[MUSIC]
Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatis Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at Mercatis.org For a full transcript of every conversation and hands with helpful links, visit conversationwithtiler.com.
[MUSIC] Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm sitting here chatting with the great Bob Spitz, the biographer. He has a new book at which I enjoyed very, very much. The Rolling Stones, the biography.
He has other very well-known books on the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Ronald Reagan, Julia Child, and more. Bob, welcome. My pleasure, Tyler, nice to be with you.
“Did the Rolling Stones have a long apprenticeship period the way the Beatles did?”
It seems they didn't, so how did they become so great so quickly? No, actually they did. They worked in a little club called the Cronetti Club, which was in Richmond, a suburb of London. And they worked long and hard there.
In fact, the first time, and I document this in the book,
the first time they show up, only like six kids show up. And they're despondent, and they go and talk to the head of the club. And he said, "Look, play as if there are 100 people there, and next week there will be 100 people." And next week, there was 100 people, and they played as if there were 100,
and the next week, 200 came. And so they worked in that club for about six months, then they went on the road, they played a lot of really crappy little places. The same way that the Beatles did, perhaps not as long in apprenticeship, but they served their time pretty well.
That seems quite short that six months. So you read about Paul McCartney. He writes songs when he's age 14, age 16. Yeah.
“Is there anything comparable in the Rolling Stones?”
No, not really.
The stones never dreamed that they would write music.
It was beyond them. They were blues singers, and so their primary goal in life was to bring that rich catalog of Delta and Mississippi and Chicago blues to the world. They did not care about writing songs at all.
They saw themselves as authentic blues masters. It was only their young manager, Andrew Oldham, who insisted. If they were going to go anywhere, if they were going to compete in the music world, the pop music world, they would have to write music. And so they gave it a try.
But this came maybe two years after they were already on the road. There's something they added to the blues. If you had to put your finger on what that was, the secret to their sound, the blues plus X. What's the X there?
The X is rock and roll. I mean, they'd jacked it up. They hotwired the blues. And they turned it into a sound that we now know is rock and roll. Chuck Berry and Boe did we started that sound?
But then the Stones really gave it extra power and ferocious guitar, and gave us the sound that we now know is rock and roll. Today, but they also have some songs that are very good.
“You could say almost country and western music, right?”
Say, circa 1968. So there's some other element musically, other than just rocking, that they're adding all along. Absolutely. They took the records that the American servicemen had left behind after World War II.
They left thousands of records behind. And the majority of them were country and western records. And so the Stones grew up like the Beatles did, too, loving country and western music, courtesy of the American servicemen. If you'd objectively, how good are their melodies?
Just as melodies. So if you ask about the Beatles here, they're in everywhere, right? That's an A double-plus melody. How do you rate the Stones? I would rate them maybe a B-minus.
The rock and roll melodies are a spectacular, give me shoulder, jump and jack flash, you know,
you can't always get what you want.
These are melodies that I would put up against some of the Beatles better songs, but perhaps not as lush, not as romantic as the Beatles, melodies in a different mode. Why was the album's satanic majesties request such a failure? Or maybe you disagree.
But I never listened to it. I don't disagree at all. Yeah, it was a failure. What they did was they were trying to mimic the Beatles' sergeant peppers. And if, you know, you can't copy.
You really have to play what's in your heart. And I think they knew it. Certainly the other people who took part in that satanic majesties knew it. The album's rarely played rarely listened to. But they mimicked many other things quite well, right?
Including the blues. Sometimes the Beatles themselves. They did, you know, I want to be your man.
Are you a B- there version was better?
What was it about the psychedelic?
“Or maybe it was studio production that they couldn't mimic so well?”
Yeah, it just wasn't in the real house. They were not a psychedelic band. They certainly did as many psychedelic drugs as the Beatles. Perhaps more. But the music just didn't come to them easily.
And so they gave it a shot. And then they went back to what they did best. Is it true that they weren't an album oriented band? The way the Beatles at least became? I don't know if I'd say that.
The Beatles had concept albums. Sergeant peppers was a concept album. Abbey Road is a concept album in its own way. Even the white album is somewhat of a concept album. And certainly magical mystery tour.
But the stones didn't do that.
I think their albums were solid.
They followed a pattern. They knew how to sequence the music so that the music built on the albums the same way that the Beatles built their energy on each album.
“And I think perhaps the stones when it came to engineering,”
when it came to production, worked even a little harder than the Beatles. They were in the studio a lot longer. So which in your view is their best album? If you had to say, uh-huh. Yeah, well, listen, I am a beggar's backwit.
Get it bleed, man. Those two albums. All the hits? There they are. I mean, you know, that was the hot spot of the Rolling Stones career as far as I care.
I think those would be my picks. No, exile on Main Street isn't album. Is that really so great? There was a time when rock critics would put that like in the top 10 albums of all time. But sometimes when I put it on, it just sounds like quite a bit of bluesy sludge.
It's all pretty good. But none of it sticks with me that much. Am I missing something there? As far as I care, no. But I've had friends who would call me on the carpet for that.
