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Pat Walsh
Pat's Peeps Podcast
Ep. 306 Today's Peep Is Magical as Magician Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller Discusses His New Book "Felony Juggler" From Street Juggler to Vegas Legend: Trains, Hitchhiking and a Made-Up Murder, and I Share a Story Which is Apparently a Rare Occurrence
The legendary Penn Jillette joins the podcast to discuss his new book "Felony Juggler," sharing stories from his adventurous past when he lived the nomadic lifestyle Bob Dylan only pretended to have. Penn reveals how he hitchhiked across America, hopped trains, and worked as a street performer - all inspired by Dylan's fictional autobiography.
• Penn's passion for diverse music and concerns about today's algorithm-driven cultural isolation
• The surprising revelation that Penn actually lived out Bob Dylan's made-up nomadic lifestyle
• How street performing was financially rewarding, paying more than his early Off-Broadway career
• Penn's unique relationship with Teller, revealing they rarely socialize despite 50 years as partners
• Modern clowning and performers like Puddles Pity Party who are reinventing the art form
• The distinction between Penn's chosen nomadic youth and actual homelessness
Join Penn Jillette for a book signing at Capital Books in Sacramento on August 4th at 7pm. Get your tickets at capitalbooksonscom.
Welcome my friends to the Pats Peeps podcast number 306. It's a Mondayay, july 28th, and as I look out my studio windows into the beautiful foothills of northern california, it's a lovely day and again not as hot as you would see this time of year in july absolutely amazing. My name is pat walsh. I'm the host of the Pat Walsh Show, as heard on KFBK Radio in Sacramento, 93.1 FM, 1530 AM, streaming live everywhere on all of your streaming platforms, including, of course, the iHeartRadio platform. We are owned by iHeart there. So, yeah, check out my show if you have not. Also, we are now going to start asking you every single time, because we're getting more and more businesses that I'm going to ask you to please, please, support our businesses. Just do yourself a favor, just go to patspeepscom. If we can get the other component of this business going, it would be so helpful to me and to all of these businesses and mostly important to you, because for you, what it means is that you're going to save money on local businesses. Since we had our Pats Peeps gathering a few nights ago, I've got three or four new businesses that we're going to be putting up, so we're getting all kinds of different types of businesses. You know, and pretty soon you're going to see more and more and more, but with the ones that we have up right now, if you could look through the categories of Pat's Peeps, we'd be so grateful. We got a little mall. It's the Pat's Peeps mall. So just type in patspeepscom and look at our little mall. Our next Pat's Peeps gathering we're going to have a Pat's Peeps mall gathering where we're going to invite everyone who has a business to bring some of their goods and show them to people who then, you know, can purchase them or look at them or learn more about them. So I'm very excited.
Speaker 1:Speaking of excited, today here on Pat's Peeps 306, we have a special guest. I've really been enjoying lately bringing in special guests. You know, what's happening is I'm now getting people asking me versus me saying, hey, you know I'm looking for this person. They're now asking me how would you like to have this person on your podcast? We enjoy your podcast, thank you, the latest being Penn Jillette of Penn and Teller some of the greatest magicians ever and I had the opportunity to speak with Penn Gillette. He's got a new book out Felony Juggler. He's coming to Sacramento and we thought, you know what, let's have him on the show.
Speaker 2:Hello, this is Penn. How are you?
Speaker 1:Penn, what a pleasure to meet you, man. I'm doing fine. Thank you very much for asking.
Speaker 2:How are you today? I'm doing fine.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much for asking. How are you today?
Speaker 2:I'm doing well. Thank you, I'm doing well.
Speaker 1:I love that you're coming to town. I guess you know Mark S Allen pretty well, huh.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I used to introduce him a lot on Comedy Central, so that's our connection there. He did Short Attention, spam Theater and I was always the voice of Comedy Central in those days.
Speaker 1:Oh, and that's right. I remember you were the voice of Comedy Central. Yeah, whatever happened with that? As we're talking with Penn Jillette of Penn Teller, I've got so many things. What happened to the Comedy Central gig?
