This show is hosted by Luke Burbank (and normally also Andrew Walsh).

This was the final Friday of their ”TBTL Roughing It!” series, spending one last weekend in the beautiful Inland Northwest at Lake Hauser in Idaho. If today was a Chinese Food Dish, it would be called ”Double Happiness”! Two things are very exciting: They have already locked in the time, date and location for the next TBTL live event, which is going to be happening on September 9th 2010 in Los Angeles at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, which means TBTL has hit the big time.

Jen (Andrews) and Sean (De Tore) will be there, they have Garfunkel & Oates booked and a bunch of other people who are still double-checking their schedules, but will surely do it. They are probably going to have too many guests of a pretty top-notch caliber! The second happiness is for everybody who heard about the Seattle live shows and was curious, but was suffering from sticker shock over the fact that the shows were $0.99 each to download. The following show is the Friday night show that they did in Seattle, the TBTL Summer Slam, absolutely for free.

The show was recorded at the historical Columbia City Center theater in Seattle. Back in the day it was called the Rainier Cinema.

Intro (TL611)

the guest line-up is presented by Sir Mix-a-Lot.

Tonights guests are:

• From The Long Winters: John Roderick
• Rachel Flotard, who has a nice ass
• Rusty Willoughby is in the house
• Ben Huh, the CEO of I Can Haz Cheezburger?
• The comedy of Andy Haynes
• This big fat rat dude named Sir Mix-a-Lot
• Your host for the night, who could have been a pimp in another life with a name like Luke ”Big Daddy” Burbank
• A woman who loves Jesus, but she also drinks a little big, Jen Andrews
• A man known as Japan’s number one mixer: Sean De Tore

Luke does a bit about Prince declaring that the Internet is completely over.

Jen does a bit about her new Toyota and its beeping seatbelt-sign. She has been working out like crazy lately because she was worried she couldn’t eat healthy, but she hates working out.

Sean does a bit about living in a war zone called his new apartment. In the first night they were shooting a porno in the apartment next to it, which he normally would welcome, but he heard it through his walls and was not invited. He also has an ant problem and a guy was parking in his spot.

Song Not Moving to Portland (TL611)

When John entered the stage he first played the song "Not Moving to Portland”. They had played the music video on their website before, but John has since rewritten the song because the original version did not have enough different time signatures in it. Indie Rock has a hard-enough time being interesting and John put more time signatures in there in an attempt to hook the audience.

John is playing the song.

While John was playing the song Luke was thinking that it has too many time signatures, but his first mistake was thinking while John was playing the song. Luke had an extra Budweiser hidden behind his seat because he has a tab at the bar. He orders another Tank & Tonic and John would like a Fruity Pleaser.

The first time John and Jen met (TL611)

Their first question for John comes from producer Jen and John remarks that she looks great, but Luke reminds him "Easy sleazy!" because her husband is here. She created this look through sliced turkey and coffee and running a mile four times a week, which was the impressive part. Sliced Turkey & Coffee would be a good name for the opening act, but they couldn’t get them because they were not big enough.

When Jen was in Friends John came into the studio one time and was very quiet and didn’t say anything, which is his method. When kids play peek-a-boo, they think when they can’t see you, you can’t see them. John’s mom’s dog does that, he puts his head under the couch and thinks that he is invisible. Jen felt like she and John had a magical connection and she wanted to double-check with John if he felt it as well. Luke was trying to slow down John’s roll when they sat down because her husband is selling the merch and has all the money from the T-Shirts. If he gets pissed, he is going to walk off with it. Welcome to the entertainment business!

One of the reasons John was so quiet on the radio program was that he was hit with a thunderbolt. While the others were talking in a way that sounded like Muppets talking through cheese cloth for the rest of the show, Jen and John felt the connection. Part of why they got cancelled might have been that they kept doing the show through cheese cloth.

It was the second time Luke met John after having met at an NPR thing, and John was surprisingly quiet and meek, which struck Luke as unlike John. John wouldn’t have used the word ”meek” because it is a wussy word, but maybe ”restrained”. John could have unleashed a torrent of interesting conversation, but he chose not to. He had showed up with the You Look Nice Today guys and Luke knew John was going to be arriving. Some doves flew buy, carrying a scroll saying ”Roderick approaches!”, which is well-known in Seattle: Wherever John goes, his handlers arrive half an hour before.

There were three members of the podcast and Luke as the host with a total of four microphones. They sat John in a chair, he couldn’t even reach a microphone with his hand, and they spent the whole time asking: ”What is up with you, Mr. No Talk?” What was John going to talk into? Without a microphone he will go back into his Chrysalis.

John being an introvert performer (TL611)

Two thirds of performers are the sociopath type: They are always on stage. If they just have two potted cactuses and their toilet is running, the attention from the audience is the only thing that gives them any reason to live. The other third of performers are really introverted people who spend most of the time picking their belly button lint out and making it into little animals. When they get on stage the microphone somehow turns them into some Mr. Hyde character.

