Muse

We're going to task off today and prep for them. John, don't overpromise this week. Sell them on the structure. You can talk about it with confidence. Keep it simple. A little something like this, John. Hey, let me walk you through our Donnelly nut spacing and crack system rim riding grip configuration. Using a field of half-sea sprats and brass fitted nickel slits, our bracketed caps and splay flexed brace columns, vent dampers to dampening hatch steps of one-half meter from the damper crown to the spur of plinth. How? Well, we bolster 12 husk nuts to each girdle jerry, while flex tandems press a task apparatus of 10 vertically composited patch hamplers. Then pin flam-fastened pan traps at both maiden apexes of the gym joints. Ooh, something like that, Lakeman. T-B-T-L. In this brochure, it says this tour is crunk. What does that mean?

Guess what day it is. Guess what day it is. It's Friday. Friday. Gotta get down on Friday. Everybody's looking forward to the weekend.

Do you eat chocolate? Yes. Do you drink soda? Yes. Do you eat fatty foods?

Yes. And a lot of people ask me, are you eating cookies late at night? And I say, of course I am.

Holy forking shirt balls. We're in the good place.

Well, all right. Hello, good morning, and welcome to a Friday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live.

Oh, yeah.

My name is Luke Burbank. I'm your host.

I like turtles.

Coming to you from the Nest Broadcast Center high in the sky above Portland, Oregon on a, I don't call it a decent Friday weather-wise. Some high clouds, but sun is also out. It's pretty warm here in the Broadcast Center. Hopefully that will warm my voice up a little bit. Apologies. If I sound kind of froggy, my allergies are really kicking in today.

Your voice is like a combination of Fergie and Jesus.

and uh i was also up watching goodfellas until oh about two in the morning hey where's the freaking gabagoo last night and then following that up with about i'd say a solid 50 minutes of lying on my couch in the dark playing the music of digital underground on my phone and rapping along to all of the album sex packets to most of This Is An EP release and various other offerings by that seminal funk and hip-hop group, of course, because of the very sad news. That's the saddest thing I've ever heard. That Gregory Jacobs, a.k.a. Shock G, a.k.a. Humpty Hump, passed away yesterday. We'll talk about the impact that he had on my life musically coming up here on episode 3,408 in a collector's series let the fun begin i also need to offer a public apology to every mcdonald's employee who i've besmirched on this show when i've said that they were that they were lying about the shake machine which also makes the ice cream at mcdonald's of course it's the taylor c602 digital ice cream machine when i said that uh they were lying that those machines were broken All the flavors of ice cream in the world wouldn't take the place of friends. I want to say sorry to those people because I just read a 17-page article in Wired magazine about what is actually going on with these machines. And, well, I'm sorry, McDonald's employees.

She's the queen, and we're the sorry people.

Also, we will continue our journey to try to figure out the best moment in TBTL history.

This is the best moment of TBTL.

In fact, we'll even feature that tape today You just heard Jen Flash Andrews We will play you two clips of tape And we will continue the TVTL drops of stupider The Deuce competition Plus, music for your weekend Spoiler alert, I'm going to suggest A song by Digital Underground All that, plus, of course, we will get an update On the longest-running co-bro of the show He may be best known for his depictions of the tall ships He's trying out a new nickname on this Friday. Apparently we're supposed to call him Lord Farksmore. He is Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now from the Roosevelt neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. Good morning, my friend. Hey, Luke. So you finally watched Goodfellas. Did you figure out...

Where is the gabagoo?

I think that's in Goodfellas 2.

Oh, no. Really? Frig.

I want to. I really want to talk about Shock G from Digital Underground, but I also really want to talk about Goodfellas with you. I, at about 11 o'clock last night, decided that it was the perfect time for me to spend $3.99 to rent the movie Goodfellas and start watching it. You know, well-known short film, breezy film, Goodfellas. Start that at 11 o'clock at night.

How long is Goodfellas a pretty – I got to say, that movie moves along. I think I was saying to you yesterday that I like the pacing of that movie, but I forgot. Does it have a long run time?

I want to say it's like two – my memory is it's around two hours, 40 minutes maybe.

Yeah, that's pretty long. Yeah. It moves though, right? It doesn't feel like a Godfather, which is a much slower kind of movie.

I got to tell you, man, that movie is so good. Yeah. It is so good. Like, I, you know, I wasn't quite sure if it was going to hold up to all the hype. I've definitely never watched it all the way through before. That was something I realized last night. The whole sort of third act where Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco are like drug paranoid with the helicopters and they're driving around trying to dump the guns. And then, you know, all of that stuff I had absolutely no prior experience with. But it all, like, totally works as a film. I mean, it's just so good. It's also Junior Varsity Sopranos, or I should say it's the proving ground for every actor you will later see in The Sopranos.

Yeah, right. I don't know a lot of those people's names, but there's just, like, a type of movie where you're like, oh, yes, oh, that's that guy.

Oh, well, Pauly Walnuts is in it. Oh, he is. At the very beginning, a young, more buff, whatever that actor, Dominic Chancey, maybe? No, I think that might be the guy who plays Junior. Anyway, Pauly Walnuts is in it. Big Pussy is in it for a minute. He's the guy who's helping Ray Liotta with this rack of fur coats that are going into the kitchen of a restaurant. That's Big Pussy is the other guy. Christopher Imperioli, or Michael Imperioli, a.k.a. Christopher from The Sopranos, is the guy who gets shot in the foot by a demented Joe Pesci.

Yeah, he's the kid. He's the, like, he's surfing him drinks. I forgot.

Samuel L. Jackson is in it for a hot second. He stacks who doesn't remember to dump the van after they pull the Lufthansa heist. There's one other one that's just, like, the funniest. I made a note last night in my mind to remember it, and now I will not remember it. But there is, like, somebody from The Sopranos. I mean, of course, Lorraine Bracco, who's Melfi in The Sopranos, is huge in this. But there's somebody else whose face literally shows up for one frame. And I'm like, oh, that's that guy from The Sopranos And I thought it would impress you that I remembered And then, of course, I decided to wrap along to Digital Underground for 45 minutes And clear my brain of most of the Goodfellas-related memories

The weird thing for me is my takeaway from that movie Is it must be nice to turn state's evidence It just seems so relaxing After that, like, huge climax Like you say, like, they're all coked out And the copter is following him He's all sweaty and pale, and his eyes are ringed with red lights. And then he's just like, oh, let's just get a – you know what? I'll just testify against my friends and just get a nice house in the suburbs. Like, all right, man, I feel you. I feel you. You've done enough.

I'm embarrassed to – I don't know why this – of all the things that I've admitted to you and the listeners, I don't know why this embarrasses me, but I'm going to tell you something that I also did last night. It's going to sound like I was out of my mind drunk, and I really wasn't. I promise you. I'd had a couple glasses of wine. I was just in a weird mood. I then started watching the movie My Blue Heaven.

Yes!

It was like a handoff.

You could not have made me happier. There is not a sentence that could have made me happier.

It was a handoff because the end of Goodfellas is the beginning of My Blue Heaven.

I think about that sometimes. I've never had this conversation, but I've had this vague feeling because I enjoyed My Blue Heaven before I even really understood that movie. I can't remember what year it came out, but, like, you could make an argument that that is the sequel with just different casts.

Well, this – okay, I'm glad that – I'm glad you enjoyed that revelation, but you're not going to enjoy – hey, town jubilation committee, I got something that's going to make you a lot less jubilant.

Oh, it doesn't hold up, right?

Well, I only got about 20 minutes into My Blue Heaven because coming off of the extremely gritty realism, or as much as a Martin Scorsese film has realism to it, coming off the realism of that gangster flick and the actors, I think, doing a great job, Steve Martin as a mafioso, it just rang so – Like the reason why that's not maybe the greatest transition is you're going from absolute the verisimilitude of.

the gangster life to steve martin doing a a over here and a tab your name is your name is terry and my name is tom like it felt so corny to me it i mean i'll bet you that movie does not hold up

even if you're not watching it right after that i mean i have fond memories of my blue heaven because i think i saw it when it was relatively new and i don't know when you're a kid you're just written by nora efron oh it is and it's steve martin i love steve martin and it's um you know What's his name to you? Honey, I Shrunk the Robster. Rick Moranis. Rick Moranis.

Oh, he is hilarious, dog.

He is hilarious, dog. But, like, I'm sure if I were to sit down and watch that now, I would only enjoy it if I had just smoked a bowl and I was feeling, like, nostalgic or something. Sure. But, like, I don't think that that movie holds up. I am gobsmacked right now to see that those movies came out in the same year. Wow.

Goodfellas and My Blue Heaven came out in the same year. And you don't believe in a god?

No, I do now. I do now.

