#387 - Everlast

Am I wrong thinking Robert Shapiro started that? Or was he just an early, like, spokesperson?

Is that true? I don't know. Let's look that up.

Either he was an early spokesman or he might have started it. Wow.

Wow. It was a smart move. Yeah, but that's one of those things.

Where you.

Be, do I want to be connected with homeboy? What is Mark Fer and do these days?

That'd be funny to find out where people, notorious people are.

Yeah. Let's see. It says jump to legal Zoom here. I guess he had something to do with it. Shapiro is one of the co founders of Legal.

I thought so.

Look at Everlast deep inside the system, understanding all the behind the scenes.

I just haven't smoked up that part of the brain yet, dog. That's all. There was still a little Shapiro. There's still a little Shapiro knowledge left there somehow.

Eat some fresh fruits and vegetables.

I'm still living like, the car chases going on. Like, go OJ, go OJ. I'm living in the 90s, brother.

Hit the music. I already did. Is that it? So it's officially started?

Yeah.

Okay, good enough. We don't need all the music.

Fuck.

We're going to have plenty of music in this podcast. We don't really need the opening song. Yeah. That OJ thing is one of the weirdest times in my life, because I was a very young man and I was still really delusional about the way the world worked. I really had no know. I didn't know to the extent of corruption and craziness and the fucking dispute between when Rodney King happened and I saw how strong the hate for police is in the anger that led to the rioting. I was like, who the fuck saw that coming? Who thought that I was so delusional? I had such little contact with that world that I had no idea what the disparity was like, how these people felt about police brutality and things like that. Do you see that video of them beating the shit out of that dude with sticks? And then they got off and everybody's like, whoa, wait a minute. What happened here exactly? Okay, he was on what? Okay, so he's on, like angel dust, so he doesn't feel it? Is that what's happening here? Do they have something they can they hold on to him? He's five guys. Can't they wrestle this dude to the ground? It seems like they're having a good time.

That's the myth of like. Or not the myth, but the grand thing about yeah, angel dust. That's the one thing they say people have broken out of handcuffs.

If that's the case, people need to revisit that one particular issue because, angel, I had a friend who had his finger bitten off, man.

It wasn't. That was just the straw, dude. That was just the straw. The camel's back was damn near snapped at that point. I was living on that side of the world. I was like part of ice, Steve's Ryan syndicate. I was running through the hatred for the police. I was normal.

What was it like rolling around with those guys?

You know what the thing was in a weird way, I was just so oblivious to it because I was treated as. I was a member of the crew.

I was already like one of them rap kid.

And it was like, as long as I showed up and had the balls to be somewhere, I felt like I was cool there. You know what I mean? I wasn't into gang banging or anything. I was never flagging anywhere. I was. And I always knew a few key people that would be like, oh, yeah, he knows that dude.

All right, dude. I was a huge ice tea fan.

I used to get told by cast, like, ice would say things like, yeah, man, you're white, man. Everybody here either thinks you're crazy for being here or you're a cop. So you're good.

Fuck tonight. Yeah. Well, you know what, man? His best shit. Well, I think colors is one of his best songs ever. That is one of the best theme songs for a movie ever, representative of what was going on in that movie. That song just fucking nailed it.

That was right place, right time, right? Dude, whoever picked him for that? It was the right. Everybody made the right decision.

It's the rap version of live and let die, kind of. That's a good, mean. Live and let die is a theme song for a movie, right, but it's a badass fucking.

Mean. Was that its original purpose? Was that its original purpose? It was a theme for a movie.

I believe Paul McCartney made it for the movie. Unless it was just a coincidence that he had a song called Live and Let die and there was a seven movie. Let's see. Okay, let's find out. We need to find out. Paul McCartney.

Weird.

Are you a fan of Paul McCartney?

I mean, as a songwriter, how could you not be, right? The guy's written a lot of amazing songs. You aspire to write that many well known songs.

He was a like. Because he seemed like such a nice guy. I think some more hardcore people don't give that guy the credit.

