Jeff Slate: tales from a rock 'n' roll troubadour - Transcript
The storied musician, songwriter, and music journalist talks about recording his album The Last Day of Summer during the pandemic, his approach to interviewing artists, and his friendships with some of his musical heroes.
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
LP: In addition to the quality of the music and the songs themselves, which I want to talk about next, I have to ask, what do you think about the how and the why of the full-length record in 2024? Is it your artistic statement? Do you think in terms of albums? Because it's no longer intuitive that that's the form.
Jeff Slate: It's not a thing. You're almost making albums for merchandise to sell at live shows because the sales of physical products are so minimal relative to what they used to be. And the money you make, obviously, from streaming is paltry, though I take issue with a lot of people because this is a separate subject, but I think if you own your masters and your publishing, you're always better off. You're going to do better. There's a bunch of people taking a piece of the pie, especially if they're major labels, then it's really a pit in the side, but that's a separate thing.
The album question is funny. Look, you and I came up at a time when that was what you strived for. You wanted to make an album. It wasn't about making singles. The singles period was dead long before we were record buyers. It was about albums. So I always think in terms of ten or twelve songs, a cycle of songs.
And when you're doing that, there are always a few that you think are the best. What I've learned in my career, and especially recently, is I have no idea what the best songs are. First of all, you don't know until you play them in front of people. You just don't. And second of all, it's the famous story of "Benny and the Jets." Elton didn't think it was a hit. And the label was sure that "Jet" by McCartney from Band on the Run, just did not think that was going to break the album. Both of those songs are still with us today, obviously, because they broke huge.
I think as an artist, your relationship to your art is very complicated, just like it is with children, or wives, or girlfriends, or boyfriends, or whatever it is. You can love something without reservation and really not have a clear-eyed view about how great or not great it is, or how it will last or not last.
So this album in particular was a unique situation. In early 2020, I'd come off the road, I'd done a lot of dates, and I had a tour with Earl Slick scheduled for October. It was February, early March. I was just finishing up the last of those shows. Did a charity show at Town Hall for the Woody Guthrie Center with Joan Osborne, and Jeff Tweedy, and it was an amazing night.
A couple of days later, the world shut down. It was pretty grim. We were going to make a record to sell at these shows in the fall—September and October of 2020. So I had already started chipping away at what I wanted to do, the songs I wanted to present to Slick and kind of work on together. When it became obvious that that tour was not going to happen, I already had a couple that I was pretty confident of. "Heartbreak" was one of them that you probably heard.
I thought to myself, you know what? I'm going to, first of all, keep writing because the thing about being in this situation where we're making albums is you're always on a deadline. And there are always three or four that you're pretty confident about, another three or four that you feel good about, but you have a complicated relationship with, and then another couple you just don't know. And that's what a producer's for, obviously, but I feel like, since I'm just at home, I'm gonna take two or three evenings a week, I'm gonna sit at my kitchen table with a guitar and a notebook, and I'm just gonna keep writing until this thing's over.
A lot of the songs that made it to the record that were in the first batch are not there, and the songs that made it to the record, one of them was when the world did start to open up. In fact, it became a single. We were going up to a recording studio to spend a week finishing up. I sat at the kitchen table, wrote two more songs because I just wasn't sure, and sent them over digitally to England to Paul Weller's drummer Ben Gordelier. He cut the drums, sent them to me. By the time we reached the studio, I had the drums, and those two songs got added to the mix.
So, it's a funny thing how, when you don't feel like there's a deadline, you have a different attitude, but that's a very rare occurrence in the life of a musical artist, particularly now, because everything's built around, not an album cycle, but the tour cycle. It's always built around the shows you're going to do. You have a deadline because I know that the month of October this year is going to be full of shows. It's just going to be chock-full. You want to have new merch to see, you want to have new t-shirts and new this and that, and you want to have vinyl and you want to have this, and so I think everything is built around that. It's not like the way it used to be, but I still think in terms of an album as a cycle of songs that memorialize a moment in time for you as an artist.
LP: On that sort of theme of the snapshot in time, it's seeming to me like there's a pretty heavy note of melancholy that is through the couple of songs I heard as well as the album title. Are you cognizant of that or is that just there after the fact? What were you feeling? What were you going through?
Jeff Slate: No, that's the funny thing. I knew the running order very early on in the process. It shuffled a little bit as the songs shuffled a little bit, but I think it is a song cycle. It does talk about a moment in time, and I think that moment in time isn't just me. Like you've heard the song "Till New York City Dies." That is about a relationship, but it's also about when I was walking around during the pandemic, we didn't know what the next date was going to bring. It was really a strange feeling, too, as a musical artist in particular—and I know people who work in day jobs have this experience, too—but your life is mapped out for eighteen months. I mean, I know where I'm playing already in 2025. So to not know any of that was a pretty strange feeling. And obviously, it's something we all went through.
I interviewed Jeff Tweedy for the Wall Street Journal at one point during the pandemic. And he's like, "I don't know who can get away with writing a song about the pandemic," because it was about his book about how to write songs. What a great book. And I get that. I identify with that. I will say this too about your previous question, but this one as well, that there are moments in your career, your very first album, I've had it a couple of times where it feels a bit like a manifesto, it feels a bit like you're taking a left turn or whatever, that you're on a new path creatively or sonically or whatever it is, relationships to players.
And this was one of those moments as well. I definitely chose songs that were, this is recorded by and large during the pandemic when people were working at home and they were available. Every musician I knew had time on their hands. So you could go back and forth and make edits and changes and just sort of bullshit back and forth by FaceTime or whatever. But I wanted a batch of songs that also suited the people I was working with. It wasn't just about me and my creative vision. There was something about the sonic nature I wanted to get right. I wanted it to sound the best. I wanted the playing to be a little less American flavored, have a little more swing to it, a little more of that British flavor that I grew up with and love so much.
The rhythm sections a lot of the time were UK guys and certainly the drummers, it's all UK drummers. So I think there are a lot of factors, but it was the time it was made in, but it was also the place I was in both as a human being living through that experience and also just as a middle-aged guy trying to figure out my place in the world. There's a universality to them, I think, as well.
And with the first single "Heartbreak," people will ask me very specific questions: "Is it about this or is it about that?" They're never right. I mean, that's the really funny thing about it. They never get it. And I think your relationship too changes from the night you sit down and write it to when you record it to when you start playing it live. What it was about initially you may not be even aware of until you start singing it in front of people. You're recording in the studio or you're singing it in front of people night after night and you're like, "Oh, I remember that."
LP: Wow, so the meaning changes or emerges? That's fascinating. To your point about talking to artists about their pandemic experience or their ability to write about the pandemic, it's been really interesting. I haven't done a ton of this, but here and there I've gone back and listened to either conversations I had with artists during the pandemic or just other interviews and podcasters. I feel like if I had more time to consume some of that material from that era I would, because it's been really fascinating to hear, especially the point you brought up about the uncertainty in the life of a touring and working artist, so many artists just not knowing what to do with themselves or exploring.
I had a conversation with Jorma Kaukonen during the pandemic and he was doing these weekly shows. He just happened to have a venue on his property. He was doing these live streams and he was very serious about it. They were scheduled, they had guests and other artists couldn't function. And some artists played with new mediums. There were as many reactions and initiatives as there were artistic temperaments. Were you already a tech-enabled kind of person and familiar with the ability to record remotely or did you have to acquire skills as well to make all this happen?
Jeff Slate: No, I have a studio here at my apartment. It's not a sophisticated one, but the sounds are really good and I've learned over many years how to do that. Not everybody's sounds were equal or as great. Duff McKagan has a studio at his disposal up in Seattle, and he went, he worked with his engineer, and his bass tracks sound like you could put them on any record, 192k, and it would sound fantastic.
Paul Weller's drummer, Ben Gordelier, cut his drums in his kid's bedroom. When the kid wasn't there, he'd set up the drums, and then he'd have to break them down, or, "I can't get the same sound again, because I broke the drums down." You know, it's really funny. And all of it was the jigsaw puzzle of putting it together because you overtrack when you're working separately like that.
So the mixer, this guy Duane Lundy, was able to figure out the jigsaw puzzle and put it together in a way that was sonically interesting and sounded like people in a room, which is the real trick. But I'm not a Luddite, but I'm not super technical by choice. It's kind of like the guitar. I can use it to write a song, but I'm never going to be Jimi Hendrix or whoever. It's just not my goal. It's a tool for me.
I did weekly streaming shows here on Facebook and Instagram, and I had to learn how to do that. And what was it? An iPad or an iPhone or a laptop? Or, you know, what got the best sound? What was the best mic? I ran all of them through my digital recorder and then back out, so they were all recorded and I ended up releasing an album of those, so they're just acoustic performances. Some of them sound great, some of them not, because I didn't worry about mic placement or any of that stuff. It's just stereo mics.