Hey, where's the gadagool that doesn't work? Now, I will say this. If I had seen My Blue Heaven at age – well, any age before I had seen Goodfellas, I bet you I would have been much more down for it because I love Nora Ephron. And to be honest with you, the beginning of the film is very promising, just like literally the title, like the opening credits. It's these great kind of very – I don't know how to describe them, but they're sort of screenshots of idealized but also very soulless American life as the song My Blue Heaven is playing. So it's like a really great – and they're kind of oversaturated, these photos. And it just immediately sets this tone of like, oh, this is what we're told is the good life, but there's really nothing there. And again, the Nora Ephron factor. I love Steve Martin. I love Rick Moranis like I was ready for it I just think my brain was in goodfellas mode and it was too hard to kind of throw the car in reverse for Steve Martin comically playing a mafia guy in witness protection but then again I was able to throw the car back into fifth gear and enjoy some digital underground music before I fell asleep

I will move on because you want to talk about shock G. But I will say that a contender for show title today is Honey, I Shrunk the Capo. Yeah, it is. It is really sad about shock. You might say I'm shocked not to be. I was really. But he's he was young. He was 58.

What happened? He was 57, I believe. And it was just like, yeah, I was, you know, when somebody when, you know, an actor or musician, when a performer passes away it the you know for some people for people that for whom or with whom the the material really connected people really connected to the person's work will be hit very hard by it and for other people it'll just be like oh that's too bad that person died and i think oftentimes i'm in you know group number two like somebody famous passes away and i think oh that's too bad and i may even say to myself well they you know they'd made some good music we'll always have their music or whatever i i can't explain why but it really rocked my world yesterday that shock g aka humpty hump has died and i think it's just because of the place that digital underground's music kind of holds in in in my life and in my like actual sort of just musical evolution if you will or the kind of music that i like to listen to when i was a lot of people everybody talks about the humpty dance but i think the most like maybe like the platonic ideal of a Digital Underground song is Do What You Like. The guy Gregory Jacobs, a.k.a. Shock G, I've been doing a lot of reading about him, and he said that basically, like, he wanted this song to just feel like the house parties they used to have at his house growing up. His parents were, like, the people in the neighborhood who would just, like, have a rolling, like, all-day Saturday party, and just everybody would come show up. And so he says he wanted to sort of musically create that. And, I mean, this song is 8 minutes and 53 seconds long. So I was in 8th grade. I had been kicked out of Jesus Creek, and I was at Washington Middle School. And I was going from an overwhelmingly white student body to a much more diverse and varied group of kids I was going to school with, which was a real change of scenery for me. And I was in this music class, and the teacher, Mr. Ito, never came to class. We would later learn that he had been battling a pretty serious illness. I believe he was, in fact, HIV positive at the time, and it was not public knowledge. And so he just kind of didn't come to class ever, and this was like a double class. It was like a two-hour choir class. So all that would happen in this class was, I don't know, 50 kids would show up in the choir room at Washington Middle School. Somebody would bring in a tape and we would just vibe to music for two hours and somebody brought in sex packets and it changed.

my life i'm telling you so like the thing about gregory jacobs thing about shock g was he was really really into funk like that was his whole thing like he loved george clinton and in fact most of the parliament funkadelic music that i ultimately became a fan of atomic dog and flashlight and stuff like that it was all stuff that i heard sampled by digital underground Like, I didn't know why I liked this music so much until I started, like, you know, hearing, like, Parliament and Funkadelic and being like, oh, my God, that's what that is? That's where that's from? Like, why did this sonically speak to me so much? It's because this dude, Shock G, was, like, a real kind of musical. He was a very musical person. Like, he was a really good piano player. Let me see if I can jump forward to this part of this song. he was also uh oh i want to play this for you too too andrew the kind of like to me like the great one of the greatest things about this band was they're like very very funny you know but not just like a joke band it's not a joke andrew the tc tugger is not you don't wear it as a joke you don't listen to digital underground as a joke so like everybody's like oh humpty humpy i like the groucho marks knows or whatever and you know it was like a big silly thing there was a lot of comedy to the band but also there was a ton of musicality um but uh i don't know if you're how familiar you are with this song do what you like but there's this great moment where they basically put a fade in for radio stations because the song is so long they know it's never going to get radio play and so anyway this is like always cracked up when i was a kid

Talk how you like, drink what you like, grab who you like, feel what you like, eat what you like, scratch where you like, it's if you like, daddy can I go outside, go where you like, kid.

A brief announcement to all radio DJs. If this record is currently being played at your station, we will provide the following time for you to announce your station identification. We'd also like to add that we've now reached the three and a half minute mark of the song. Radio stations may begin your fade here. For those that would like help, we will start your fade for you. now if this record is being played at a club disco lounge house basement or block party car stereo stoop or at any other social gathering we will now allow the beat to continue and proceed to give you more of what you like this message has been brought to you by the makers of the way

So basically in my kind of deep diving on Digital Underground today, I didn't realize this, but basically they had this, obviously this huge hit with the Humpty Dance. And then after that, the label Tommy Boy just kept saying, you need to put out another Humpty Dance. You need to do another. And they didn't really want to do that because they were into, you know, kind of making their music and doing this kind of funk jazz thing that wasn't that popular on the radio. But check this out This is actually Shock G playing piano As Piano Man He was like a legit Really good piano player That's some Atomic Dog for you

that's a sonic yeah right

Prince Paul right This is Humpty Hump playing piano. Anyway, I just love that part. I just love this band so much. I sort of said this earlier, but I don't know. if somebody didn't bring this tape into that music class at Washington middle school, I don't know if I would listen to the same kind of music or appreciate the same kind of music as like a 44 year old dude, because you know, I,

I, I, I, I, I, I, I,

wasn't a hip-hop head at all then i wouldn't even go so far as to say i'm a hip-hop head now but it

I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I,

certainly turned me on to a style of music that has become really important to me and that i don't

I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I,

know i mean if you know if it would have been nwa at that moment or if it would have been you know public enemy i don't know if i would have connected with it the same way i connected

with this music yeah i um spent my entire life just thinking of you know digital underground as the Humpty Dance. That's all I kind of really knew them for, too, until I met you, and you were, I don't think, playing it for me, but just kind of telling me kind of that, oh, no, no, the background of this band is way, way more interesting than just that song and then the whole Tupac connection and how Tupac was, you know, his first verse was on that EP. This is an EP release, and you were telling me all of that stuff, and then I remember the first time, I think you played maybe, like, the Way We Swing when we were driving across we were in one of our road trips I want to say our RV and yeah it was because I remember I had a fidget spinner and I'm just like spinning this fidget spinner like have you ever actually heard a digital underground I was like not really and so we were listening to that song it was amazing and then I have just one specific memory I mean nowhere near what you're talking about but it's funny because I have I spent one afternoon where I listened to both this is an ep release and um sex packets kind of in a row and it was because it was the first opening during the pandemic and a record store in the u district was open and i was like can i is there any chance they're open they have tons of cds and cassettes and of course vinyl and everything and i go down there and i'm poking around i'm looking for some day loss stuff of course and i don't see it but i grab a bunch of other stuff that's sort of in that vibe i grab a black sheep record i grabbed some prince paul thing and then they have sex packets and uh and this is an ep release and so i remember i bought the cds luke but i didn't have a cd player on me but like i was felt like a kid again so i put on the albums on spotify like there's something missing i know

that move i can i can i can understand that i bought my cds and now i wanted to walk around

and enjoy them but i didn't need to play them on so i just put them on spotify which really makes you wonder why did i buy the cds well because they brought me pleasure and they bring me pleasure they're sitting here next to me now and i just spent that one afternoon again this is just what six months ago just wandering around the u district listening to um those two in a row and one thing i i feel like i've been talking about a lot lately luke when i talk about things i like is i like world building right and listening to these records and you talking about the house party vibe of that song but also just like all the characters he plays that Humpty is just one and he's got all these different characters and I mean it's like it's almost like listen to comedy bang bang improv at times he's going back and forth and I was like whoa this is a whole universe

friend well and you know he uh he actually did comedy later oh I didn't know that yeah shock gee he did stuff with the people's republic of comedy like I remember seeing him at uh chop suey Like doing stand up basically And doing kind of like comedy performance art stuff Yeah So he was like a very multi-dimensional Dude I want to just play And as you mentioned He's very strongly associated with Tupac So I've always When the subject of Digital Underground comes up I always say oh and you know Tupac was a backup dancer For them but I was reading this very long interview With Shock G this morning Where he said I want to dispel that rumor uh Tupac was not a backup dancer of ours he was our roadie so and he said Tupac was the best roadie they ever had like nothing got lost everything made the journey but the problem was Tupac was constantly fighting people and like he was like he was like when when we were innocent and when you know when it was like justified it was great to have Tupac in our crew because he he wouldn't put up with anything from anybody but that he was like sometimes he was just wrong And he would never back down Which is hilarious He also told this story of like When they were touring and Tupac was their roadie I forget what album was out But they would have these after parties And everybody would be freestyling And he said that his mom Gregory Jacobs said his mom came to one of these get togethers And Tupac was freestyling And she pulled him aside And she said like who's that one And he said oh that's our roadie Tupac She's like that guy's going to be a star Somebody cast him in juice Yeah, right Speaking of which, by the way This is, I think this might be If not the first Time Tupac Was, you know, recorded Definitely was like the first, I think Pretty popular song That anybody would have heard Tupac rapping on This is Yeah, this is the same song Oh, same song, right Which, by the way, I forgot this

Thank you.

part too carrie and her brother were obsessed with this movie called nothing but trouble oh which yeah the dumbest movie of all time they were obsessed with it because it was one of like five vhs tapes they had growing up you know how that works where it's just you're just like well this is the movie this is our selection of movies it's these four films and so we're just gonna really get down with them nothing but trouble is this like john candy dan ackroyd film which also I believe, stars Chevy Chase and Demi Moore.