A lot of people hear that album in a different way than you and I heard it. They hear it as something authentic, something that moves from genre to genre. There are blues songs, there are rock songs, there are country and western songs. For my money, I agree with Mick Jagger. Mick Jagger can't listen to that album.
That isn't one of his favorites.
“And I think it's because he didn't really participate much on that album.”
He had just gotten married. They were in France. Everyone was in France in exile. But Mick was flying all over the world with his new wife. Every once in a while he would check into the session and participate in the recording.
So, you know, it's a mixed bad. We hear it in different ways, but I agree with you. Excel on Main Street is. I think they didn't need two albums and it gets sloppy and mushy. If you had to pick a most underrated rolling stone song, what is it?
That's a good one. Wow, you've stumped me, Tyler. I'd say have you seen your mother baby standing in the shadow, which is pretty well known. But it's one of their top half dozen songs, and I don't think it's that famous. And maybe I'd say 19th nervous breakdown.
That was my other pick. Yeah. It was the follow-up to satisfaction. It kind of got lost in the fewer of the satisfaction made. And yet, I think it has the same spark, the same energy, the same bite, the same snap.
And it really showcases the stones in that whole rock and roll satisfaction garage band mode that they got. I think it's actually the very best song if I had to say. I'll be darned. Thanks.
Do your doctor would be another pick for underrated? Absolutely. Right. Yeah, two folks eat to be a seminal or iconic stone song. But it's again, I'd say one of their best.
Yes, and there are quite a good songs to what Hackney Diamonds, which took me by surprise. You know, 40 years had gone by. The stone's music wasn't as of the moment anymore. They hadn't had hits in a while. And yet, they put a fabulous blues album together when they were 79 years old.
And which I'd find absolutely remarkable. Now, as you point out, Charlie Watts was a jazz drummer at heart. Did he actually enjoy playing for the Rolling Stones? Was that just a money thing? Did he ever want out?
Never wanted out. I think he loved it. I'd brought out another side of Charlie. Charlie was a straight-laced guy. He didn't say much.
He didn't participate in the high drinks much. When the guys sat down and computed how many women they had slept with. Charlie was out of the conversation completely. He loved to dress and he dressed beautifully. Saval room.
Row clothing. He was a bespoke tailor man. Dress to a tea, raise a rabion stallions, had a co-lection of the finest cars that money could buy.
Never had a driver's license.
Never drove one of them. He was an unusual man. But I think he loved to bring out this other side of him and be the Rolling Stones drummer.
Of course, as you know, he was an excellent drummer.
Once we get past the early years when he was foundational,
“what exactly did Brian Jones add to the sound of the stones?”
And what changed once he passed away? Yeah, not much. He didn't bring much to the stones. As you know, Brian was, what's the leader of the Rolling Stones at one point? He founded the band.
He put it together. He named the band. And Brian was a musical savant. He could play anything.
When he was a young boy, he played piano and saxophone at an incredible level.
Of course, we're in the guitar, played every kind of instrument including the guitar without ever taking a lesson on the guitar. So he he brought a lot of intricate musical sounds to the early stones. But once he is ego got involved, once he lost his will to be the band leader, once he couldn't write music, he stopped contributing.
He really did. And there's there's one session in the book in 1968 when Brian shows up at a session, says to Mick, hey, what can I play?
“And Mick looks at him and says, yeah, Brian, what can you play?”
Because he just wasn't contributing at all to the band after that. Here's a sentence from you, quote, "the nascent British rock and roll movement was born in art colleges." unquote, please explain. Oh, well, art colleges.
We don't have them here, but they are a foundation of UK education. There is an 11 plus test that is given to every student when they're 11 years old. And it really determines whether or not they're going to go on to university or they're going to go to a vocational school. And in those early days, a vocational school met that you'd wind up working in a factory,
you'd wind up working at a clerk for the railroad, take on one of those jobs. But art schools came into being and this was a kind of repository for people who had talent, but didn't know what to do with it and weren't that academic. So art schools sprang up in almost every community in the UK. And we have people like Jimmy Page coming out of art school, Keith Richards, Jeff Beck,
Pete Townsend, all the great. John Lennon, right? John Lennon, absolutely went to Liverpool College of Art and it was an incubator for the arts, but also for rock and roll because people brought their instruments to school. And they would play in the classrooms.
And that's where they really formed bands and learned how to play with other musicians. So the art school movement really gave us that whole British rock and roll thing to this very day. I mean, Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine came out of it. Jarvis Cocker came out of art schools. They're still thriving in the UK.
And they're still giving us new innovative music.
“How is it that the Rolling Stones proved so stable?”
I mean, they're still with us, right? That's incredible. Led Zeppelin is not still with us. They could still use the name, but they don't. The Beatles, that's a long time ago.
Why so stable?
Stable is never a word that I would use with the Rolling Stones.
Maybe Enduring is the proper word, but stability, I don't know. Their foundation has been rocked time and time again. First with Brian's death, the drug busts. There are times when Mickey and Keith don't speak to each other. But let's talk about their endurance.
