DISGRACELAND - Bonus Episode: Oozing Cool, Busting Out the Pills, and "You're Playing With the Big Boys Now"

Episode Date: March 21, 2024

This week in the After Party, Jake discusses the concept of coolness, this week’s DISGRACELAND episode on Steve McQueen, and of course your emails, texts, DMS, and voicemails. Was there a cooler actor in the 60s and 70s than Steve McQueen? Let Jake know at 617-906-6638, [e-mail], or on socials @disgracelandpod, and come join the After Party.To hear an extended version of the After Party with more insight into the would-be conspiracy between Steve McQueen and a certain King, and more from the DISGRACELAND community, become a Disgraceland All Access member at disgracelandpod.com/membership. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. Hey, Discos, you can listen to an extended version of this after-party episode by becoming a member of Disgraceland All Access. Just go to disgracelandpod.com slash membership for more details and to sign up. Hey, guys, welcome to the Disgraceland podcast, which is brought to you by Double Elvis. This week, we have a brand new episode on Steve McQueen in the disgraceland feed.

also have an exclusive Hunter S. Thompson episode available to our All Access members and our Patreon and Apple subscription feeds and a new episode coming next week for our All Access members as well on Lane, Lane, so be sure to make sure you're all signed up for our all access content either on Apple Podcasts or on Patreon. All right, let's get into this bonus episode. Hey, Discos, need a little more disgrace land in your life? Just a touch to get you through? Yeah, me too. This is the podcast that comes after the podcast. Welcome to Disgraceland, the After Party. Welcome to the Disgraceland bonus episode. A little thing we like to call the after party. This is the show after the show, the party after the party,

the bridge to get you from one full episode of Disgraceland to the other, the backyard to dig into the dirt. On this episode, we are talking about our brand new episode on Steve McQueen, the sources we used for this episode, which helped us uncover a wild story, wild involving John F. Kennedy. And of course, your voicemails, text, DMs, and more. And as always, a whole lot of rosy. All right, discos, let's get into it.

We place an outsized amount of importance on the concept of cool in our culture. And here at Disgraceland, we're probably more guilty than most, but is that a bad thing? I don't know. I'm fascinated. I've always been fascinated by the concept of coolness relative to the subjects that we discuss here. How cool is perceived, how cool is expressed, how it's maintained, how it's misinterpreted, how it's exploited.

Cool is, of course, not something that you can actually aspire to. It's something that simply is. It's born out of a potent mix of authenticity, taste, and not giving a fuck. It's hard to define, easy to spot, and it's eternal. It's simple, but it's also complicated. You can be so uncool that you are, in fact, cool. Make sense? Yeah, it does. You know it. I know it. You know it because you're cool. That's how, that's how you guys know it.

You also know that this week's subject to disgrace land, Steve McQueen is one of the coolest to ever do, I was about to say one of the coolest to ever do it. But the reality is he's one of the coolest to ever do anything. He was, of course, one of the biggest actors of his era. But he's also a race car driver, a speed demon of all different stripes, the prototype for masculinity in his day. And it seemed effortlessly cool. being cool, despite how we define it, it's not actually effortless. It, in fact, takes a lot of effort. The trick, of course, is not letting anyone see you try. But that's so disingenuous that it hurts for me to even say it. Steve McQueen did not seem like he cared at all. He oozed cool. I was going to say charisma.

But it wasn't an accident. It was all very calculated. He knew the single most important thing in show business. know what your audience wants and give it to them over and over again. Steve McQueen knew what his fans wanted. He knew exactly who his audience expected to see on screen, how they wanted him to act like a tough guy or someone would even say an asshole. He knew exactly how they wanted him to look like he didn't care,