Yes, Veeves and I watched this sometime in the past, I don't know, five years or something. I had no idea this thing existed. And it also, yeah, and who is it who's under all of the, that's Ackroyd who plays this ancient, ancient blob of a man, right?

Oh, Bobo and Lil' Devil? Well, there's, okay, there's so many. I mean, it is a mess of a movie. But I think loosely the plot is there's this town in New Jersey that's run by Dan Aykroyd who plays this guy called the Shire of the Reeve or something. He's some weird judge who runs this demented town. And I think Chevy Chase and Demi Moore get pulled over by maybe John Candy. And then they're trapped in this town in this Kafkaesque court system run by Dan Aykroyd under all this makeup. Side note, there are these two weird, these weird blobs that are called Bobo and Little Devil that are there. And then at some point, for no reason, Digital Underground shows up and does this song. Oh, speaking of which, here comes the Tupac line in a minute.

So, yeah, at some point, Digital Underground shows up and does this song in the Nothing But Trouble universe,

which is one of, like, a hundred things that make no sense in that movie. Also, for some reason, Dan Aykroyd's character, I believe he calls cigars dog rockets.

I don't remember much. I mean, everything you're saying.

Kerry will be like, oh, you're smoking a dog rocket.

A cancer dog rocket. Yeah, I remember watching this with Veeves. I have no idea why. It was probably late Friday night. Like, all right, what about this thing? By the way, it came out in 1991, so it could be a sequel to Goodfellas one year later.

That's the natural. I will tell you that I fought the urge to fire up nothing but trouble at 2.45 p.m. last night. So, anyway, RIP Shock G and Humpty Hump, man. No shit. Pour some Hennessy. If all the Hennessy on your shelf has not been consumed, go to a Burger King bathroom today and pour out some Hennessy for Shock G, man. This guy really changed my life.

Did I tell you my Burger King bathroom story? It's not actually about me in a Burger King bathroom.

Did you once get busy there?

I did, but it's not what you think.

You once got messy in a Burger King bathroom.

My sister's wedding, which was a long time ago now, I think more than 10 years ago, I don't recall. My sister and I have very, very different tastes in the world. and i found out somehow um that she had a no hip-hop rule for the dj at her wedding at the like reception or whatever so that is just what it is i would guess that most of the people in attendance uh that did not really bother them much um it offended my sensibilities to a degree so i asked the um dj to play a song i can't remember what it was and she said no i'm not supposed to play hip-hop i'm like are you shitting me um you're like well how am i gonna do the cupid shuffle so i can't remember exactly and i'm not even at what i'm not somebody who usually dances at weddings but there was a small period in my let's say 20s when i maybe you know shook my tail feathers a little bit at a place like a wedding and so i'm like what and i don't know how i got some special dispensation i don't know if i talked to my sister or i just convinced the DJ, just, like, one song, just, like, one song. I'm just, like, just play the Humpty Dance. Like, this is a nostalgic song. Yeah. Like, it's poppy. Everybody will love it. Like, I'm telling you, the dance floor will fill up. Like, people want to hear this song. And so somehow I make my case. And Genevieve's there with me at this wedding reception. And so they allow it. And the song comes on. And I've never seen so many white people leave a dance floor so quickly. And I fought for this. So Veeves and I...

have to dance because i made a big fucking deal out of this so and i know i've told this story in the show before because i tracked down the photo there's a photo that my dad took of me i'm i was in the wedding in some way or another so i'm wearing a tuxedo genevieve is you know dressed nicely in a in a some sort of a party dress and we're the only ones on the dance floor and we're just dancing our ass off to this song and i also just thought like this is the most innocent song and i forget like that there's a moment where the music stops he says i once got busy in a Burger King bathroom, which is a little fresh for my family. Sure. And then, if I recall this correctly, that song ends, and then an ACDC song, like, It Shook Me All Night Long comes on, and everybody comes rushing back to the dance floor, and I thought, well, I got my song. I want to choose my words carefully. Yes, we should.

I want to choose my words carefully, but man, if I was going to, for me, just rhythmically For how my dancing works If my choice was ACDC or The Humpty Dance I'd kick to the side like my leg was broken Shaking and twitching kind of like I was smoking Crazy Whack Funky people say You look like MC Hammer on Crack Humpty That's alright Andrew because my body's in motion I'm not going to do the whole song I promise But That's surprising To me that I thought that story was going to end with And then the dance floor flooded with people But I would argue that But in a way, this also speaks to Gregory Jacobs to shock G's influence, not just on my life, but on your life, because that's got to be the only scenario in which you were out dancing just you and Genevieve at a wedding on full display. Like that would have that would have only happened because of like the Humpty Dance.

Yeah. I'm going to see if I can find this photo again and send it to you.

Oh, please.

It's one of the few photos I like of myself, too.

Anyway, yeah So everybody, if you're not familiar with Digital Underground If you're, you know, somebody who's much younger than me Or maybe much older than me Go check them out, they did some pretty good stuff I was also shocked, Andrew, at how many of these lyrics I remembered They're just living back there in your brain They're just way back at the very, very, very, I don't know, lizard-y part of my lizard brain. It was like, wow, brain, how is it that you remember all of the lyrics to Underwater Rhymes? Why has that information been—why is that the data storage hierarchy? And yet you can't recall Nicole Kidman's name. True story. All right. Also featured, I believe, in Nothing But Trouble. Nicole Kidman She might be I can't remember if she's Bobo Or Little Devil I think she's Little Devil

Okay

Alright Let's take a quick break And then when we get back Andrew I'm actually very excited To tell you the story of The McDonald's ice cream machine Debacle I'm interested in hearing that too This is TVTL On your mark On your mark Get set. Get set. Now ready.

Ready.

Go.

Everybody razzle, dazzle.

Everybody razzle, dazzle. Let's thank some dazzling donors. Wonderful folks who are dazzling us with their donations of dough each month. It's really essential in getting to do this show for our jobs. I want to thank Jared Coelho of Las Vegas, Nevada. Jared says, you guys rock. Thanks for giving me some habitual thing to do during the on-again, off-again work shifts during this pandemic. What do you think Jared does in Las Vegas? I mean, I assume Croupier at a craps table.

Is Croupier the name of the person who's in charge of a craps table?

I think it's the person who wields that kind of, like, long hook. I know there's a film called Croupier, which is the only reason that I even know that term, and I think it's starring Clive Owen.

Hmm. But I don't know. Sounds like a director's name would be, like, Florence Croupier. Oh, totally. Like, you could see that on the back of one of those director's chairs. You know, I know that you used to be a valet for a minute right and that was here in seattle am i correct on that yes do you know that there was a time i don't think you do i don't think i've ever told this to anybody but when my all stories come back to the divorce and how it still affects me to this day but my parents got a divorce and um i there was a my mom lived in las vegas for a period of It's good. time right after that divorce she became a flight attendant for american airlines and i think that's why she was in las vegas i think that maybe that's where she was um based for a while and i remember being in college and coming pretty close to taking her advice to come out i think for a summer and get a job as a valet i'm a little fuzzy on the details i can't remember if she knew somebody who said oh yeah just have him come out here he can just work as a valet um for a summer and i always wonder like how would that have affected who i am today because like the idea i think i'm way more scared to park somebody else's car today than i was back when i was in my late teens early 20s right as a college student you're like yeah whatever i can do that job sure now i think i'd be more nervous to park uh fancy people's cars um but i wonder like what if i had moved out to vegas wow and did i say la before i'm in my head okay no you said if i hadn't moved out to vegas and And just, you know, had a summer of parking cars as a valet. Like, who would I be today? Vegas, baby?

