Jesse Thorn: Hi, I am Jesse Thorn, America's radio sweetheart and this is the Sound of Young America. [music] Hi, out there ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages, welcome to the Sound of Young America, a public radio show about things that are awesome. I am your host Jesse Thorn, America's radio sweetheart. You know optimally on the Sound of Young America, we've got this really tight cohesive theme to each program you know. We had a movie show you know, with different looks at the movies, that kind of thing. This week it's just two guys that I really wanted to have on the show. Coming up on the program we will talk with Chuck Klosterman.
Chuck is the author of "Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs" and most recently "Killing Yourself to Live - 85% of a true story". He's one of the most renowned and funniest and most thoughtful and interesting writers in the world of rock n' roll music and pop culture generally speaking. We'll talk with him about touring the places where rock n' roll stars have died.
Also coming up on the program, a personal hero of mine, Dave Foley of the Kids in the Hall, one of America's greatest comic actors. Also the star of the sitcom News Radio, the film A Bug's Life, the host of the Celebrity Poker... thing, although we won't be talking about that. In fact, we'll talk with Dave about the Kids in the Hall, their history and potentially even their future. That's all to come on the Sound of Young America, Sound of Young America Audio Entertainment Network, of course on the internet at maximumfun.org. We'll be back in just a second, keep it locked.[music]
You're listening to the Sound of Young America, I'm Jesse Thorn, America's radio sweetheart. My guest Chuck Klosterman is the author of the book "Killing Yourself to Live - 85% of a true story" as well as several other books including "Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs". He is a former writer for Spin Magazine, a columnist for Esquire, he occasionally contributes to espn.com. Chuck, welcome to the Sound of Young America, how are you?
Chuck Klosterman: Oh well, I am doing okay, I guess.
Jesse Thorn: [laugh] what does that mean?
Chuck Klosterman: Well I...you know it's...I...
Jesse Thorn: You're like well...
Chuck Klosterman: I could have said like, perfect and then you would be like oh, I guess that, I guess you were assuming I would just say good but you know, I was trying to be more honest.
Jesse Thorn: Yeah, well I mean doing okay, what it sounded to me like, the reason that I asked you, after I asked you, is that what it sounded to me like was you were like, well I mean with credits like that, I guess I am doing fine.[laugh] Thank you very much.
[?]
Chuck Klosterman: Well I mean, I'm doing all right, I guess well, yeah we've spent a lot of time now on this introduction question but I guess I am doing all right.
Jesse Thorn: Okay good, so I want to talk to you kind of about how you see your role as a rock journalist and you know the rock journalist is such a thing you know. Your writing in your books is very personal and your writing in periodicals is often less so but what do you see as being the role of the rock journalist?
Chuck Klosterman: Well the role of the rock journalist I guess in the macro sense is basically to give people who like music enough that they actually want to read about the experience you can really only have sonically. Now do I, I don't know if I necessarily fulfill that criteria because really the situation I am in is I am just sort of a writer who happens to write about a lot of things but predominantly rock music. It's not like you know I know some people who you know they are in seventh grade, they wanted to be a rock critic and they started you know, I was never like that, it just sort of worked out this way. I mean you know when I write about, you know, whether it's like Led Zepplin or if I am writing about Gnarls Barkley, or whether it's new or old or whatever your relationship is. I mean a lot of my writing is really just very autobiographical and sort of an attempt to kind of look at cultures through the prism of my own experience. I mean basically, I use my life as literary device to talk about cultural ideas. Now a lot of times, the way it's worked out is that it's within you know kind of a the idiom of rock music bt I mean I don't I don't self-identify myself really as rock critic really.
Jesse Thorn: You but yet at the same time you are the kind of guy in this book, you know you are packing up for a three week trip to visit the death places of famous people in Rock n Roll and one of your gag lines is that you, you spend some time going through your CDs to figure out what you should bring and you end up with your kind of 600 top...
Chuck Klosterman: Mmmm
Jesse Thorn: CDs, are there things in your life that are that are as meaningful as rock music and if not why is rock music do you think at the top of the pile?
Chuck Klosterman: Oh well, I mean I guess I would have to say there are lots of things in my life as meaningful...
Jesse Thorn: [laugh]
Chuck Klosterman: or more meaningful then rock music.
Jesse Thorn: [laugh] I realized immediately after I asked that question, I was like, maybe I should have said, you know like, cultural things or something because I would imagine that your relationship with your parents for example is right up there with rock music [?]
Chuck Klosterman: [laugh] well, I was even referring to cultural things. I mean like you know am I more interested in rock music than I am in sports? I would say no. Am I more interested in rock music than films? Well yes, but just barely, you know, am I more interested in rock music than say, politics or religion or sort of things like that, well I would say I know more maybe in a specific sense about rock music but my degree of sort of the degree that it kind of compelled me or interests me is very similar. I mean the real, my thing always is that, and I sort of I guess realized this when I wrote "Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs" which was this essay collection. There's 18 different essays in that book and they're not really connected but the one unifying element is that I kind of slowly came to realize what interests me about culture is not so much the artifice as how that urge sort of engages its audience and sort of forms the way they look at their own life or the way they look at society or kind of just their world view. So I mean, I guess because of that I am able to sort of write about lots of very very unconnected things with sort of a similar voice or a sort of objective.