like he was both part of the era, but apart from it at the same time. Steve McQueen could just as easily been smoking a joint with his fans backstage at Woodstock as he could have been pounding shots with their parents at an Elks Lodge. effortlessly. That's how it all seemed. But like I said, it wasn't effortless. It was calculated. It just came off as effortless. And that's the trick, I guess. I don't know. I'm not that cool. That's why I'm a podcaster and not an iconic star of the screen like Steve McQueen. But it's all fascinating to think of. I came to Steve McQueen. I came to being a Steve McQueen fan late in life. I was always more of a Paul Newman guy, not because of HUD or Cat on a hot tin roof, but because of late era, older Paul. Newman stuff, slap shot, the verdict. Nobody's fool, the damaged, ornery Paul Newman. I think Paul Newman learned that attitude that he developed in those later years. I think he learned that coolness from Steve McQueen, though. That's what I've come to learn or come to think. Earlier in Paul's career, he looked apart, sure, but he didn't have that effortless thing that Steve seemed to

come out of the womb with. Again, I'm putting air quotes around effortless. And again, key word being seemed. Who did Steve McQueen learn his cool from? It wasn't Merlin Brando, and I can't think of one actor from an earlier generation that is a direct influence on Steve McQueen. If you can, let me know. And by the time, though, Steve McQueen made the getaway in the early 70s. I think it came out in 1972. By the time he made that movie, whatever his influences were, they all coalesced into a wholly unique, wildly compelling, impossible to ignore a character. Steve McQueen's Don McCoy in the getaway. It's, uh, it isn't a unique character so much as as Don McCoy, the guy that Steve McQueen

is playing is made unique by the character of the actor, Steve McQueen, playing the role, if that makes sense. Like, I'm sure the Don McCoy character in the script did not come off as dynamic as it does on screen with Steve McQueen in that role or, or as it would have come off with anyone else in the role. I can't think of any other actor on the planet. who could have made you root for that character in that story up on that screen

in that movie like Steve McQueen did. Maybe Al Pacino, that's the only one I was trying to think of before I came on the mic here, but not really. Not at all, actually. Don McCoy is vicious. He is a bad dude, but his coolness makes you look past that. And somehow there's something within him that you recognize as broken, eternally broken,

that makes you empathize with him. The real Steve McQueen was vicious in a lot of ways, too. He was a horrendous person to be involved with romantically for many, many problematic reasons that we aren't going to litigate here, but to say that perhaps his broken childhood, that that imprinted his character, his persona with some slight tinge of vulnerability to offset that famous hard-ass exterior that was all too real. That is what I think is going on. That is what I think Steve McQueen had that no one else had. Only so much, though, can be taken from watching Steve McQueen's movies. They're obviously a blast. I didn't even, I've been talking for 10 minutes here.

I didn't even mention Bullet. I didn't, I didn't mention the Great Escape. Just iconic movies. And we, of course, watched these films when we were putting together this episode. And we also, of course, did a ton of research into Steve McQueen from various sources to help us paint the picture that we paint in the recent disgrace-land episode. I'm going to take a quick break, and I'm going to be back in a flash to discuss some of those sources. All right, there's a bunch of books out there about Steve McQueen. And we used a handful of them for this episode.

including but for not this episode you're listening to now if you're new there's a full episode scripted sound design all on steve mclean okay that that's the episode i'm talking about that we used a handful of episodes sorry a handful of books to research for okay uh biographies written by mark elliott marshall terrell and darwin porter not to mention an awesome documentary from 2017 titled steve mclean american icon now you may be asking yourself why so many books why not one won't one do. I'll tell you why. And we come across this all the time in our research. Various points of view on the subject that we are covering. You want to know when you're writing, even if you don't share the point of view, you want to know what those points of view are. You want to know what the other points of view are. So you can make sure that you're on the right side of

history. You can make sure, honestly, you can develop your own take on it. You take these varying points of view and you measure them up against each other and you go with what you think is actually the truth of the story based on who the source is, how credible they are, what they're agenda is how they were incentivized by writing what they wrote or saying what they said, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You often get different takes and different stories when you read an autobiography versus a biography, okay, written by somebody else. And of course, then you have authorized biographies and unauthorized versions. And they all differ. They can differ quite a bit. What we try to avoid is the situation where you outline and write an episode of disgrace land,

only to find out later that there were other sources with better information that we completely missed that would have provided us with a different point of view, would have molded how we meld the source material that we get into to form our own take. This is, you know, and oftentimes there's just nuggets. If you go wide in the research and deep as opposed to just deep, there's often stories that have fallen to the wayside. Great stories. Great stories. One that comes to mind is in researching Charles Manson. Now, you know, you're sick of me talking about it. I know, but I've read a lot about Charles Manson. I've watched a lot about Charles Manson. I'm sure some of you have as well. A ton, too much. More for one person in one lifetime. Frankly, I'm sick of

reading about and talking about Charles Manson, okay, even though I just did it in the last Steve McQueen episode. However, I came upon this story. two years ago from a Michael Kane biography, autobiography, by the way, written by Michael Kane, is very hard to find, and that did not go unnoticed by me.