But it was hard and one of the great things about those shows was when people could interact with you. I was singing and playing the guitar and people were firing questions at me. I'm forgetting the word or where I am. If you watch the first couple, they're clunky, but they're charming. And by the end, I think I did better. More than forty of them, just pretty much every week. By the end, it's just a gig. You know, it's like Thursday at four o'clock Eastern, I was gonna be here on my couch, and I was gonna play fifteen or twenty songs, and when I was done, I was done, and I felt like I'd done a show because you're invested in it in a way that you wouldn't think. I was playing to people in my living room, and I quickly figured out it was essentially just a TV performance.
LP: For me, my analog to that, rough as it is, is that recording the podcast throughout the pandemic was super helpful in terms of not only getting out of my own head, focusing on someone else's story and just being present for them, but actually connecting, knowing I was going to connect with someone on a regular basis and talk to somebody outside of my bubble. And the majority of the time it's somebody interesting, going through, like we talked about before, different challenges related to the pandemic. It was so therapeutic, as trite as it might sound. Was there a healing and supportive sort of aspect of why you did the live streams? And did your motivation change?
Jeff Slate: Yeah, I started in April 2020, the first week of April 2020. In April 2020, it was pretty grim here in New York City. And I live within hearing distance of the local hospital. And if you listen to those recordings, you will hear sirens in the background, like constant sirens, if there's a pause or a gap or anything.
And I think part of it was, I mean, I had COVID from being out on the road. When the world shut down within three days, I realized I had COVID and there was no information. I was able to FaceTime with my doctor. He was really on top of it. It was as good an experience as it could have been. His thing was to keep your regular routine, get up in the morning, get at your computer, go through your emails, work out, do yoga, meditate, whatever it is that you're doing, keep that routine.
And I thought, "I'm used to playing." So I picked a day and a time, and I also found a charity that was raising money to bring meals to hospital workers. So I did that and I did that for twenty or fifteen or twenty weeks and then the whole social justice movement took off while I was doing them. So I started raising money for organizations that were paying bail for people who are getting arrested at protests, or there's a Black artists organization here in New York City who are giving grants to painters, various kinds of mixed media artists who couldn't show their work, sell their work, their dealers were closed down.
So I raised a lot of money for things like that. And that felt really good. And it connected me with people who were sitting at home, who I quickly realized were really happy to see me every, it became a thing to see me every Thursday at four o'clock. People would send me screenshots of their cat watching or they had it on their TV in their stereo system or they just had their cup of coffee and it was really sweet, really endearing, but they also were donating a lot of money.
There were weeks where we had eight or ten thousand people streaming it and in, not necessarily in real-time, but over the course of the day or two or three afterward. If 10 percent of those people are giving you twenty or fifty dollars, it's a lot of money. It really adds up. I felt really good about it.
Jeff Slate: Similarly with the album I put out in, I guess it was September, that took all the recorded stuff, sent it to an engineer who, he mixed everything and I just picked. There were probably four or five hundred songs to choose from. And I picked the best ones, I made a playlist, I went through—delete, delete, delete—and made a running order and so forth.
And when I put it out, I expected to sell a few, but I had the T-shirts and CDs. I don't think I have any of those CDs. You know, it's very rare as an artist these days that you order two thousand CDs and they're gone, certainly, maybe over five years or something, but as a small artist, it's rare. The T-shirts, everything went. They just went. And people were buying catalog stuff, and people were just putting money in the tip jar, and it was just a remarkable experience.
There were a lot of DMs, and people were, I don't think lonely was the word so much as disconnected. And anything that connected them to somebody they felt like-minded with, or there were people who did not agree with my politics, and I did not hide my politics, but they hung in there, and some of them didn't, obviously, but, because it's a weird time we live in. But a lot of them did hang in there, and I just think that's an amazing thing in this world we live in.
LP: Tell me a little bit about the cast of characters on the record, on the new record. You had mentioned earlier that people were around, so it was kind of easy to get folks to participate. Would it be a different lineup if not for the pandemic, or were these folks that you would normally be able to tap into anyway?
Jeff Slate: Good question. Between me and the producer and one or two other people, we're all multi-instrumentalists, so I think we probably would have had it covered, but I think what gives it the flavor was when David Bowie died, I did a bunch of pieces where I interviewed his collaborators, and Mike Garson, who played keyboards for him off and on for many years, back to the Spiders from Mars, said something, which he said many times, but I think it was one of the first times he said it, which was that David Bowie treated the people he worked, the musicians he worked with, like a casting director.
He would hear what he wanted in his head, and he couldn't achieve it, but he knew what he wanted, and he knew, that guy could do that, and that guy could do that, and he's not right for that, he is. And I very much took that approach. There were songs where I would get the drums, and I would have, essentially, an acoustic and electric guitar, and a guide vocal for me, so you'd have sort of the basics of it.
I'd send them to the producer and he would throw some stuff on to fill it out. And then I'd listen to them and think, this could be done, because Slick, we were going to do most of Slick's guitars once we were able to go and record them in person because it's more fun. So I knew I had that. Like I said earlier, I can't think of anybody I approached who didn't do it, who didn't say yes.
Actually, that's not true; there's one. Peter Frampton didn't do it. I heard him playing a solo on one of the songs. He didn't do it because at the time he wasn't playing the guitar. He didn't know if he was ever going to play the guitar again. And it was Dion who actually got him to at least try. And obviously, he's back and I think it's great and I wish him the best and he'll be getting a phone call next record.
And the other was Paul Weller who was just so busy doing exactly what I was doing. He just never got to it. And in the end, I think it worked out okay because I think what will probably happen is we'll end up recording something—me and Slick and whoever—at his studio. I've talked to his manager about this and I think if he's there physically present it's going to be a completely different experience. He's going to have a different relationship to the song and the music than if he was just tracking a backing vocal and a little rhythm guitar.
I would have loved to have him on the record and it's certainly a disappointment, but more, I think, for my label, who wanted his name associated. I didn't care about that. And I don't think that matters to people anyway. It mattered to me because I heard him on the track, but once I figured out a way around it because it just, I didn't know if it was going to happen or not, I thought I was going to approach this as if it's not happening. The track was done. And when I did hear back from his engineer, "Yeah, I'll send it to you, but it's, I don't know what he can do now." To be continued.
But everybody else was just at home. And these are people who obviously Earl Slick's on it, Duff McKagan's on it, Ron Blair from the Heartbreakers is on it, Lee Harris from Nick Mason's Saucerful of Secrets, who was in The Blockheads for a while. The guys in Weller's band, Steve Craddock, Ben Gordelier, and people from Noel Gallagher's band. They were just at home.
Some of them, like Talbot, actually wanted to go to a studio. He wanted to play Rhodes and he wanted to play Hammond. He didn't want to use a Nord or whatever. He wanted the real deal. We had to wait a minute till there was like a break in things where he could go to a studio and whatever. And man, he was right. It was a completely different sound.
Jeff Slate: Anyway, it was one of those things where I didn't just email people because they have a name, because I think most of those people are not household names that I just ticked off, maybe Duff, certainly. To me, they were the right people for those songs.
There's a song called "Moving On" which there's a sort of funky, soulful version of it. And on the album, there's a version of it that's much more like "I'm Losing You" from Double Fantasy. And I heard in my head a sort of funkier bass, a groovier bass than certainly I could do or any of the people in my immediate orbit.
So I contacted this woman whose name's Boogie Cindy. She's in a band called the Boogie Wonder Band, which is a disco revue. They play the hits of the '70s and early '80s. And they're huge. They play these giant shows at casinos and outdoors and whatever. And I'd seen her at The Cutting Room here many moons ago. We just struck up, I mean, it's mostly a relationship that's digital because we're both out on the road most of the time, but I knew she was the right person for that track.
And then when I said, "Oh, you know what? I'm going to cut it again." She had done it in E, which is the swampy kind of, "I'm Losing You" version. And I was like, "I think I'm going to cut it in A," which is like, you know, and I can't really use Pro Tools to do that. "Can you just recut it?" And of course, because it was a completely different approach to the song, she came up with a completely new part and played it differently.
Jeff Slate: So these are people who were, they really put their heart and soul and creativity into it in a way that you always try to do that when somebody sends you a track, but I didn't expect everybody to really give their A game, and I really feel like they did.
LP: There are a couple of other things I wanted to talk to you about.
Jeff Slate: Oh, we didn't talk about Dave Stewart, by the way.
LP: Yeah, please, give me a little Dave Stewart rap! That's always welcome.
Jeff Slate: "Broken Without You" was a song that was one of those that I talked about earlier that I wrote the night before the last session, the last batch of in-person sessions, and I heard it in my head as sort of part English folk song and part Smiths, right?
