeah, he was the lead singer of the Reverse.
SPEAKER_06Um guitarist and lead singer, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00And he's you know, he's a lot like um Joe McDermott. He's got his he does he helps other bands out a lot, at least around this time he did. Um this is probably the most rocking song on the album.
SPEAKER_06It's definitely a lot of energy, perfect right behind that album.
SPEAKER_00This is this is a song he he mentioned to me and is mentioned in interviews when he's trying to push back on the power pop.
SPEAKER_06I would say this is uh not a power pop song.
SPEAKER_00He's like, this is not power pop.
SPEAKER_06It's not a power pop song. But man, George Reef on bass listen to that bass. Just listen to the bass on this song. It is exactly what the bass is supposed to be doing. It's fantastic. Yeah.
SPEAKER_08The bells are remini. The birds? Well, they covered Pete Seeger's song. Yeah. Uh probably no one is surprised that this gentleman has listened to the birds. There's some uh jingle jangle melody.
SPEAKER_00Well, and you said this was the the most Tom Petty sounding song to you, which of course is you got a direct connection.
SPEAKER_08Well, if you if you take the birds and they become the mommy and Bob Dillon becomes the daddy, you get Tom Petty. But they love each other very much. And out comes Tom Petty. I love the tune. I do. I do too. It's it's if you don't like this album by now, ladies and gentlemen, you need to call your physician. Yeah. Now, here's one where Doug Cooper struggles a little bit. Are we being too cute?
SPEAKER_06I thought this might be the Aurora Bore Alice.
SPEAKER_08Aurora Aurora Bory Alice. Alice as in restaurant. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Alice, can you hear me? Tonight the sky's not clearing. You'll never see Castillo be a good apartment. I'm there in your apartment.
SPEAKER_00I want to get I want to play the end because I really like what happens at the end of the song, too. Love how that end starts off and just keeps getting building and building and building.
SPEAKER_06Well, the whole song starts getting faster and faster as this as it progresses.
SPEAKER_00Loves you more than the northern lights.
SPEAKER_06Uh this is the most psychedelic song on the album, I think. Um This is going to be the opening track originally. I could see that being the opening track.
SPEAKER_08It's very it's um they made the right decision.
SPEAKER_06They did.
SPEAKER_00It seems very it seems very bowie-esque to me for some reason. I can see it.
SPEAKER_08It's sound it's got a little bit of a lot of sounds at the end of this phrasing.
SPEAKER_06I'm surprised they didn't put his vocals through a phase at some point. It because it sounded like that's a drone.
SPEAKER_00Well, and the the thing is there's there's like this weird sort of drone, but it's almost like a calliope playing the drone through the song, if that makes any sense. It does. And uh I mean, how many songs have we talked about to say Cassiopeia?
SPEAKER_08So he's playing with the night sky, yeah, and we have uh Cassiopeia's the queen, and we have the Pleiades and Orion. Orion is famous for chasing the Pleiades through the night sky, and they're hiding with Taurus the Bull, hoping that he'll leave them alone. But I love uh I love that, and then uh she's a great girlfriend until the skies uh get cloudy. Yeah, then uh she's not your heavy weather girl, she's gonna be gone on you. Yes, great song.
SPEAKER_00So here's a couple of little interesting facts. Um he thought that this was a little cute play on words originally that they came up with, but evidently newspapers at the time of Theodore Roosevelt called his daughter that's Aurora Borealis. So Brad Jones gave called that to his attention and then sent him a portrait of of Alice um Roosevelt that's hanging in his studio right now. Wow. And then I love this is called his daughter the papers, didn't it?
SPEAKER_08The papers called his daughter Aurora Borealis. Yeah. What was her real name? Ali Alice Roosevelt, yeah. Okay, so he didn't think of it, but you don't I mean it's pretty obvious uh pun there if you wanted to.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_08It's like uh when we named our program.
