This week, Merlin and John talk about:

• Childhood compulsions (Personality)
• The Indie Rock Doctor, Dr. John (Career)
• Merlin’s family talking very loudly (Merlin Mann)
• Merlin playing in a cover band with Stephen Fox (Merlin Mann)
• John’s High School band The Truly Awful Band, Rick Garnett (Career)
• John spraying a stencil for his band Chautauqua and getting arrested for vandalism (Stories)
• John’s band Chautauqua never playing a single show (Career)
• John's ravine having been declared a critical wetland (Mid-century Modern)
• John meeting Tom the bass player of Chautauqua and hiring him for his yard (Currents)

The Problem: A stencil plays into the story, referring to Merlin making spray stencils for his fake band and John made a stencil for his first band Chautauqua when he first moved to Seattle in 1990.

The show title refers to a 6-minute song of John’s band Chautauqua about an astronaut on a space mission that was so unlikable that the other astronauts wanted to throw him out of the air lock.

The audio starts with two seconds of an unknown Rock song.

It is early, they haven’t recorded at 10am in years!

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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.

Childhood compulsions (RL449)

When Merlin called John first he sounded like he was under a blanket. It is early and Merlin has had only part of his iced tea. He never learned why John had hippies in his ravine (see RL448) and he is not even done blowing his nose, which is a multi-stage process, and he wishes he could breathe more and tells John that he could use his CPAP machine if John is not using it.

John’s doctor looked into his nose and said it was full of scar tissue from all the years where he was not able to breathe, which is now making it even harder. He already had no shot at breathing because of his face architecture and this has only screwed it up more. There is apparently a way to roto-router it out. Merlin’s friend Alex did that and it didn’t help. Merlin was thinking of having it done. There is a thing to suck the snot out of your kid’s nose and John has previously used that on the baby.

Merlin was a very sensitive kid, he hated blowing his nose and he thought he could fool his mom by putting the Kleenex up to his nose and sucking it in, but that it is a very different sound. Hypodermic needles were the worst for him and he lived in constant fear of hearing a balloon popping, getting s shot, closing a cat in a door, and other things. When John would visit Merlin and would be in the bathroom to urinate and he didn’t close the door all the way it would slowly open unnoticed, John has a closet door like that in the hall right now. Everything in Merlin’s house is a joke and is built on some grade.

Merlin continues to explain why he was afraid to close the door on a cat and how that was supposed to work. John thinks that when you cycle through a 1000 different possible anxieties that is not what he would typically settle on unless there was a triggering event, but Merlin didn’t even have a cat and as he says in his Wisdom Project document: ”We don’t get to pick what we love in life!” The same is true with compulsions. Merlin had a lot of compulsions as a kid, but around 5-6th grade things started to settle down. 6th grade was a very good year.

The Indie Rock Doctor, Dr. John (RL449)

John’s sister Laura was an anesthesiologist, not Susan or the other sister Susan. She worked with Dr. John, the Indie Rock Doc (John first called him Dr. Bob but realized that it doesn’t make sense to anonymize him because John is just as much an untraceable name as Bob) who walked in Tacoma (see RW119 where John said that Dr. John was from Olympia). He loved Indie Rock and would drive up to Seattle to see every show. Eventually everybody knew him and if you broke your ankle or twisted your finger you would call him and he would come to see you. It was apparent that he was on the spectrum.

John was looking up some guy in the UK who started seeing shows in 1973 and has written down every show he has every been to, he has every ticket stub, and he has put it all in a website where he documents every show. He says he has been to over 5500 gigs since 1973, but Dr. John might rival him.

They talk about how you don’t need to come out with all the details immediately, you can just say you are from San Francisco and only if the other person wants to know more they can still ask. It is like when you say that you are a ceramicist (see RL56). One day John still wants to become the sheriff of Twisp (see RL28), which is a real place. They closed the North road to Twisp, so in the winter it is hard to get there.