And we cut it. Ben cut the drums. We cut it pretty much on the fly at the studio in Connecticut, Dirt Floor Productions, which Eric Lichter runs. And he's a great Americana producer. And it came out kind of rock. Very straight-ahead rock. And that was fine, but I didn't love it.
And so I was down to the wire where we're like assembling the running order and getting the final mixes and it's going to go off to mastering. And I was going to drop it from the running order. And I had struck up a relationship over the pandemic. I had interviewed Dave Stewart, I think pre-pandemic, but we kept in touch. He's one of these guys who once he decides he likes you, you can't get rid of him. And he's fascinating, just a fascinating guy.
I don't remember if he called me or texted me, I think we were on the phone and he was like, "What are you up to?" And like everybody, it's like just checking in with people during the pandemic. And I said, "Oh, you know, we're reaching the end and I think I'm going to drop this one." "Don't do that. What's wrong with it?" I told him, and he said, "Send it to me, I'll fix it." And I was like, that's insane.
LP: That is fucking insane.
Jeff Slate: He's in the Songwriter's Hall of Fame. He's got Grammys. He's got number-one hits. And okay. So I called up the guy who did the mixing, Duane Lundy. And I said, "Look, Dave wants to remix this song." He's like, "Okay." And he said, "You know what? I want to know. He's friends with Bob Dylan. He was friends with Tom Petty and George Harrison. He's friends with Ringo. What is it about this guy?"
And so I sent it to Dave. He added some guitar, he changed the sonics. If you get the deluxe CD version, the version you'll get on streaming services, it will have in the running order my original version in the running order, which is a kind of meat and potatoes, rock and roll version. And the bonus track is the single version, which is his. I don't know. I think the average listener is maybe not going to hear the difference, but it was a revelation to me when I got it because he had done exactly what needed to be done to lift it from "It's okay" to "Wow, this song." It's got, it just sounds beautiful.
LP: It's fucking crazy, isn't it?
Jeff Slate: If you A/B them, if you took like the left of one and the right of the other, I don't know that you'd necessarily hear so much of a difference, but I do. And it felt different artistically to me, and that was really important. So then the vinyl you're going to get, instead of the rockin' version on the normal running order of the record, I've said this on a few podcasts, I'm curious what people will say when they put the two together if they ever bothered, but I just think his is so far superior.
But I wanted people, so it's almost like releasing a demo and then the final version because it just felt like such a different experience listening to his. And to answer Duane's question, which quite a few people have asked me, I think what he did is exactly the reason people like Dylan and Petty and George Harrison would have him around. He's a great cheerleader. He's just endlessly positive. He's a kook and he's an autodidact and he's just like a fascinating guy who knows a lot about everything, not just a little about everything, but a lot about it. And he's endlessly interested in technology and connecting with people virtually and in person.
And I think having him around for them, he was a peer, a colleague that was maybe a little bit like this for them, but also in their world enough that they felt they could be themselves. And when you have somebody that you can be yourself around, that you can say, "I don't know about this track," and have them go, "No! Don't give up on it!" I mean, that is so valuable to a creative person. That's not what a producer does. That's not what your manager does. That's a friend telling you not to give up. And I think that's a really cool thing.
But at the end of the day, I said to Duane, "I think he's just a really good hang. I mean, he's really fun to talk to."
LP: What's interesting about that too, though, is you think about some of those artists and the scope of some of the records they make, and it only gets more complicated for a lot of them. Or there's this weird middle period where it's like, who am I? What the fuck am I doing? Like, how do I fit in the modern context? And to have somebody like that who's saying, "No, this song is really good," I would imagine it helps with the dark night of the soul a lot of the times.
Jeff Slate: He had success in the '80s when those guys were, certainly it seemed at the time, lost creatively. It's not that they didn't have hits, and it's not that they weren't well regarded, but they weren't the capital letters, big bold names that we think of today. McCartney struggled, Stones struggled, Dylan struggled, and even Petty. Southern Accents was a really hard record for him to make. Long After Dark and Southern Accents... it's not that there aren't great songs, and it's not that he didn't play them to the very end, but the making of those records was difficult.
He was generationally a younger guy than those other guys. So I think when you meet a guy who you can relate to and that you like and who grew up with the same music you did, that deep blues and American, Americana music, Hank Williams and the Carter family and all that, and he's an English guy so he's got a completely different perspective on it too. You can learn something from him but also he was having hits when they weren't. Or they were having hits, but he was having massive hits.
LP: Yeah, part of the culture hits.
Jeff Slate: Yeah, he was part of the cultural firmament, so I think that's attractive to them, and as the relationship developed over time, it just became peer-to-peer, collegial, and I think he's a guy who can say to whoever it is, "Maybe that's not your best, but don't give up on it," and I think that's a crucial thing to have around.
LP: I wanted to shift gears slightly and ask you about, because I love to follow your writing, to blow a little smoke up your ass, specifically in your interviews, what I enjoy, and it's something I try to aspire to, is I really feel like you're the voice of the reader in the interview, and I really appreciate that you ask the questions I want to know about.
But there's also a sensitivity in some of the interviews where it's not about shying away from controversy, it's about like, this isn't really important to drag this person into it. And that came up for me a few times in your Chrissie Hynde interview. It would be so easy to just agitate her and turn it into a thing and get a sensationalized interview with her because she's so easy to get under her skin.
But anytime she started to go that way, we'll link to it in the show notes, you very deftly sort of turned the conversation a little bit and was like, alright, this is about enough heat as we need in this part of the conversation and went on to the next thing. But something that is really fascinating about her in particular, and there's a lot fascinating about her, just the life she's lived and the scenes she's been through over the years, but the fact that she's found this role in the last few years of this opening act role for artists who I would think have lots of choices about who they could bring with them as a support act.
I think about Guns N' Roses or Foo Fighters. And to pick The Pretenders is fascinating to me, sort of point one. But point two is, it's funny because over the years I came to really enjoy that band as an opening act. Even twenty or more years ago, I can remember seeing them open for The Stones or open for Neil Young. An hour or seventy minutes of The Pretenders at the beginning of the night. You're ready then for rock and roll. It's just fucking perfect. What was your relationship with her and the music before you sat with her? Were you a fan?
Jeff Slate: I was a first-generation Pretenders fan. I love James Honeyman-Scott. I thought he was one of the great guitar players of the post-punk era. I just, he was a huge loss. That early version of the band, they were magnificent. They were just the real deal.
And playing music that, not all of us, but many of us musicians cycled through punk pretty quickly. Unless it was really interesting, like The Clash, or was really well crafted, like The Jam, it was pretty easy to reach the bottom quickly. The Pretenders were the next wave that, like Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, who were not a punk band, were really built on roots rock. American rock and roll, playing it back to us with an English sensibility, that swing that Martin Chambers has. But they were pop songs. They were pop songs with an edge.
There are a lot of pop songs with an edge in the '60s. It's just, they weren't the top ten hits. They're the deep cuts that you don't necessarily hear so much anymore. But you could put up any Pretenders song with "Glad All Over." Their "Tattooed Love Boys" goes right along with it. It's that rough and ready kind of, anything from Nuggets outshines that, I think.
I loved them at the beginning. She was such a badass and such an amazing singer, but I loved the songs and James Honeyman-Scott's guitar. I think it was around '84. Yeah, it was '84 when The Clash 2 were touring. The Pretenders were at one end of town and we had been following around The Clash 2 and had gotten to know them a little bit.
I had already gotten to know them a bit in the waning days when Mick Jones was in the band, they were a really important band to me as a kid. Paul Weller and The Clash were just hugely important to me as a kid growing up, but I've maintained those relationships for a reason.
And so we're backstage at, I think, the Agora in Hartford. Chrissie showed up because their show was over. She was like, "Who the fuck are these kids?" Like, "Why are these kids here, Joe?" And Joe went to bat for me and the bass player in my band. He was just that, that was his guy. "Oh, they're okay, man. They're okay." And she left us alone. And I ended up talking to her a little bit that night, but she fascinated me, just fascinated me.
Flash forward five years or so, not even. They were looking for a bass player for a tour and they auditioned and it was like a minute in my life and I, she was not, she didn't play with us. It was, you know, but I did play with Martin and Robbie McIntosh. It was pretty, it's pretty special. It was a pretty cool experience. I think I was a little too young. I was maybe twenty at the time, maybe a little older.
So when we finally connected, I think I interviewed her when she made the record with Dan Auerbach. I told the very short version of those stories. So she knew I was a musician and she could tell the way I talked. And I think that's part of it too, that musicians know another musician right away when you talk to them. We just hit it off.
And her publicist said, "I heard from Chrissie and she loved you. She wants you to come to the show and she's never said that about any interviewer." And she tries, she told me this, cause now we, we, you know, I have a number we text and we keep in touch and whatever. And we have a lot of mutual friends. She will say, she only does one interview a year if she can get away with it, and she covers everything she can possibly cover, and then she just tells the writer, "Cut that up and try to sell it to as many places as you can, because this is all I want to do this year."