Their endurance begins with Mickey and Keith. The entire enterprise depends on their rapport. Mick being the webbidness peacock. The showman Keith being the consummate musician. And the great thing about it is they do not interfere with each other.
They have different tasks. Keith is so happy to let Mick be the frontman as long as he can play music. And so they endure because they love what they do. And they perform.
It's one thing that John and Paul never learned.
In 1966, the Beatles stopped performing. They stopped connecting with their audience. They stopped getting a response from their audience. And they soon came apart. They broke up in the studio.
Also John and Paul competed to be the top musician in that band. So no competition with the Stones. They really endured because Mick and Keith love being out there. And the minute they stop recording in the studio, Mick says, let's go on the road.
Because the bad boys know that if they are not performing, if they're not in the studio, then trouble arises. And so to keep them out of trouble, to keep them stable, I'll use your word title.
Mick keeps them working.
And I think that is the secret to the Rolling Stones longevity.
When Mick had that low-level recording deal in the early 1980s,
“I thought at the time, for sure, this is it, right?”
But it wasn't. No Keith thought it was it, too. It offended Keith. He couldn't believe that Mick number one would want to make his own album. But more than that, that Mick would want to go on the road
and perform and sing Rolling Stones songs. Keith was just not having it. And he was furious. And so as we know, he attacked Mick in the press. He began referring to Mick as her majesty or Brenda,
because Keith went by a bookstore in France, and so that there was a novel written by a woman named Brenda Jagger. So Mick became Brenda. To their credit, and this is another example of their stability, Mick turned a deaf ear to almost all of it.
Keith really slagged him off in the press. And it just, it didn't bother Mick. He forgave him for it. Also, when at the height of the ranker with each other, when Keith turned 40 and married Patty Addson,
who stands up for him as best man, Mick Jagger. And so it's that unshakable bond, which keeps that band on the road. Those guys are intertwined, their lives are intertwined, their mates for life, and they are the Rolling Stones. Mick once said, his favorite economist was Friedrich Hayek.
Do you know anything more about that? I do not, actually.
“But I think it's incredible, but Mick had favorite economists.”
We do know that Mick was a scholarship student to the London School of Economics. And that for two and a half years, he attended. And was, and got pretty good grades. I mean, he did fairly well.
The one thing that amazes me about Mick coming out of that London School of Economics is this. After 1967, when Andrew Lou Holden stopped managing the stones,
they have never had another manager.
They've had some money managers. But as far as managers go, Mick Jagger was the manager. He has served as this Rolling Stones manager, bringing all of his experience from the London School of Economics. Since 1967, and so he's negotiated all of the recording contracts,
they're publishing contracts, every tour that comes along. He negotiates with the promoters. Every date he oversees, he designs the stage, and he invests the stone's money. So remarkable that this guy who's a London School of Economics dropout.
Let's call them that. Has done so well for the rest of the band? A very general question, why do you think popular music today has less cultural influence than it used to? An easy answer.
I think there are no more musicians. The bands that come out today, they're performers. They let their producers push all the buttons in the studio, and they do sing, but they're much more interested in showmanship.
“And I think they've lost their edge in that respect,”
because they're not really thinking in terms of studio excellence, they're not mastering instruments. It's a different form of music. Look, I have learned to step aside and give them a wide birth. My daughter is of that age.
My parents step aside and give me a wide birth when I discovered the Beatles and Elvis Presley, and the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, of course. But I may not understand my daughter's music or the music of today, but it's their music, and I don't begrudge them that.
And why if guitar is falling out of favor? Yeah, because they're not musicians, they don't play. They don't even play keyboards. That's all done with electronic. You know, take a, and I'm going to get crucified for this,
but you take a performer like Taylor Swift. Beautiful voice in a wonderful performer. I'd love to teach her more than the four chords she knows on guitar. How much real talent do you think the Partridge family had? I work with them, right?
Yes, I did.
It was my first job at a college.
I met a man named Wes Farrell who was producing the Partridge family. Interesting. There was a lot of talent involved. Very little of it had to do with the Partridge family. You know, they, again, they were performers, and most of the musicians even most of the singers on those albums
were done by studio musicians. There were a pair of boy I'm pulling this out of my memory, because it was 55 years ago, but there were a pair of twin brothers who did most of the singing as the Partridge family on the albums. And my colleagues, Michael Pelin, Jebbie Creticus,
with whom I went on to manage Bruce Springsteen, wrote a lot of the songs for the Partridge family.
It was a collaborative effort,
but it was really a tell vision show. Paul McCartney and Ringo Star, they're still alive, of course. Assuming they would be relatively willing to be open, while they're still with us,
“what should we be asking them to better understand the history of the Beatles or their lives?”