Jesse Thorn: Two of the things that you mention as things that you really enjoy are both things that tend to really be important the things in people who are forming their identities in sports and rock music, I mean I don't think relatively speaking that there are that many people who form even, even film nuts don't really relatively speaking form their identities like Goddard or something like that in the way that say you know a New York Giants fan forms their identity based on their love of the New York Giants and you know that community or a rock fan bases their identity on loving you know, Sleater-Kinney or something like that.
Chuck Klosterman: I would argue that they do but maybe not in as much of a conscious way, I mean you are right in the sense that music and sports particularly rock music and sort of like you know, the major sports like the football, basketball, baseball do seem to clearly indicate that the way a certain kind of person may be self identifies himself. I mean, I wonder how it is really interesting is that age you know usually, at least for guys around like 12,13,14 when they are that age and all of a sudden without really knowing it, they suddenly come to the conclusion that like being a guy in the Strokes would be cooler than being Dwayne Wade.
Jesse Thorn: [laugh]
Chuck Klosterman: They kind of make this, without, they kind of make this decision that somehow like, because I mean, sports, are fundamentally a very conservative concept and rock music is even regardless of the way it's changed over the decades, it's still supposed to sort of represent sort of like kind of a counterculture ideal so I think that's always a really important shift. However that said, you know, you say like a film person maybe doesn't ident- you know, views himself through Stanley Kubrick, you know, the way you know a Zepplin fan views himself through Zepplin. But I think that they do.. it's just that the context is different. I mean the kind of person who wants to be a fanatical, say fan of literature thinks that literary fanaticism has a different meaning than being a fanatic of the Grateful Dead. So therefore that they will sort of almost self engineer a detachment that they somehow aren't, that you know, well I am sort of my own person or I sort of read lots of books because you know other kinds of media I find shallow or whatever. But it means it's still happening, it's just sort of like you know I mean, people sometimes want to know like why am I so willing to write about like the most populist culture. And I guess my belief is like that there is a real import to it because it's sort of the way the average person unknowingly, kind of unknowingly or unconsciously or latently views what's interesting about being alive.
Jesse Thorn: I thought it was interesting in "Killing Yourself to Live" the way that one of the first stories you tell is the, is your visit to the night club where you know dozens of people died in the accident at the Great White concert which is hardly like, people kind of, you know in terms of rock n roll death sites that's hardly the place where Kurt Cobain shot his head off or something like that in the sense that you know Great White is just like a really regular band. You know what I mean that's like a real pop metal band, you know what I mean?
Chuck Klosterman: Uuh mmm
Jesse Thorn: And I thought it was interesting the way that you chose that as something to sort of start off or at least you know hit bat second after you know, after the Sex Pistols. Why was that?
Chuck Klosterman: Well why, the easy answer to that is just sort of geography, I mean I left from New York so like obviously I am going to go to Rhode Island before I go to Seattle you know. But I guess the, the even if that hadn't been the case, I mean you know I think that that what you happened in West Warwick does have a real relationship sort of, the iconography of being a rock fan because you know you said, you're kind of saying like, Great White was just sort of this, this sort of unimportant hair metal band and you know. I mean if we are sitting around with a bunch of rock historians that's probably true but I mean when you think about the people who died going to that concert, who were like burned alive seeing a band that hasn'y been I guess culturally relevant in 15 years. I mean they were really going to experience music for probably the best possible reason. I mean they, they simply loved Great White and it made them sort of remember a period of their life when listening to hair metal was sort of the sound track for their existence you know and sort of, kind of framed the way they remember being a teenager or being a young adult. So nobody who died in that fire died because like they were trying to go to a show to be cool and they were unlucky. I mean they were, they sort of found themselves in a situation where there is a sincere un-ironic appreciation of this rock band kind of coincidentally ended up ending their lives. I mean I do think that's meaningful. I mean it was the most evocative place I went on this trip.
Jesse Thorn: How has your relationship to music changed, you just described this kind of, the way that a lot of people's relationship to music changes which is you know that it sort of forms their identity when they are in their teenage years, you know maybe their college years for some people, and then it often kind of freezes there and you know whether it's like you know people listening to Motown Records in what's that movie.. The Big Sleep? No that's the Raymond Chandler movie... [laugh]
Chuck Klosterman: The Big Chill?
Jesse Thorn: The Big Chill. [laugh] What an odd pair of things to conflate. But you know whether it's people listening, whether it's baby boomers listening to Motown or you know whether it's you know the people who are like the 40 something and listen to the rhythmic AC station you know.
Chuck Klosterman: Oh well I mean absolutely it's sort of an amazing coincidence, how often when you talk to people they will conclude that rock music suddenly got bad either when they graduated from high school or when they graduated from college.
Jesse Thorn: Exactly.