And I love that about her, but what it means is, she'll sit on the phone with you for, I think my last interview with her was three hours, for like a thousand-word piece in the Wall Street Journal. She was game to talk about anything and certainly was willing to talk about those controversies you brought up. Her book came out in 2015. It's been covered. She's been pilloried and back again. It's not interesting to me. How can it be interesting for her?
LP: Yeah.
Jeff Slate: And a lot of it was sort of cordial. I was pointing out that there are publishers she worked with to do a book of her paintings. And I said, "You should do a Pretenders oral history." And she's like, "What do you mean?" And I said, "Well, tell the story of the band and you would be the through line. And it just be explained how that worked and heavily illustrated and really beautiful. And then you can do a trade version, whatever. And maybe that could be the model for a documentary about the band because you don't want the band to be forgotten. And you certainly don't want the band's heyday to be forgotten."
And she said she wrote her memoir really just so people wouldn't forget James Honeyman-Scott. She didn't care about sales. She didn't care about it, she wanted his story to be out there. It's funny, she said when they were driving back from Glastonbury, Johnny Marr sat in the band at Glastonbury. They'd found on YouTube, an interview with Jimmy of going through the first two records, what guitar he played, how he approached the sound, how he came up with the parts, and she said she and Johnny, and Johnny told me the story subsequently from his point of view, they were just sitting there like hanging on every word because they didn't even know this existed and I encourage people to look it up it's on YouTube.
I think she has a reason for doing the things she does and she's also just unrepentant about the way she lives her life and I think that's a beautiful thing in 2024.
As far as opening for the artists that she opens for, if you do a tour and you open for Guns N' Roses or the Foo Fighters in particular, who are big fans, the guys in those bands, big fans of The Pretenders, grew up with them. They're roughly our age. That allows you to play on your off days in whatever market you're in, a smallish club or a theater where you don't have to play fifty minutes of hit after hit after hit, the stadium hits, which is great.
LP: Yeah.
Jeff Slate: And, which we all loved. But I went to see her at, at, I guess it was Bowery Electric, while they were on tour with Guns N' Roses last fall. And they didn't do any songs anybody knew, and it was great. It was like two hours plus. And the only song that everybody recognized was "Tattooed Love Boys" because they did it toward the end. You know, it was kind of like get the people going and head into the encore, but the rest of it was deep, deep, deep cuts, which you've got to imagine for somebody like her who's played "Stop Your Sobbing," I don't know, ten thousand times, probably, that's got to be fun, refreshing. It also keeps the band busy and the guys creatively interested and engaged, and it's a smart move on her part.
LP: One other quick thing about a recent piece. So you saw Tommy, you saw the Broadway show. I never saw any of the Broadway productions. It was never enough in my consciousness to make the effort to go after reading your piece. I actually have deep regret about not checking in with it the few times it's been around over the years. You came away, it seems like, pretty favorably disposed. Like they did a good modernization of it.
Jeff Slate: I think so. It's not for everybody. It's moody. It's kind of dark. It's very different for people who are nostalgic for the '93 show. I saw the '93 show probably twenty-five times. Certainly, I saw the second act twenty-five times because it was right at the time I was working with Townshend and we were friends. My girlfriend and his girlfriend were best friends. So we'd double date and that's how we really got to know each other. He ended up executive producing a bunch of demos for me, which next year, I think we're going to put out all ten. There were, I think only three have ever come out. We're going to put out the whole album's worth, which is really exciting. Record Store Day and the whole thing.
But we would hang out at the Royalton Hotel, drinking at the bar or whatever, and then he'd be like, "Oh, it's the second act. Let's go catch the second act and take the cast to dinner" or whatever it was. So I saw that second act many times and got to know that cast. As a rock and roll fan, I think the first time I saw it, as a young rock and roll fan, not very far removed from punk, I wasn't a Broadway guy. It didn't speak to me. I didn't get why you would do it that way and whatever, but it really grew on me.
I could also see that it was an artistic outlet for him that wasn't just about money. There were creative decisions that needed to be made because it's a very meaningful piece of art to him. It put him on the map as a creative person for the world. Prior to that, they were a cult band, essentially. They'd had some hits, but their hits were long gone. And Tommy, they exploded, and Roger became Tommy on stage, and it became this whole other thing.
And so I saw it at the Universal Amphitheater in L.A. when they opened it there. And I think I saw it in London too. I was very fortunate to see it and also be able to not see it through his eyes, but see it on his shoulder a little bit, and how it developed from the previews here in New York to opening night to the Tonys to then going on the road. It was a very interesting thing to watch unfold. Didn't change my mind about Broadway per se. It's just not for me. I mean, dramatic Broadway is one thing, but not musical Broadway.
But I appreciated it as a creative vehicle for the composer, and the director as well, Des McAnuff, who I got to know. I was talking to him a couple of months ago and he's like, "Tommy's opening, you want to come to opening night?" "Yeah, of course, I want to see what they did with it."
And then it turned into a thing where because they wanted to invite all the alums from the '93 cast that could come, as well as his friends, whatever, they were going to be dark the night before, but they did a show. Essentially the bottom of the theater, the upper deck was press and tickets they sold, but the bottom level was almost all people from the original cast, people I hadn't seen in thirty years. And it was just the warmest, nicest feeling.
But I think the one thing everybody agreed on was that they'd leaned on the '93 show where it needed to be leaned on and they'd updated it where they needed to update it. And I don't think anybody took umbrage at the things they updated. And I don't think anybody felt offended that it wasn't them reprising their role from 1993 in the parts that felt a little retro. Again, I don't know if it's for the true blue Who fan, and I don't know if it's for the tourists from Montclair, New Jersey. But it seems to be doing okay. I had a good night. I enjoyed it.
LP: It's fascinating the way he just returns to that work. And to your point, it's clearly about more than just money. It's something that's stuck in his head and his heart for a long time.
Jeff Slate: It was funny when I got to know him, he was really hung up on Tommy because he was in the middle of bringing it to Broadway. I talked about Quadrophenia endlessly. How that didn't leave my turntable for five years as a teenage boy in suburbia.
Interestingly, over the next couple of years, I'd get a phone call periodically. "I was talking to Scott Weiland, he said the same fucking thing." Or "I was talking to Eddie Vedder, he said the same fucking thing. What is it about you guys?" We were like maybe twenty-five or something, twenty-seven at the time, "What is it about you guys and your obsession with Quadrophenia?" And he eventually revisited Quadrophenia.
But it's a very specific time and place in English lore. And the songs are superior. That was, that period from Who's Next to Quadrophenia, he couldn't write a bad song.
LP: Such a kickass album. They're so strong and muscular.
Jeff Slate: It's just, even the outtakes are just magnificent, it's just crazy how good they are. But I think there's a universality and flexibility, a fluidity to Tommy and the story that allows somebody like him to play with it. Whereas Quadrophenia is, it is what it is. It has a beginning, middle, and end. It's a better story, but it wouldn't resonate the same way in a Broadway show.
LP: I think that's fair. Listen, man, good luck with street date and getting back on the road and all that stuff. And it's great to talk to you. And I guess we'll have to do it again in a year and a half, two years. It seems to be our cycle.
Jeff Slate: Next cycle. Yeah. I mean, I'm always game and there's plenty of interviews to talk about. It was interesting. You pulled Chrissie out of it. I liked that. It's usually Ringo, it's usually Dylan. It's usually the people that the interviewer's a little bit starstruck about, which is understandable. I am too.
I liked that and I like talking about that because I hadn't thought about it. She is the real deal. You know when you're reaching the point where she's going to check out from seeing other interviewers fail. Yeah, you've got to take note of that.
And also it's what you said. It's partly as a fellow traveler. I tell this story a lot, but the first time I interviewed David Crosby, who I became really good friends with, I knocked on his hotel room door and I was there for Esquire. He opened the door, and he went, "You're not from Esquire, you are one of us." He knew I dressed like me and I was there for Esquire, but he clocked right away. There's something musicians can tell, somebody who's been on the road, somebody who has that sensibility, whatever, and I think she gets that as well, but I think that's important.
It's important to recognize that for them, and to be respectful, and to come like you know they're, like, I don't interview anybody I don't want to interview. I don't do anything just for the money of it now. I do it because I really want to talk to that person. But I also think when you're interviewing those people, and this is something a lot of managers have said to me, I am there for the audience.
There are things I want to know about, there are rabbit holes I want to go down, and sometimes I will and they don't make it to print. But by and large, I stick to the stuff that I think there's a universal nature for or something that everyone can identify with, even if they only played guitar in their garage on weekends in their 20s and 30s.
You know, it's like there's something they can connect with to that person that other magazines are putting them on a pedestal or trying to tear them down. I don't want to do either of those things. I want to get to know them and I want the audience to get to know them.