Yeah, I think they ought to come clean with the relationships. The relationships were often fraught. We understand that Paul and John were intertwined as songwriters, but that only happened for a very short period of time. I think we should be asking Ringo a little bit about his background,
the fact that he never went to school,
that he was a very sickly young man who wasn't supposed to live beyond the age of 10 or 12 years old. Live most of his youth in a hospital, recovery room, stricken with polio, and other diseases, bronchitis. And I'd love to ask them about how they keep their youth,
they keep their sound, again, their longevity. I'd like to know the secret. I'd like to drink the same water. Keith Richards and Ringo Star have held up for McCartney too. They've all held up remarkably well.
Mick too, I mean, you know, I went to see the Rolling Stones last year at Sophie Stadium in California, a massive football stadium, and from the stage extended a proscenium that no exaggeration was two city blocks long. And Mick Jagger danced out on and back on that proscenium
for two and a half hours. And I had to jab my wife in the ribs and say, "You're looking at an 82-year-old man." I mean, I know how Mick does it. Mick from a very early age was an exercise freak.
As we know from my investigation in the book, Mick's father was the jackalain of the United Kingdom. He had a television show in exercise show like Richard Simmons,
and he always had a great person to show off the exercises.
Young Michael, he would say, "Might get down, show on 50 push-ups. "Might do 100 chins and Mick would jump to it and do it." That man still has a 27-inch waist at the age of 83. Keith on the other hand is a medical miracle. He is a person who we all know, Keith abused his body.
If he had nine wives like a cat, that cat has had nine wives many times over. The fact that he's still alive still making music still has his great sense of humor is beyond anyone's knowledge. Although it looks like arthritis of all things has caught up with him. Not drugs, not smoking, not alcohol.
It's his body. It's arthritis. We're all headed in that direction, Tyler. When you wrote your Beatles biography, you lived for a year and a half in Liverpool. Now putting aside the Beatles, but what do you learn about Liverpool? Fabulous city, unbelievable.
First of all, it has the best Chinese food I've ever tasted because it was the port where people came in from China. And that was where Chinese food really originated in the Western world. And it still has a big Chinese community there. But the town itself, the city itself, was remarkably beautiful.
“And I think that's because all the Chadwars who built those Koonar ships and whiteline ships”
that sailed out of Liverpool built all the buildings there. The interiors of the buildings, they're gorgeous. The wooden structures are beyond the libraries and the bars and the concert halls. We're all built by the people who built those ships with the remarkable woods that were still around at that time.
And so the city itself is gorgeous and the people there have a different sense than anybody ever met. They have a sense of humor. They're Irish, right? In a sense, most of them were Irish. Yeah, exactly right. And they called themselves scoutsers because they made a scouts stew.
They kept a pot on the stove simmering all week long. And whatever scraps came off one meal went into that pot. And at the end of the week, they ate that. It was called Scouts. And so they took the name Scoutsers. And Scoutsers have a really unique sense of humor.
So that year and a half, it was almost two years that I spent commuting between New York City and Liverpool, gave me a remarkable insight into the people and a real education about the history of that unbelievable city. Let's say we put you in charge of social welfare.
“Was it good that the Beatles split up when they did?”
I mean, for the world, not for them.
Perhaps it was. I always felt that a lot of people
run out of steam after three or four albums. If you look at
You know, Bob Dylan and Neil Young and Van Morrison and the who.
And maybe even the Rolling Stones. After a couple years after
maybe four or five albums, they start trying to duplicate themselves.
“And I think the Beatles gave us everything they had and then they stopped.”
And so we have 230 songs, perhaps the most remarkable song book aside from Hammerstein and Rogers that we know of from the 1900s on. The Beatles song book I would put up against anybody's. And I think maybe if they had stayed together, they might have lost some of that that spark.
Think how many more George songs we got from this list? That was all songs for that matter. Absolutely right. But George, I mean, that, you know, toward the end, George really came into his own. And even after in his solo career, we got some of some real gems out of George.
“I think it took him a little longer. And more than that,”
I think he learned how to step out of the Lenin McCartney shadow and stand on his own two feet. What did you learn jamming with Paul McCartney? Ah, boy, that was an experience. There what year is this? Just for 1997. The New York Times magazine sent me to the UK right after Paul was knighted to talk to him about that and has given me a few of his memories of John Lenin.
We were in Hastings in his house. It was a strange experience because I expected Paul McCartney to have an expansive house. And it was really this tiny two-and-a-half three-bedroom cottage. And I said, "Do you actually live here?" And he said, "I do." And I said, "But you have five children. You have three bedrooms." And he said to Linda said
“that we all need to live on top of one another. And so that's what we do. And we are a family year.”
As I was leaving, he said, "Hey, you know, you're a musician, right? Want to see the studio?" And of course, you know, that was like catnip to a guy like me. So we went downstairs and he showed me it was a room no longer than say my dining room in New York City. But there were all the instruments from Abbey Road that he had as well as Bill Black's base. Bill Black was Elvis Presley's base player. Paul had bought all these instruments and
maintained them. And he said sit down. I said sit down. He said Paul sat down at the piano. And he nodded me into a guitar. And what did we play? We played a few Beatles songs. So it was frightening. I mean, you know, I played with some great musicians before. But when you see Paul Macartney nodding you into a song. It's a different fillet all together. Believe me. So he was good. Was he good? Oh, yes. I would say he was good. And then I let him sing
maybe I'm amazed by himself on the piano. And that was freakish having a private audience in a
tiny room. Never experienced anything like that before. Why didn't you like Led Zeppelin at first?