Merlin’s family talking very loudly (RL449)

Merlin mentions that he loves all of his family, some more than others, and he mentions his ill-fated poorly thought-out trip to Rhode Island this summer where everybody was drinking and talking loudly with no masks on while Merlin’s family did wear masks and nobody could understand them.

John’s school had 2700 kids in it, it was enormous and from one end of the hallway to the other you couldn’t see the other end, it disappeared into the ozone. Merlin thought he was at a large High School, but they only had 666 kids when he was in 10th grade.

John was watching Sense and Sensibility last night with Kate Winslet (John first said Rose McGowan) who was in Titanic and at one point his daughter asked why everybody sounded like they were talking to a microphone, and it turned out they had very echo-y homes and everyone was enunciating.

Merlin likes to watch police interrogations on YouTube. He watched one yesterday about a mother who had Munchausen's Syndrome by proxy and mistreated her daughter. Merlin’s wife Madeleine came into the room and was asking if that was the same one as last time, but it was a different one. It is a very low-effort type of YouTube video.

Merlin playing in a cover band with Stephen Fox (RL449)

One time Merlin played in a 1990s cover band together with Stephen Fox. Apart from Stephen’s band Flanders it was the most popular band that any of them had been in in Tallahassee.

The bar Cow Haus was owned by Merlin’s friends and his band would practice there and at one time the drummer from Flanders needed a band to open for Annabella and Baw Waw Waw who came through town. Why wouldn’t Merlin spend 3 weeks learning 20 1980s covers, most of which he already kind of knew, in order to be in a band with fucking Stephen Fox who once tried out for Foo Fighters?

Stephen always knows the parts and Merlin doesn’t even know how he does it, it is a fucking gift!

John’s High School band The Truly Awful Band, Rick Garnett (RL449)

His John’s very first band in High School was The Truly Awful Band. Their guitar player Rick Garnett had learned early 1980s British Heavy Metal songs by Judas Priest and others and he would play them in practice, but John didn’t know the music well enough to recognize that they were songs by other bands and John would write his own lyrics to them. Rick never informed him that this was an Iron Maiden song.

This was back in a time when learning guitar and being a guitar stud was one of the 5 ambitions that any boy in High School had. Rick was one of the kids in school who was good at that. He was one of the rare kids in school that was a little bit younger than John (who was always the youngest kid in school), but he was not immature, he was raised in a large Catholic family that was well to do and he was an achiever, a handsome kind and he was popular. In his bedroom he had a drum kit and a whole guitar setup.

At some point their friend Jim McNeil, a transplant from Arkansas, started to play the drums in their band. Jim was working construction Downtown and after work he would sometimes show up at Kevin’s house to hang out and get a beer and at one point Kevin said that every time Jim showed up at his house he was wearing his tool belt and his hardhat, but in order to drive there and get in his truck he had to take those things off, which means he put them back on when he arrived at Kevin’s house.

Jim was the drummer in the band and Rick could play The Hellion / Electric Eye (by Judas Priest) and John got recruited as the singer because he was the only one with charisma. John would write songs about how the Great Alaskan Moose came down from the mountains to bestow his wisdom on all of them, some wizard music except about Alaska. Rick was one of those terrible people who was great at everything. As one of the King Conserves he dated a Sosh, which was an absolute scandal. This was the moment when the Soshes realized that they would look up to the Conserves one day.

Today Rick, whose full name is Richard Winfield Garnett is a professor at Notre Dame: ”Paul J. Schierl/Fort Howard Corporation Professor of Law, Concurrent Professor of Political Science, founding director of Notre Dame Law School’s Program on Church, State, and Society”. Merlin calls that title a data dump and when he has a rule in his house that for the first hour after he gets home no data dumps are allowed, but John counters that Merlin is already supposed to know all that because they have been podcasting for 11 years. Whenever Rick sends John an email it has that whole title in his signature and at the very bottom it has a link: ”Download my scholarly papers here”

Rick is very Catholic and his family converted to Catholicism. When Amy Coney Barrett got elevated to the supreme court Rick claimed she was the best candidate and he was extremely offended about all the personal attacks that were levied at her during her supreme court confirmation process. He and John have argued about politics since they were 14 because he was conservative then and John was a Leftist.