Chuck Klosterman: You know and what's really, I mean but that's sort of like I mean what makes rock music so important, it's the only major genre of art, that's specifically directed towards young people and that part of it, the criteria for sort of its value has to do with its relationship and its ability to sort of reflect being a young person. You know I mean it is, it's really interesting how people's values change and priorities differ and because it's what I do for a living, I sort of have, that hasn't happened to me as much but you know like I have, one of my best friends in my college was a huge fan of the Smiths, like you know Morrissey poster over his bed, he loved the Smiths and he was always telling me how great the Smiths were. Well he becomes an engineer and like we're out of college for 3 years. Morrissey comes out with a new record and I call him up and I'm like, I just, I am really curious just to know what is your take on this record, the Morrissey record was Maladjusted, he had no idea it had come out like he had like in three years he had went from this fanatical, like someone who self-identified himself as a Morrissey fan to someone who didn't even know when their records were released, and it had been out for like a month. But like you know his life had changed, he had been married and you know he had a kid and all these things and I basically, probably am more engaged with culture now than any point in my life just for the nature of my career, you know.
Jesse Thorn: Are you missing out on something for having, for continuing to have you know the 22 year olds relationship to culture?
Chuck Klosterman: Oh well no, I mean I think it would be weird if I did, I mean I think you know like you know my favorite record of all time is Guns N Roses "Appetite for Destruction". That's because it came out in 1987, you know I was in high school, I was really into metal, that was the best metal record, you know the next really big record in my life would have been like Nirvana's "Nevermind" and I was a sophomore at college and it seemed like it was changing the entire landscape of music, you know. And then there have been records since then that I really liked a lot. Radiohead records, Oasis records you know but I am a different person now. Like you use those, you use music and stuff like that, you use sports or whatever to sort of form your identity when you're figuring out like how you want to be perceived by other people. I mean you know it's like I don't think, like in no way did Kurt Cobain represent me. I sort of used him to represent myself and say I am the kind of person who likes Nirvana, you know, and once you get to a certain point in your life, you don't need to do that anymore. I mean now I am really fortunate, I get to kind of establish my identity through these books that I write, you know I mean I am able to sort of, you know and I think a lot of people that may be able to establish their identities by being an architect or you know, by being a nurse or whatever, by being a mother you know. So I mean it would be strange still if like I was listening to the radio, trying to find artists and songs that helped me understand who I was you know or am.
Jesse Thorn: What about the way that death works in rock n roll, that's probably the biggest theme. Well you know you deal a lot with your own sort of romantic relationships in your book but obviously the sort of overarching theme is the way that death works in rock n roll. I mean you describe it as causing as causing, as creating a sort of re-examination of pretty much anyone who dies just sort of necessarily. What's the relationship between a rock n roller dying and that sort of identity thing that we were talking about?
Chuck Klosterman: Well what I realized when I did this story that, which became "Killing Yourself to Live" this is something a lot of people might hear and go like, that's totally obvious but I guess for me I sort of worked this out over the course of writing this book. But the relationship between celebrity and death is a completely interior process. I mean that it has no extrinsic meaning, it's completely sort of intellectual relationship. Like what I mean by that is this, like Jeff Buckley is a great example. Jeff Buckley was a singer/songwriter in the Lower East Side of New York and he had a, he made a record called Grace and some other records and he was popular amongst serious music people or people who were into that style of singing but for the most part he was just this guy. But then he goes swimming in the Mississippi River and he drowned and all of a sudden people go back to that record Grace and re-listen to it may hear these lyrics about you know, drowning in your own tears and all these, like all those imagery that you know prophesizes his own death. And then what they did is they took the knowledge of his death, injected it back into the album, played it and heard it again in a different way. Like they re-created the meaning of those songs even though of course the cd is exactly the same and that's sort of a kind of keeps happening over and over in this book when I go to these places where rock stars died. You know there is a sort of this weird assumption by I think maybe, by some people like I would go to where Buddy Holly died and I would get to the spot and I would all of a sudden I'd be like Aha! This was what it means to be alive or whatever. And like that never happened. All those the actual places are non-events. What I realized is that the meaning of these deaths I create I mostly on the drive in between the places.
Jesse Thorn: But what about the way that it changes people, I mean one of the classic ways of understanding a rock n roller's death is that it freezes them in a certain point in their career in the sense that you know, like Kurt Cobain killing himself freezes him in this point where he's still sort of at the top of the, at the top of the rock world and he's still filled with the same kind of youthful torment that drove him to make Nevermind. You know what I mean?
Chuck Klosterman: Mmhmm
Jesse Thorn: What about the way that sort of sets in stone the identity of a rock n roller?
Chuck Klosterman: Well I mean on the one hand that's completely true, but on the other that's sort of the red herring of the book in the sense that there is, there does seem to be this easy conclusion or this super superficial sort of realization that the best move a musician can make is to die because you know they never make a bad record, because rock music is so tied to youth, they never grow old, they sort of like people are able to take the knowledge of the person's life and almost reconstruct the meaning of those songs. However that's actually you know a very interesting way of kind of, I guess a depressing way of looking at the meaning of death because what it's basically saying is that dying is the best move a musician can make if they only have one goal which is to be this sort of timeless iconic figure that audiences are able to sort of, to change into whatever sort of figure they need for their own purposes. I mean it's not the best move if you want to do things like read or like you know fly a boxkite or you know or like go canoeing or whatever. I mean that's what I, you know it's, the best move a musician can make is to die but only if they have a very sort of short sighted view of what a successful life is.
Jesse Thorn: Did you, did all this, I only imagine that all this driving across America and I did this once when I was 11, I just remember it like a lot of corn and I can only imagine that all that driving must have forced you into kind of engaging yourself in a new way, even for a guy who you know, writes first person journalism.