SPEAKER_00So he played he played um when they recorded this in Leander, he plays the bass, drums, and organ and did two electric guitars, and Wit plays guitars, and then when he made the rough six uh mix of the song, he put everything through a Leslie cabinet, even the vocals, everything except the Hammond. That's the only thing he didn't put through it. And he said, he goes, uh Brad heard the mix and assumed we were being intentionally ironic, but we weren't. I guess it just sounded best to us that way.
SPEAKER_08That's hilarious. I enjoyed that. I like that fact.
SPEAKER_06Um to me, it's a thing I like about the song is like it's it starts off like it's stuck in the mud and first gear. Oh, yeah, yeah. And it just keeps they they finally get in the overdrive at the at the very end. It's a really uh
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the way it keeps building is just great. Yeah.
SPEAKER_08You know about the Beach Boys. I heard about them. You gotta love the Beach Boys. We have the Church of Wilson. And I'm assuming they're talking about Brian and not Dennis at the moment. They are talking about Brian. The genius.
SPEAKER_06I do too. And um it's another song that takes it in a different direction. It starts off that kind of discordant thing. It almost starts off the same way that uh arcade fire song starts off. Starts off with a heavy distortion. Yeah. And then it just goes and careens into a totally different direction. The melody just becomes like pure power puff at some point, which I'm sure he wouldn't like to hear that. But I love that. And there's that droning octave guitar that goes through it. I think that's really cool.
SPEAKER_08And it sounds a lot like the Beach Boys don't sound.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, he says uh the this is him. The Wilson would be Brian. My opening guitar sound was promising. You can hear uh it's you can hear it start the song, and then by some act of incompetence, I guess I erased it. We tried all afternoon to summon a guitar sound half as cool and never got close. The sound at the end you hear is a power drill I was holding when I cut the vocal. I sang and I sang it with the mic plugged directly into a Rolling Space Echo, which I owned for about 24 hours before destroying it. It sounded awesome, but the smoky order didn't odor didn't seem healthy. It's still in a shop in South Austin Music, as far as I know.
SPEAKER_08That's hilarious. Yeah, it is.
SPEAKER_00But uh yeah, he said uh he goes, when Contiki came out, everybody talked about the Beatles connection. I was reminded listening to this that the band we were really into at the time was the Beach Boys and in particular Pet Sounds, which Witt Williams um and I had both just discovered.
SPEAKER_06That's amazing when you're when you discover that album, what it does for you.
SPEAKER_08Well, I think there's something universal about the Beach Boys. Everybody thinks that they're just like a flippant little uh Yeah, they're probably controlled by record companies and they're just putting out surf music and race car, and then you realize how wrong you were. Right. And then then you go, oh yeah, but pet sounds is different, and then you keep digging and you start finding out No. I was I was wrong about the surfer girl is not an easy song. None of them are simple, even though they sound simple, which is probably what it means to be brilliant.
SPEAKER_00That's the art right there, isn't it? Yeah, that's the art is making something that sounds I mean, what who what is it little Steven that said that pop songs are some of the hardest things in the world to write? You know, that's the thing. Make it sound simple, but it's not.
SPEAKER_08I think there's a lot of people out there that say, Oh, I don't do pop music because I'm so deep and meaningful. The real answer is you don't do pop music because you can't. Yeah. We have a song, uh, I guess this is the most popular song on the album that got the most attention. It's called Lily Dreams On. Pretty song.
SPEAKER_00It is a very that's a damn near perfect song, as far as I'm concerned. I mean, that line this line gets every time that that line kills me. It's like uh uh close your eyes, baby, I'll dry mine, echo through the phone, far from this, Lily Dreams On.
SPEAKER_08It's just oh it reminds me of we had another great song about a mother. Crowded house. Oh, yeah, Crowded House, yeah. That song. I love that song and I love this song. Um, on the long drive home from Leander, Woot Williams turned to me and said, Do you think it's too personal? I said, Hell no. If you're asking me that question, I think we're doing something right. Yep.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's a good thing. He he did say though he could it was too it was far too personal for him to sing live. I can understand that.