Rick was the one that famously shouted down the hall at John something when they had been arguing about Jack Kemp and he shouted ”Go read the constitution!” - ”You need to read up on it!” and all of their friends were standing in the vicinity and it became a thing that they would all say to each other (see RL381): ”You should totally read up on it!” - ”What, is this your first day?” (see RL218) It was a scorching burn, but it was also funny because everybody knew that Rick had read up on it and John was telling him to read up on it.

The Truly Awful Band (who called themselves TAB) only ever played two shows: For one of them they moved all of their kit from Rick’s bedroom into their rec room and played 5-6 songs for his 8-year old sister and her friends, all these loud Judas Priest songs with John’s lyrics about magical moose, and they were culture-jamming enough that John wore one white glove and Jim wore a painter’s cap with the two long safari flaps in the back, which was dynamite! The other show they played was in front of teens at the tennis club party for their senior graduation, and there was shock and awe on the faces of the other teens as they watched them completely earnestly rocking out these tunes.

They and many of their friends would sit in class and doodle TAB album covers and then pass them around. John has a whole stack of them! Having a band is a new version of a made-up club. In 5th grade Merlin really liked the idea of Animal House and he started a Fraternity and gave out titles to people. At John’s High School there was one called Tappa Mega Kegga and one of them ended up at the University of Colorado and kept doing it. People in Colorado love beer. Merlin always wanted a Punk Rock band called Flesh Bullets and he went so far as to make a spray stencil and they made shirts.

John spraying a stencil for his band Chautauqua and getting arrested for vandalism (RL449)

A stencil also plays into John’s story. When he first arrived in Seattle in October of 1990. His friend Brian had gone to Gonzaga with him was a drummer and had played in a lot of Hardcore bands in Seattle in the 1980s and had decided independently that Punk Rock had run its course and wasn’t the future anymore because they had done it all and it couldn’t possibly continue because there was nothing new there. When people look back at the Grunge era they don’t know because the comprehensive story has not been told and all those books about Grunge are all just telling one side of the story.

In 1990 and 1991 before the Nirvana and Pearl Jam records had come out there were so many bands in Seattle that were not Grunge at all, like The Walkabouts, the Posies, or The Young Fresh Fellows. John and Brian put a band together and from the newspaper they got a guy to play bass called Tom Roberts. They were rehearsing in Brian’s dad’s house’s basement’s tiny little TV room, and as Tom showed up he had very long hair, big gold hoop earrings and a Paisley shirt buttoned up to the top, he looked like the guy who played extra guitar in Nirvana for a little while before Kurt Cobain kicked him out for being too metal, but Tom wasn’t metal at all, he was really into the Posies and into Jangle Pop.

The formed a band called Chautauqua (see RL313) when that whole Mudhoney thing had played its course, the future was not playing Punk Rock in a High School auditorium, but they had all been influenced by Full Moon Fever and the future was Rickenbackers and Jingle Jangle. It was all going to come back around to Benmont Tench and Stan Lynch (both from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers) and it was going to be The Birds again, and these buttoned-up shirts were going to make the 1960s look like the 1940s. At this point in time R.E.M. had not become a huge band yet, they were still a cool college band. There was The Cure and My Bloody Valentine and those didn’t sound Grunge!

John’s band practiced 4 times a week, they went to a studio and made a professional demo tape with 5-6 songs on it and they made a two-color stencil (see OM188) designed by John’s other friend, a different Tom. It was bigger than a pizza box and it was not as easy to apply as it looks because they had to have 3 colors with them when they went out at night. In 1991 when Grunge was exploding around the world there were Chautauqua stencils all over the place in Seattle. They even put them right on the pavement on the crosswalk of Broadway and John St and everybody waiting for the light would look down and see the orange / yellow / black logo of Chautauqua.