LP: That tone comes through. All right, man. Thank you.
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(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
LP: In addition to the quality of the music and the songs themselves, which I want to talk about next, I have to ask, what do you think about the how and the why of the full-length record in 2024? Is it your artistic statement? Do you think in terms of albums? Because it's no longer intuitive that that's the form.
Jeff Slate: It's not a thing. You're almost making albums for merchandise to sell at live shows because the sales of physical products are so minimal relative to what they used to be. And the money you make, obviously, from streaming is paltry, though I take issue with a lot of people because this is a separate subject, but I think if you own your masters and your publishing, you're always better off. You're going to do better. There's a bunch of people taking a piece of the pie, especially if they're major labels, then it's really a pit in the side, but that's a separate thing.
The album question is funny. Look, you and I came up at a time when that was what you strived for. You wanted to make an album. It wasn't about making singles. The singles period was dead long before we were record buyers. It was about albums. So I always think in terms of ten or twelve songs, a cycle of songs.
And when you're doing that, there are always a few that you think are the best. What I've learned in my career, and especially recently, is I have no idea what the best songs are. First of all, you don't know until you play them in front of people. You just don't. And second of all, it's the famous story of "Benny and the Jets." Elton didn't think it was a hit. And the label was sure that "Jet" by McCartney from Band on the Run, just did not think that was going to break the album. Both of those songs are still with us today, obviously, because they broke huge.
I think as an artist, your relationship to your art is very complicated, just like it is with children, or wives, or girlfriends, or boyfriends, or whatever it is. You can love something without reservation and really not have a clear-eyed view about how great or not great it is, or how it will last or not last.
So this album in particular was a unique situation. In early 2020, I'd come off the road, I'd done a lot of dates, and I had a tour with Earl Slick scheduled for October. It was February, early March. I was just finishing up the last of those shows. Did a charity show at Town Hall for the Woody Guthrie Center with Joan Osborne, and Jeff Tweedy, and it was an amazing night.
A couple of days later, the world shut down. It was pretty grim. We were going to make a record to sell at these shows in the fall—September and October of 2020. So I had already started chipping away at what I wanted to do, the songs I wanted to present to Slick and kind of work on together. When it became obvious that that tour was not going to happen, I already had a couple that I was pretty confident of. "Heartbreak" was one of them that you probably heard.
I thought to myself, you know what? I'm going to, first of all, keep writing because the thing about being in this situation where we're making albums is you're always on a deadline. And there are always three or four that you're pretty confident about, another three or four that you feel good about, but you have a complicated relationship with, and then another couple you just don't know. And that's what a producer's for, obviously, but I feel like, since I'm just at home, I'm gonna take two or three evenings a week, I'm gonna sit at my kitchen table with a guitar and a notebook, and I'm just gonna keep writing until this thing's over.
A lot of the songs that made it to the record that were in the first batch are not there, and the songs that made it to the record, one of them was when the world did start to open up. In fact, it became a single. We were going up to a recording studio to spend a week finishing up. I sat at the kitchen table, wrote two more songs because I just wasn't sure, and sent them over digitally to England to Paul Weller's drummer Ben Gordelier. He cut the drums, sent them to me. By the time we reached the studio, I had the drums, and those two songs got added to the mix.
So, it's a funny thing how, when you don't feel like there's a deadline, you have a different attitude, but that's a very rare occurrence in the life of a musical artist, particularly now, because everything's built around, not an album cycle, but the tour cycle. It's always built around the shows you're going to do. You have a deadline because I know that the month of October this year is going to be full of shows. It's just going to be chock-full. You want to have new merch to see, you want to have new t-shirts and new this and that, and you want to have vinyl and you want to have this, and so I think everything is built around that. It's not like the way it used to be, but I still think in terms of an album as a cycle of songs that memorialize a moment in time for you as an artist.
LP: On that sort of theme of the snapshot in time, it's seeming to me like there's a pretty heavy note of melancholy that is through the couple of songs I heard as well as the album title. Are you cognizant of that or is that just there after the fact? What were you feeling? What were you going through?
Jeff Slate: No, that's the funny thing. I knew the running order very early on in the process. It shuffled a little bit as the songs shuffled a little bit, but I think it is a song cycle. It does talk about a moment in time, and I think that moment in time isn't just me. Like you've heard the song "Till New York City Dies." That is about a relationship, but it's also about when I was walking around during the pandemic, we didn't know what the next date was going to bring. It was really a strange feeling, too, as a musical artist in particular—and I know people who work in day jobs have this experience, too—but your life is mapped out for eighteen months. I mean, I know where I'm playing already in 2025. So to not know any of that was a pretty strange feeling. And obviously, it's something we all went through.
I interviewed Jeff Tweedy for the Wall Street Journal at one point during the pandemic. And he's like, "I don't know who can get away with writing a song about the pandemic," because it was about his book about how to write songs. What a great book. And I get that. I identify with that. I will say this too about your previous question, but this one as well, that there are moments in your career, your very first album, I've had it a couple of times where it feels a bit like a manifesto, it feels a bit like you're taking a left turn or whatever, that you're on a new path creatively or sonically or whatever it is, relationships to players.
And this was one of those moments as well. I definitely chose songs that were, this is recorded by and large during the pandemic when people were working at home and they were available. Every musician I knew had time on their hands. So you could go back and forth and make edits and changes and just sort of bullshit back and forth by FaceTime or whatever. But I wanted a batch of songs that also suited the people I was working with. It wasn't just about me and my creative vision. There was something about the sonic nature I wanted to get right. I wanted it to sound the best. I wanted the playing to be a little less American flavored, have a little more swing to it, a little more of that British flavor that I grew up with and love so much.
The rhythm sections a lot of the time were UK guys and certainly the drummers, it's all UK drummers. So I think there are a lot of factors, but it was the time it was made in, but it was also the place I was in both as a human being living through that experience and also just as a middle-aged guy trying to figure out my place in the world. There's a universality to them, I think, as well.
And with the first single "Heartbreak," people will ask me very specific questions: "Is it about this or is it about that?" They're never right. I mean, that's the really funny thing about it. They never get it. And I think your relationship too changes from the night you sit down and write it to when you record it to when you start playing it live. What it was about initially you may not be even aware of until you start singing it in front of people. You're recording in the studio or you're singing it in front of people night after night and you're like, "Oh, I remember that."
LP: Wow, so the meaning changes or emerges? That's fascinating. To your point about talking to artists about their pandemic experience or their ability to write about the pandemic, it's been really interesting. I haven't done a ton of this, but here and there I've gone back and listened to either conversations I had with artists during the pandemic or just other interviews and podcasters. I feel like if I had more time to consume some of that material from that era I would, because it's been really fascinating to hear, especially the point you brought up about the uncertainty in the life of a touring and working artist, so many artists just not knowing what to do with themselves or exploring.
I had a conversation with Jorma Kaukonen during the pandemic and he was doing these weekly shows. He just happened to have a venue on his property. He was doing these live streams and he was very serious about it. They were scheduled, they had guests and other artists couldn't function. And some artists played with new mediums. There were as many reactions and initiatives as there were artistic temperaments. Were you already a tech-enabled kind of person and familiar with the ability to record remotely or did you have to acquire skills as well to make all this happen?
Jeff Slate: No, I have a studio here at my apartment. It's not a sophisticated one, but the sounds are really good and I've learned over many years how to do that. Not everybody's sounds were equal or as great. Duff McKagan has a studio at his disposal up in Seattle, and he went, he worked with his engineer, and his bass tracks sound like you could put them on any record, 192k, and it would sound fantastic.
Paul Weller's drummer, Ben Gordelier, cut his drums in his kid's bedroom. When the kid wasn't there, he'd set up the drums, and then he'd have to break them down, or, "I can't get the same sound again, because I broke the drums down." You know, it's really funny. And all of it was the jigsaw puzzle of putting it together because you overtrack when you're working separately like that.
So the mixer, this guy Duane Lundy, was able to figure out the jigsaw puzzle and put it together in a way that was sonically interesting and sounded like people in a room, which is the real trick. But I'm not a Luddite, but I'm not super technical by choice. It's kind of like the guitar. I can use it to write a song, but I'm never going to be Jimi Hendrix or whoever. It's just not my goal. It's a tool for me.
I did weekly streaming shows here on Facebook and Instagram, and I had to learn how to do that. And what was it? An iPad or an iPhone or a laptop? Or, you know, what got the best sound? What was the best mic? I ran all of them through my digital recorder and then back out, so they were all recorded and I ended up releasing an album of those, so they're just acoustic performances. Some of them sound great, some of them not, because I didn't worry about mic placement or any of that stuff. It's just stereo mics.