Chuck Klosterman: Well it was because you know I do lot of first person journalism but you know, in those stories physically I am actually doing something. Like I am going somewhere, I am meeting people and you know so much of this trip was this static situation where you are in a car just playing compact discs, so what it really was, it was, I mean I whenever I describe this book to people I always feel like I want to make things very clear, like this is not like an encyclopedia of rock deaths. I think some people have purchased my book and then they felt ripped off sort of because they thought it was mostly going to be about the lives and deaths of musicians. But all those places that I went to, that is only the structure to the story, that just kind of creates the framework. I mean this is really a book about sort of my own ideas about the relationship between love and death in rock music which obviously isn't like, I'm not the first person who ever drew these comparisons. I mean there's probably 14 Bob Dylan songs about that subject but you know.
Jesse Thorn: In a certain way that seems like that sort of, that encyclopedia of rock deaths, Maybe it's what your editor wanted out of it and there's a certain extent to which in the beginning of the book, you try and set it up for the reader so that they won't have any, to just disabuse them of the notion that that's what this kind of, that's what this book is going to be about.
Chuck Klosterman: What happened was this was originally a story I did for Spin magazine in 2003 and when I, and I had no intention of writing a book at that time but when I went out, I was going to like you know, all these different places and I was writing a 5000 word story and I almost immediately realized that the most interesting thing to me would never make this story because there was just a limited amount of space. Plus, the people who would buy a rock magazine, you know, they want to read about rock musicians, they don't want to read about the writer so I made this decision and in the magazine it would just be the journalism. It would just be my thoughts on these specific places and the interviews I did and it would just feel like a great story. Then I would take that and use that sort of like as the structure to write a book about all the stuff that was more intriguing to myself which was the sort of the, you know I mean, very egocentric style specific book and it's mostly a guy in a car thinking about his life. Now the mistake I made is that I realized that it was sort of a very egocentric thing of me to do so I decided that early in the book I would make that very clear, I would come right out and say like Okay these are the parameters on which this book will exist under and you will either, and you can decide whether or not you want to keep reading. And I sort of, I mean it was really naive but what I sort of thought is by saying that people would be like well okay this is the book, is the book really about him you know and I'll make my decision, it ended up being the only thing a lot of people noticed about the book. Like I had pointed out a reason for them not to like it.[Laugh]
Jesse Thorn: So your next book Chuck Klosterman 4 is sort of an anthology of past work but you're also working on a novel. Why write a novel?
Chuck Klosterman: Well you know, that's a good question, I mean I view myself as a non-fiction writer and as a journalist but I just wanted to do it, I just wanted to see if I could do it. I mean I was interested in the idea of starting with absolutely nothing and just having to basically create every idea or thought within the narrative. I mean you know the upside to non-fiction is that the story is just sort of there, you're really you know in some ways just the person typing it. I mean you, these things happen, these people said these things, these events occurred. I am going to reconstruct it for you in a way that's sort of entertaining. Now the downside to non-fiction writing is that a lot of times those things don't always add up. I mean like there's a situation in Killing Yourself to Live where I talk to a waitress in the south in a Cracker Barrel and we had this conversation about like dreams, the nature of reality and all this stuff and some people read that and then they say well you know this was a kind of interesting conversation but then the character never appears again and then like it never you know it never comes full circle. Well that's because I never her again! I mean you know like in non-fiction you are limited to the reality of what occurred. So I am thinking of like, I'm going to trying to write a, I want to see if I can write a book that kind of sort of, would allow me sort of to create the situations that normally I would like to report on.
Jesse Thorn: Have you written anything you've decided is a keeper already?
Chuck Klosterman: Well in this Chuck Klosterman 4 anthology just because I had the fear that there are some people probably who've read almost everything I have written and I didn't want them to feel ripped off so I included this novella I had written in like the year 2000 when I was living in Ohio. So that's like one piece of fiction that will published, then I have started working on a novel now but I don't know maybe I can't do it, I have no idea like I've never written a novel before so we will see. I mean I have just, I mean I don't know if this is a, maybe this will make me seem like a jerk for saying this I mean it's kind of, just kind of see if I can do it. I don't know, I mean it seems like it will be fun.
Jesse Thorn: Is there something, is there something driving it besides a see if I can do it element? I mean are there you know ideas or feelings that you want to get out through fiction?
Chuck Klosterman: Oh absolutely I guess, I mean yeah, I mean I am not doing it just to see what will happen, well I am, it's, it's sort of like, a lot of the book is based around sort of the idea of kind of small town mythology and sort of kind of how in rural areas, sort of reality is shaped by these sort of universal things that everyone knows. Even though they are very specific to the town itself and might not even necessarily be true. I mean that will be, I mean I suppose they would be ways, I could have just said like I came from a town of 500 people in North Dakota. I suppose I could have went back, lived there for a year, talked to everybody in town, wrote about what it's like to live in that town and that, those ideas probably could've came through. But instead I am sort of setting it at a different time and I am just sort of kind of creating.
Jesse Thorn: Well Chuck thank you so much for taking the time to be on the Sound of Young America, it was a real pleasure to have you.
