We Built This City: Jefferson Starship List. Blade gets stuck in an Aristotle rabbit hole??

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Transcript

Why Hits Surprise Everyone

J.J. Jackson-MTV VJ 0:03

Enthusiastic about the new album. We were surprised at all about the huge success of we built the city.

Mickey Thomas-Jefferson Starship 0:08

Well, I think anytime we get a number one single, it's a surprise. But it's not something you can play in a million. It's just takes a lot of luck and a lot of other factors.

Grace Slick-Jefferson Starship 0:19

I mean, it's been a long time, and um also I'm surprised when they don't. Sometimes we have a real good song and you think, I didn't have to. I'm always surprised.

Welcome And Favorite Tracks

J.J. Jackson-MTV VJ 0:29

I'll tell you what, what we're gonna do now is we're gonna go to home base, man, that you've worked with recently.

Show Intro-Chrissie Haynes 0:33

Hey there, it's Chrissy Haynes, and welcome to Blade's podcast. Today, a warning on buying hot dogs in the grocery store. Blade gets into an Aristotle rabbit hole. He tries getting on a city commission, and it did not go well. I didn't grow up with the man, but my folks did, so I heard the stories. Here he is. Go, Blade.

Blade 0:56

Ugh. Lights camera action, you dummies. People made fun of that song, but I love it. You have to have lived in that town to know what they mean when they say we built this city. But uh, here's my list. Baha! Number three, The Girl with the Hungry Eyes. Number two, Miracles. Love it every time. Part of my high school years. Number two, Runaway. It's a guitar solo in it that does it for me. Half the time you'll find my favorite songs all have these amazing guitar solos. And the crew.

Crew Shoutouts And Social Media

Blade 1:40

Thank you. Papi Hachikawa, video editor. Riley Blanchard, stories editor. And we have a social director, but he doesn't do much. Does he? Gaston Brandenburg doesn't do shit. Every now and then he does one. I pay him. Every now and then I see something on Instagram or something. I don't know. Anyway, Facebook is much better only for me, only because old people do Facebook. Like it or not. So my demographic is 65 plus. Seems like yesterday I was doing 25 to 44 demographic. Now it's 65 plus. But you know, when you get to be 65 plus, you look back on life. As Bruce Springsteen said, the glory days. You know, when you're 24 or 25 or whatever, you're looking, you know, how you're going to get laid that weekend, you know, or where the party is, or you know, how you're going to pay your rent. Two different things. That's where I am at this point. So I'm looking back at the glory days.

Radio Glory Days In Raleigh

Blade 2:52

You know, there's a couple of cool pictures there in the intro of the gang at WRDU, the station I worked at for many, many years in Raleigh, North Carolina, 22 years, in fact. And we were the Rolling Stone Magazine, radio station of the year, for two years in a row. 1989 and 1990. It's a big honor, big award. Picture of the gang, you know.

Why Rolling Stone Feels Pretentious

Blade 3:15

And I hate Rolling Stone magazine. I hate them. I've always hated them. So damn pretentious. You just picture some guy in a beard and glasses like a college professor, writing some article about rock and roll, trying to intellectualize it and be smart. And their little social issues. Wrong, you know. I've always felt like that. I've never liked them. Every time I read part or some of that magazine or a whole magazine, I'm like, what? And the worst thing is their uh album reviews. You know, you read the album review, and no matter who it is, the new AHA or the new Eric Clapton or the new, you know, you know, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, you know, and you don't know whether they like it, if they don't like it, if it's good or not. Just tell me if you like it. Tell me if it's a good song. You know, tell me what's good about it. And they never do that. They have to make it some kind of all kinds. They don't want to piss anyone off, so they make it wordy. I'm telling you, they were AI before AI was AI. They're big words and all this. I ran into some article the other day that was from Rolling Stone magazine, and I read it, and I didn't even under I didn't understand a word it said because it was completely AI. You know, it's like there's no guy writing that. You want someone's personal touch on an article that you read is what you want. You want it professionally written, but not.

