This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: Kids don’t follow, referring to a song by The Replacements.

The show title refers to how the things you have in your jeans pockets will create wear patterns that tell the truth about you.

Merlin starts the show singing John’s name ”John, ahaaa…” like in the song Flash Gordon by Queen and he decides that this is going to be the upbeat episode.

Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.

Distinctive wear patterns in your pants and other clothing (RL132)

John is wearing his wool pants today, which is nice, except that on the first time of wearing your wool pants you have to get used to feeling scratchy down there. These pants are old and they just took a sheep and took the insides out to turn it into condoms and pants.

Merlin wears some different pants today, too, just to mix it up a little bit, a different pair of Levi’s 501, it is the second-radiest pair he owns and he wears them probably once a quarter and if he sees somebody from his child’s school on the street it leaves an impression. In the radiest ones his dingdong falls out so he can’t wear those. Merlin has very distinctive wear patterns on his pants because he carries his phone and his space pen in his front pocket.

You can not lie to your pants, but your pants know the truth about you in so many ways. Today he has a very clear outline of an iPhone 5s in his left pocket. There are even more unsavory ways that your jeans tell a story. Back in school John would always have a chew can ring in his jeans from Copenhagen snuff, not Red Man. There was a pretty clear divide between guys who chewed Skoal who were pussies or candy asses, and guys that chewed Cope who were toughs. This was before the advent of all the other kinds of snuff, there was no Kodiak at the time.

In his young teens John was very opposed to chewing tobacco although a lot of his friends chewed in school. He would hector his friends and lecture them about what they were doing wrong and they would try to conceal their chewing from him, but you can’t conceal that from your friend. John really envied the chew can ring in the back pocket of their jeans because it said a lot about a guy, and he started wearing an old chew can that his friend Kevin gave him as a little wallet, a little dime bag, he carried it as a little pouch, but then he started chewing tobacco and the rest is history.

Merlin carries a taxi driver wallet, which is not a super-thin wallet, but it folds in half and it has a little clasp where you can put coins and cards inside. It creates a very clear outline on his jeans down to where you can see where the snap is. John carries a taxi wallet, too. Merlin gave one as a present to John’s mom and she gave it to him and he wore it until it fell apart, nobody including Merlin himself knows why he gave John’s mom a men’s wallet. Then John found one at the thrift store that was completely unused and he had to fight a Chinese lady for it who claimed she was about to pick it up.

Merlin has asymmetrical wear pattern on his knees, and one knee always starts to wear before the other. It is a thing that you notice on shoes, cuffs, or elbows as well.

The other day John was in a mall, which is not where he wants to be, but he had to go from one end to the other which is a long trip, and as he was walking he was consciously trying to change his gate. He usually walks a little splayed and when you try to point your toes inwards your whole body feels different. When John was walking across Europe he would do that for days at a time and point his toes in the direction he was traveling and he still does it sometimes.

New destination space in Merlin’s favorite mall in the Barnes & Noble space, no more book stores in San Francisco (RL132)

Speaking of malls: Merlin sent John a link to a photo. He and his daughter saw a movie the other day at the big fancy mall Downtown (the Westfield San Francisco Centre)//. You can get off the subway at Powell Station and walk into the food court. It is one of Merlin’s favorite places to see movies because they have good seats and great food, it is a great daddy-daughter-day place to go.

One of their stops has always been what used to be a Barnes & Noble and became a Remainder Book Store that later added toys, so you could get $2 books, puzzles, Dr. Who figures, it was a fun place to go! Now something new is moving in and there was a sign over the whole store front that said: ”BESPOKE - Nestled within the retail epicenter of San Francisco sits a dynamic new destination: a community where digital innovators collide with the world’s greatest brands - for work and for play.” and below three icons: ”Coworking - Events - Tech Demos”, colored in a gun-metal grey that is the same color as John’s Audi 5000s (see RL26). They talk about why the first letter in BESPOKE has an underline, it looks like a prompt on a computer.