You would be very sunburned. Because that sounds... Summertime in Las Vegas, parking cars. Yeah. Like, I actually really liked being a valet, but that's because it was summertime in Seattle. Yeah, sure. So it was like 78 degrees, and I'm, you know, I'm parking cars at a golf tournament in, you know, whatever, Bellevue or something. But the summertime in Vegas, running back and forth to the lot to grab the car, to bring it around for people who may or might have lost money, you know, large sums of money in the casino who might be grumpy. I was lucky because I was dealing with people that were drunkenly leaving a chowder house, which, you know, raises the question, should I have given them the keys? I don't know. There was no pep talk about that. Right.

Were they drunk on chowder, though?

pacific parking never said hey don't give them the keys it just always be some like it'd be some divorced guy who was out on i mean this is pre-internet dating but it would be like a older divorced guy coming out with you know often sort of a a date who you know was younger than him and they always make the same joke it's the ferrari um you know when when they give you the keys or when when you're running to get their car when they give you the tag the story that i've told many times on this show and in real life uh which would not make you less scared to park an expensive car andrew was when i was working at uh i can't remember if it was a golf tournament or if it was um at this restaurant i don't want to mention the restaurant because that guy ripped my dad off and i hate him so that's why i'm not giving him a free plug this was unrelated to me parking cars there just happened that the valet that i worked for had a contract with this chowder place in seattle chowder and um and then my dad also did a bunch of signs for him and then he declared bankruptcy on this one location even though he owned like eight restaurants and therefore didn't have to pay any of the contractors because this was like a standalone business entity which i found to be very well trump-esque andrew even though back then we didn't have those words for it but um yeah i was parking a very expensive car and i couldn't remember some of these fancy cars in order to put them in gear like they're five speeds and you would push down on the yeah the stick yeah and some of them you pull up okay yeah um and i got confused this was a push down but i thought it was a pull up and i just pulled the entire oh god like polished you know fancy walnut you know some fancy wood gear shifter and the leather skirt that it was attached to and i just remember change going flying everywhere in the car uh-huh because it was like there had Just he had the guy had been like, you know, throwing some pocket change down on this kind of leather skirt that was covering the whole gear shift. And I remember just looking down at the now exposed naked metal gear shift. And this is like a hundred thousand dollar car that I'm parking and just being like, well, this is how I die. And then just like putting the gear shift back on, patting it down and parking the car in the furthest corner of the lot and making a mental note that I was not going to be the one who brought that car back. Is that where the story ends for you? That's where this for me that will. I mean, yes, I did not bring that car back. I didn't hear anything else about it. Who knows? Maybe it was a wonky.

I mean, if it popped off like that, like if it popped off like that, if you were I mean, it sounds like if you didn't feel anything break. Like, here I am, like, I know anything about cars, and this is something that happened 30 years ago. But, you know, if it popped off cleanly and you didn't feel something break or you didn't feel something, like, scrape, like you were, like, you know, ruining threads, sounds like the thing just popped on and off, and most people don't pull directly up on it. So if you put it back on and tapped it down, it might have just been fine forever.

Yeah, I certainly didn't put enough force on it to, like, break it. And, like, you're right, I never thought of this, but you're right, Andrew. I mean, the fact that the whole skirt came up, I like I didn't you know, I wasn't ripping this thing out of the center console. It probably. It probably happened all the time, and I've lived my whole life thinking, God, that was a close call. And probably the guy probably did that like two times a week in his whatever that kind of car was. But back to your question of how your life would be different if you were a valet in Vegas. God, I could have seen you falling in with a card-counting crew, just becoming, you know, you and, I don't know, Doyle Brunson, a.k.a. Texas Dolly. Maybe you just become a high-stakes poker player.

I do tell people when people ask what happened to my broken finger now, I say, well, I thought I was getting a tour of a casino after I used my special method to win at Blackjack. I didn't think there was anything wrong with just paying attention what cards had already been dealt, but apparently the casino bosses had different ideas.

I would like to say for the record, I'm with you on that. I don't think remembering should be illegal. Right? That's just me. And it's not illegal. It's just their stupid rules. Yeah, they just frown upon it. I always mean to count cards, and then instead I start having alcohol. And then I quickly lose my math on where we're at with the blackjack. For a while, I mean, I never really thought I was going to be a card counter, but I was intrigued by the whole thing. And there were all these systems that are supposed to, you know, you go like plus one for this, minus one for that. It's supposed to kind of make it much easier to keep track of the card. If you're not like an MIT bringing down the house type of person, I couldn't even keep up with the easy ones.

I mean, can we both agree, though, that drinking is way more fun than counting?

Well, that's been my experience when it comes to the local casinos there in Vegas. So, anyway, Jared in Las Vegas, thank you so much for your donation. We really do appreciate it. The maestro.

On your mark. On your mark. Get set. Get set. Now ready. Oh, will you look at this? Go.

Our dear friend Chris O'Leary is also one of our dazzling donors today. chris o'leary in brooklyn new york he of the almost empty flight that's right um i i you know of all there have been so many things about the pandemic that have really really sucked but for chris personally i think it would probably include the fact that there are many more people who have been the only person on a flight now yes that is true he's his special his special status like that was an extremely weird thing that happened to him for those that don't know chris i think basically went viral for being the only person on a flight from like i want to say it was like cleveland to

new york i'm gonna be unfun here i think he was one of two people on that flight because i looked up the article well there was the pilot no i think there's one other passenger but anyway that makes

it a little bit less fun but you know again two is still a very low number exactly pandemic and

if we're gonna be a journalistic operation like i said yesterday we gotta get these details chris Get at me if I'm wrong, but I think we looked this up, and in the MSNBC story or whatever about you, I think there was, like, you and one other guy, maybe?

Yeah, so Chris was, like, on this basically empty flight, which was pretty crazy at the time, but now I bet you that that happened, like, many more times because of the weirdness of air travel during the pandemic. So anyway, Chris, RIP your viral status. But thank you for being such an amazing TBTL supporter. Chris will often schedule—I know he's going to mention his sub-stack about beer and breweries here in this message I'm going to read in a moment. But Chris is a knower of all things beer-related, and he'll often schedule his beer-related trips around TBTL events. So he'll just pop up at any old thing, and I'll be like, what are you doing in Tacoma? And he's like, well, there was a beer convention in Portland, so I bank-shotted off of that, and here we are.

So Chris might be one of the only people, and my apologies if I'm wrong on this for anybody involved, but I'm pretty sure Chris is one of the only people who came to two shows of our little mini tour because I think he was at the Waffle House show in Florida and then also met up with us again back in New York where, of course, he lives. Or maybe he did New York and Seattle. I can't recall.

Or maybe the private show that I did at the Homewood Suites in, where were we? Tampa? Oh, yeah. Florida? Yeah. No. Just a very, very, that makes it sound dirty. Orlando. Here's what Chris says. Orlando. What Chris says in his message. Thank you, Luke and Andrew, for keeping me sane in a year that has been everything but. And to my fellow tens, you are all lovely, and I really can't wait to see you all in person again. I've never been much of a self-promoter, but I've been spending a lot of my spare time writing about beer. So I'd like to plug my substack, brewyork.substack.com. It's mostly about beer in New York City, but I always feature a piece.

or two about my travels in search of good beer and visiting breweries, something I'm really looking forward to resuming this year in addition to attending a TBTL live show. Heck, if you do another live show in a brewery, that kills two birds with one stone. Excuse me, Chris. That feeds two birds with one scone. Thank you. Can we please, can we not feed a fed horse here, my friends? By the way, I have continued to promote that, And the arc of every sort of conversation around that When someone says kill two birds with one stone And I go actually it's feed two birds with one scone First they're like give me a break PETA And then by the end of the conversation They're saying it with delight And I believe they repeat it for the rest of their life

I unironically like those alternatives better as well And it's not I mean I've always found beat a dead horse to be I remember being a kid and hearing that And thinking like what? What did you just say Impani? Like, why are we doing this to horses? And so, yeah, I mean, I'm not some huge animal rights person, but I also just I just find those sayings delightful. I mean, it's not even about like doing the right thing for me at all. I don't care about doing the right thing.

Well, that's the thing. The people that I tell about it again, they hard eye roll because they're not like and they're none of them are converted to being vegetarians or they don't join PETA. But it's just so dumb and fun to say that kind of work. So, Chris, we look forward to feeding two birds with one scone and having another show.

Scones can't be good for birds, right? Don't you think that it's going to fill up in their stomach? That's Alka-Seltzer, right? Oh, that definitely is bad, yeah. Or rice?

Isn't rice really bad for birds, too?

I think they stopped throwing rice at weddings because of that.

Because of that. God, you can't throw anything anymore, Andrew.

I know, bricks, rice.