And I think the reason that it is now hard to find is because of the Charles Manson's story within it. And I've talked about this in the past. And it's a story where Michael Kane is at a pool party at Mama Cass Elliott's house, I believe, and he runs into none other than Charles Manson

and members of the family and Roman Polansky is at this party, okay? That's huge. It puts Charles Manson at the same party with one of his victim's husbands. And I'm losing the thread now in my head with all the different stuff that's floating around in there, but I believe Sharon Tate might have been there as well.

Nonetheless, even without Sharon Tate, it is a wildly interesting story, part of the Manson lore that is not in much of any of the other Charles Manson material. that you would normally go to. Another example of this is the Jimmy Hendricks episode that we released recently. There's the great story about Jimmy Hendricks getting kidnapped, okay? This isn't in any of the Hendricks biographies because it's mainly a story about his manager. The best version of this story comes from the guy who's credited with saving the day here, okay? Who's like a gangster,

who told his story, I believe, to Rolling Stone back in the 90s or early 2000s. But I'm getting off track. The point is, there's a lot of different material out there, and we try to scrape as much of it together as possible before we put these episodes down on tape or down on digital file. And of course, we found this to be true with the Steve McQueen story, which is why we dove into the three separate biographies that I mentioned. The one by Darwin Porter, however, Steve McQueen, King of Cool, Tales of a Lurid Life, that title ain't fooling. I don't think this is actually a very good book, so I'm not necessarily recommending that you read it. But this is the book where we dug up that very salacious,

tidbit about the supposed rivalry between Steve McQueen and John F. Kennedy, a standing bet that they had on, well, you're going to have to listen to the episode if you haven't already to hear about what Steve McQueen and John F. Kennedy bet on, a bet that was made when JFK was still just the junior senator from Massachusetts, which in my opinion makes it all the more believable than had he made the bet had he been present at the time, which he didn't. It was a senator, junior senator, and which supposedly continued until he died in Dallas in 1963. Great, great, great tidbit of information. Story is incredible.

It's incredible to think of, given that when these both men met, they weren't yet the icons that they were to become, just two dudes, almost literally having a dick measuring contest and a bathroom together. I want to know your thoughts, aside from that. That was one of those sentences you say, and you realize how silly it sounds after you say it, that's why I'm laughing.

But aside from that, I want to know what your thoughts are on Steve McQueen, okay? John F. Kennedy, dick measuring contest aside. was Steve McQueen, the King of Cool, as he has come to be known? Was there a cooler actor in your estimation from back in the classic days of Hollywood in the 60s and the 70s, a cooler actor than Steve McQueen? Is it Paul Newman? I don't think so. Is it Bert Reynolds? Clint Eastwood.

Can any modern leading man compare to Steve McQueen? Or perhaps I would shine him? Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio. Dare I say Timothy Salome? I'm not going to say Timothy Salome. or Tom Holland, maybe, who? Who falls into the same category, the same cool category, as Steve McQueen from either the past or the present?

617-906-66-66-38 to let me know. Just like this text from the 9-15, yo, Jake, it's Jim from the 9-15, awesome, awesome, awesome Steve McQueen and the best of the best men, miss him dearly, but you did him justice. Take care, Jake, peace out. All right. Well, we know what Jim thinks of Steve McQueen.