Chuck Klosterman: Oh thanks to having me, man.
Jesse Thorn: Chuck Klosterman is the author of "Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story" which is recently out in paperback as well as the author of the previously released "Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs" and more in the soon to come Chuck Klosterman Four. You are listening to the Sound of Young America. We will be back with Dave Foley in just a moment. [music]
Have you ever been to the last game of the baseball season, they call it fan appreciation night and they give out prizes. Well scientific research has proven that the Sound of Young America is 30 times better than baseball, America's national pastime. So instead of fan appreciation night we've got listener appreciation month. Every weekday in July there will be a new contest on the Sound of Young America blog and everyone of those sweet contests will have a sweet prize and an awesome Sound of Young America listener/winner. We have got CDs from Stand Up Records, we have got books with pictures of Mr. T in them, we've got DVDs from our friends at [?] Factory and it's all for you the Sound of Young America listener. So every weekday in the month of July visit the Sound of Young America blog at maximumfun.org and enter one of our many wild and fun contests and win something, I order you. I'll see you there!
You are listening to the Sound of Young America, I'm Jesse Thorn America's radio sweetheart. My guest on the program, Dave Foley, is a founding member of the Kids in the Hall, the star of the long running sitcom News Radio and the Pixar film A Bug's Life. Kids in the Hall and News Radio are both out on DVD these days. Dave, welcome to the Sound of Young America, how are you?
Dave Foley: I am very well and I'm Canada's crazy ex-girlfriend.
Jesse Thorn: Okay good [laugh]. It's good for everybody to have a title so we're all on kind of equal ground. So, something I read about you that I had no idea of was that you were a high school dropout.
Dave Foley: That's true.
Jesse Thorn: You are a bright, well spoken guy, what were the circumstances of you dropping out of high school?
Dave Foley: Well at the time I didn't realize it but I was fairly seriously dyslexic but I didn't know it, so I was just getting increasingly frustrated with the fact that I couldn't read at a rate that let me do any work. So I eventually dropped out rather than sort of because I couldn't figure why the hell I couldn't keep up with the workload. And then after I dropped out I found that I was dyslexic.
Jesse Thorn: But what was your family's opinion in this whole thing?
Dave Foley: I come from one of those families that tries not to be too involved in their kid's lives.
Jesse Thorn: [laugh]
Dave Foley: Other than to blame them for everything, yeah no, I was, I mean I, I was able to bluff my way through school mostly, but mostly I just have an extremely slow reading rate, I don't scan properly and my, you know, my father's response to that was just to make fun of me. So that's the way you did it in those days, you didn't get an assessment done. You were just mocked.
Jesse Thorn: Did you have any kind of idea of what your life would be when you dropped out of school? Did you drop out of school with the idea of becoming a comedian or did you drop out of the school just with the idea that you just didn't want to be in school anymore.
Dave Foley: Well I dropped out, by the time I dropped out I had started doing stand-up, I'd started writing stand-up while I was in high school, the school I was going to was sort of a hippie high school called C School and you could get points for life experiences, you could grades so I started writing stand-up and performing while I was at the hippie high school, so I had started hoping that I would be able to make a living out of it eventually.
Jesse Thorn: Did it make sense to you that you would be able to, I mean did it seem like something actual or not?
Dave Foley: Well at the time I thought if I worked at it, I would be able to,my aspirations were fairly low. At first it was just, I figured if I could manage to get on the circuit as a club comic, you know and do well enough I could maybe make you know $5000 a month was my goal.
Jesse Thorn: That's not bad, that's more than I make today [laugh]
Dave Foley: No that was my but that was my, but I never made it.
Jesse Thorn: [laugh]
Dave Foley: Don't get me wrong, but that was my goal. I had heard that a good road comic could make up to 5000 a month.
Jesse Thorn: How, what was your stand-up act like?
Dave Foley: It was like a precocious 17 year old Lenny Bruce.
Jesse Thorn: [laugh]
Dave Foley: You know it's really pretty unpleasant thing to have to sit through I have to imagine, but that was it, I was doing, you know trying to do social satire at 17.
Jesse Thorn: How did you move into improv and sketch?
Dave Foley: I found out about Second City workshops and thought that it might help improve my stand-up so I went to take a course in it, and in the the very first class I was randomly paired up with Kevin McDonald who became my partner in Kids in the Hall.
Jesse Thorn: How old were you at this point?
Dave Foley: At this point I was 19.
Jesse Thorn: So at 19 you were performing improv and you and Kevin McDonald actually ended up shortly thereafter forming the group called the Kids in the Hall although it was you and Kevin McDonald and was there other people as well?
Dave Foley: There was a third person named [?] Kazmiri, who's been working as a writer and producer in Toronto, but the three of us were the original Kids in the Hall and then we merged with a group called the Audience that had Mark McKinney and Bruce McCulloch in it eventually led to the five of us once Scott joined.
Jesse Thorn: At what point did you become independent and like move out of your folk's house?
Dave Foley: That would be, I guess that would be when I was 19.
Jesse Thorn: You think they were at all coincidental?
Dave Foley: Yeah I don't know. I mostly I managed to find an apartment, I could afford on my salary as a pizza cook.
Jesse Thorn: When did you start doing sketch?