SPEAKER_08James can sing it because he boohoo's.
SPEAKER_00No, I wouldn't be able to sing it.
SPEAKER_06I don't think I'd be able to sing it even though I didn't write it.
SPEAKER_00I think Witt sang it live. It says we doubled the echo and ham and organ on the ascending line just before the chorus to get that effect which still cuts me to the bone. The percussive percussive sound at the end of me uh turning the kn or the turn mean me turning the knobs on a Fisher Price toddler toy from the 1960s, which still lives in Brad Jones' studio.
SPEAKER_08This is used in a sh TV show or a movie or something like that. Veronica Mars.
SPEAKER_00It was the Veronica Mars. It was the last uh I think I don't know if it was uh the finale or it was the the uh last episode of a season, but um And that's a TV show? Yeah, it's the one I was telling you about that Rob Thomas from Jesus, the guy who created created Veronica Mars and uh Cupid and um are these all TV shows? They're TV shows. And uh yeah, it's a season one finale, and he is it's also the show that has Paul Rudd singing a Cotton Mather song on it as well. Yeah, because he was a fan. Well he was an awesome musician.
SPEAKER_08Yeah, but the guy that made the show, that's who you're talking about.
SPEAKER_00Was an Austin musician. He was from Sam Marcus, and but he they would he was the he was the bassist and main songwriter for Jesus, which later became Black Irish, which is a not a good name. Hey Zeus is a better one. Yeah. And uh and he went out to Hollywood and made made his uh made his mark making all these very popular shows, uh television shows, and he would intersperse them with Austin music music, particularly pop, like javelin boot and cotton mather and a bunch of shows I never heard of.
SPEAKER_08And by the way, this is my least favorite word in the world password. Why? Because I'm always asked for it, and I can't it's wasted more time in my life than any other word. All right.
SPEAKER_03Password, which one?
SPEAKER_00I don't I'm not sure, and we got we cut it off before the harmony kicks in. It's a great song. I'm not I don't know how Robert Harrison would feel if I said this, but it's to me, this is the one song that always seemed the most like their previous album. It's very straightforward. It's not in that it's not as crystal clear sounding. There's something else going on that makes it slightly different, but in terms of the straightforwardness of the song, and just it's kind of there's no nothing very odd happening with it in terms of loops or anything else. It just feels to me. It feels like a nice break after the song before it, though.
SPEAKER_08It's a fun song.
SPEAKER_06It's a fun song, and uh there's two things about it that stand out. One is the tambourine, when the tambourine comes in, it almost sounds like it's not it's it's almost like somebody's standing next to you playing the tambourine, and all of a sudden, listening.
SPEAKER_00He says, uh he says, all the fun stuff at the end I added with Brad in Nashville. Brad's playing the shaker because I wore out my hand playing the tambourine.
SPEAKER_06It sounds like and then George again on bass, it's just I I I I think that's George playing bass, but it it's incredible. That that bass line is just it's one of my favorite. It may have been the one that George was talking about when he said this is listening to me back in 1980.
SPEAKER_00He says, complexities and cleverness aside, Cotton Mather, like most bands, wanted to be loved. We're coming right out on the song and declaring as much. It's a pure offering of joy with a question mark at the end.
SPEAKER_08We had a fight last night, but who slept outside? No, it's we had a fight last night, I won. No, we had a fight, I won last night, but who slept outside? That's good advice for anybody who thinks winning a fight with your wife is a good idea. The uh the beginning reminds me of what's that show called? Friends. Oh, don't say that. Don't say that. Oh, I hate that. Listen to it. I don't like it either. And that's not a that's I'll be there for you.
SPEAKER_00That what is that? The Rembrandt's visit. Anyway. My friend Pat is gonna be all over me because he's always trying to get me to like the Rembrandt. I can't do it. There's been people.