But it was hard and one of the great things about those shows was when people could interact with you. I was singing and playing the guitar and people were firing questions at me. I'm forgetting the word or where I am. If you watch the first couple, they're clunky, but they're charming. And by the end, I think I did better. More than forty of them, just pretty much every week. By the end, it's just a gig. You know, it's like Thursday at four o'clock Eastern, I was gonna be here on my couch, and I was gonna play fifteen or twenty songs, and when I was done, I was done, and I felt like I'd done a show because you're invested in it in a way that you wouldn't think. I was playing to people in my living room, and I quickly figured out it was essentially just a TV performance.
LP: For me, my analog to that, rough as it is, is that recording the podcast throughout the pandemic was super helpful in terms of not only getting out of my own head, focusing on someone else's story and just being present for them, but actually connecting, knowing I was going to connect with someone on a regular basis and talk to somebody outside of my bubble. And the majority of the time it's somebody interesting, going through, like we talked about before, different challenges related to the pandemic. It was so therapeutic, as trite as it might sound. Was there a healing and supportive sort of aspect of why you did the live streams? And did your motivation change?
Jeff Slate: Yeah, I started in April 2020, the first week of April 2020. In April 2020, it was pretty grim here in New York City. And I live within hearing distance of the local hospital. And if you listen to those recordings, you will hear sirens in the background, like constant sirens, if there's a pause or a gap or anything.
And I think part of it was, I mean, I had COVID from being out on the road. When the world shut down within three days, I realized I had COVID and there was no information. I was able to FaceTime with my doctor. He was really on top of it. It was as good an experience as it could have been. His thing was to keep your regular routine, get up in the morning, get at your computer, go through your emails, work out, do yoga, meditate, whatever it is that you're doing, keep that routine.
And I thought, "I'm used to playing." So I picked a day and a time, and I also found a charity that was raising money to bring meals to hospital workers. So I did that and I did that for twenty or fifteen or twenty weeks and then the whole social justice movement took off while I was doing them. So I started raising money for organizations that were paying bail for people who are getting arrested at protests, or there's a Black artists organization here in New York City who are giving grants to painters, various kinds of mixed media artists who couldn't show their work, sell their work, their dealers were closed down.
So I raised a lot of money for things like that. And that felt really good. And it connected me with people who were sitting at home, who I quickly realized were really happy to see me every, it became a thing to see me every Thursday at four o'clock. People would send me screenshots of their cat watching or they had it on their TV in their stereo system or they just had their cup of coffee and it was really sweet, really endearing, but they also were donating a lot of money.
There were weeks where we had eight or ten thousand people streaming it and in, not necessarily in real-time, but over the course of the day or two or three afterward. If 10 percent of those people are giving you twenty or fifty dollars, it's a lot of money. It really adds up. I felt really good about it.
Jeff Slate: Similarly with the album I put out in, I guess it was September, that took all the recorded stuff, sent it to an engineer who, he mixed everything and I just picked. There were probably four or five hundred songs to choose from. And I picked the best ones, I made a playlist, I went through—delete, delete, delete—and made a running order and so forth.
And when I put it out, I expected to sell a few, but I had the T-shirts and CDs. I don't think I have any of those CDs. You know, it's very rare as an artist these days that you order two thousand CDs and they're gone, certainly, maybe over five years or something, but as a small artist, it's rare. The T-shirts, everything went. They just went. And people were buying catalog stuff, and people were just putting money in the tip jar, and it was just a remarkable experience.
There were a lot of DMs, and people were, I don't think lonely was the word so much as disconnected. And anything that connected them to somebody they felt like-minded with, or there were people who did not agree with my politics, and I did not hide my politics, but they hung in there, and some of them didn't, obviously, but, because it's a weird time we live in. But a lot of them did hang in there, and I just think that's an amazing thing in this world we live in.
LP: Tell me a little bit about the cast of characters on the record, on the new record. You had mentioned earlier that people were around, so it was kind of easy to get folks to participate. Would it be a different lineup if not for the pandemic, or were these folks that you would normally be able to tap into anyway?
Jeff Slate: Good question. Between me and the producer and one or two other people, we're all multi-instrumentalists, so I think we probably would have had it covered, but I think what gives it the flavor was when David Bowie died, I did a bunch of pieces where I interviewed his collaborators, and Mike Garson, who played keyboards for him off and on for many years, back to the Spiders from Mars, said something, which he said many times, but I think it was one of the first times he said it, which was that David Bowie treated the people he worked, the musicians he worked with, like a casting director.
He would hear what he wanted in his head, and he couldn't achieve it, but he knew what he wanted, and he knew, that guy could do that, and that guy could do that, and he's not right for that, he is. And I very much took that approach. There were songs where I would get the drums, and I would have, essentially, an acoustic and electric guitar, and a guide vocal for me, so you'd have sort of the basics of it.
I'd send them to the producer and he would throw some stuff on to fill it out. And then I'd listen to them and think, this could be done, because Slick, we were going to do most of Slick's guitars once we were able to go and record them in person because it's more fun. So I knew I had that. Like I said earlier, I can't think of anybody I approached who didn't do it, who didn't say yes.
Actually, that's not true; there's one. Peter Frampton didn't do it. I heard him playing a solo on one of the songs. He didn't do it because at the time he wasn't playing the guitar. He didn't know if he was ever going to play the guitar again. And it was Dion who actually got him to at least try. And obviously, he's back and I think it's great and I wish him the best and he'll be getting a phone call next record.
And the other was Paul Weller who was just so busy doing exactly what I was doing. He just never got to it. And in the end, I think it worked out okay because I think what will probably happen is we'll end up recording something—me and Slick and whoever—at his studio. I've talked to his manager about this and I think if he's there physically present it's going to be a completely different experience. He's going to have a different relationship to the song and the music than if he was just tracking a backing vocal and a little rhythm guitar.
I would have loved to have him on the record and it's certainly a disappointment, but more, I think, for my label, who wanted his name associated. I didn't care about that. And I don't think that matters to people anyway. It mattered to me because I heard him on the track, but once I figured out a way around it because it just, I didn't know if it was going to happen or not, I thought I was going to approach this as if it's not happening. The track was done. And when I did hear back from his engineer, "Yeah, I'll send it to you, but it's, I don't know what he can do now." To be continued.
But everybody else was just at home. And these are people who obviously Earl Slick's on it, Duff McKagan's on it, Ron Blair from the Heartbreakers is on it, Lee Harris from Nick Mason's Saucerful of Secrets, who was in The Blockheads for a while. The guys in Weller's band, Steve Craddock, Ben Gordelier, and people from Noel Gallagher's band. They were just at home.
Some of them, like Talbot, actually wanted to go to a studio. He wanted to play Rhodes and he wanted to play Hammond. He didn't want to use a Nord or whatever. He wanted the real deal. We had to wait a minute till there was like a break in things where he could go to a studio and whatever. And man, he was right. It was a completely different sound.
Jeff Slate: Anyway, it was one of those things where I didn't just email people because they have a name, because I think most of those people are not household names that I just ticked off, maybe Duff, certainly. To me, they were the right people for those songs.
There's a song called "Moving On" which there's a sort of funky, soulful version of it. And on the album, there's a version of it that's much more like "I'm Losing You" from Double Fantasy. And I heard in my head a sort of funkier bass, a groovier bass than certainly I could do or any of the people in my immediate orbit.
So I contacted this woman whose name's Boogie Cindy. She's in a band called the Boogie Wonder Band, which is a disco revue. They play the hits of the '70s and early '80s. And they're huge. They play these giant shows at casinos and outdoors and whatever. And I'd seen her at The Cutting Room here many moons ago. We just struck up, I mean, it's mostly a relationship that's digital because we're both out on the road most of the time, but I knew she was the right person for that track.
And then when I said, "Oh, you know what? I'm going to cut it again." She had done it in E, which is the swampy kind of, "I'm Losing You" version. And I was like, "I think I'm going to cut it in A," which is like, you know, and I can't really use Pro Tools to do that. "Can you just recut it?" And of course, because it was a completely different approach to the song, she came up with a completely new part and played it differently.
Jeff Slate: So these are people who were, they really put their heart and soul and creativity into it in a way that you always try to do that when somebody sends you a track, but I didn't expect everybody to really give their A game, and I really feel like they did.
LP: There are a couple of other things I wanted to talk to you about.
Jeff Slate: Oh, we didn't talk about Dave Stewart, by the way.
LP: Yeah, please, give me a little Dave Stewart rap! That's always welcome.
Jeff Slate: "Broken Without You" was a song that was one of those that I talked about earlier that I wrote the night before the last session, the last batch of in-person sessions, and I heard it in my head as sort of part English folk song and part Smiths, right?
And we cut it. Ben cut the drums. We cut it pretty much on the fly at the studio in Connecticut, Dirt Floor Productions, which Eric Lichter runs. And he's a great Americana producer. And it came out kind of rock. Very straight-ahead rock. And that was fine, but I didn't love it.