One time in the middle of the night they were tagging a building Downtown and they put their stencil right next to the famous Pearl Jam tag of a little stick figure guy with dreadlocks holding his hands up in the air, they might still have been Mookie Blaylock, and all of a sudden a door opens right on the wall where John was standing and he saw a brightly lit warehouse full of women sitting at sowing machines and a guy came out: ”What the fuck are you doing?” and he ran after them through whole Belltown, which at the time was a scary neighborhood at night and he jumped in a car and started chasing them in a car.

As they were running out onto 2nd Avenue the guy was going the wrong way up a one-way street, John came up over the top of the hill and there were two cops sitting there and it was a big kerfuffle. The cops put John in the car because he was the ring leader and admitted that he had done it, so the other guys left. The cops took John down to the building and asked him: ”Did you do this?” - ”Well, yeah!” - ”This is the best stencil I have ever seen!” - ”Thank you!” - ”But I have to arrest you for vandalism!” and they did.

The problem was that when John was supposed to come back for his hearing he skipped it because he was too Rock’n’Roll which turned into a $500 bench warrant which he ignored and turned into a $1000 bench warrant which he couldn’t pay and at one point John had been going to the movies with a guy and was riding in his car afterwards through Bellevue. The guy was black and the cops pulled him over being black with a white guy in the car and they ran their ID and pulled John out of the car and cuffed him and took him to Bellevue jail.

The guy Howard Wooten had to take $500 out to bail John out and he bailed him out under his name and although John paid him the $500 back, but when he showed up to the court hearing and asked for his bail back they told him that the bail belonged to a Howard Wooten and John hadn’t seen Howard in 2 years at that point and he never got his bail back, at a time when $500 was a lot of money. Bellevue is near Redmond where Microsoft is and it is just the rich people from Microsoft.

John’s band Chautauqua never playing a single show (RL449)

The worst thing about Chautauqua is that they practiced 4 times a week for all of 1991 while Grunge was exploding all around them and even the worst band in the city was selling 400 tickets a night, and they never played a show. They had a demo tape and everybody in town knew their name because it was stenciled everywhere, but they never booked a show. If only they had 10% more Jane’s Addiction in the band and 10% less International Pop Underground, if they had been slightly less Brit Pop! They had been not quite self-aware enough about the moment.

John had a song called Galaxy’s End that was 6 minutes long and was telling the story from the perspective of an astronaut on a spaceship who was so unlikable that the other astronauts wanted to put him in the airlock and throw him out. Imagine if John Carpenter had done that in the Dark Star era (1974)! It came to John as a plot because they had Major Tom over here, the guy who is saying ”… got no soup!”, but they didn’t have the actual real scenario of being 5 years into a space mission where everybody is really tired of this guy.

If they had put that song next to Touch Me I’m Sick (by Mudhoney), which is 2 minutes long, they would have gotten beer bottles thrown after them. The song was in John’s style of the time and had 14 chords and it was a total drone.

John's ravine having been declared a critical wetland (RL449)

Because the hippies have taken over John’s ravine they have put a set of little flags in the ground and have said that it is now a critical wetland habitat and he was no longer allowed to mess around down there because they had put 1000 new plants down there as part of a program that has saved John from the city of Normandy Park shutting him down. They filled out all the paperwork and as a part of that they keep him out of there and he can’t monkey around there anymore, which is fine for John because the alternative was that the Corps of Engineers was going to put him in rendition somewhere in Dubai, they were going to put him in a Dick Cheney container (see Dreams and Fantasies) because he wasn’t in compliance and hadn’t filled out the paperwork and hadn’t gotten the critical wetland study done.

Now the rest of John’s yard, the domesticated quadrant, which he had just been covering in a foot of wood chips to kill the grass and get the moles out of there while he was down in the wetland. It was a biome and John was growing mushrooms you wouldn’t believe in the wood chips. The wood chips kill the grass because John didn’t want the grass and the moles eat the grubs that eat the roots of the grass, it is an ”old lady who swallowed a fly” type situation.