When they got a Barnes & Noble at the Tallahassee mall in 1992/93, there was a Starbucks inside the Barnes & Noble and that was the first Starbucks that Merlin has ever been to, that is how classy Barnes & Noble was, alongside Borders (also a book store) they were a juggernaut. This was probably 50.000 sqft of store! It used to be huge! They were driving out all the little children’s book stores on the Upper Westside. Sometimes they were that big that it felt like they took over an old grocery store, a Pantry Prider type situation, and when the mall got refurbished they got a Barnes & Noble.

Now there is not a single big box book store in Downtown San Francisco. John used to go to this places, but they were not built for him, he would walk around and eventually he would buy a paperback copy of Plato’s Republic just to give himself something to do, and he would then give that to a homeless guy because the path to recovery starts with Plato. Every once in a while he would buy an artist’s model, those little wood articulated men for creative people that sit on the end tables in the homes of interesting people, and then give it as a gift to somebody.

Merlin has always loved spending two hours in a store like that, it is great for Christmas gifts, especially if you don’t care that much whom you are buying it for.

John getting a tintype picture taken of himself, first experience with a coworking space (RL132)

The other day Jessica Kausen, who works for their sponsor Squarespace, sent John a message on Instagram that there is a guy who is taking Tintype photographs in John’s town today, an itinerant tintyper traveling the world with his giant camera, doing real tintype photos, looking for talent, people who look old-timey, and John contacted this guy and got invited down to Pioneer Square in Seattle. He expected the guy to be wearing a Bowler Hat and a mustache, but he was wearing neither, and he was taking tintype photographs with this camera that he kind of built himself.

He was using an alcove in a coworking space (WeWork, see RL420) that had some public interest angle where they were non-profits or they were trying to make the world a better place, and it was full of people, every seat was taken by people on their laptops and they all appeared to be using Windows 95. John was astonished that in the middle of the afternoon people would choose to pay to be in this environment and he came out of that experience both with a tintype photograph of himself and with a new curiosity about his coworking movement because it was his first exposure to it because he doesn’t work or interacts with people who work.

For Merlin having an office is good and bad because he has a place to have all his shit, but even if you just bring a laptop, he cannot imagine a more purpose-built environment for distraction and unnecessary noise and movement. He had opportunities to co-work at places in town, he got offers from really nice places to rent a desk, like Twitter 5-6 years ago before he had an office, which sounded great, he would go to South Park every day, Jason Goldman offered to set him up, but it was so loud! It would be really cool to work alongside all those cool people, but people were throwing a ball, there was music going on, it seemed like a place that was uniquely inappropriate for a large number of people to be doing something quiet in.

An environment like that it would be a personal challenge for John to try to distract everyone else as much as he could. He would go from desk to desk and go: ”Hey, what are you working on? How long have you been in Seattle?” He wouldn’t be there to work, but to socialize and find interesting things about those people. If he was going to work he would want to be in seclusion. Merlin would on some days be pretty annoyed about how much activity and movement there was, while he also could see himself walking up to somebody’s desk and talking to them for 2 hours. It would be the worst of both worlds! He needs to get out of the house, but how much does this offer than a café? He has friends who do podcasts in a place like that!

John’s band practice space near the Richard Hugo House, the history of the Richard Hugo House (RL132)

When John was first starting out in music in Seattle, the biggest challenge was to find a practice space. His friend Reese Lam was a painter, and he knew all the people in underground Seattle, the people living in the hole, and he always had a place to paint, often an uninsulated corner of a steel-frame building, and John asked him several times if he knew a space that could be converted into a band practice space, but bands are so loud and he was afraid that if he hooked him up and John would open a band practice space that it would attract attention to the whole underground economy and then the cops come around busting all those old buildings and the guy making rubber bands and the refrigerator guy will be out of work because of John.

The Rubberband Man (by The Spinners) is such a good song!

There were always shared band practice spaces, but you had to know somebody, they were always full to overflowing, and John couldn’t find a space until his friend Peter took a job as a custodian at a theater company that was occupying an old funeral home, in exchange to letting him live in one of the out-buildings, the garage where they had kept the hearses. It was uninsulated and John offered to help him and they took the hardware of the garage door off so it was just a wall and didn’t open anymore, and they cut a door in the side and found an old patchwork metal door that looked like a refrigerated area door, and they hung it into the side of this building.