I'm looking forward to the Bill Maher segment on why you can't throw rice anymore. I do think they just went with scone Because it sounds like stone But you're right If I was a bird I'd be like Hard dry biscuit Can we get something a little bit Bagel maybe It's not the water Feed two birds with one It's definitely not the water Alright Thank you Chris so much man We really do appreciate you And we look forward to Getting back out there in the world And doing some live stuff And seeing you And all of the other wonderful TBTL listeners Hello, and welcome to Top Story. Getting to the Top Story is about 50 minutes into the show, which I'm going to be honest with you, Andrew.

Better than usual. Earlier than I expected. I know. I was going to say, actually, it felt like a victory to me. We heard the Top Story sounder. I didn't expect it.

I had all my Humpty Hump talking I wanted to do. I wanted to update you on how Goodfellas was. We got into a Goodfellas to my blue heaven handoff. A lot happened in 58 minutes. If there is a Pulitzer Prize for ice cream machine-related journalism, I think we need to just go ahead and hand it to Andy Greenberg of Wired.com. This story, Andrew, is just a masterpiece. The title is They Hacked McDonald's Ice Cream Machines and Started a Cold War. it's such a great piece i'll just i'm just going to read the first graph if i can of all the mysteries and injustices of the mcdonald's ice cream machine the one that jeremy o'sullivan insists you need to understand first is its secret passcode press the cone icon on the screen of the taylor c602 digital ice cream machine he explains and then you tap the buttons that show a snowflake and a milkshake to set the digits on the screen to 5, then 2, then 3, then 1. After that precise series of no fewer than 16 button presses, a menu magically unlocks. Only with this cheat code can you access the machine's vital signs. Everything from the viscosity setting for its milk and sugar ingredients to the temperature of the glycol flowing through its heating element to the meanings of its many Sphinx-like error messages. No one at McDonald's or Taylor will explain why there's a secret undisclosed menu, O'Sullivan wrote in the first cryptic text I received from him earlier this year. So basically, the story goes that McDonald's, this is pretty much the standard ice cream slash shake slash McFlurry machine in 13,000 McDonald's restaurants in the U.S. and many more, tens of thousands more around the world. The default ice cream shake machine is this Taylor C602, and it is unbelievably finicky. So what this guy, Jerry,

Jeremy O'Sullivan and his business partner decided to do was build a little machine, a little thing that is described as being about the size of a small paperback book called the kitsch. and you put the kitsch inside your expensive and finicky mcdonald's ice cream machine and the kitsch monitors what's going on and uh over the internet lets you as the franchisee or the manager of the mcdonald's troubleshoot and diagnose what the hell is going on with your broken shake machine wow because they break all the time it's a whole thing on the internet By the way, the guy, the writer of this piece said on a recent evening in March, I attempted to tally the number of people who tweeted some version of the joke that they were going to spend their fourteen hundred dollar COVID stimulus payment to fix their local McDonald's ice cream machine.

I lost count at 200. Didn't you remember if it was you or if it was just us reacting to some other kind of viral thing a year or two ago, talking about how there is a conspiracy theory that the machines are just said to be broken because the employees don't feel like going through the process of making.

that's been my working theory and this is why i need to apologize andrew because my theory was they had broken down the shake machine they had cleaned it and then they didn't want to make it dirty again but that's not a thing that even happens because this machine part of the whole problem is it is self-cleaning or really what it is is self-pasteurizing there is this crazy proprietary confusing process wherein this machine heats itself up and self-sterilizes and therefore doesn't have to be cleaned but that process itself uh sort of fails all the time according to this article and when it fails it shuts the machine down for like four hours and then you got to get somebody to take the machine apart the machine has like um the uh Let's see. The machine's parts include no fewer than two dozen rubber and plastic O-rings of different sizes. Leave a single one out and the pump can fail or liquid ingredients can leak out of the machine. One McDonald's franchisee's tech manager told me he's reassembled the Taylor ice cream machine more than 100 times and had it work on the first try at most 10 of those times. So I have been in the drive-thru maybe trying to order a shake at, say, a very late hour and been told our shake machine isn't working. and i've been like you're just lying to me because you don't want to have to re-clean the shake machine and by definition that's not even possibly what was going on the shake machine was probably legit broken so i am very sorry mcdonald's employees does it change

your perspective on any of these other theories you have about like i don't know kind of no

no towels on the floor no towels on the floor of the hotel is still bullshit in my mind okay just

By the way, I think I knew the answer to that question before I answered it. I just felt I needed to ask. That was good. I appreciate it. It's a fair question. It's a fair question.

In this one case, I want to really like I want to walk back all of my all of my annoyance and all of my sort of false assumptions about what was going on inside that McDonald's. By the way, McDonald's also knows that this is a problem because remember when that kind of meme was going around in August on Twitter where people would say, I – let's see. I can't think of an example of it. I'll just tell you what McDonald's did and you'll know the meme I'm talking about. McDonald's, their official corporate Twitter account put out, we have a joke about our soft serve machine, but we're worried it won't work. Oh, right.

remember that meme started with another fast food restaurant or some sort of company tweeting something out and then every all these other corporate brands jumped on it right and then

just people in general like i peter segal was going crazy with these because it was the it was a real intersection of like comedy and being very smart so his were like i i was i was gonna make a joke about chaucer but then i don't even i can't even finish that pretend premise because i don't know anything about chaucer right but so you know what i mean like it got it became a whole thing point being mcdonald's was like admitting on twitter that their ice cream machines are a disaster well here's why this was an article in wired because when these folks invented this other little device the kitsch it started selling like crazy to these franchisees and mcdonald's and the maker of the ice cream machine Taylor got mad and Taylor started making its own version of this that the folks from Kitsch thinks involved that basically they stole a Kitsch out of a machine somewhere took it

apart, studied it, and now have made their own

version of it, and have effectively killed the business for the kitsch people. Luke, I was going to make a joke about Chaucer, but I Canterbury. Oh! Holy shit, man. That's a good joke.

That's a solid joke. I was like, is that the guy who did the Canterbury tale? Let's end the show.

Let's end the show. That's the high watermark for me. I'm sorry. I hate to do it. There's a lot of good stuff to come, but I can't go on. I can't sully the show after that shit.

No, you're totally right.

DBTO! See you on Monday. Power out! Sorry, Luke, go ahead.

Actually, that's a great place to end it because that's all I wanted to tell you. I mean, that's a solid power out. And, yeah, the gist of it is there's this battle over, you know, the technology around trying to fix the McDonald's shake machine. So I would highly recommend checking out Andy Greenberg's piece in Wired. and I would highly recommend being a little nicer to the drive-thru folks at McDonald's when they tell you the shake machine is broken

because it's probably broken. Instead of giving them a scowl, give them a little sympathy.

Now, I don't know what's going on with Jack in the Box. That's a whole lot of bullshit when they say the shake machine is broken.

Well, they're notoriously evil employees making way too much money.

Yes. All right. Day 13 of Drops of Stupider.

We are getting close to wrapping this thing up. It seems, I got to say, I was a little concerned if this was going to be too much navel gazing, too much looking at the past. But it seems like listeners have been enjoying hearing these blasts from the past, especially hearing some voices that we haven't heard in a long time. Jen, Sean, and what have you. So thanks, everybody, for supporting this project. And thanks again to Jake for setting it up. Today, we are moving on to our final kind of category, which is guest appearances on the show. Or at least, like today, it's not a guest appearance, but things related to guests we've had on the show as well. Because today, we have the number one seed, Scatting with Chris Hayes, versus the number eight seed, Revenge Raps with Rap Master Maurice. Oh my gosh, Derek Erdman. That's right, and that's going way back in time. I need to start with the Chris Hayes one because I have been thinking all morning how I summarize this nutso story in a way that is both concise and makes sense. And I think I have it. I didn't write it down, but I think I can explain this. So people who have no idea of this story at all, I'm going to start from the very beginning. You're probably familiar with an actor named Mark Proksh, if I'm saying his name at all, anywhere near how you pronounce that. He's been in things like Better Call Saul and some other things. Before he was a famous actor, though, he was kind of a prankster, and he would get onto local TV stations playing a character named K-Stross, who claimed to be the yo-yo man, who claimed to go into schools and give kind of presentations to kids and get them to listen through his yo-yoing, only he was terrible at the yo-yo game. and he would come onto these TV shows and basically be a doofus and in that way kind of prank the station. Well, we use a clip of tape of Yo-Yo or K-Strauss, the Yo-Yo Man, and I think I even have that here. Yeah, so this is a little bit of him scatting. This is one of the ways he gets the kids to kind of relax and listen to him. He does a little rap like this.

Bo-de-de-ba-ba-ba-da-de-de-skid-de-de-de-da-ba-ba-da-de-de-do-do-do-do-do-yo-yo-yo.