Dave Foley: Well that was pretty much just as soon as I met Kevin McDonald we started writing stuff and performing and doing improv but it wasn't really until we sort of settled in at the Rivoli on Queen St in Toronto to start doing shows every week. I mean we wrote a whole new show every week for that and that's when we really started writing sketches.
Jesse Thorn: And these shows were kind of I mean, you say you were writing a whole new show, these were big shows, right? I mean is like full, whole night multiple hour shows with like an hour of sketch in them?
Dave Foley: Yeah it was like the first half would be an hour of brand new sketches every week and then the second half would be another hour of improv and sometimes the first have would wind up being two hours long depending on how much stuff we'd written that week. And I said that week what I really mean is between Friday and Monday evening, you know because we'd usually meet and then on Friday night and by the following Monday we'd have the show together.
Jesse Thorn: I mean that's just a monumental amount of material for five people to generate.
Dave Foley: Yeah it was but then we did that for a couple of years like that. And then every once in awhile we'd do a best of show where we would actually go back and try to remember the sketches we had done that we'd like the best and put them up for a few days in a row. That's the most we ever repeated anything.
Jesse Thorn: What were your relationships like at the time, I mean I can't imagine, it must have been very intense to be working that hard over three days.
Dave Foley: It was, it was very competitive [laugh] very volatile, but ultimately there was a real feeling, there was a genuine excitement in the group I think about what we were doing, just because it seemed, it seemed like we were doing something new that was catching on with people. We were kind of the first sort of alternative comedy act in Toronto I guess.
Jesse Thorn: What was the kind of people that were coming to the shows, I mean what was the scene like?
Dave Foley: It was weird, most, I mean first it was mostly like pretty young people, you know college kids and you know I guess maybe some high school kids, mostly college kids, Queen St sort of art scene started coming eventually once they got you know, but first it was like loathed by the Queen St crowd because they thought comedy was really uncool. This was back in the time when it was all very serious 80s bands. But eventually we got, we started to get the artsy crowd and the punk rock crowd coming down. It was mostly, and then after a little while we started getting the people that worked at Second City theater started coming and then after people from SE TV started coming to the show.
Jesse Thorn: That must have been exciting from people from actually from SE TV coming to the shows.
Dave Foley: Yeah, I mean like when they, Dave Thomas, Marty Short, [?], Sister Mary Margaret came a lot. Yeah, it was very exciting for us. You know and then eventually, through that, through word of mouth we wound up getting together for Saturday Night Live.
Jesse Thorn: So when you were scouted for Saturday Night Live that was when Lorne Michaels, who had left the show for a few years, had just returned to the show right? And in what capacity were you scouted?
Dave Foley: Well that was in 85 when Lorne came back to the show and he was just looking for new writers and performers and at first he sent Al Franken and Jim Downey came up, and who else, and Dave Thomas came to the shows, we did like a showcase. And actually it was just us auditioning for them in an empty club and then they hired Mark and Bruce to come down as apprentice writers in 85.
Jesse Thorn: What is apprentice writer even mean?
Dave Foley: It means a writer without a desk.
Jesse Thorn: Okay [laugh]
Dave Foley: Basically. They didn't have an office and they weren't paid as much as the other writers.
Jesse Thorn: I mean what did that mean for half of the group to get hired to go work on Saturday Night Live or where did that leave the rest of you?
Dave Foley: Well at first we thought it was probably the end of the group, but once they got down there they realized that they had a lot of weeks off because Saturday Night Live they have, they don't really work that hard. They like to talk a lot.
Jesse Thorn: [laugh]
Dave Foley: They had a lot of time off so every time they'd have a week off they would fly up to Toronto and we should write a show and put it up and so we kept doing that all the way through their time at Saturday Night Live. And then, you know, by the end of that year Lorne decided to come up himself and see the rest of the group to see if there was anyone else he wanted to bring down. And we did a ridiculously long show for Lorne on a very hot night, we wound up doing, I think we did like almost a three hour show.
Jesse Thorn: [laugh]
Dave Foley: And made Lorne stay all the way through it.
Jesse Thorn: What led you to believe that that was a good idea?
Dave Foley: Just our foolishness [laugh] you know and again we were doing a lot of the show we were doing brand new material that we hadn't tried out before and it was just, I guess our brash bit of punk attitude toward it we said alright, we're just going to do what we do, Lorne can come and watch, we're just going to do what we do.
Jesse Thorn: [laugh] You've got the, you've got the most important person in sketch comedy practically ever coming to your show, you are like well let's just try out some new stuff.
Dave Foley: Yeah, oh yeah basically.
Jesse Thorn: [laugh]
Dave Foley: And then everyone in town had heard that Lorne was going to be there to see us, you know so they other, a lot of other groups that were hoping to get Lorne to come over and see their shows and we actually had somebody actually crash our show and run up on stage and start doing a poem telling Lorne to go to see another sketch group that was playing across the road.
Jesse Thorn: [laugh] Oh god.
Dave Foley: Yeah and I think Scott Thompson just pushed them off the stage,[?] get the fuck off our stage and then shoved them off the stage.
Jesse Thorn: [laugh] Lorne Michaels was impressed I presume.