Now John has to turn his back on the ravine and start focusing on the yard where he was going to do a neo-Chinese garden in mid-century Seattle style. He likes to buy his plants at the nursery on sale and any time he sees a pallet of plants for $5 marked down from $50 he will buy them and find a place for them, but he is trying to do this with native plants. Now John got overwhelmed in the same way that you do when you realize that publicity or graphic art is actually a real job, it is not just people who used Photoshop for 6 months on a job and call themselves graphic artists.

John realized he needed a garden artist and a landscape architect because this was over his head. John used to plant gardens, but it was always along a fence, it was a 2-dimensional thing, but this garden needs to be 4-dimensions because it is in three dimensions, but also plants grow and how is it going to be 5 years from now? Is it going to be close to that?

John meeting Tom the bass player of Chautauqua and hiring him for his yard (RL449)

John was over at a friend’s house who is a great Rock musician who has just started an artisanal delivery pizza service that he drives around in a van and drops off to people, they were outside in the front yard talking about music and he was offering John all those pizzas which he gladly accepted, and a guy walked out of the house next door and said: ”Hey John!” and it was Tom, the bass player of Chautauqua whom he hadn’t seen since 1991, but he had lived in Seattle this whole time and has followed John through the newspapers.

John asked Tom how he has been doing and Tom said he is a landscape architect now, and John told him that the hippies had taken over his ravine and he needed a landscape architect for his yard. Yesterday Tom came out to John and they walked around the garden all day, like: ”Right here you could put a tall Oregon Grape and right here you could put a Wax Myrtle!” John hired Tom who normally architects big parking lots, but he promised that on the weekends he was going to come up with a plan for John so that John and his mom could buy plants by the pallet at the discount rack and Tom is just going to provide some guidance and tell John where to put them.

John’s mom was there when Tom came over and she said to him: ”Tom, we have never met, but for 30 years I have been listening to Galaxy’s End and I want to compliment you on your bassline!” - ”For 30 years I have been waiting for somebody who had ever heard Galaxy’s End to tell me that they liked by bassline!” Making that tape and practicing 4 days a week was for Tom the pinnacle of his Rock years, but they never played a show! She could have hummed it to him, she knows it so well.

The hippies have now left, but had to leave their flags for the next 3 years. It was already a wetland and John discovered it. His mom said: ”I know we are not supposed to touch anything, but we are going to have to move a couple of these plants and we are just going to move the flags, they are never going to notice!” They are young hippies who were walking along the trail that John made and are planting plants in the middle of the trail behind them, it is like they are painting themselves into a corner!

When John was in High School everybody wanted to be a Marine Biologist and now there are whole colleges devoted to hippie majors that didn’t even exist when John was a kid, like Habitat Restoration, Creek Hydrology and Invasive Species. They have a master’s degree in restoring John’s backyard ravine and all the stuff John was doing by just putting some boots and some gloves on and throwing stuff around is a thing they spent years working out the geometry of it. They went to college to wear Carhartts to work everyday and have big muddy boots. It is a big job!

They will grab 30 Civilian Conservation Corps kids wearing Helly Hansens, paying them $10 an hour, college kids who couldn’t get the job sitting up in the fire watch tower in the mountains of Oregon, and all the kids down in the ravine, every single one of them a hippie, they are all nice, and Merlin overreacted there a bit because he doesn’t like hippies who quit smoking and then hate everybody who smokes and keep yelling at them.

These are Northwestern Eco Hippies who climb up into Redwood trees and tie themselves up there so they don’t cut down the trees, they are honorable in a way, they are lovely people, they like to be in the creek, and John also likes to be in the creek, they are the same type of people, but it is their ravine now - we will see about that!

As John took Tom around the ravine Tom said that this was his fantasy, he was touching every leaf of every plant and he knew everything, he was naming all the mushrooms, but he said: ”Don’t eat anything just because I said so!” - ”What good is it to know every mushroom if you can’t tell me which ones I can eat!” - ”No, no, no, no, no! I am not going to tell you which ones to eat!” He touches every leaf, he is communing, he has probably met John’s dresser before.