I knew nothing about Led Zeppelin. I was in the midst of writing a biography of Ronald Reagan. And in fact, I had just begun the research on that book. And my editor called and said, listen, I need to sign you up for another book. And I said, I'm up to my eyeballs in this. I'm not even thinking of the future. And he said, no, I've always wanted to do this book. We're going to sign you up now. We're going to give you a contract. You're the only guy who can write it. And I said,
who is it? And he said, it's Led Zeppelin. And Tyler, I have to admit, my heart sunk. I knew nothing about the band. How can you know nothing about Led Zeppelin? Given all the other things you know, that's weird. It's like, if I said, I know nothing about Adam Smith or Cains. Right. I had been on the road with Bruce Springsteen and Elton John, while Led Zeppelin came into the forefront. And our paths
never crossed. I never listened to their music. I knew that they were a heavy metal band. I wasn't
interested in heavy metal. I have 20,000 vinyl albums in my collection. I didn't have a single Led Zeppelin album. And when my editor asked me about it, I might have been able to mention that I knew whole lot of love. I might have known stairway to heaven. But I couldn't name another Led Zeppelin song. And so I found myself saying to him to my editor, of course, I'm your guy. And I was really happy that I did it. And I'm convinced now that I was the right person to do it because I'm a musician. I love
music. I was an empty vessel when it came to Led Zeppelin. And I just let them fill me up. I really studied it as if I were taking a foreign language. And it never studied that language before. And it gave me an opportunity to spend a good year and a half before I started writing, listening to their music,
Trying to understand it, asking other music, great musicians, explain John Bo...
to me, explain Jimmy Page's guitar to me. I asked Jeff Beck to explain it to me. Jeff Beck was
“Jimmy's boyhood neighbor. And so I came at Led Zeppelin from a Neophytes angle. And I thought,”
okay, I can be incredibly objective here when it comes to writing about the span. I was happy that I have the experience to do it. It taught me a lot. And I fell in love with their entire
catalog of music that I had never appreciated before. Starweight heaven, overrated or underrated.
Completely rated as it should be. Although I promised my wife I would never play that song again in the house. That I had to do that. However, Listen, we all made fun of that song at some point in our lives. But listening to it, I find it remarkable. The same way that I can hear Bob Dylan sing one of the early songs. A song that we've heard a hundred times, bone in the wind. And it
“can still bring tears to my eyes when I peel back the layers of the voice, of the instrumentation,”
of the words. I can do the same thing with stairway to heaven. And it really appreciates it for
what it is. What can you tell us about Bruce Springsteen's work ethic? Wow, never so anybody who
had a work ethic like Bruce Springsteen. I was really I got a chance to see it up close. When we were kids, when we were 21, Bruce came into our office and auditioned with his guitar. And we quit our jobs, Mike Appell and Jimmy Cretis, kids tonight. We quit our jobs the next day. And so Bruce, because he lived in Asbury Park, and needed to be in New York to record and to see John Hammond, the great Columbia Records producer, Bruce stayed in my apartment. And he wrote a lot of
those songs in my apartment. And I watched him work and put a band together like never before. Bruce is a master when it comes to rehearsals and making demands on the other musicians. There are a lot of demands. Time has to be right. Sound has to be right. It has to be everything that's in his head. And he knows exactly what he wants and he knows how to get it out of people. And yet, he is an incredibly nice person. I mean, just a gentleman, not that easy to work with,
when it comes to music, because he is so demanding, but really a master of knowing how to work with people and how to get what he hears in his head or into a record and onto a stage. My hat goes off to Bruce. We've known each other for 45 years and he still amazes me. When Barack Obama was elected president of the state, United States, he flew back to Chicago that night to make an acceptance speech and the helicopter landed in a field near the stage. And Obama hopped out,
Michelle hopped out. The next person who hopped out of that was Bruce Springsteen. And when I saw that I burst into tears, we had come a long way. Twenty-one years old, rough kids, unformed, unlect, maybe Bruce, a less unlect than me. And here he was with the next president of the United States,
the first black man to accept that honor. It was beyond my imagination.