He like, for, like, if you look at the Beatles, you break them down. It's like John Lennon wrote the more ethereal, kind of weirdo kind of songs or more government related, protesty kind of stuff. Paul McCartney wrote the stuff about love and life and everyday things, you know what I mean? And turned them into poetry, kind of that. I love them both in different ways.

Me, too. I perfectly said. He was commissioned specifically for this movie and credited to McCartney. His wife Linda reunited the former Beatles producer George Martin, who both produced this song and arranged the orchestral break. It was all done for that movie. It's like one of the most successful movie theme songs ever. Because it was a real song.

Yeah, and then guns and roses recut it and sold 10 million records.

That's a fucking badass song. For your theme song, your movie's making $100 million no matter what. Just with that song on it, it can't go wrong. And then band on the run. That's a crazy song. That's like two songs in one. You listen to the beginning of it. And then when the rain exploded with a mighty crash as we fell into the sun God damn Paul McCartney. I mean, that's a beautiful fucking song.

It's a work of art and good drugs.

Oh, fuck, yeah. He'd seen everything there is to say. He saw the full mandala of.

Saw that happen as he fell into the sun he saw that happen.

Well, the rain exploded with a mighty crash as we fell into the sun damn. He had to have seen all that.

That's some old. I can hear the colors. I can hear the colors, man.

You can't write something like that unless you've seen something like that. You can't fake that lyric. The rain exploded with a mighty crash as we fell into the sun what the fuck? The first one said to the second one there, I hope you're having fun. That is as psychedelic as a lyric ever can get without being, like, ponderous. You know what I mean? Without being, like, blatantly obvious. You're trying to be, like, trippy. That's a perfect lyric. Well, the rain exploded with a mighty crash as we fell into the sun and the first one said to the second one there, I hope you're having fun. What kind of shit are you on, son?

Acid. For real?

It has to be, right?

Heavy doses of it.

It's such a trippy lyric. That band was so instrumental in opening people's minds to the ideas of altered states of consciousness because they were so into, like, meditation, and there was always hanging out with weird gurus and shit. They were freaky dudes, man. And they started off like these really sweet guys from England with cute haircuts, making girls scream. And then somewhere along, they morphed into this spiritual injection. Like, if you go to the white album, if you became a fan of the Beatles, you became a fan of very strange alternate ways of thinking.

Yeah. You saw at the time, if you were a fan morphing with them, you had to be pretty open minded.

Yeah.

But luckily the music was just really good, so it helped a lot.

Well, I think that to be that.

Good, you could say some really stupid shit on a bed of music. That sounds good. And that proof is all around us today. Yeah, all around us.

All around us. Always will be. But I think to be that good, you have to get crazy. And I think they got crazy. They just went everywhere. They just went with it. And there's no can't. That's not a regular dude. Regular dude's not going to make that song. It's literally not possible. The mind does not work that way. You got to be some crazy dude out there wearing robes, hanging out with dudes in Tibet. For real. You got to really.

And be a perfectionist.

You got to have gurus and shit. Indian dudes with white beards and they tell you freaky shit.

But also, the cats didn't have the benefits of computer technology, man. They had to be good at all of the shit they were doing.

Yeah, totally true.

Now, a guy could grab this guitar completely out of tune. Like, strum it on it a little bit. And literally in the box, make it sound like he was doing something.

Do you think that that cheapens music or does it just give an artist more tools? Is it obvious when it cheapens it?

I think it could do either. It's a double edged sword. But when it's just used to blatantly suck the light. We talk about something like, we'll listen to old records that were sampled and made into hip hop records before we go on. I like to listen to a lot of old music when we play. So we'll listen to the old versions of stuff. And then we'll put on new versions. And new versions. Even though they're sampled or using pieces of that old version. They don't have the grease because it's not alive. There's not five guys locking up, playing it. It's like a machine. Here's a piece, piece, piece. And then we repeat that piece, piece, piece. And then we can repeat that piece, piece. It sucks the life out of things. Sometimes, you know what I mean? For club music, if you're just making