John falls into the second category. His whole mantle is full of little rabbits and turtles that he made out of his belly button lint and weeks go by when he doesn’t talk to another person because he is inside. He lives in Rainier Beach and it is actually harder to not talk to people out there because your neighbors are friendly, unlike in the White Neighborhood in the North where people don’t talk to each other. Luke says that everybody there has 6 acres (24.000 sqm), but how do you live on a working farm in Seattle? John is actually building a giant windmill and he is going to live in it, put helium balloons on it, and fly away.

John wearing braces and having his front tooth back (TL611)

Luke apologizes for making fun of John’s braces because that was a low blow, but that is the business of show and Luke has to do what he has to do. Radio is a very visual medium. With his braces John now also has a full complement of front teeth which he didn’t have for a long time. Jen loved him before he had teeth, but they should take this conversation offline.

John walked around with a missing tooth for a long time, but unfortunately people have an unconscious awareness that if a man in his 40s is missing one of his front teeth, things aren’t going so well. Things were going great for John and it couldn’t be better! One time John was texting Luke that he was having dinner with Amy Sedaris in New York, and Luke was thinking: ”… with one tooth missing!”

There was an unconscious response from people in grocery stores who were just like ”Oh, how are you?” and it came to the point when John was afraid that the missing tooth was becoming his signature and he wasn’t going to be able to get away from it, like the guy from the Counting Crows’ hair or something: ”Who is the fat guy? Oh, he shaved his dreads!” John was afraid of it becoming his deal that he had to do something about it.

John’s front tooth fell out because when he was a young man he did not take care of himself, let this be a lesson to you if you are in your teens or twenties! The things you do turn around and make it hard for you to go to the bathroom later on. When you are 19 or 20, you think that your liver can take it forever, but eventually your organs will turn on you and you will not be able to pee. When he was a teenager John used to get into fights. He thought it was hilarious because he grew up in Alaska where that is the definition of hilarious, just as it is in Montana, Texas and Oklahoma.

John is a Smart Alec and in those states those get their shit kicked out of them a lot. He is a big guy and he dealt it out, but a lot of times it was four on one. John has to stop fighting the Harlem Globetrotters! None of that stuff seemed to matter until John was 39/40 years old and then all of the broken parts just stopped working at once. Fortunately, John is still a mad lover. The tooth fell out and he has a bum knee, but other than that he just sits in a chair and lets it all happen.

Intermission: Jen Andrews (TL611)

Jen was on a road trip around the whole country for nine months. They created a segment ”Five ways that Jen made America better and five way she made it worse”

Better:

• Siren went off in the city
• Bison
• Book store in Maine
• Adapting to local customs
• Mr. Nightly (dog) raising $17 for the Humane Society

Worse:

• Posing in inappropriate ways in National Parks
• Mr. Nightly peeing over an electric outlet, shorting the light display
• Ceiling in Hurst castle coming from Spain
• Olympics talk, kept getting mittens
• Accidentally having her shirt not buttoned in Delaware

Intermission: Ben Huh (TL611)

Ben is the CEO of I Haz Cheezeburger, Lol Catz and Fail Blog. After he came on stage, Ben iced Luke (John talked about this Bud Ice meme in RL220) although Luke had declared this to be over already, but because Ben is the emperor of this kind of bullshit, Luke has to do it, and he did. The last person Ben tried to ice was Buzz Aldrin, but he hadn’t had a drink in 25 years and was not going to start today. It meant he was an alcoholic on the way to the moon.

When Meg Whitman was running for governor her ad-people took a screenshot of Fail Blog and faked an image of Jerry Brown on there (see in this video). The blog was the root of people saying ”Fail!” for the most mundane things. The next Lolcat or Fail is going to be Derp. They do that by posting photos of it until you like it.

They talk about what is going to be the next hot Internet thing.

Intermission: Rachel Flotard (TL611)

Rachel is performing with Rusty Willoughby, playing the song Do Right Woman - Do Right Man by Aretha Franklin. They talk about Rachel doing different shows.

They have a segment called Rachel Flotard Life Coach where they answer audience questions about sex.

Intermission: Sir Mix-a-Lot (TL611)

They had lied to him to get him to come to the show, telling him that the show started at 6pm, but the show actually started at 8pm.

Luke asks him how often the song Baby Got Back enters his life on a given day and it is a lot, mostly when he is at Safeway. People misunderstood the song, but there are never days when he regrets having written it.

He rents out his really nice cars to rappers who want to pretend to be as rich as him for their videos.

They do a segment called Sir Mix-a-Lot helps the Insane Clown Posse. They talk about the song Magic & Miracles and Sir Mix-a-Lot has to rhyme on ICP lyrics. It is the song with ”Fucking magnets! How do they work?”

Intermission: Andrew Haynes (TL611)

Andrew does a comedy routine about different American cities and about it always raining in Seattle. Bringing a girlfriend to New York is like bringing a warm beer to a bar where they serve free cold beers. He talks about a porno called gay-racula.

There was a bit about the Large Hadron Collider and the problems it had when they turned it on.

There was a bumper sticker saying ”The Titanic was built by professionals, the Ark was built by amateurs. Which one sank?”

They do a segment called Awesome - Not Awesome. The only story they had was that LeBron James declared he was not playing for Cleveland anymore and the owner of the Cavaliers (Dan Gilbert) posting an open letter in Comic Sans.

Outro (TL611)

Luke thanks all the guest for being here today. John plays one more song called Pushover.