SPEAKER_08You can tell them that it's five seconds at the beginning and it has nothing else in common with that song. I hate that I don't like that. All right. Anything else about password? No. No. Well, do y'all feel like going to an animal show drinking song? Sure. Sure. Animal show drinking song.
SPEAKER_03Well, yeah, you almost played the whole song. Yeah, I was about to tell you.
SPEAKER_08Sorry. Well, you don't maybe sorry. It's just a very short song. That song has six lines.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. Um, I guess it's time to go home. Well, it's another Melotron song, very prominently played. Yeah. It's almost uh, yeah, if you wanted to know where they got. Sgt.
SPEAKER_07Uh a brief astrophériic interlude.
SPEAKER_00Well, the title is uh so it says this was originally intended as a re reprise of our planted title track, Animal Show, which we in fact abandoned and recorded later as a B side for the big picture, which is the album following this, but never released. So that's where that comes from.
SPEAKER_06Well, a little intrigue on that it's it's I like the song. Fine, fine tune. I wish I'd written it.
SPEAKER_08Well it wouldn't have taken you long.
SPEAKER_06No.
SPEAKER_08All right.
SPEAKER_00So now we move into instrumental, yeah. Is that what this is? An instrumental?
SPEAKER_08A prophecy for the golden age. When was the golden age? Right now, man, according to Trump.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's another one we got to do. Uh I don't know. It always always seemed like his uh his little three th like under minute version of uh Revolution number nine or something. Yeah. Flying off of uh magical mystery too. It's uh it's essentially just uh this is what it says from the uh from the um liner narrow scraps from home home front cameo.
SPEAKER_08That's all it says. Maybe the point of the song is to keep the album from having 13 songs since that's unlucky. So maybe never do an album with 13 songs. That's what they used to say back in the day, ladies and gentlemen.
SPEAKER_00If you do 14 songs, then you have done an album with 13 songs.
SPEAKER_08Ooh, no one thought of that before, Tom. All right, how about we move on? She's only cool.
SPEAKER_00Masterpiece, my friends, this song.
SPEAKER_08Who does what band is this remind me? The Rembrandt? Negative Sun Vault. Sunvolt? I don't think I'd go that far. Sunvolt? Listen to that pounding drums, those arpeggiated guitars that piled on top of each other.
SPEAKER_00If the guy's voice sounded different if it sounded like a I think this is a very, no offense, Robert Harrison, if you're listening, a very power poppy song, and Sunvolt does not sound power poppy to me at all.
SPEAKER_08Okay. We'll see what he says.
SPEAKER_06I think this is uh just a brilliant pop song. It's it's in fact, yesterday this was my favorite song of the album. I think it it changed today when I was listening to it.
SPEAKER_00So, Doug, uh let me ask you this if you're not smiling and singing along with the song, what are you?
SPEAKER_08You're a horrible person.
SPEAKER_00You're a horrible person.
SPEAKER_08And if you don't know, it sounds like uh thumb vault. Robert, Robert Harrelson says, Go ahead and email this is vinyl tap and tell Tony I'm right that this sounds like that, and that you agree with me, and that it's a compliment.
SPEAKER_00He said uh he said um the line, My world's my words fail me now, and it's better that way, could be a motto for this album. Wow, it's better that way. Yeah, yeah. Uh that's true in my life. Well, he was talking about how in the older songs he would try to just pepper them with all this intellectual stuff in it. Yeah. And he didn't want to do that anymore. So it's better if he's just, you know, writing from the heart. Uh well, it's a cool title too.
SPEAKER_06She's only cool. Yeah, like what else is she?
SPEAKER_08She's only cool tonight, and I've lost your sight.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. It's about his his being, you know, like the girls on the road and stuff. Each night that I spend away is one more I have to behave, but she makes it seem so cool not to cave. And then that fantastic solo comes in.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, it's it's a cool song.