Dave Foley: Yeah he was, you know he thought about for while, he thought about bringing some of us down to Saturday Night Live after that, after about a week he decided that he didn't want to break the troupe up that he wanted to produce a show for us and that's how we land up getting our first special on HBO, and that turned in to a series.
Jesse Thorn: Tell me about what the transition was like for you guys from writing an hour long stage show and performing another hour of improve once a week to producing a half hour scripted, filmed sketch show?
Dave Foley: Oh well it definitely required more preparation. [laugh] You know you couldn't you know, we still had the, we still sort of had the creative control to do whatever we wanted to do but we defintely, we had the script in on time and they had to be producable, and we also had a lot to learn about what works on TV, a lot of stuff that you do on stage just never really translates on TV. Pieces that sort of the hinge on the experience of being there, you know, they are just not so much fun to watch on television and so a lot of the sketched we wrote during that time of the club days I'd say probably, you know, we used up the ones that were any good in the first season, and then after that we had to sort of figure how to write for TV.
Jesse Thorn: Were the people surrounding you, Lorne Michaels, and the other sort of television people, how did they feel about the strangeness of the material that you were producing? I mean I can only imagine, the TV show, which is obviously all I've seen, I wasn't in Toronto in 1984, was a very strange show and I can only imagine that you must have been doing stuff that was even stranger before that if you were generating an hour of material a week.
Dave Foley: Yeah, the club show was probably a little wilder and more punky than the TV show ever was. You know a little more, I think probably more, a little more aggressive because, you know, we could just get up and do anything we wanted. But yeah I guess the TV show at the time, I guess it was weird [laugh]. It's odd now there are, now everything's changed so much since we did the show. I don't know it still seems weird or not, but I guess at the time I mean when we, the series went on the air in 89 I guess, there wasn't that much like what we were doing then.
Jesse Thorn: I think the cultural impact of the show was really significant in, that this was a show that as you mentioned was very much unlike what else had been seen on television and for somebody like me who grew up watching it you know in reruns on Comedy Central I haven't felt that impact but if I talked to somebody who's five or ten years older than I am, that's one of the key elements of Kids in the Hall for them is that, is the way that they felt when they first saw something that was so unique on television. Did you guys get a feeling for people watching this and having their minds blown early on?
Dave Foley: I think there was, it's odd because it first started happening in the club show where I mean the club show caught, suddenly caught on in such a big way in Toronto that we started having these, like the house was packed almost double its capacity every week and we had a line up going around the block and kind of disrupting the restaurant out front and that was kind of when we first, the people that liked us felt like they were, you know it really I felt like people that liked us felt like they were part of a community which, I think is more common now especially because of the internet but in those days it was, it really was like this was a club you joined when you became a Kids from the Hall fan and that it was something that sort of bound people together and the TV show seemed to be the same way that we really got a very passionate response from the same small group of people in every town that the show ran. But I think it was definitely an emotional connection to the show.
Jesse Thorn: How was the, what was the dynamic within the group like when you went from you know from stage to screen and all of a sudden were on, were actually on people's televisions?
Dave Foley: It was the way it always was, which was silently competitive [laugh] and really you know it went, everything from just really cold blooded passive aggressive to Machiavellian manipulation to you know screaming fits and that's always been the way the group worked together so it kept up that way. But then there was there was always this sense that we would fight constantly but it was always the five of us basically against everybody else when it came down to it, and we, we all ran the show together as a sort of five headed monster.
Jesse Thorn: What do you think I mean besides just being members of the Kids in the Hall, what do you think the five of you shared that allowed you to have that you know that togetherness?
Dave Foley: I think it was really just the fact that we could each make the other four laugh harder than anybody else that they knew. And we really just found that being around each other was fun because we could make each other laugh more than you know most people could make any of us laugh but when we were working together, we would be in tears most of the day.
Jesse Thorn: For one reason or another it sounds like.
Dave Foley: Yeah, but when we were actually trying to make each other laugh you know, it's even when we get together the five of us it's a very different kind of chemistry than I think we have with anyone else that we've ever known.
Jesse Thorn: I am going to skip over the last ten years or so of your career because you mentioned getting together now. The five of you have while you've all got together for two tours...
Dave Foley: Yes.
Jesse Thorn: ...in the past five or six years or so, but most recently you've gotten together to perform the kind of shows that you described performing in the early 80s in Los Angeles, tell me about how that came about.
Dave Foley: Well it started, I had, the guys were over at my house here in Los Angeles for we were getting together just to talk about whether we wanted to try and pursue any kind of projects as a group in the future. And we you know we weren't really coming up with anything that anyone got too excited about, that anyone thought they really wanted to do and I just sort of suggested that we, I'd done these shows called The Tribute with my wife and some other friends of ours at the Steve Allen Theater here in L.A. and thought wow that this kind of feels, the space feels, reminds me of the Rivoli and so I suggested to the guys that we should just take a week out of our lives, get you know, just plan a week where we will get together and write for three days and then put the show up and do the show that weekend and everybody got excited about doing that and we, it was just to see if we could still write that way, if we could still come up with ideas that we did all contribute to and all enjoyed and do it fast and basicially avoid debating was the idea, just see if we had any ideas left in us as a group.
Jesse Thorn: What was your feeling about what the answer to that question was before you started doing it, what did you think was going to happen?