They got a bunch of futons and drilled holes and put bolts and washers and hung them over the windows, they found a bunch of insulation somewhere and insulated this whole building. It was an amazing space! John worked on it with Peter for several months, making it into the ultimate bachelor pad practice space, it was a huge garage, they found some couches and some carpets. Peter was living there and he was a tidy guy, he would get up in the morning and make his bed and put some throw-pillows on it so it looked like a couch. It was his personal dignity, he was German and had 8 brothers and sisters and he made his bed in the morning.

Peter had a band, John had a band, and they started practicing in this space and right away the relationship started to sour, like: ”This is my house, my home, and you guys are practicing here and leaving your chew spit cans lying around and your marijuana reefers!” - ”What do you mean, this is your house? This is the fantasy we always had, it is a club house!” - ”It is not your club house, it is my club house!” - ”You are getting this place for free for not even being a janitor over at the theater company!” It got very contentious, and reflecting back on it John realizes he was taking over Peter’s private little space.

John went over to the theater company and asked them if he could have one of those additional outbuildings that they had and they said they were going to rent one to a motorcycle repair guy, but John was an artist, they were as a theater company premised on helping people make art, and they gave John a cinderblock garage that was moldy and covered with oil, and John and his band who had just helped Peter fix up his spent 3-4 months fixing up this garage. They actually took the garage door out and built a cinderblock wall.

This is the space near the Richard Hugo House (see RW207) at 11th and E. Howell. The theater company sold itself to the Richard Hugo House and John continued a relationship with them, he was grandfathered in, and it is still a Rock band space to this day. It was handed down from John to a series of bands, some of them quite famous. The Richard Hugo House just announced that they sold the entire quarter of a block with all the out-buildings and the funeral home and everything to some developers who are going to put in a condo tower, and it is all going to go away, all the history, all the blood, sweat, and songs and marijuana reefers and Peter’s lost youth and John’s lost youth and the first performance ever of Unsalted Butter, and it is all just going to get back-hoed into the basement of some kind of condo, fucking Tears in Rain (reference to Blade Runner)!

Richard Hugo is Merlin’s second favorite American poet. Like all good American friends, John and Merlin have previously shared their Top 4-5 American poets, which is absolutely not weird!

The house was funded by some rich people, the first generation of Microsoft and Amazon multi-millionaires back when they were millionaires already but the town was still pretty shabby and real estate was cheap. The changes started after John was aware of real estate and he is sad he didn’t get in on it. In 1995/96 you could still buy an undeveloped quarter acre (1000 sqm) lot within 10 minutes walking distance from Downtown for $20.000, and they were all over the place.

Nobody saw it coming, although John did see it, and it was hard to convince people because from 1970-1995 that lot didn’t change in value and you got to pay the taxes. For $150.000 you could have bought what would ultimately be $20 million in real estate now. Developers are going through that neighborhood today, tearing down $5 million 3-story brick apartment buildings in order to build a $15 million building.

You could buy a house in the center of Seattle for $50.000 and yet the world’s richest man lives here and this will one day soon be the last livable place! This was all evident 15 years ago, John has seen Los Angeles and knows what is going on down there, but he didn’t have any resources and he didn’t have the moxy. In retrospect he knew it and should have devoted all his energy to it, but he was trying to write songs and be in a band, he wasn’t trying to be a real estate developer.

These people who funded the Richard Hugo House were newly-minted millionaires and they went into Capitol Hill’s ritzy neighborhood. There is a particular house right across the street from the Cornish College of the Arts that is a massive and beautiful gracious home, but it is right on a busy street. When it was built then every once in a while a guy would putter by in a 1-cylinder car and go beep-beep, which was charming, because the busy-ness of the guy who was bringing the milk on the horse-drawn cart didn’t impact your enjoyment of your home. Now all day long there are busses and cars and it doesn’t have enough seclusion, but it has a big pile of luxurious finishes and you couldn’t afford to live there unless you were a rich person, and if you were a rich person, why would you want to live there?

The Richard Hugo House people were going to buy this house, which made perfect sense because it was a fantastic place with a big entry hall, a staircase that you could take a team of horses up, and it just screamed Literary Arts Center, but in an early example of Seattle Nimby the old rich building who lived in the gracious homes right around there wondered where those Literary Arts people were going to park and they didn’t want some kind of Literary Arts people, it was going to invite people who wear feathers for jewelry and you are going to hear those pencils scratching.