SPEAKER_00It's a great song.
SPEAKER_08All right, last song on the album is Autumn's Birds. This is a fantastic way to end this album, too. And it's the one that started the album.
SPEAKER_03But you gave the word to love, and you found a pre-four.
SPEAKER_06John Lennon were raised in Lubbock, Texas. I think this is what the type of song he would write.
SPEAKER_00Well, it's all about it's all about, you know, uh loss. Yeah.
SPEAKER_08His world his life's work goes out there and then the loss is a good thing. And it gives the world his number.
SPEAKER_00He said uh he said when he was in Dublin or outside of Dublin in that place looking out the hotel window when his wife was working over there. Um he's looking out the window and he just starts crying. And that's when the song came to him. This is written over there. Well, that's an exceptional song. It's an incredible song, and this is the song that kind of made him say he found his voice and he found what he wanted to write about.
SPEAKER_08And so this is the first one written on the album, correct?
SPEAKER_00It's the first. He says it's the first of what he calls the Contiki Sweet songs, yeah. Okay. But there are other songs that are I maybe written before that, but the one where he's just the one that got the idea. Did you say it's like okay, this is it, yeah. Because he says, um, he says, uh, although the writing of a few songs of the record predate this one, the arrival of Autumn's Bird and later later its recording initiated Contiki. I felt I'd landed on something which might lead to a frontiersman declare, we're building our town here, boys. So there you go.
SPEAKER_08Very cool. And we have Endless Summer, which is what? Oh, that's Little Wing, don't say movie. A Jimi Hendrix song. One of my favorite songs. My favorite is the Jimi Hendrix song, yeah. And I think it's showcases his songwriting.
SPEAKER_06Vocal ability, guitar playing, and and just sheer guitar.
SPEAKER_08When he plays soft, that's when you can tell how great he is. This is a great song. Um I love my ability to hear music uh that I've never heard before and to love it, even if it comes from Tony.
SPEAKER_00I think that makes me a remarkable person. Listen here, buddy. You've recommended tons of stuff I'd never heard before that I like. Yeah. So take that Mickeys, and you know what.
SPEAKER_08The uh did you hear that beginning? It sounds like when ELO tries to sound like the Beatles. You know that singing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but you know what the difference is, is there's no freaking giant orchestra, disco orchestra on this song.
SPEAKER_08Discount where did the disco touch you, Tony?
SPEAKER_00In the ELO.
SPEAKER_08All right, ladies and gentlemen. This is maybe one of the longest recordings we've ever done. We're we started at 11:30, it's almost 30 now. So uh probably we don't have wives anymore. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00But again, I just want to thank I want to thank Robert Harrison for his time to sit down and talk to me about this stuff.
SPEAKER_08Yeah, we very much appreciate that. This is the part of the evening we give a uh a review of the record. One review is us pretending like we're uh critics, and the other is our personal taste. And I'm gonna go to Jonathan J. M. Roe first.
SPEAKER_06All right, so for me, this is pretty easy. It's a 4.5 um for both. And um well, that's handy. It hit me in a way that uh it I had to take a couple of listens to it to actually start figuring out how what I liked about it. There were things I mean, I liked everything that I heard the first time, but I started getting into the album a little bit more as I kept listening to it. And I'm kind of glad we got to have a little bit more time with it. I think the playing is excellent. There's there's nothing that's overdone. Uh the drums sound incredible. It's incredible to me how this album was actually made. The the lyrics are good, everything just kept me captivated the whole time that I was listening to it. So I highly recommend this album.
SPEAKER_00I would have done it earlier, but like I've said this before about albums I really like. I dread talking about them because I'm afraid I'm gonna not do them justice.
SPEAKER_06Anyway, 4.5 both sides.