That came quick asking you shall. I'll receive 860, write to you, magnificent bastard. I've been hoping for this McQueen episode for months. I just watched Bullet last week, and my thoughts were one. Back in the day, littler guys could still play convincing tough guys, whereas today it's all Helmsworths and rocks. That's a really interesting point. Even your smaller guys like, I don't know, like Mark Wahlberg or something,

like he's still jacked, even though he's not very tall. Number two, holy cow, does the camera adore Jacqueline Bisset? Yes, it does. I think immediately here, this is me talking about number two here from the 860. When you say Jacqueline Beset, 860, I'm immediately thinking about that scene where they're out on that date and they're in that little like cafe. Is it a cafe? Is it a bar? There's like a band with a flute playing or something in Bullitt.

I don't know what the fuck is happening there, what kind of place that is. But there's no dialogue. I don't think. You just trained on these two beautiful people, Steve McQueen and Jacqueline Beset. You can't take your eyes off. Number three, Robert Vaughn is the best, smarmy bad guy. Is that a statement? It looks like a statement.

And, yeah, Robert Vaughn is really, really dislikable as a character. All right, all right, 617-906-6638. You want to send me a text. That's how you do it. We shall also take your voicemail 617-90666-36-36-3-8. I'm going to take a quick break, though, back in a flash. All right, we are back in approaching the end of this week's after-party, but if you, like me, don't want the after-party to end just yet,

if you need more of this, more behind-the-scenes stuff, more holy shit moments, more engagement, more interaction between me, between you, between you and your fellow discos, more voicemails, more texts. We do a little bit of everything over in the disgrace land, all access membership feed that's on patreon okay head to disgracelandpod dot com slash membership just for five bucks a month or even less if you sign up for an annual membership you will get not only an extended version of this here after party each week but one exclusive fully scripted episode of disgrace land every month like the all access only episode on hunter s thompson that's waiting for you right now

and future episodes like the one on lane staley from alison chains which is coming next week Bosquiat. We've got another one on Basquiat, another one on Chris Cornell, those are coming up in the months to come. Plus, if you choose to subscribe via Patreon, like I mentioned before, you will get access to an always-on chat with me. I'm in there every day pretty much, and all the other discos. We're in there talking about music. We're talking about movies. We're talking about everything we're talking about in this year after-party. It's just more of it. I'm in there answering questions, asking questions, sharing playlist, getting recommendations, all kinds of stuff. You can guess what we're doing over there. It's immediate connectivity. It's community and it's a lot of fun. So come

hang with us. That's in the Patreon app. You can also hang with us. You can also subscribe, excuse me, to this all-access membership feed via Apple Podcasts as well. So again, that's disgracelandpod.com slash membership to sign up for disgrace land all-access and get more disgrace land in your life. Like I said, this extended version of the after-party where we are going to be talking about the quote-unquote holy shit moment in that Steve McQueen biography. Not involving JFK, okay, involving Elvis Presley. So if you want to go deeper with us, you want to go deeper, you got to get this all-access

version of the after-party, disgracelampod.com slash membership, all right, gets you all this. Hang tight. Back in a flash. All right, let's recap, shall we? Number one, there is more after-party to listen to right now. All you got to do is go to disgracelampod.com slash membership and sign up to become an all-access member. But if that ain't your bag, then number two.

Right now in your feed, a brand new episode on Steve McQueen. Number three, coming tomorrow, a rewind episode on Iggy Pop. Number four, over in the Badlands Feed, we got an episode from the archive on Sunny Liston. Number five, next week in the disgrace land feed, a brand new episode on Van Halen. Number six, my number, six one seven, nine oh six six three eight, calling on the telephone or text me. Number seven, remember no one cares about the music you love more than you do, and well, that's a disgrace. And now, my moment of bliss in honor of this week's episode on Steve McQueen, from Beach Grove, Indiana, just outside of Indianapolis,

me reading you the Indianapolis City Directory from the year of McQueen's birth, 1930. Betna, student, R4125, Broadway. Indires, Betty, R1338, Columbia Ave. Mrs. Betty, dishwasher, R1528 Mill. H. Bingham, 2301.5 Belafonte. Dom Birdie, 613, North Senate Avenue.

Charwin Bianch, H5444 East 19th. Mrs. Beanche, H233446, Highland Plains. S. Boyd, H3102, East 13, apartment, 5. Sherley Boyleich, H1. Talking and start Mitch. Cut it!