The neighborhood ganged up together and kept the Hugo House from being able to buy it, it wasn’t just a grass roots campaign, but they actually went to the city and said that this neighborhood was not zoned for this kind of questionable commercial artistic use, and the Richard Hugo House ended up buying that old funeral home that was pretty far down on their list of choices, maybe their 4th choice. They bought that entire lot for $1 million and it is surely $10-15 million now or more.

John still drives past that big beautiful home across the Cornish College of the Arts and thinks that one day this will be a Literary Arts Center if he has his way. When he is an old man he will come here and turn this into a Literary Arts Center, just to spite the ghosts of those people. When that house was built someone presciently probably wrote Literary Arts Center in chalk on a beam - it was meant for that and John is so mad!

Merlin talks about why he loves Richard Hugo. He had a real eye for all kinds of stuff in the Pacific Northwest, he is famous for his fish poems, but Merlin likes his stuff about tumbled-down Western towns, analogies for life falling apart. He also wrote a wonderful book on writing, called The Triggering Town. Merlin’s love of Richard Hugo is one of John’s favorite loves. There are so many things in Merlin’s life he doesn’t talk about because it bores other people. He is the rich-man’s Raymond Carver!

Buffalo Tom, The Replacements, and others trying to recreate the sound of Hüsker Dü (RL132)

John was listening to Buffalo Tom on the way in today. They used to sound a lot like Dinosaur Jr. and The Replacements, as all the bands from the late-1980s in America, and the recordings don’t sound very good, and there is a lot of jangle strumming through overdriven amps. This also happened with Dump Truck, the cluster of bands that were crusty post-Minneapolis band like The Lemmonheads and Soul Asylum, The Buck Pets that very much had their roots in Hüsker Dü.

Soul Asylum’s stuff before Hang Time sounds a lot like The Replacements, it is kind of funny. John mentions Clam Dip & Other Delights, but that was after Hang Time. It is such a great record! The Goo Goo Dolls, the guys with the frosted hair, used to sound even more like that. All of those bands, their late-1980s output all sounds like that. Merlin stands by Hang Time, it is glossy, but it is a good album, like The Replacements meets Cheap Trick. John never got into The Goo Goo Dolls. You can clearly hear that they all wanted to recreate that sound, just like Merlin’s band with R.E.M.

What is funny is that they all got famous for some jangly power ballad or 6, like Runnaway Train (by Soul Asylum). The Lemonheads started to turn it down with the album It’s a Shame About Ray, and he actually dated Winona Ryder like everybody, although John never did. Buffalo Tom had the headlights song (called Taillights Fade), which was a power ballad.

In the early 1990 all the way after Grunge had already crested, Paul Westerberg (from The Replacements) was still voted America’s Number One songwriter in some Rolling Stone poll, but that is like the Academy Awards where he is getting credit for stuff he did earlier, or like Tim Conway getting an Emmy Awards for his appearance on 30 Rock. Merlin sings: ”If it’s a temporary lull, Why’m I bored right outta my skull?” from the song I’ll Be You by The Replacements. Is that really better than Unsatisfied (also by The Replacements)?

R.E.M.: John doesn’t know if at a certain age you drink the Cool Aid and then that is the Cool Aid that you drank, the one that was given to you in your time. If Monster was the first R.E.M. album you heard, then you are going to have some very awkward conversation with Merlin. John says that the first three R.E.M. records (Murmur, Reckoning, Fables of the Reconstruction) are absolutely bulletproof and even the wrong notes are right, but then he puts on The Replacements and he has heard it all 1000 times and he saw them back in the day and he has sat in a dirty couch with two other guys in horn-rimmed glasses and baseball hats form Feed & Seed companies and they have argued this for 25 years, but John just goes: ”Ehh…”

Merlin thinks that Let It Be (album by The Replacement) is a way better finished product than Tim (also album by The Replacements) because the production on Tim is incredibly dated. Even Jim Dickinson’s stuff (he was the producer) on Pleased to Meet Me, there was a lot of gated reverb on there that makes it sound like they are playing in half a toilet with the lid falling down.