SPEAKER_08Alright. Well, at the risk of making everyone turn off after I go, I'm gonna go ahead and go, uh the there's a there's a a problem with the blues. A lot of people who listen to the blues say it just all sounds the same. And people who listen to reggae sometimes say, it all just sounds the same. And they're they're wrong. What they mean is that there are things that are similar, but the songs are are very different. And it takes a while to listen so that you can distinguish the things that are different about the songs. This album, if you only listen one time, you might say, Oh, this all sounds the same. Because it is a lot of jangly guitars, a lot of uh things that sound like the Beatles. Um but if you'll hold on you will find out that there's a lot of variation in this album. The songwriting is masterful. Anybody who can criticize the songwriting on this album you should not listen to at all. The lyrics are great. The uh he puts hooks there's hooks in every single song. It's irresistible, as I said before, it's absolutely accessible. It's an intelligent songwriter. You can tell this guy thinks hard about his lyrics. For me my personal is 4-8 and my critical is 4-8. It's a great great album and I really enjoyed listening to it except for the part where I felt so ignorant that this was in my backyard the whole time and I didn't know about it. Great pick, Tony Now we'll go to Tony to see if he's right.
SPEAKER_00So uh I was gonna say that quote that I kept trying to remember that Robert Harrison said and he said that the true story of Contiki is not an in spite of in other words not this album was created in spite of all these things but a because of it was created and I think that's a perfect way to sum this up. It's not it's not that oh all these things happen it's no it's because of all these things he was able to figure things out a different way he said I thought this was fascinating he said there's no way I could make this album today because uh it'd be too easy to correct all the things I was trying to correct and because they were difficult he had to find ways around it and there were creative ways around it and it made things interesting and that's why this album is so endearing and enduring. Personally it's a five for me. This is one of my favorite albums by one of my favorite bands. This is a band that routinely puts out stuff that I love and I'm very close to it so it's hard for me not to give it a five I'd say critically I'd want to say a five too but a double five is an awful heavy thing to say so I'm gonna say four nine just because I'm not sure it's a great album but I you know there's a couple albums I've given double fives to and I'm not sure if this is quite up there with those but it's real damn close a lot of other people have given it a five yeah well my personally it's a five um it's it's fantastic and and uh as you will hear when I get to my recommendation the guy continues to write compelling cook filled songs so all right speaking of as y'all know Tony is the youngster here and he keeps hip with what the kids are listening to. Tony do you have a recommendation for I do have a recommendation uh I am gonna recommend the new the newest future clouds and radar uh album which is Robert Harrison's current band and this album came out uh well I bought that I went to the record release last night and bought it so but I've been listening to it online for a while but I'm gonna play my favorite song on the album which is right now I gotta live with it for a while because it might not be but my favorite song right now is a song called Cabbage Town Don't hypnotize me when we get to wake up a problem I've had the impression lately I left my number one at a table in the silver sun of a catsu defy you to listen to that and not have it stuck in your head listening to it does sound like it does sound like Wilco early Wilco to me it sounds uh like he's in Austin. It's got a little country flair to it. Yeah it's all right complaining all right next song I'm gonna play is called Chicken Out it's the opening track that's good that's that is uh original and then I'm gonna play one more called the man who would be king and you know if you like this stuff support the guy we'll have a link to this album on the website buy it CD electronic LP however you want to do it so glad you still crown and king even when you know your way around a melody there you go another good one yep future cluster radar big the name of the album again it's uh big weather I believe big weather big weather big weather outstanding not heavy weather big weather all right Tony thank you very much for that recommendation and thank you very much to uh introducing many of our listeners to Cotton Mather and this fantastic album next week we're going to be looking at an album from the Velvet Underground the who the Velvet Underground an album from 1970 called Loaded with you was just by told there was nothing happened at all radio there was nothing going down at all not at all our host Doug Cooper our co-host Tony Slagle and me your humble producer Jonathan J.
SPEAKER_06M. Rowe this is Final Tap where we mine the layers of long players and we hope we can be here before and after the rivals station