I'm amazed how many of his live versions of songs sound as good and as tight as the studio versions. How does he manage that? He's a master performer. I mean, he has a beautiful voice. He works harder than anybody I know. And how does he stay on stage for three and a half hours and not lose his energy and not lose his voice? You know, it's another example, a different example of what Keith Richard does. Keith learned how to live through drugs and alcohol. Bruce learned how to extend his life
battering his body on the stage for three and a voice on the stage for three and a half hours. You know, you can't explain these things, Tyler, but we have to know that when one or two of these people come along, it really does as well to sit back and appreciate them because you won't see people like that very often. What does Bruce maximize? It's not income, is it? Oh, no, it's not income. Although
“as income is astronomical, I think he maximizes his open heart. He has a huge heart. He loves his”
fans. He is a kind human being. More times than enough I have seen him after a gig, see kids in the parking lot, not knowing how to get home and so Bruce in his truck, which he drove to the give himself
To a stadium, stops and takes those kids home, picks them up and takes them h...
he would bring the doorbell and walk them into the house and introduce himself to the parents. I've told Bruce this recently, after all these years, we're both now the same age, we're in our 70s. At first time I ever said to him, Bruce, you're my hero. I look up to you. You've speak for all of us. You've put yourself on the line. You're a magnificent performer and you recline human being and as far as I go in my book that says it all. What's his greatest musical
achievement? I guess it would have to be the born to run album. For me, there are a couple masterpieces on that album. She's the one, right, thunder out, all of it really, the sequencing. I would say thunder wrote it's his masterpiece. I've seen him do it with a band and a hot wire it, but I've also seen him sit down at the piano and play it where he rings every last ounce of romance out of that song. And who writes a song that starts out, you know, the screen door
slams? I think, you know, it's just it's beyond me. I don't know where that comes from. You can't
“you have to bottle it. Why didn't Bob Dylan show up for his Nobel Prize? Because Bob Dylan doesn't”
do anything anyone expects of him. I mean, he's never shown up for any prize. What does he do all day?
It's me. I don't know. But here's myographer. Well, you know, Bob reads a lot. He studies a lot. He still studies Talmud. I was a biographer for 40 years ago. He sat on my steps in the village, chatting with me. And so I kind of got a sense of who he was then, but I wish I were his biographer. Again, I mean, I would, I'd love to have another crack at that, but I don't know what he does all day. I don't know what I do all day. You write all day. Are you assemble materials, right?
I do, but then the day goes by and I mean, it goes by in a flash. And, you know, I wonder how that all that work that I spent that day contributes to maybe a couple sentences in a bucket. It's magical. You have this unusual habit that you don't start writing until you've assembled all your materials. Is that true? That is true. And then I write in sequence. I start at the beginning.
And I work to the end of the story. Also, perhaps unusual is that I don't edit. I've never
edited a word of my book. I don't rewrite. I massage each sentence as I go. And sometimes that works to my benefit. And sometimes it doesn't. You might have heard that when I delivered the manuscript to the Beatles, I put it on my publisher's desk. It was 2800 pages. And he looked at it. And he said, Bob, you know, this is unpublished. And he was right. He said, so we're going to do an edit and we'll get back to you. And they called me about three months later and said, okay,
the first edits in, we cut 1100 pages out of the manuscript. And I read it and I said, what did you cut? I mean, it read beautifully. He said, now we're going to make you cry. We're going to cut another 600 pages out of the book. And they did make me cry. I gave up about 1500 pages of
Beatles stories that you'll never hear again that were really fantastic stories. But they made the
book much more streamlined. They made it a sleek 964 page book. And we didn't rewrite a word.
“We just cut. Can you talk them into putting out a director's cut? All those stories?”
We can search it through, you know, using AI. Oh, give me the three best Paul McCartney stories. And then someone just reads that on the Kindle. Won't that work? Tyler, I wish we could. I'm going to tell you why that could never happen. And it's the same nightmare that I have whenever I have a nightmare. I moved out of a house in Connecticut after I was done with the Beatles. It had taken every last ounce out of me. I was broke. A marriage had fallen
apart. I was 50 years old and really wondering where I was headed after that. I had spent eight and half years on a three year book. And I was wiped out. And so my wife and I moved out of that house. And before we moved, I took all my research and all those interviews. And we took them to the dump. To the dump. Yes, we did. It's the most foolish mistake I've ever made. I did it out of exhaustion and temper and not thinking. And all those stories I'm afraid to say are gone.
And you and your viewers can berate me for it over and over again. How good a cook was
“Julia Child. That's another of your biographies. Like actually, how good was she?”
She was great. She was a wonderful person. But here's the little secret. Julia was a great cooking teacher. But not a very good cook. There were people who left her house in John Updite told me this. He was a frequent guest with her Kirby Comer who was a wonderful food writer told me this as well. They believed Julia's house. They'd go to a little park around the corner and they'd get physically ill that gets sick. Julia used too much butter, too much cream.
She really had no reins on her when it came to using things like that.
teach cooking. She had great recipes and she changed the way that Americans not only cook but a way that they eat as well. She changed the way supermarkets position food. She gave us the wine industry. This was all because Julia went on TV and she demanded it. I was extremely lucky to be able to travel with her in Italy for a couple months. That was Sicily, right? It was. What was she like as a traveling companion? Fabulous. We ate three meals a day together and otherwise we talked.
“And at those meals, I always said to Julia, you're 63. You're in great shape. How do you do it?”
And she went, oh, dear, I'll show you how I do it. And she took a knife and she divided a line right down the center of every meal that came. And then I watched this Julia eight one half. And when she
was done with one half, she ate the second half as well. She was funny. She was intuitive.