So that's Kay Strauss, the yo-yo man on some local TV station from a long time ago. We told that story. Chris Hayes, our friend and our most famous friend, Chris Hayes of MSNBC, fell in love with that tape as well. And one time Chris was on our show and he scattered that himself. And at least that's how you and I remembered it. And then as time went on.

Because let me mention Chris, among his many talents, is also a really good singer. Done karaoke with him. Like Chris is Chris is a low key, a bit of a theater nerd, like a musical theater guy. So he's he he can also sing really well. So it it made sense in my brain when when at some point I Mandela that hell out of this and started to think that that was Chris singing. It checked out because he could actually sing that if he wanted to.

Here's a clip of him doing that or as we thought later him doing that when he was joining us on the show. We asked him a question, and he started by saying, well, first, let me just say this. This is how I get in my zone. And then we were amazed at how close he got that. And it was more in hindsight. Like, he did that. We laughed about it. But then, I don't know, weeks or months pass. And we keep using both drops. And we're like, boy, he really nailed that. And then at one point, he was bragging to his staff at MSNBC.

about his poor people they must just be like they must be like you know we're stoked that we work on this hit television show but why is it a hostile work environment that the host keeps telling us about a podcast during our editorial meetings so anyway at one point he asked me to

send them both clips I think the tape I'm going to play for you now will um will explain the rest so I send Chris that piece of tape of him supposedly scatting and you and I are starting to get suspicious and the listeners are like wait a second that isn't chris scatting on that that's just him playing it back over the phone i think and you and i are like wait a second was chris pranking us or does chris think that he's saying that too it was like this complete mandela effect where chris thought that he nailed it perfectly too until we all kind of finally realized wait no no no chris just played this over the phone from his computer while while in an interview with us, and we'd all just forgotten that. So anyway, take a listen to this. I probably over-explained this, but here was kind of, as you and I were starting to piece this together way back in 2017, I think. His response is quote, my favorite thing about the yo-yo scat is that every time you play it, I can't tell if it's me or him until like two-thirds of the way in. And then in the email, Chris asked if I could send him both of the files so that he could play them back-to-back. He was like, He is so amazed by how close he got it that he actually wanted to hear them played back-to-back himself. As a matter of fact, for the newsletter, I took those audio samples and I laid one on top of the other to show everybody just how close he got it. So this is a mashup of the Yo-Yo Man originally scatting and Chris Hayes scatting, and I laid them right on top of each other. and you can tell like chris is the one who's on the phone and that's the one that we're laughing and clapping over and it's a little bit harder to hear because it's cleaner but then the the yo-yo man is also in there and the length is exactly the same and as far as i can hear the pitch is exactly the same almost note for note because it's the same tape as we now know it is so confusing but talk about the mandela effect chris didn't even remember that he didn't saying that he, you know, six months later was thinking, man, I really nailed that. That's why you can't trust anything you hear on this show.

I know what that's like, though. And certainly anybody who's been in a relationship with me knows far too well what it's like when I start to misremember something and then that just the groove gets formed in my brain that that's what happened.

Yeah, me too.

And then I am so, so locked in to that narrative, that reality, or, you know, in this case, surreality, and I will just, I will die on the hill of, no, no, no, I was the one who scattered that thing until overwhelming evidence is presented to me that it's not how I remembered it.

Well, even me, you know, I was telling you that story earlier about how it was just me and Veves on the dance floor dancing to the Humpty Dance, but then I just found the photo, and it looks like there are some people behind us. Are those people dancing on the dance floor? And in my head, it was like this extreme vacuum as people all fled the dance floor. Or is it just that a bunch of people did, but there were still some other people on the floor? I don't know. Maybe those other people are just waiting in line for a drink. Like, I don't really trust any of my narratives anymore at all. Even thinking about, you know, me telling you on Monday about or I guess I told you on Tuesday about breaking my finger on Monday and my interaction with the bus driver and how it seemed like the bus driver was really waiting a long time for me to get on the bus, even though I waived him to move on with his day, his route. Like, I don't know, like that, it felt like several minutes to me, but it could have been literally 10 seconds and my head was just swimming. I'm a completely unreliable narrator.

Will you promise me one thing, Andrew? When you're breathing your last breath, will you please promise me it won't be an apology?

Why, am I apologizing now?

No, but I'm thinking about you being worried about the bus driver's time after you'd sustained a really bad injury like and i just my i just i just want to hug you i just want to hug this andrew and never let him go like i'm imagining you like on the pavement broken hand just like in so much pain and so kind of such a bad situation but also a big part of your brain being like i don't want to inconvenience this bus driver just keep going i'll figure this out and it's like i'm imagining you at the at the very end of it all being like to the nurse like I'm sorry I made you bring that water That I have not consumed

Well There's a bunch of people on the bus too So I was really considering I'm just

You're just so There's some happy medium between you and me I think

Maybe that's why people like this show, because you're far too thoughtful about people, and I'm far too thoughtless. And maybe right in the middle is the right amount. By the way, this picture is awesome. I may have seen it before, but I've forgotten. Veeve's hair is the best. I know, right? You guys really do look like you're in a Tarantino film. I mean, I'm hearing, it was a teenage wedding, and the old folks wished him well. It's real Uma Thurman and John Travolta. I love it.

It makes me want to shave my face again. I'm not I don't have a beard there I should if you shave your face people will officially 100% not know anymore that we're two different people right now the beard is apparently the only differentiator really good point yeah of course the mask doesn't help okay so anyway that's scatting later on by the way Chris joined the show because we ended that episode by saying now is Chris Hayes has he been pranking us all this time or was he really confused and it turns out he also was really confused that is the number one seed for this matchup the number two seed as i mentioned is revenge raps with rap master maurice now there were a bunch of instances of these luke and i'll let you talk about this because this is before my time do you want to maybe oh i see i thought you were going to play it and then i was oh no i said i'll let you talk about it sound like i was going to the tape no um this is of course the artist derrick erdman right and he was a friend of the show and he'd come on and play this character a

lot right well yeah i believe he was at the time living in chicago for this is this is going to be the most confusing ron not to be confused with just a minute ron by the way which is a whole other thing that's been happening this week um this is this is also slightly confusing because when we first found out about a guy named rap master maurice it was i believe these were sort of viral maybe youtube videos that were going around where this artist derrick erdman who at the time was living in chicago and but would later move to seattle um he would basically call up what he saw as you know landlords who were not dealing fairly with their tenants or he called a lot of payday loan places he was really on a mission to kind of bother and shame these kind of you know usurious can you can you use usury in that can you conjugate it to that in fact i mean

this is exactly when you were introducing him uh in the clip of tape we won't hear you say this exact thing but way back in 2011 you were mentioning that too when you're when you were

introducing him yeah so he he was he was sort of using this character of rap master maurice as a kind of a bit of vigilante justice for the little people who are getting screwed over by the system so he would call these places and do these very sort of funny raps and then record them and put them online that's how we heard about them and then we heard that derrick erdman was going to be in seattle aka rap master maurice and so we invited him on the show yes and so back then i

I think he would charge you $7. You could submit a claim, and for $7, he would call somebody who offended you in some way or a business that wronged you in some way, and he would offer them a revenge rap. Now it looks like it's still on his website. It looks like it's up to $17 now, but actually not bad, actually. Still a pretty good deal. So here, this is from July 28, 2011. He's there in studio with you guys. You know I keep picturing you on the radio here But 2011 this would have been podcast only Right so he's

Oh wow well you know that's really funny Because he must have been on twice

Oh god he was on a bunch He was on a whole bunch of times Luke Yeah this is the one that I just happened to grab But it looks like this is episode number 875 from 2011 Okay so take a listen to this

But mostly right now we want to focus on your rap skills And we actually have some people that have requested You make calls on their behalf The first one is a faithful listener to the show. We call him Sailor Jared. I don't actually have his number here, Jennifer.

Maurice, do you have that? I do have it, yeah.

You want to hand it to me, and I'll dial it, and then I'll hand you. Good, because I'll mess up. Okay.

Does this sound like radio to you, Luke? Is there a chance that this was something that you re-ran in 2011? Highly possible. Okay. Extremely possible. You wouldn't have said that in the description because you wanted people to listen. Because doesn't it sort of sound like – does it sound like the podcast days to you or the radio, or is that an impossible question? I'm just curious.

It sounds like the radio days to me because – and I have a very strong memory of having Derek do these calls on the radio. My guess would be this was from the radio days, but then it was replayed and repurposed in 2011, and you're probably right. I probably didn't want to necessarily tip everyone off that this was a rerun in case they hadn't heard it the first time. And so also I don't know what is going on with my voice There's no way that's hungover voice Because we did the radio show at 7 o'clock Or 6 o'clock at night But I was definitely battling Some kind of a cold there My voice is blown out

Oh man, okay, so here we go

Go back to the tape. Dial it, and then I'll hand you. Good, because I'll mess up. Okay. So we'll see if this works. Jen, is there anything you want to tell us about?