John thinks there is no worse record in terms of production than I against I by Bad Brains, and yet John loves that record! It is an SST record and that spot guy (probably Ron Saint Germain) ruined a lot of really good albums. John thinks that is a fantastic album and he can listen to it and love it through the production that sounds like they put a microphone down a manhole cover and the band was driving in a truck that was driving by. It just sounds terrible, and you can’t go back and re-record that record because nobody could do it and play it now. They were touched by angels!

The sounds of The Replacements not withstanding, their songwriting makes John think that this is for other people, for guys in Feed & Seed hats or for The Goo Goo Dolls. He felt that way about Dylan the first time he heard him, but then he grew to understand and love Dylan and he moves him now, but he has gone back to The Replacements 100 times and he always comes out feeling like: ”Those were the guys that lived in the house across the street from the house that I lived in and we were friendly, but not friends!”

Buffalo Tom inspiring John that having a band and playing shows was doable (RL132)

John saw Buffalo Tom in 1990/91 and the show just blew him away and he can’t hear a bad word about them. He will always love them because he remembers the feeling of being at their show and feeling like: ”This is doable! These guys are doing this and I could do this! This is amazing!” There were a lot of people at that show and they were all… John had always gone to Punk shows, those were the only shows you went to, hardcore shows where a lot of it was about the mechanics and volume. John couldn’t afford to see The Cure or Starship, he was going to the $3-5 shows at the rec center.

Those bands were all hardcore bands and he would look around and everybody was rocking their Punk thing and John loved to slam-dance, but he did not walk out of that show and felt: ”You know what? I am going to shave my head and I am going to go vegan and I am going to start living and working at a soup kitchen!”, he was not transformed into the life. But at that Buffalo Tom show he looked around and everybody was his age, wearing Carhartt jackets, there were girls there, and most of these guys were wearing glasses, these were his people! It was freaky!

Merlin went to some of the early shows and they were electric, such an adrenalin shot, but sometimes he would end up seeing bands that were opening for somebody else, that he had heard the name of and was a little bit familiar with, and those were the bands that ended up sticking with him, like Yo La Tengo and The Feelies. If you just heard their record first you might not get it. Urge Overkill were a bit example of that, they were really glossy, but they were amazing.

Merlin thinks that the songwriting of Yo La Tengo is fantastic, the evolution of the band over time is great, and they seem like interesting people. The Feelies is as close as Merlin will ever get to something like Grateful Dead, where he is intently watching a song unfold. It is very Rock’n’Roll and very intense, but also nerdy, like Yo La Tengo, and it caught him that night and it led him down the rabbit hole of looking for all of their records. That is stuff that really stuck with him, like John and Buffalo Tom.

John doesn’t think it is artistically defensible to stand on an overturned crate outside of Hyde Park and say that you like Buffalo Tom and you don’t like The Replacements. Somebody might throw a coffee cup of pee at you!

People don’t listen to music the same way anymore, but John doesn’t care. He was listening to the radio and they were playing some old music from his youth, Punk and Grunge, and he was struck again how bad most of it was, and you could not sit a young person down and explain what it meant, that it used to be hard to hear music, to even find it. To be 22 years old in John’s case and go to a Rock show where it was your first exposure to an audience that looked like you.

He had been to Heavy Metal stadium concerts, he had been to 1000 Punk Rock shows in youth centers, but he had never been to a show in a club where the audience had taken some college classes. Those bands never came to Anchorage. R.E.M. never played in Anchorage when John was growing up. How would you explain that experience to someone who is 22 years old now? Presumably they are aware that there are rooms full of people who resemble them, even if they have never been in one.

It turned out that John didn’t belong there either. He walked around and said: ”Hi! Nice to meet you!” to people, but everybody was like: ”We don’t just walk up and say Hi to each other, that is not how we do it!”

Outro

The other day John was walking down the street, and he had been taught that when you are walking down the street you make eye-contact with people and nod and smile. Merlin gets worried when John is starting with this new topic, because they have now been recording for an hour. ”Kids don’t follow!” (song by The Replacements)

Interview with their sponsor Threes: (Download)