And so I was down to the wire where we're like assembling the running order and getting the final mixes and it's going to go off to mastering. And I was going to drop it from the running order. And I had struck up a relationship over the pandemic. I had interviewed Dave Stewart, I think pre-pandemic, but we kept in touch. He's one of these guys who once he decides he likes you, you can't get rid of him. And he's fascinating, just a fascinating guy.
I don't remember if he called me or texted me, I think we were on the phone and he was like, "What are you up to?" And like everybody, it's like just checking in with people during the pandemic. And I said, "Oh, you know, we're reaching the end and I think I'm going to drop this one." "Don't do that. What's wrong with it?" I told him, and he said, "Send it to me, I'll fix it." And I was like, that's insane.
LP: That is fucking insane.
Jeff Slate: He's in the Songwriter's Hall of Fame. He's got Grammys. He's got number-one hits. And okay. So I called up the guy who did the mixing, Duane Lundy. And I said, "Look, Dave wants to remix this song." He's like, "Okay." And he said, "You know what? I want to know. He's friends with Bob Dylan. He was friends with Tom Petty and George Harrison. He's friends with Ringo. What is it about this guy?"
And so I sent it to Dave. He added some guitar, he changed the sonics. If you get the deluxe CD version, the version you'll get on streaming services, it will have in the running order my original version in the running order, which is a kind of meat and potatoes, rock and roll version. And the bonus track is the single version, which is his. I don't know. I think the average listener is maybe not going to hear the difference, but it was a revelation to me when I got it because he had done exactly what needed to be done to lift it from "It's okay" to "Wow, this song." It's got, it just sounds beautiful.
LP: It's fucking crazy, isn't it?
Jeff Slate: If you A/B them, if you took like the left of one and the right of the other, I don't know that you'd necessarily hear so much of a difference, but I do. And it felt different artistically to me, and that was really important. So then the vinyl you're going to get, instead of the rockin' version on the normal running order of the record, I've said this on a few podcasts, I'm curious what people will say when they put the two together if they ever bothered, but I just think his is so far superior.
But I wanted people, so it's almost like releasing a demo and then the final version because it just felt like such a different experience listening to his. And to answer Duane's question, which quite a few people have asked me, I think what he did is exactly the reason people like Dylan and Petty and George Harrison would have him around. He's a great cheerleader. He's just endlessly positive. He's a kook and he's an autodidact and he's just like a fascinating guy who knows a lot about everything, not just a little about everything, but a lot about it. And he's endlessly interested in technology and connecting with people virtually and in person.
And I think having him around for them, he was a peer, a colleague that was maybe a little bit like this for them, but also in their world enough that they felt they could be themselves. And when you have somebody that you can be yourself around, that you can say, "I don't know about this track," and have them go, "No! Don't give up on it!" I mean, that is so valuable to a creative person. That's not what a producer does. That's not what your manager does. That's a friend telling you not to give up. And I think that's a really cool thing.
But at the end of the day, I said to Duane, "I think he's just a really good hang. I mean, he's really fun to talk to."
LP: What's interesting about that too, though, is you think about some of those artists and the scope of some of the records they make, and it only gets more complicated for a lot of them. Or there's this weird middle period where it's like, who am I? What the fuck am I doing? Like, how do I fit in the modern context? And to have somebody like that who's saying, "No, this song is really good," I would imagine it helps with the dark night of the soul a lot of the times.
Jeff Slate: He had success in the '80s when those guys were, certainly it seemed at the time, lost creatively. It's not that they didn't have hits, and it's not that they weren't well regarded, but they weren't the capital letters, big bold names that we think of today. McCartney struggled, Stones struggled, Dylan struggled, and even Petty. Southern Accents was a really hard record for him to make. Long After Dark and Southern Accents... it's not that there aren't great songs, and it's not that he didn't play them to the very end, but the making of those records was difficult.
He was generationally a younger guy than those other guys. So I think when you meet a guy who you can relate to and that you like and who grew up with the same music you did, that deep blues and American, Americana music, Hank Williams and the Carter family and all that, and he's an English guy so he's got a completely different perspective on it too. You can learn something from him but also he was having hits when they weren't. Or they were having hits, but he was having massive hits.
LP: Yeah, part of the culture hits.
Jeff Slate: Yeah, he was part of the cultural firmament, so I think that's attractive to them, and as the relationship developed over time, it just became peer-to-peer, collegial, and I think he's a guy who can say to whoever it is, "Maybe that's not your best, but don't give up on it," and I think that's a crucial thing to have around.
LP: I wanted to shift gears slightly and ask you about, because I love to follow your writing, to blow a little smoke up your ass, specifically in your interviews, what I enjoy, and it's something I try to aspire to, is I really feel like you're the voice of the reader in the interview, and I really appreciate that you ask the questions I want to know about.
But there's also a sensitivity in some of the interviews where it's not about shying away from controversy, it's about like, this isn't really important to drag this person into it. And that came up for me a few times in your Chrissie Hynde interview. It would be so easy to just agitate her and turn it into a thing and get a sensationalized interview with her because she's so easy to get under her skin.
But anytime she started to go that way, we'll link to it in the show notes, you very deftly sort of turned the conversation a little bit and was like, alright, this is about enough heat as we need in this part of the conversation and went on to the next thing. But something that is really fascinating about her in particular, and there's a lot fascinating about her, just the life she's lived and the scenes she's been through over the years, but the fact that she's found this role in the last few years of this opening act role for artists who I would think have lots of choices about who they could bring with them as a support act.
I think about Guns N' Roses or Foo Fighters. And to pick The Pretenders is fascinating to me, sort of point one. But point two is, it's funny because over the years I came to really enjoy that band as an opening act. Even twenty or more years ago, I can remember seeing them open for The Stones or open for Neil Young. An hour or seventy minutes of The Pretenders at the beginning of the night. You're ready then for rock and roll. It's just fucking perfect. What was your relationship with her and the music before you sat with her? Were you a fan?
Jeff Slate: I was a first-generation Pretenders fan. I love James Honeyman-Scott. I thought he was one of the great guitar players of the post-punk era. I just, he was a huge loss. That early version of the band, they were magnificent. They were just the real deal.
And playing music that, not all of us, but many of us musicians cycled through punk pretty quickly. Unless it was really interesting, like The Clash, or was really well crafted, like The Jam, it was pretty easy to reach the bottom quickly. The Pretenders were the next wave that, like Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, who were not a punk band, were really built on roots rock. American rock and roll, playing it back to us with an English sensibility, that swing that Martin Chambers has. But they were pop songs. They were pop songs with an edge.
There are a lot of pop songs with an edge in the '60s. It's just, they weren't the top ten hits. They're the deep cuts that you don't necessarily hear so much anymore. But you could put up any Pretenders song with "Glad All Over." Their "Tattooed Love Boys" goes right along with it. It's that rough and ready kind of, anything from Nuggets outshines that, I think.
I loved them at the beginning. She was such a badass and such an amazing singer, but I loved the songs and James Honeyman-Scott's guitar. I think it was around '84. Yeah, it was '84 when The Clash 2 were touring. The Pretenders were at one end of town and we had been following around The Clash 2 and had gotten to know them a little bit.
I had already gotten to know them a bit in the waning days when Mick Jones was in the band, they were a really important band to me as a kid. Paul Weller and The Clash were just hugely important to me as a kid growing up, but I've maintained those relationships for a reason.
And so we're backstage at, I think, the Agora in Hartford. Chrissie showed up because their show was over. She was like, "Who the fuck are these kids?" Like, "Why are these kids here, Joe?" And Joe went to bat for me and the bass player in my band. He was just that, that was his guy. "Oh, they're okay, man. They're okay." And she left us alone. And I ended up talking to her a little bit that night, but she fascinated me, just fascinated me.
Flash forward five years or so, not even. They were looking for a bass player for a tour and they auditioned and it was like a minute in my life and I, she was not, she didn't play with us. It was, you know, but I did play with Martin and Robbie McIntosh. It was pretty, it's pretty special. It was a pretty cool experience. I think I was a little too young. I was maybe twenty at the time, maybe a little older.
So when we finally connected, I think I interviewed her when she made the record with Dan Auerbach. I told the very short version of those stories. So she knew I was a musician and she could tell the way I talked. And I think that's part of it too, that musicians know another musician right away when you talk to them. We just hit it off.
And her publicist said, "I heard from Chrissie and she loved you. She wants you to come to the show and she's never said that about any interviewer." And she tries, she told me this, cause now we, we, you know, I have a number we text and we keep in touch and whatever. And we have a lot of mutual friends. She will say, she only does one interview a year if she can get away with it, and she covers everything she can possibly cover, and then she just tells the writer, "Cut that up and try to sell it to as many places as you can, because this is all I want to do this year."