Well, Jared has been laid off. And, you know, a lot of people wanted Rat Master Maurice to make calls for them, but they were all kind of happy calls. And he specifically said he wanted to get a little indignant. So I liked Jared's. So are we calling his? His boss, his ex-boss who laid him off.

All right, let's see if this works. I may have misdialed. This is the hard... Oh. I've never been so nervous on this show.

Luke, I'm going to keep on interrupting this. The anticipation of a ringing phone is fantastic radio.

Yes, it really is.

I love a telephone ring.

I'm nervous again.

I know, right?

This already happened.

Years ago, a decade ago. But I'm...

It's re-triggering me.

I know. Okay, back to the tape. Sorry.

You have reached...

Hi, this is Jim. Sorry I missed your call. Please leave me your name and number, and I'll call you back just as soon as I can. Thanks, and have a great day.

Please leave your message after the tone.

Hello, Jim. This is Rap Master Maurice. Recently, you laid off one of your best employees, and it wasn't a very nice thing to do, so I made a rap about it. Well, my name's Maurice, and I'm here to say you've been mistreating your employees in a major way. Now, my man Sailor Jareb does a good job at work, but then you go and lay him off. I think you're kind of a jerk. The economy is in a bit of a mess, Listen, everybody's got to spend a little bit less. Laying off Jared's not the way to save dough. Spending less on cologne is the way you should go. So do the right thing and hire him back. Shaftin' a good employee is totally whack. I assume if you keep letting go of all your good employees, your whole business will go down the tubes. Peace. Oh, thank you.

Rap Master Maurice, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the best moment of TVTL.

So good. God.

That is good. I love how bad it is. And I'm here to say something, something in a major way.

That was always the setup.

I think all that would be good, yes.

And then also he always ends them with peace.

Yes.

I mean, the thing that's so amazing about Derek is that Derek is an extremely talented visual artist. Like I mean obviously I don't think there's a huge living in Revenge Raps But I mean Rap Master Maurice was just a kind of a you know A little side project for him But like the guy is an immensely talented painter and drawer of things In fact there's a whole huge wall I went by Like a mural that's all Derek Erdman stuff down here in Portland That I just randomly was driving by the other day I looked up I was like well shit Derek painted the entire side of a building here and it looks amazing

And guess what I saw on my little trip to Capitol Hill on Monday before I busted up my hand. I was coming out of the Capitol Hill light rail station, and there's this giant mural of two hands kind of pinky swearing, and that is our friend Ellen Forney. I only raised that because she came up on the show recently. you and I were reminiscing about the time she was on TBTL again like a decade ago but how much I enjoyed her her graphic novel and how much I enjoyed that interview and then there it was so there's another friend of the show whose art was on big display I think Derek might be back in Chicago now he is there's this whole thing about how he was going to be dual cities for a while like it must be the stranger I can't remember what publication is really really into his scene And and it was like it was like a loss for Seattle when he finally said, no, I just got to stay in Chicago.

This is where I belong. Well, because he was for a time married to Emily Noakes, who is the lead singer of Taco Cat. And yeah, and writes for The Stranger. So there was a period of time where there was a and he was living in Seattle and they were a real Seattle artsy power couple. And both of them just absolutely lovely human beings. So, yeah, we are hoping that Derek is doing well, wherever it is that he might be these days. He was living in, like, a converted flour factory one time. Like, I mean, like, flour, like, the thing that you make bread out of. Yeah, yeah. In Chicago. I went to his loft once and interviewed him for TBTL back in the day. And he was, like, the coolest place, like, the coolest place you could ever live in. Yeah. This giant.

Industrial loft it was just full of his art And cool shit and I was like this Guy has it figured out man yeah that kind of Space especially in Chicago or reclaimed Industrial space like that I will just close this out by Saying so those are the two Clips you can vote on So you can see all of the matchups If you go to tbtl.net and click On today's show Page or if you sign up For the newsletter all of this week's will be In there as well

All right hey let's do a little music for your weekend before we get on out of here i know you are

very excited about your song that you're gonna play andrew yes um i was in in honor of the um the the passing of shock g i was gonna play never mind i was about to give away what you're gonna play which would have been a very rude thing to do just for a bit um no i'm not gonna actually play any digital underground because i've been excited to play this song for you for a while um quick backstory on it i'm gonna have to kind of fudge over some of the details which i bet you listeners are happy of but i told you i was um listening in and out to that podcast that is based on the um the tv show patriot and it's one of the characters leslie claret who i'm i'm blanking on

the actor's name luke uh kirkwood smith yeah kirkwood or kirkwood i believe that i think t

thank you i put you on the spot there but no kirkwood by the way people might know he's the dad in that 70s show right exactly and he plays a character in um in the show patriot you actually heard him at the very very very beginning of today's show that little um you know spiel about piping and whatnot and so this podcast which i mentioned is uh i love the format of it this is the type of thing that i would have wanted to do like to grow up to do which is it's just like a mixed media thing where it's kind of like a memoir it's kind of like an owner's manual or some sort of a um some sort of a manual for industrial jobs uh but it also is interspersed with music and if you're familiar with the tv show patriot it's very much the type of music that the character john lakeman would usually play but it's not the the actor who plays john singing these songs It's actually a little band that was put together in, I think, to support this podcast. And the name of the band is the Jones Sisters.

Actually, I've played a Jones Sisters song on this show before because they also do the theme song for Perpetual Grace Limited, the other Stephen Conrad show that I got obsessed with. And the opening song to that is the Jones Sisters.

You know what? When I was kind of, yeah, going back and trying to figure out who did this song, the name the Jones sisters sort of rang a bell to me. I didn't know why, but essentially, yeah, the the guy who's, you know, the showrunner and all of the, you know, the creative mind behind this entire universe is Stephen Conrad. And clearly music is important to him. And you will hear in the song that, you know, he's got this penchant for writing these songs that are both like lyrical and poetic, but also like very kind of literal in a way. If those things can exist at the same time in this kind of folky style. And so this sounds like the type of song that you would hear in Patriot, but it's not as far as I know from the show Patriot by the Jones sisters featured in this podcast. Why did I make this so complicated?

The name of the song today is that we're actually declaring.

This is so confusing. We're on Fridays. I love this song so much. I'm going to play a full 90 seconds of it because that's kind of where the natural break is. It's called I am completely unprepared for what's about to happen. And I guess there's a language warning that goes along with this as well. But I've been swearing like crazy on the show for quite some time now. So I don't know why I have to warn you when other people do it. Here you go. All right.

Mornings drawing nearer. Winnings Drifting Towards the dealer And I'm trying to remember If I ever Even told you Where I am And I guess I'm Walking back there In the rain And I am completely fucking Unprepared for what's up

I have been singing this song in my head non-stop all week.

I think the lyrics even get better from there, but we have to leave it there.

It's amazing because it's, I mean, you described it before you played the song, but it's like it taps into essentially what's so great about those John Lakeman songs in the TV show that they are just, they describe a kind of a universal feeling of being like unprepared for what is about to happen. That's like a feeling we all have in life a lot, but then setting it to music and somehow It's just like, yeah, it's a very effective way to convey a kind of an experience or a feeling.

Yeah. And it's so I mean, the narrative is so clear that this is a breakup song, but he also just feels like, you know, a degenerate. He's out, you know, he's been gambling all night long. Winning is slowly moving towards the dealer.

Right. That's a great that's a really, really interesting way to say that winning is slowly moving towards the dealer because that is written. And I don't know what Stephen Conrad's deal is like in what his relationship with gambling is. But I that is a very genius way to describe the feeling of the momentum shift of when you're a player and you're playing whatever you're playing and it's kind of going well and you're kind of building up some chips. And then at some point the winning starts going towards the dealer because they ain't building those places out of charity.

And he alludes to it there in the first kind of in the first chorus and it kind of changes as it goes on. If you don't mind just spending a second here with this song, I've been thinking about it a lot. But, you know, I don't have I don't have that exact experience. And he goes on to say, like, I'm going to go back and I'm going to go knock on. He says it better than I'm about to. But to paraphrase, you know, I'm going to go knock on this door that used to be ours. And I'm about to wake you up and I'm completely unprepared for what's about to happen. And there is a feeling that I've had that's very, very hard to talk about. And it's one of the reasons why I dislike holidays. I think growing up when I was becoming kind of a young man is there's a feeling when you feel like your life is I think spinning out of control is maybe too strong of a word but you feel like you've been living a sort of dirty lifestyle and you have to walk back into somebody's life where it feels pristine and clean and in this story I picture this guy who's you know he's bedraggled he's been out gambling he's not dealing with the breakup right meanwhile at least from his perspective presumably the woman that he's left behind if we're gonna go if we're gonna assume that this is a straight person you know is you know still living in the house and still watering the plants and everything is still you know clean and tidy and she still smells like whatever she smells like and he feels like he's dragging his dirty ass back into her dawning morning or whatever the line is And that's kind of how how I used to feel in college when I was, you know, chain smoking cigarettes, drinking too much, but then like coming home for the holidays and just feeling like I don't know how much how I presented or but all I felt was like that dirt bag dragging himself back into this life where everybody was clean and had just gone to church and was, you know, ready to sit down to brunch.