Dave Foley: Before we started doing it I thought there was a really strong chance that it wouldn't work. I thought you know I was really worried, I mean I was probably the only one who really thought this way, but I was very worried that everyone would show up with a bundle of sketches that they were committed to getting into the show and that we wouldn't collaborate. That it would just be people you know trying to get their pieces that they'd written individually into the show. But the way it worked out was that we really did, we got together in smaller groups before that week just to talk about ideas for sketches but we didn't write them, we just pitched ideas and then we all got together that week, sat around a table and talked through all the ideas that we thought were good and whichever ones people started throwing ideas at were the ones that we worked on and so every sketch that we did on the show was contributed to by every member of the troupe which is kind of the way we used to do it and which we hadn't really done since before the TV show.
Jesse Thorn: How was it, how was it different from the writing that you did 20 years ago?
Dave Foley: Well it was different in that we are all middle aged men [laugh] so I guess we wrote about, I guess we probably wrote about some different things. But it really, to be honest it didn't seem that different. It sounded very much like and there were actually, it was odd there were actually some people at the show in L.A. who had gone to the Rivoli shows in the mid 80s and had seen those shows and they also did it felt exactly like being back there. You know we looked older and fatter but other than that they said it really felt like the same same vibe.
Jesse Thorn: How did it feel to you?
Dave Foley: It felt great and we you know, were actually kind of nervous going on and after the first sketch, the first sketch hit and we did and it went really well and then the next sketch went over and had tons of laughs in it and everybody was having a good time and we just went through and you know as the show went on we all kept coming off stage and looking at each other and being excited about what we were doing which I don't think, I don't think we'd really felt that way in a long time.
Jesse Thorn: What did that success mean to you, to the Kids in the Hall as a group? Are there implications?
Dave Foley: Yeah I think the main, I mean the main reason for doing this was to find out if we could collaborate and if we could, and just to make sure that we had something that was you know funny and worth saying as a group. You know that we, that we wouldn't just be getting together and doing Kids in the Hall style material or you know trying to recapture you know old sketches but that we could actually find something new to do and I think, we thought we succeeded in that. So that really opened the door for us to maybe do more of those you know unannounced shows. I mean cause that's the other cool thing, was the Steve Allen Theater only holds 200 people and we hadn't performed in that room of that size in over 20 years. So that was really, a big part of the excitement was just playing in a small room again so I think it did open the door for us to maybe develop more material and perhaps you know either go out on a tour with new material or develop new material for some sort of a TV project or a film project.
Jesse Thorn: Do you have any trepidations about those prospects, I mean is there any part of you that feels like you know you are trying to recapture something that's gone instead of creating something new or something like that?
Dave Foley: I think there is a big, there is a strong vein of that trepidation in all of us I think, and also more than that, there is this horrible thing that we will recapture something from the past which is the awful awful fighting...
Jesse Thorn: [laugh]
Dave Foley: ...and all the ugly, you know, ugliness of being in the troupe. Though we don't want to recapture any of that and I think everyone was worried about that before we did that, the show at the Steve Allen. I think that was really the main thing, we just wanted to make sure that we weren't, that if we did stuff together in the future then we weren't going to be a nostalgia act, that we wouldn't do stuff together again unless we had something worth doing.
Jesse Thorn: Has doing these new shows and having these DVDs released, which was really the first comprehensive release of your material, I mean I think there was best-of's on video before...
Dave Foley: Yeah that's true, yeah.
Jesse Thorn: Has that given, has that given you any kind of new perspective on the work that you did you know 10, 15, 20 years ago?
Dave Foley: Umm I don't know, I don't really feel that connected to any, to the DVD release you know? I mean it was fun when we went in to do commentary, but I don't really feel, because I don't know what the experience of watching them is because I don't, you know, eventually I have sat and watched some of them with my kids but I don't really, I mean I don't know what the show mean to anybody else now. I don't really feel that connected to the release. I am glad that they are coming out and really happy that it's the original uncensored versions of all the sketches which nobodies seen since they went off the air, it's been long time since anyone's seen these versions.
Jesse Thorn: Well Dave thank you so much for taking the time to be on the Sound of Young America, it was a pleasure to have you.
Dave Foley: Oh well thanks for, thanks for having me on.
Jesse Thorn: Dave Foley is a member of the Kids in the Hall and the former star of the sitcom News Radio. Season four of the Kids in the Hall and Season three of News Radio just became available on DVD [music]
Jesse Thorn: Thanks for listening to this week's Sound of Young America broadcast. Of course, I've been your host, Jesse Thorn, America's Radio Sweetheart. The show's produced by Speaking Into Microphones, our theme music is by Dan Greyson, with a little help from myself. Interstitial music is by DJ W. Hey, and we've got 5 Kids in the Hall season 4 box sets to give away. We're going to be giving them away Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, on the Sound of Young American blog. If you want to find out how you can win one of these awesome box sets, visit the Sound of Young America blog at our website maximumfun.org. If you have thoughts about the show they're always welcome, splangy@splangy.com. And otherwise we'll see you next week! Bye bye. [music]
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"Like a youthful maiden, Dawn shines brightly forth
Stirring to motion every living creature.
Divine fire was kindled for the use of men;
Dawn created light, driving away the dark."
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