And I love that about her, but what it means is, she'll sit on the phone with you for, I think my last interview with her was three hours, for like a thousand-word piece in the Wall Street Journal. She was game to talk about anything and certainly was willing to talk about those controversies you brought up. Her book came out in 2015. It's been covered. She's been pilloried and back again. It's not interesting to me. How can it be interesting for her?
LP: Yeah.
Jeff Slate: And a lot of it was sort of cordial. I was pointing out that there are publishers she worked with to do a book of her paintings. And I said, "You should do a Pretenders oral history." And she's like, "What do you mean?" And I said, "Well, tell the story of the band and you would be the through line. And it just be explained how that worked and heavily illustrated and really beautiful. And then you can do a trade version, whatever. And maybe that could be the model for a documentary about the band because you don't want the band to be forgotten. And you certainly don't want the band's heyday to be forgotten."
And she said she wrote her memoir really just so people wouldn't forget James Honeyman-Scott. She didn't care about sales. She didn't care about it, she wanted his story to be out there. It's funny, she said when they were driving back from Glastonbury, Johnny Marr sat in the band at Glastonbury. They'd found on YouTube, an interview with Jimmy of going through the first two records, what guitar he played, how he approached the sound, how he came up with the parts, and she said she and Johnny, and Johnny told me the story subsequently from his point of view, they were just sitting there like hanging on every word because they didn't even know this existed and I encourage people to look it up it's on YouTube.
I think she has a reason for doing the things she does and she's also just unrepentant about the way she lives her life and I think that's a beautiful thing in 2024.
As far as opening for the artists that she opens for, if you do a tour and you open for Guns N' Roses or the Foo Fighters in particular, who are big fans, the guys in those bands, big fans of The Pretenders, grew up with them. They're roughly our age. That allows you to play on your off days in whatever market you're in, a smallish club or a theater where you don't have to play fifty minutes of hit after hit after hit, the stadium hits, which is great.
LP: Yeah.
Jeff Slate: And, which we all loved. But I went to see her at, at, I guess it was Bowery Electric, while they were on tour with Guns N' Roses last fall. And they didn't do any songs anybody knew, and it was great. It was like two hours plus. And the only song that everybody recognized was "Tattooed Love Boys" because they did it toward the end. You know, it was kind of like get the people going and head into the encore, but the rest of it was deep, deep, deep cuts, which you've got to imagine for somebody like her who's played "Stop Your Sobbing," I don't know, ten thousand times, probably, that's got to be fun, refreshing. It also keeps the band busy and the guys creatively interested and engaged, and it's a smart move on her part.
LP: One other quick thing about a recent piece. So you saw Tommy, you saw the Broadway show. I never saw any of the Broadway productions. It was never enough in my consciousness to make the effort to go after reading your piece. I actually have deep regret about not checking in with it the few times it's been around over the years. You came away, it seems like, pretty favorably disposed. Like they did a good modernization of it.
Jeff Slate: I think so. It's not for everybody. It's moody. It's kind of dark. It's very different for people who are nostalgic for the '93 show. I saw the '93 show probably twenty-five times. Certainly, I saw the second act twenty-five times because it was right at the time I was working with Townshend and we were friends. My girlfriend and his girlfriend were best friends. So we'd double date and that's how we really got to know each other. He ended up executive producing a bunch of demos for me, which next year, I think we're going to put out all ten. There were, I think only three have ever come out. We're going to put out the whole album's worth, which is really exciting. Record Store Day and the whole thing.
But we would hang out at the Royalton Hotel, drinking at the bar or whatever, and then he'd be like, "Oh, it's the second act. Let's go catch the second act and take the cast to dinner" or whatever it was. So I saw that second act many times and got to know that cast. As a rock and roll fan, I think the first time I saw it, as a young rock and roll fan, not very far removed from punk, I wasn't a Broadway guy. It didn't speak to me. I didn't get why you would do it that way and whatever, but it really grew on me.
I could also see that it was an artistic outlet for him that wasn't just about money. There were creative decisions that needed to be made because it's a very meaningful piece of art to him. It put him on the map as a creative person for the world. Prior to that, they were a cult band, essentially. They'd had some hits, but their hits were long gone. And Tommy, they exploded, and Roger became Tommy on stage, and it became this whole other thing.
And so I saw it at the Universal Amphitheater in L.A. when they opened it there. And I think I saw it in London too. I was very fortunate to see it and also be able to not see it through his eyes, but see it on his shoulder a little bit, and how it developed from the previews here in New York to opening night to the Tonys to then going on the road. It was a very interesting thing to watch unfold. Didn't change my mind about Broadway per se. It's just not for me. I mean, dramatic Broadway is one thing, but not musical Broadway.
But I appreciated it as a creative vehicle for the composer, and the director as well, Des McAnuff, who I got to know. I was talking to him a couple of months ago and he's like, "Tommy's opening, you want to come to opening night?" "Yeah, of course, I want to see what they did with it."
And then it turned into a thing where because they wanted to invite all the alums from the '93 cast that could come, as well as his friends, whatever, they were going to be dark the night before, but they did a show. Essentially the bottom of the theater, the upper deck was press and tickets they sold, but the bottom level was almost all people from the original cast, people I hadn't seen in thirty years. And it was just the warmest, nicest feeling.
But I think the one thing everybody agreed on was that they'd leaned on the '93 show where it needed to be leaned on and they'd updated it where they needed to update it. And I don't think anybody took umbrage at the things they updated. And I don't think anybody felt offended that it wasn't them reprising their role from 1993 in the parts that felt a little retro. Again, I don't know if it's for the true blue Who fan, and I don't know if it's for the tourists from Montclair, New Jersey. But it seems to be doing okay. I had a good night. I enjoyed it.
LP: It's fascinating the way he just returns to that work. And to your point, it's clearly about more than just money. It's something that's stuck in his head and his heart for a long time.
Jeff Slate: It was funny when I got to know him, he was really hung up on Tommy because he was in the middle of bringing it to Broadway. I talked about Quadrophenia endlessly. How that didn't leave my turntable for five years as a teenage boy in suburbia.
Interestingly, over the next couple of years, I'd get a phone call periodically. "I was talking to Scott Weiland, he said the same fucking thing." Or "I was talking to Eddie Vedder, he said the same fucking thing. What is it about you guys?" We were like maybe twenty-five or something, twenty-seven at the time, "What is it about you guys and your obsession with Quadrophenia?" And he eventually revisited Quadrophenia.
But it's a very specific time and place in English lore. And the songs are superior. That was, that period from Who's Next to Quadrophenia, he couldn't write a bad song.
LP: Such a kickass album. They're so strong and muscular.
Jeff Slate: It's just, even the outtakes are just magnificent, it's just crazy how good they are. But I think there's a universality and flexibility, a fluidity to Tommy and the story that allows somebody like him to play with it. Whereas Quadrophenia is, it is what it is. It has a beginning, middle, and end. It's a better story, but it wouldn't resonate the same way in a Broadway show.
LP: I think that's fair. Listen, man, good luck with street date and getting back on the road and all that stuff. And it's great to talk to you. And I guess we'll have to do it again in a year and a half, two years. It seems to be our cycle.
Jeff Slate: Next cycle. Yeah. I mean, I'm always game and there's plenty of interviews to talk about. It was interesting. You pulled Chrissie out of it. I liked that. It's usually Ringo, it's usually Dylan. It's usually the people that the interviewer's a little bit starstruck about, which is understandable. I am too.
I liked that and I like talking about that because I hadn't thought about it. She is the real deal. You know when you're reaching the point where she's going to check out from seeing other interviewers fail. Yeah, you've got to take note of that.
And also it's what you said. It's partly as a fellow traveler. I tell this story a lot, but the first time I interviewed David Crosby, who I became really good friends with, I knocked on his hotel room door and I was there for Esquire. He opened the door, and he went, "You're not from Esquire, you are one of us." He knew I dressed like me and I was there for Esquire, but he clocked right away. There's something musicians can tell, somebody who's been on the road, somebody who has that sensibility, whatever, and I think she gets that as well, but I think that's important.
It's important to recognize that for them, and to be respectful, and to come like you know they're, like, I don't interview anybody I don't want to interview. I don't do anything just for the money of it now. I do it because I really want to talk to that person. But I also think when you're interviewing those people, and this is something a lot of managers have said to me, I am there for the audience.
There are things I want to know about, there are rabbit holes I want to go down, and sometimes I will and they don't make it to print. But by and large, I stick to the stuff that I think there's a universal nature for or something that everyone can identify with, even if they only played guitar in their garage on weekends in their 20s and 30s.
You know, it's like there's something they can connect with to that person that other magazines are putting them on a pedestal or trying to tear them down. I don't want to do either of those things. I want to get to know them and I want the audience to get to know them.
LP: That tone comes through. All right, man. Thank you.
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