You know, I just don't understand how it was Stephen Conrad was able to hook up a hidden camera and film my actual life over the last three years. I think we've buried the lead

Right Anyways, thanks for letting me ramble about that That's a hard emotion to describe

No, I I overly identify with the sentiment Of that song and what you just said So yeah, of course I did want to play a little Digital Underground I wanted to In case folks haven't heard this song This is, well it was on Sex Packets, but it was I guess actually the B side of So when Digital Underground got started, of course, like is often the case, they couldn't get any interest from any record label. So they self-released their first album. And it was just a short little thing. And this was the B-side was this song, Underwater Rhymes. And what I love about it is, I mean, I just think it's lyrically really kind of funny and clever. I think the bass is just so infectious in it. And, yeah, I might let this go for slightly longer than normal just in honor of Shock G. But yeah, let's hear a little Underwater Rhymes from Digital Underground.

We're now descending. We're at 200 fathoms and dropping. We're at 400 fathoms. We have arrived. Now last night, underwater, I saw a French mermaid. Treated her to caviar. Wine over shrimp brain. In the raw, on the ocean floor. Need I say more? You never heard nobody kick it like this before. Pink champagne, octopus spring Saw your DJ underwater through the windowpane That sucker tried to hit a mix, but the mix didn't happen Records kept floating, all the fish kept laughing A blowfish blew my mind and thought it to rhyme As the octopus cut nine records at a time Your boy said, show me how to keep my records down But the shark ate his amp, your boy got clammed The rhymes he say have no particular order Go ahead, buy the rhymes if you think that you're order Hold your breath, MCs. My rhyme's on the word.

Underwater rhymes.

Underwater rhymes.

Underwater rhymes. Underwater rhymes.

Underwater rhymes. I tried to mix a cut from a TV blooper. Got pulled by a deep sea state trooper. Told me that I didn't have the right to bite I said your wife looks just like a fat blue grouper Sitting in my aqua blue jail cell Didn't have my bail I had to break out with the rhyme Shrimp scatter on a platter I rock like a mobster Told an MC Yo, you look like a lobster Qualified to wreck your mind I get busy one time

So many parts of this song just have lived, as they say, in my head You know, rent-free over the years Like, if I hear the word shrimp I often think shrimp scatter on a platter I often think If I'm thinking of like Insulting someone Told an MC Yo you look like a lobster

Am I wrong? Does he come back and rap As the octopus at some point?

He comes back as MC Blowfish

Oh okay Should we stick around? Yeah why not?

That's a very, very Parliament-sounding... I don't know if that's actually Parliament, but it's very inspired.

I also like the idea of the octopus being able to cut nine records, like you said.

I know. Don't they have eight arms, though? I've never understood that.

Yeah, I don't know. I was doing the math, too. I was like, wait, is it ten?

Oh, one, two, one, two.

A little mic ticket. One, two, one, two. One, two, one, two. They call me MC Blown French. We love to do a little something like this. Well, I'm a deep sea gangster, underwater prankster. Kissing all the girl fists, dissing all the shanksters. Because I blew your mind and started to rhyme. Doesn't mean we're cool, because you'll be back next time. With a hook and a line, so you can hear that frying sound. I'm telling you I'm down I'll spin your boat around Leave suckers lost in a bag You want to play? I'll hook your line to a stingray Get out of here I'll hit your boat with a stick Get out of line I'll call my homie Moby Dick I'm not thinking about dying Fool, stop trying to test me People fishing don't catch me And when you get homesack or you miss Just remember MC Blowfish Oh man

I love that he loves the format but he's also like it's a way of saying like yeah i can slip into these characters but i don't have to like pretend to be hard like a lot of the contemporaries right like let's just take that whole hardness thing and let's i don't know put it at the bottom of the sea right and and also

like i'm sorry there's like the listeners that don't care about digital underground like okay we get it guys but like i was in going back and really looking at the tracks on sex packets well first of all sex packets is is which was their kind of their big hit because or their big you know album hit because it had a humpty dance on it well first of all they did this whole crazy guerrilla project around the song sex packets which is basically this idea that like there is this magical thing called a sex packet you can take that will help you visualize the person you want to have sex with they basically did all this research on actual stanford experiments around human sexuality and people taking things to try to increase their sexual potency and experience And then they printed up all these fake flyers for this study and they like posted them around Oakland and they would like leave them on the bus. They created this crazy narrative around the idea of sex packets being a real thing, which just seems like a lot of work. And then Tommy Boy, the label, wanted them.

to call the album Sex Packets because they were under the impression that people were more likely to click on or click on, this is before there were clicks people were more likely to basically pay attention to something that had the word sex in it so that was kind of how Sex Packets became the name of that album but there's a song called Danger Zone which is really like a whole song about how dangerous it is to get addicted to crack there's like I don't know if I'd go so far as to say Sex Packets is a socially conscious album but they're kind of talking about A lot of interesting stuff They're not They have no interest In talking about how They're hard Or they have guns That was just not their vibe Yeah But the music was You know Like I keep saying It was really fun But I do think There was some interesting stuff That was woven in there And in fact If you look at If you you know Go to whatever music service You use to get Digital Underground It's not listed as hip hop It's listed as funk And in some places It's even listed as jazz Hmm You know So anyway Yeah I love that song That was the song last night When I was listening to it Post Goodfellas Post Some of My Blue Heaven That I was like Wow I know the entire MC Blowfish part The only reason I wasn't rapping over it Was A Because it would annoy the listeners And B Because I would be out of sync Because you're playing The song in Seattle But man That is a song That really holds up in my mind So Alright Let's get to our listener suggestion Which comes from johnny um johnny says hey dummies i'm alerting you to an album that my son riley and his partner have put out it officially drops this friday march 12th it's already gotten some good reviews and my totally biased belief is that you'll probably like it it's country or americana or folk or whatever you might want to call it uh one cut that might work for music for your weekend is will you now this is the thing andrew this is riley who has actually performed on livewire excuse me on tbtl before maybe livewire someday he's actually been on tbtl because he had a band when he was very young i want to say like seventh grade or something yeah riley riley and johnny came

by your old studios in mount baker yes yeah and like i went i clicked on this link um and uh and

Went and saw this album Which by the way of course this is I should never give you Any crap Andrew about The Blur's Day segments Because you have to kind of Lightly edit them for content and also To try to you know help with the flow I did that with Riley's Email and now of course I managed to delete the part that says Who the band actually what the band's actually Called so let me just oh you mean Johnny's email well

It's the name of it so it's Vivian Leva if I'm pronouncing That name correctly with Riley And I don't know how to say Riley's last name properly

I'm going to go Calcano Calcano I've only, you know, Johnny's only been Supporting the show for like a hundred years We've only had Riley on the program And yet I still Will always struggle with saying their last name But anyway, I went and clicked on the link For Riley's Band And I could not believe How grown up Riley is Yeah, he's a grown ass person. It's like I feel like, you know, my nephew grew up or something like I was just blown away by how how how grown up he is and also how good this song and killing it at the game. Yeah, I know. Getting good reviews and dropping songs on Spotify and other places where they're getting all kinds of attention. And well, it's it's well deserved because this is a really good song. So this is from Vivian Leva and Riley Kalkanio. The song is Will You, and that's going to be our music for you. Also, Riley has more of a beard than I can grow. What's going on with that? I don't want to get shown up by Riley's facial hair. This kid was a child at my house, and now he's a hunky-bearded adult man.

Anyway, we went from praising him to getting close to beating him up.

It always does with me. It always does. Anyway, take a listen to this. This will bring us to the end of our broadcast week. Thanks for listening, everyone. Thanks for being part of TBTL. Have a great weekend. Stay safe. We'll see you on Monday. Until then, please remember, no mountain too tall.

And good luck to all. I promise to you.

Please hear me when I say I can't live without you. Will you still love me when I tear your heart away? Will you still love me And know my worth and my sake

I walked with a shadow that hung before my eyes What I could not see was heartbreak in disguise Now I look through a mirror of what might have been And wish for the day I might see you smile again

Where's new love for me When I tear your heart away

Power out.