She loved people and loved watching them cook. I went into restaurant after restaurant with her in Italy. Where she marched into the kitchen and she demanded to know how many women were cooking in the kitchen. She wanted to make sure that that women were being integrated more and more into the kitchen. And she also had a wide palette. When we got back to the United States, she said to me, "We've eaten such good food. I want to take you to one of my favorite restaurants."
“And she did. She took me to McDonald's and we had a big Mac. So, you know, Julia could go”
high as she could go, though. She was quite a character. And when she was young, she lived in
Kunming and also Chongqing and China. Could she cook good Chinese food? Never cook Chinese food.
She had enormous respect for it. And it was one of her favorite cuisines. But I don't think I ever saw a walk in Julia's kitchen. She stayed away from that and she lent others who knew how to do it better than her cook Chinese food. Now, one of my favorite books of yours is your New York Nix book. I bet the team in its glory years. Yes. Another thing I had no interest in, no knowledge of. Somebody asked me to write a book on the 1969 Nix. And I was kind of poor
young and up and coming right over at the time. And I said, "Sure, I'll do it. I didn't know anything about basketball. But I got to talk to all these wonderful individuals who played for the Nix and not only them, but all the great players. I saw it out of all the great players who played opposite them, Oscar Robertson and Jerry West, who explained the game to me and explained how they interacted with the wonderful Nix. You know, Bill Bradley and Walt Fraser and Dave DeBusher,
a team like we've never seen in New York since those days. And so I learned all I could
about basketball. And I became a lifelong Nix fan. And it's one of the great things about writing, not knowing Led Zeppelin, not knowing basketball, never voting for Ronald Reagan and yet becoming his biographer. Very fortunate that I may not have gone to grad school. But this is my, I've done a PhD in heavy metal. I've done a PhD in Republican politics and basketball. What a wonderful experience. I saw some of those Nix games at the time. Now, how did Dave DeBusher end up as coach of the Detroit
Pistons at age 24? That sounds so impossible today. He not only played for them. You know, he would come off the bench and he would sit back down on the bench and coach them as well. They didn't have any money. They couldn't afford a new coach. And Dave was a gregarious guy. You know, he sometimes didn't show up because he and his father loved to drink beer and they couldn't get it together to get to the game for the next day. But when it came time to finding who had a rapport
with the rest of the players and could motivate them, this 24-year-old kid could. And so Dave wore both masks as a player and a coach. I don't think we've seen that happen since. And why did those Nix jails sell well as a team? They were smart. And they were willing to play for Red Holtzman who played a smart game. He had one rule and that was see the open man.
“That's what I loved about watching that team. They were selfless. They looked for the open man.”
They passed the ball. Today it's all give me the ball. Give me the ball. They want to get the ball. They want to score their points. They want to look at the stats. I have seen players today sit on the bench and the first thing they do is they want to see the stats. They want to see how many points they scored. None of the Nix and those days cared about that. They cared about
The team and winning the game and sitting in the open man.
in a second term toward the end? I don't think see an aisle. I think he was wearing down. His
“battery was wearing down. He was tired. He was too old to be president. I think that second term.”
He napped repeatedly during the days. He didn't sneak away to do it. He did it in public. He would fall asleep at a cabinet meeting. But I don't think the scenario had happened until he had that accident right after he was out of office. When July 4th, he fell off a horse. He hit his head. Something went wrong and it was downhill from then on. Nancy knew it. There's a wonderful scene at the end of my book where she calls people together and she admits that
Ronnie is not thinking clearly and they decide what to do and then he sits down and writes that
heart rendering speech about his lack of memory and an incredible moment, especially for a biographer
to get that close to somebody. And the very early Reagan, you know, the Hollywood years was he
“actually a communist or just a leftist. He was just a leftist. I think he would have been offended”
to have been called a communist and there was this. He was still a patriot. But of course he was a Democrat where he grew up in his hometown. There was a democratic headquarters who ran it. His father did and Ronnie came in to help them all the time. Ronnie and his brother. They were some of the only Democrats in that small city. It wasn't until after World War II that he went to the other side of the aisle. And what shifts him? Money. And unusual story. But when Reagan was
in World War II, he put together promotional films for the army. But he had read somewhere that the soldiers in World War I after the war were excused from paying taxes while they were soldiers. So Reagan just with held his taxes to rain World War II because he was sure he didn't have to pay them. Didn't happen that way. And then he started being done for money by the IRS and it irked him. And he became obsessed with economics, obsessed with not paying money to the
government, not paying a lot of taxes. And that ushered him right into the Republican party. And you know, in the later years, do you think there's still like a real Ronald Reagan under the surface? Or is he as a human being just becoming the TV personality? Oh, I think there was a lot of Ronald Reagan under that surface. He really cared about the laws that were being enacted and the relationships of lawmakers and the relationships that he had with
foreign affairs people. And so I think he was still pretty riled up. Yes, he was a personality as a president. He knew how to turn on the charm. He could look in the camera and really sparkle like an
“actor would sparkle. And that's what made him connect with his audience. But I think there was still”
a lot of fire and brimstone under there. And as a person, what do you think that real Ronald Reagan was like? Again, in the later years? I think it was a nice grandfatherly old man. Yeah, I think he lost some of that snap, lost some of the fire and brimstone in the just in the last few years. We weren't had to appreciate his life a little more and his wife a little more, retired his home in Santa Barbara in Montesito and enjoyed writing horses. So yeah, I think he was kind of grandfatherly.