Speaker 2:Well, it was a one-year job, job that went eight years, so it went pretty well. I I made it through um three changes of management, which is not bad, and by that time it was mostly in new york and by that time I'd moved out to vegas do it?
Speaker 1:does everyone that you that interviews, you have as a conversation with you? Do they give you the standard intro? Do you know your standard intro that I was given? I could do that. I have a better intro, but I have the standard intro. If you'd like to hear that, do whatever you want.
Speaker 1:Ladies and gentlemen, here's the standard intro for this man who I've been a fan of, and I've got a little quick story I want to share with you too ben gillette joining us, who is just a super cool guy, by the way, who, with Penn and Teller, have now had the longest residency I mean, I know you hear that all the time in Las Vegas. So here's our intro. Our guest tonight is half of one of the most legendary magic duos on the planet. An author, a podcaster, a man who's made skepticism cooler than pulling a rabbit out of the hat. He's fooled audiences, fooled magiciansians and somehow convinced us he doesn't talk too much, despite writing a brand new book called felony juggler uh, please welcome. Also known, the one that talks is pen gillette, or, as I like to say, the former drummer of loud hate. That's where you probably know well, thank you.
Speaker 2:Thank you for the uh, for the introduction yeah, certainly you're welcome.
Speaker 1:I you know one thing I love about you and I could, we could talk about the fact that you are coming, your new book, welcome. One thing I love about you and we can talk about the fact that you are coming, your new book. You're going to be here and you're going to be in Sacramento, capital Books. You're going to be signing your books the Felony Juggler, which is a portion of your life, which is super interesting, that I want to talk about that and I just think it's really cool that you wrote about this. It's going to be happening on the 4th of August, 7 pm, capital Books, here in Sacramento. You know, one thing I know about you is that you and I started with the drummer thing because I know you're a fan of music.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm a big fan. I play upright bass. I'm mostly playing jazz now.
Speaker 1:Oh well, you know, I think, that you and I have something in common in terms of music and that is a fondness for that you'd hear like the average white band, and it really exposed us, I think those of us who love music like you do. It exposed us to so many different genres of music. How important was that to you when you were growing up?
Speaker 2:Oh, that was very, very important. I mean also all the Motown stuff, and James Brown was just mixed in with, you know, with stuff, all the 70s not as much, but stuff like the Beatles and you know the Eagles were on the same, you know the same radio station as Soul. And we've broken down our demographics. You know my children are 19 and 20. And music to them is targeted so exactly, even though we have now the Internet which gives us access to all music.
Speaker 2:I mean, when I was growing up in a small town I had to like order Edgar Barret's, you know 20th century classical weird stuff, stravinsky I had to order and then wait weeks. The Lenny Bruce records I had to wait for. You know I could get the stuff that was more mainstream, which is to say like the Mother's Invention and so on. But it's remarkable that what we have available to us is so much greater and yet what we have desire for has been made more limited. They've done so much in our culture and I think part of the fault of this is the internet getting so good at learning about us that even though we have more available to us, we tend to stay even tighter within our group, and I think that's doing a lot of damage musically, culturally, all of art and certainly all of politics, and society has broken it down. So there's even more loneliness and less expansiveness and I think it'll turn around, but it might take a while.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean those are very good points. And, as you're saying, varese and Stravinsky, I'm thinking I wonder if he's a Zappa fan. And then you say Mothers of Adventure Like I'm a huge Frank fan. And when you said those names I'm like I wonder if he's a Zappa fan. And then you say Mothers of Invention Like I'm a huge Frank fan. And when you said those names I'm like oh, those are both Frank influences big time. And then you mentioned the Mothers of Invention, which, well, I was fortunate.
Speaker 2:I was fortunate to have. I did not know him well, but I had dinner and spent a rather long evening with Frank and it was a wonderful experience to talk music with Frank and he played me some stuff. It was pretty great. I know Moon a little bit now and we get to talk about her dad, so that's nice.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've had the opportunity to speak with Dweezil on numerous occasions and introduce his band.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, he's wonderful.