Three Things He Loves In Arizona

Blade 4:34

Okay, so I've been in uh Arizona for 14 years. I was in North Carolina for like 40 years or something like that. And I figured out the three things that I love absolutely the most about Arizona. Number one is the heat. And I love the joke, you know, it's but it's a dry heat. You can't say that without me laughing. I still laugh every time I hear that. The feels like factor is like if it feels like 117, it is 117. North Carolina, if it feels like, you know, if it's 90 degrees, it feels like it's 117. So what I hated about North Carolina was the humidity, period. I'll never move back east because of that. Yeah, so I love the heat in Arizona. You walk outside, it's like you're on vacation, like you're in Hawaii or something. You know, I jump in the pool. And number two, the thing that I love about Arizona is the Sawaro cacti. Look, they're beautiful, and they're only in Arizona. Only. I mean, if you jump above the wall that they're building now, Arizona and New Mexico and uh Mexico, you can see one or two. But they're only in Arizona, indigenous to this state and this state only. And then my favorite thing about Arizona, without question, is the Roadrunner. You cannot get photos or images of a roadrunner because they're too fast. Every time you see one, it's like, yay, it makes your day. A roadrunner. You know, and that's why I hate, you know, the Roadrunner on Wily Coyote. You want Wily Coyote so bad to sit down in front of a nice, steamy, hot roadrunner with a fork and knife, with his napkin, eating that damn road smart ass roadrunner is what you want to see. Not these guys that look how cute they are.

Aristotle Obsession And Virtue Talk

Blade 6:23

Man, I've been in this Aristotle rabbit hole. I'd give anything to see some CCTV footage from 322 BC, Aristotle. Anything, anything. I've been trying to be virtuous as I come to the last quarter of my life. I've never been virtuous. I want to be virtuous. You know what that guy did? He would go on and he'd talk about life and living and what life is all about for like 12 hours. You know, he'd start at six in the morning and go on till it got dark. Sometimes he won even longer than that. And all the guys would sit around in Greece, you know, in their chitons. I think that's what it is. C-H-I-T-O-N-S, those dresses or whatever, those cloths they wore, you know, in Greece, and they'd listen. You know. If I was one of those guys, I'd walk off shaking my head. What did that guy say? That's too much information. TMI is what I'd say. You know. But I didn't like Aristotle because he made fun of Socrates. And I love Socrates. Should be called Socrates, not Socrates. You see it written down, you see Socrates. You don't see Socrates. Now, Testocles, that's a different story. You can call him Testocles, the first Greek pornography. Because if you didn't call him Testocles, you'd call him Testicles, and that just doesn't make the joke, you see. But Socrates was the one guy that said, I know but one thing, and that is that I don't know anything. Which I love. And I didn't get that from him. I'd been saying that for many years. I don't know anything. I I I really can't prove anything is true. I can't.

Colonel Clink 8:11

I know nothing. Nothing.

Blade 8:16

I paraphrase it in a different phrase. I always say, I don't know shit. And if I've got a good crowd that day, I'll say, I don't know shit about fuck. I'm sorry, I know that's offensive. I don't want somebody on some TV camera doing some podcast swearing at me that I don't know. Sometimes you have to to get the point across. Look, look at this drawer that I have in my kitchen. This is the world we live in. I'm not gonna say anymore.

Construction Traffic And Snowbirds

Blade 8:59

So I live in the state in Arizona now that's going under construction everywhere. The secret's over. When I moved here in 2014, it was a beautifully clean and very cheap place to live and so gorgeous out here. It's not like that anymore. It's just crowded. And now we've got the snowbirds around here and they make everything twice as bad. They all come down to Arizona. They don't go to California anymore, would you? You know, or Texas are really I mean, sometimes they go to Florida. But they all come down here to Arizona now. You know what the state flower is here of Arizona? It's the construction cone. It is. I mean, you gotta go 25 miles per hour through the construction area. You don't want to run over a construction guy who's probably illegal. No, I don't have any problem with that. I don't. Because I don't have to get a job doing that kind of thing. But at any rate, that's different. I don't want to get into anything like that. But it's 25 miles per hour. You don't want to hurt anyone, right? And so the snowbirds come down here and they drive about 12 or 13 because they're old. You know, it makes it even worse, and everybody just sits there in the car. We look at each other beside each other when we're stuck in the traffic jam, you know, and we laugh. We do, because we say, God. You know, and then they slow down and back up these snowbirds because they didn't quite catch the name of the street sign. Because they can't see. Because they gotta find the right street sign to get to the grocery store to, you know, take everything off of our shelves so we have nothing by the time we get there.