But although at the same time, never learned how to be a father. He was a very remote father.
What is Robert Carrer like? Robert Carrer is the guy I look up to whenever it comes to whenever it comes to writing biographies. That man has a way with words that has often intrigued me and humbled me. I was at a party one time. And a guy came over and said, "I hear you're writing a book about Ronald Reagan. There were about 150 people in this party." And I said, "I am he said, can you talk to me about it a little?" And we sat down on the couch.
And I looked and I saw over the man's shoulder, my wife was going, "It's Robert Carrer. It's Robert Carrer." At which point my semi-intelligent dialogue became bedab, bedab, bedab, bedab. But he was an incredibly thoughtful man. He sent me a number of notes from time to time. He is the biographer's biographer. I don't know how he does it. A great reason. Why doesn't he do more in public? Is it a Bob Dylan kind of thing? Or just he's too busy writing and
researching. I think he's too busy writing. This guy writes and researchers around the clock. I have learned not to do that. But from what I've gathered, he's up to his eyeballs and work day and night. And he lives to do that. That's his process. Does he understand how much if a cult surrounds him?
Since he's not out in public much?
on the street. I mean, he's like a rock star. And he gets a lot of letters from people, especially people who want to know if he's ever going to finish that last installment of the Johnson biography. I expect we're going to see that any day. That would be great. Why is film and Louise an interesting movie? We're getting into my wife's profession here. My wife Becky Aceman is the real writer in the family. She spent 20 years as a reporter. She is a brilliant writer. And she felt
that film and Louise was really one of the very first feminist movies. And it's an outlaw movie.
And there was women live as men in the movies have always lived as outlaws. And why not? Why
“shouldn't they? Why shouldn't they talk the same way men talk and behave the same way men talk?”
Plus they looked out for themselves. And when they were reduced, they fought back. And so it's a controversial movie. I mean, people were still wondering, was it film or was it Louise who shot the man? We don't know. And should they have ended the movie the way they ended the movie? By we assume committing suicide. It's an intriguing film. It has like a soprano's ending. The same way the soprano's ended. Did the movie really end that way? We think it did. Could it be a fantasy?
Perhaps we don't know. It's a movie that makes you think. And it's a movie that has a great political undertone. I think movies need to get that edge again today. I've seen that film too many times, but every time I do I learn something from it. How does that matter being married to another
writer? Such a treat. We write our books back to back in the same room. So I can always shout out Becky,
sitting in them for a vicious. And I mean, she loads the fact that I would interrupt her writing, but we do that. And we edit each other almost every night. We look over our work. We talk about it. It's the table conversation. We kind of get to live our books. And to have somebody else who does the same thing and understands what I do and what I go through, it makes for a fabulous marriage. And how is it that you write so much? She writes a lot too. The number of excellent pages you've
written is really quite high. I write so much because I can't believe that there's anybody in the world who would have gotten me to write. So I'm going to keep doing it until they tell me I can't. I learned very early on that writing was not a bloody process. Becky and I both believe,
“don't believe in writer's block. If you can't come up with what you need to come up with,”
take a walk, walk away and come back to it, think about it a little and you'll come to it. But I love the whole process of writing. To me, it's like doing a crossword puzzle. You have to think about it and look at all angles on it until you're sure what you're writing is the right thing. And it's like solving a puzzle every day. I feel great while I write and I feel great after I write. And the fact that by subconscious works at night and allows
me to wake up in the morning and solve certain things is just, it's a fabulous feeling. I love doing it. Before the last question, just another plug for your new book, the Rolling Stones, the biography of which I read every page. Final question. What will you do next? I'm working on a project already. I'll tell you what it's about. It's about John Wetton's second act. It is from the breakup of the Beatles to his tragic death. Covers about 10 years of his life.
And I think we're going to get a picture of John that we've never gotten before. Fortunately,
I'm going to be one of the first people allowed into the John Lenin archives. So his scrapbook through there, his journals are there, his diaries are there. No one's ever seen them. And I hope I'll be able to bring this remarkable mantle life. I think both mind games and rock and roll are
“quite underrated albums. You're in a minority tower. That's why they're underrated.”
I say, all right, we'll have to have that out on a different show. But we'll see about that. I'm going to learn to love them. I am going to come to understand right-guide learned about Red Zeppelin. Why this person made those albums of what makes them great? Bob Spitz, thank you very much. This has been a pleasure. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts,
Spotify or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TilerCowin and the show is @CowinConvows. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.