Speaker 1:He's such a good guy I mean, this guy is so caring about his fans, Penn, that he sits there and he signs autographs until there's no one left out there and I could just tell you were a music fan. So I really hope you don't mind that I started with that rather than magic, Not at all.
Speaker 1:You know, if I may share a story. This is so funny. This is probably that's not really funny, but it was interesting to me.
Speaker 1:So, um, I don't know, maybe it's 20 years ago, something like that a buddy and I were up in south lake tahoe and we decide you know, hey, we're going to go to this brunch, and we so we hear that harrah's has a very good brunch, and you got to go up the elevator to one of the top floors I don't remember how high up there was and on this particular morning the brunch was very full, a lot of people and they said, well, we have a table in the back, and so they take us back to this back area and sitting right next to my friend and I are Penn and Teller.
Speaker 1:And I look at my friend and I go this is Penn and Teller, and we're the only ones in this area, and we were sitting there and we were so fascinated by the fact that it was you guys and and that teller was speaking. You were having this conversation and I remember us thinking, wow, how many of other people have really even heard him speak? Uh, so that was a fond memory that you were unaware of, but I have in my mind.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, that's actually fairly rare because, you know, teller and I care very much about our show but we don't socialize very often, so it's very rare. We probably eat a meal together, maybe, you know, four or five times a year. Whoa, so that was a. You really caught us on a rare occasion. But yeah, we're still going strong. You know 50 years and we're still banging out the shows. Bob Dylan said me. I'm still on the road heading for another joint.
Speaker 1:Which let's get into your book, which I just love. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is like a time of your life, maybe when you were a late teenager somewhere, I don't know 17, 18 years old, and you're kind of living vicariously, in a way, through Bob Dylan music, and here you are thinking you're living this lifestyle that Bob Dylan would love and he's telling the world he's living this lifestyle and this is the segment of time that you're writing about in your new book. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, bob went from the University of Minnesota to spokesperson for his generation in about six months and he was asked to write a quick bio for his first record and he said that he hitchhiked around the country and hopped trains and worked in carnivals. And he made all this up because all he'd really ever done was, you know, been at his father's hardware store and been to Minnesota, to college, to Minneapolis, and you know he met Woody and he did a little bit of traveling, but very little. But I read that and didn't know that Bob had made it up. So I lived it.
Speaker 2:I actually did hop trains, I actually did hitchhike, I actually did work carnivals and for years I thought I was following in Bob Dylan's footsteps and he just made it up. So if you read about what Bob Dylan did in his early days, that is years that I lived, just you know, sleeping rough, sleeping bags, sleeping on the ground, hopping trains, hitchhiking, and it was a time in my life that I've never really talked about much. So I put it in a story that's completely autobiographical, except that I added a bank robbery and a murder. It did not happen.
Speaker 1:All right, that's pretty good. Well, what else can I add? How about a bank robbery and a murder? I can only imagine. Now, obviously, these are different times. This is a different era when you're hitchhiking and riding in trains and all that different era when you're hitchhiking and riding the trains and all that, uh. But I I can only imagine, uh, that the there's got to be some, because I did a little hitchhiking in the 70s, you know, and I I'll tell you what it was scary. I can only imagine there's got to be some stories. Are you sharing some of those stories within the book?
Speaker 2:like, oh, yeah, oh yeah, yeah, although you know, uh, the thing that we, um, we don't seem to understand, and it's because of the way news is presented to us everything is safer now than it was in the 70s, but we don't know it because we have a constant news and things that are very, very rare to happen, dangerous things we hear about constantly Mouse, we think it's more dangerous. It was actually more dangerous in the 70s and more dangerous was not very dangerous. I mean, yes, I had adventures and yes, there were many scary things. Hopping a train alone is very scary, but you know, I got to if anything.