Shopper 10:40

Look at this. Boom.

Blade 10:42

Empty. Boom, empty. This is where the grocery carts should be. But they're all gone, they're all taken. That bad. Not a single grocery cart left. Fuck. They rise up the price of housing. You know, it's bad, really bad. I talked to a judge who's a friend of mine, and he wants me to be on a on a commission here in town. Nice guy, and he says it's a negative. Snowbirds don't bring a bunch of money into this town. It's a negative. You know, we lose money when they come into this town. They get what, 180 days here, 240 days here, and then they have to leave a month and a half, and I'll be a happy guy. I'll sit here in the summer and I will enjoy it without snowbirds.

Commission Interview And Homeless Hustles

Blade 11:37

Anyway, I went to one of these commission interviews, you know, they wanna see if they wanted me on a commission in town, and uh there's a homeless guy, and there are so many homeless people in this town. You know, think about it, we're two hours from Mexico. No, but there's homeless people so much all over the United States, Canada, everywhere now. Just seems that way. You know, and this guy says, Listen, you got any extra? I'm in a tough way, and I just happen to have two dollars on me. And so I pulled out my wallet and I gave him one, you know. And he looks at me and he goes, All right. Then I gave him my last one, my last two dollars. Nobody has any money on them. That's the problem with being homeless these days. Here you can take my two bucks, that's all I've got. But they've got this system, the homeless people I've found out. And they get you with a sob story at first, no matter who they are, and they do get you.

Blade 12:34

Boy, their stories are terrible, and they get good at telling terrible stories about what happened to them with their seizure and all that, you know, in the hospital and you know, where they sleep and cardboard shy, all that whole thing. You know, they get you with that, and you go, wow, that's really bad, you know, if you make eye contact with them. And then if the conversation ends like this, God bless, they've won. They've taken you for money. Happened to me about a year and a half ago. I got into this guy's story. It's like, wow, that's a tough story. And I laid down a 20 at a Dunkin' Donuts one time, and he, God bless, you know, and then I walked off shaking my head, thinking, I don't know if I did something good or if I've just been taken. You never know. I mean, that's what this guy was a homeless guy since the day he left his house, which was at the age of 16, until he's had to have been 65. It's a system they all use, and it works. Because they all use the same system. Remember, when they say, God bless, that means that they won. And there are networks, you know. It's like pimps. You know, they're like homeless pimps. You know, you go out there and you panhandle for money and you give a cut of that to the, you know, the head of the network, homeless network. So there's a bunch of that. That's kind of a big problem out there. Anyway,

Hot Dog Labels And Food Rules

Blade 13:55

about marketing, you know, I bought two packages the other day of hot dogs, you know, original Oscar Meyer hot dogs, because I love fucking hot dogs. Catchup mustard relish, that's it. That's all I put on them. That's all I've ever put on them. And I love them. And I got two packs of them, you know, and I ate one the other day, and I'm like, no, wait a minute, this is not right. Original, Oscar Meyer, you know, Frank. Didn't say beef, Frank, Frank, turkey, sausage, chicken. And you can't see it. All you see is original on there. So you think it's the original all beef frank. Not that all beef is all beef. I don't care about that, but I like the way the quote unquote all beef hot dogs taste. So you know where the chicken, turkey, and sausage Franks go and the dog bowl. Damn it. I've got to tip with my specs on and take a look. You know, to make sure that they are all beef Franks. When I buy hot dogs, you should too. Eating a turkey hot dog is like eating a turkey hamburger. I had a buddy who did that to me once. He said, There's no difference. When I ate that hamburger, it was a turkey burger, didn't know it was a turkey burger. I'm like, yes, there is a difference. It's like putting a pineapple on your pizza. You don't do that. You don't do that. You don't eat turkey burgers, turkey hot dogs, or put pineapple on your pizza. Fuck.