Speaker 2:all the hitchhiking and all the living on the streets got me very much trusting people and being more open. Being from a small town you tend to be rather insular and living in kind of all the United States at once kind of opened me up and also got me to learn to perform. You know, I was a very good juggler by the time I got out of high school. Notice, I don't use the word graduated. By the time I got out of high school I was a very good juggler and so I had to learn to perform and present that. And when you are juggling on the streets for people who can just walk away and you're juggling in front of bands where no one wants to see you, you learn how to get people's attention and hold it and I think I believe that served me fairly well over the next 50 years.
Speaker 1:We're talking with Penn Gillette. He's got a new book, felony Juggler. He is going to be at the 4th of August, 7pm, capital Books in Sacramento. Check out Capital Books on capecom if you want to get tickets to this, which is. I love that you're coming to our area as a street performer. You're talking about these years as a street performer, you know. I think most people might have the thought that yo, he's a street performer, and this is a person who's desperate, you know. You imagine a guy with a suitcase out there and people throwing coins in there. Truth is, though, as I understand it, you, like you were blowing people away during this time, money-wise, like you were doing just fine. Thank you right, isn't that? Oh yeah that's.
Speaker 2:You know that? That's the funny thing. Um, when I was uh, when I was uh going off broadway to broadway, I would get all these interviews and like people magazine and stuff saying you know, you went from street performing to uh, to off broadway and I guess, uh, that must have been a huge change. You must have been struggling and the you must have been struggling and the truth of the matter is I was actually making more money juggling on the streets than I did off Broadway. It wasn't until we got to Broadway that we crossed that amount. So I was doing very, very well. I was.
Speaker 2:Everything was by choice, and that's why you might notice that I've avoided using the word homeless in my hitchhiking around, because I was not people that are. I was a teenager, I was healthy, I was sober, I had money and I was just choosing to not live somewhere, and that's a very, very different thing. I don't want to be disrespectful to those who are having a very hard time. It's a very different thing than what I was doing. Mine was playful, recreational. I had parents that would have welcomed me back any second. I talked to them all the time on the phone. I was very loved. I was very taken care of. I just didn't want to stay in Greenfield, massachusetts, right, right loved.
Speaker 1:I was very taken care of. I just didn't want to stay in greenfield, massachusetts, right, right, geez, you move out of massachusetts and look at this incredible career. Then you meet teller, who I believe his name was originally, is it? I mean, I think he actually changed his name to teller, is it joe teller? Is that his actual?
Speaker 2:name. No, no, that's his father, but he's just teller. He's just teller.
Speaker 1:Passport it's just Teller His passport.
Speaker 2:It's his passport, his driver's license, all his documentation is just Teller. He's always wanted to have that one name.
Speaker 1:Well, you know what I?
Speaker 2:But Joe was his dad.
Speaker 1:Okay, okay, you know, one thing I appreciate about you so much and there's a lot of things that I appreciate about you is the fact that you know you're not really a political guy. You're not polarizing that way. You know you chose to live your life in a very you know clean way in terms of no drugs and things like that. I really, truly admire that. I admire the fact that you are an incredible magician one of the best I have ever seen in my life, the fact that you are an author all of these things. You're extremely talented. You at one point went to clown college. Now I happen to be maybe I'm the last person in the world Penn that appreciates a clown. Whatever happened to clowns? Why does everyone seem to hate clowns these days?
Speaker 2:I mean, I know they're in movies. We can blame John Wayne, gacy and Stephen King, I think I don't know. You know clowns were. I was never particularly good, you know, I was always too verbal, you know. Now we have. And if you wonder what's happening to clowns, we now have one of the best. I mean, puddle's Pity Party is taking some of the classic ideas of clowning and putting it together beautifully with wonderful singing and great wit. But that idea, that idea of the outsider represented with grease paint in the symbolic, surrealistic environment, is something that has been so deeply usurped by movies and television that it is kind of an anachronistic art form. But if you're looking for somebody that's doing clowning, you have Puddle's Pity Party and there's also a movie I have coming out called the Big Whoop, which stars three fabulous clowns out of LA. So it still happens. It still happens.
Speaker 1:It's funny you mention Puddles. I mean, this guy is super talented. I don't even know how many people you know are aware of who you're talking about, but he is super talented. He does a version of Folsom Prison Blues mixed with the who, and it is just absolutely phenomenal.
Speaker 2:He's been opening for Weird Al. He just played Madden Square Garden, so three nights at Madden Square Garden. A few people will be hearing about puddles.
Speaker 1:I'm sure, that's great. Well, pen pen gillette, everyone please go check him out. Like I said, uh, this is going to be, uh, the 4th of august, 7 pm, capital books. I really appreciate the time and I really appreciate the conversation today and I thank you for that wonderful talking to you, man.
Speaker 1:All right, thank you, you too bye-bye, pen gillette's felony juggler a quote, mostly true account of the pen and teller magician's life story. And again, he's going to be coming to capital books in sacramento. Uh, this is going to be the fourth of august, 7 pm, and if you like tickets, go to capitalbooksonkcom. You'll get your tickets right there and it looks like we might be giving away some tickets, okay, on my radio show, the Pat Walsh Show on KFPK Radio. So if that's the case, we'll be starting that here this evening.
Speaker 1:So, as I'm thinking, as I wrap it up and I do appreciate his time I'm thinking like what song comes to mind first? What Is it? Frank Zappa? No, no, no, even though we talked about Frank no, no, no, no. Or Varese, or Stravinsky? No, no, no, no, no. Or what could it be? A magic, of course. We didn't really talk that much magic right there, by the way. So I'm going to play this song, which is not.
Speaker 1:I do have this in my record collection, my rare 45s, but this is not from there. I would have had to gone over there because now they're kind of out of order. So I'm being honest with you, like I always am, and I I did not go out and pluck this from my record collections. I'm just going to pull this one up because I'm thinking all right, what song is going to come to mind first when it comes into magic and things like that? It could be so many different songs, but the first one that pops into my mind in regards to magic is a song that was used and abused, in my opinion, on TV. So much so did it just. Of course, I'm not going to say it makes me mad, but they just ruined it, and this started in 2018. I would imagine that there are people who know the original song and when they think of the original song, even if they like it or even if they don't like it, whatever, I like it.
Speaker 1:It's very commercial, it's very pop, it's from the 70s, but even as I think a 15-, uh, 14 or 15 year old, I still liked it. But then they start using it in a tv commercial. You know what I'm talking about, right, I bet you do. Pharmaceutical company Novo Novo Nordisk, in 2018, began using this song in its ads for this now wildly popular product that is being used for ways that it was not intentionally used for to begin with. But this is an injectable drug. Can you imagine you sell out to this drug company? I mean, if you need money? I mean, you only had one hit, they only had one hit. So I can't necessarily blame them for making millions of dollars for selling out here I really can't, but it just kind of. In a way, it didn't ruin the song, but it makes you think of this, and people who don't know the original probably don't even know there was a song that had the. There was an original, it was a real song. They just know this ad or this jingle, whatever you want to call it. But this is an injectable drug which is originally intended for people with type 2 diabetes, which became very popular for its off label use as a weight loss drug. You know I'm talking about ozempic.
Speaker 1:David payton was asked to return to the abbey road studios to record a new version of the song which, from a vocal standpoint, is a little more than his singing the opening line replacing words it's magic, with ozempic otherwise adding nonverbal singing. So after all of these years and this is since 1974, he goes in and recuts this. So when you hear that, oh, oh, oh, oh, zampik, that's the same guy just went and recut it. But this is the original and it just seemed appropriate for Penn and Teller. Penn Jillette. Thank you for listening to Pat's Peeps. 206. See you on the radio. Make that 306, not 206, 306. I'm not going to sell myself short like that. Cleaning on my pillow in the morning. Lazy day in bed, music in my head, crazy music playing in the morning light.
Speaker 2:Oh, oh, oh. It's magic, you know, Never believe it's not so. It's magic, you know, never believe it's not so.
