The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 250: Doin' it Your Own Way with Whiskey Myers

Episode Date: December 7, 2020

Steven Rinella talks with Cody Cannon, Chris Alexander, and Khris Poage of Whiskey Myers, and Spencer Neuharth, Sam Lungren, and Corinne Schneider.Topics discussed: switching your name to Steve Fever; natural condoms made out of lamb casings; castration bands; unethical hunting and plowing down an elk herd; calf shelters as a moral boosting thank you to ranchers who enroll in block management; to wolf reintroduce or to not wolf reintroduce?; when the best stuff about America is written by a bunch of British guys; thoughts on eating bass; when the best country music is really just rock-n-roll; people gravitating towards sad songs and the song called "Sad Song"; the cultural difference between European and American hunting; Americans ignorantly talking about Europe as a monolith; Fergusson the carp being pulled to shore on a landing mat; starting on music because your wild grandpa leaves a guitar for you; a superb day of duck hunting; peiking-ing a duck; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with OnX. Okay, among others, we're joined by Cody Cannon. Whiskey Myers. What's going on, man? Is that a stage name? What? Was that your name you were born with? Cody Cannon? Yes. Dude, that's a great,

great name for a musician, man. You're bound to be a rock star with a name like that. Dude, yeah, if you were a rock star named Steve Rinello, that shit ain't going to work. I think it'll work. Cody Cannon, man. He's kind of a rock star. Well, I'm switching to Steve Fever. There you go.

And I'm going into the music business hard. Having a little Copenhagen, huh? Yeah, always. It's my vice. It's one of the only vices I have left, and I don't think I can give it up. That's your flavor? Yeah. Spencer, did you used to dip?

You look like a guy that used to dip. No. Really? A couple times while out fishing in like 100-degree heat when I was in high school. That makes you want to have a dip? Maybe not want to have one ever again. I was wondering how long you'd get without addressing his dip in his mouth. That's the only thing.

It's the primary thing I'm interested in in life. I didn't think long you'd get without addressing his dip in his mouth. That's the only thing. It's the primary thing I'm interested in life. I didn't think it'd be the first minute. That was quick. Oh, first thing out of my mouth. I saw that Coke come out. Yeah, I got a little dip, though. This is like church-sized dip. Show me your pinch size there, if you don't mind. I'm saying not at church.

I'm saying like Saturday night, half drunk. Oh, half drunk? Yeah. That much? The whole tent. The upper and the lower. Do you ever fill in upper and lower lip? No, no.

I ain't that ignorant. That's just pushing boundaries. Yeah. That's just silly. All right. Chris, introduce yourself. I'm Chris Alexander. I'm the tour manager for Whiskey Myers.

You chew? I do not. I used to. You quit? Yeah. Was it difficult to quit? No. I did it when I played baseball when I was in school, and that was when I got done.

I stopped. Someone was telling us the other day that they used to actually mix gum and chew when they played baseball. The Terry Francona. Oh, is that what it's called? That's what it's called. Who was telling me this, too? He said it would make such a mess. Oh, Kurt Roscoe.

What is that? Like you have great bubble gum on one side and you have dip on the other? I don't know if it was Big League. You know how memorable we were kids, too, too? We liked Big League Chew a lot when we were kids, man. She had like a pouch of shredded gum. He was saying that when he played baseball, they would mix their chew and their gum. And he said when you were out standing there for a game doing that,

it would generate so much spit that you would actually have a stained circle around you. Like you'd build up a big chew stain area because it would just generate an enormous amount of saliva. I don't know if that's a universal name, but we refer to that as a Terry Francona. Is that a famous athlete? He's a famous baseball manager. Gotcha. So that's a real thing. Yeah.

That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think I can do that. We had a musician in here one time he was chewing while we talked to him just like yourself and uh we were talking about a full stadium which it was explained to us is when you have the upper and lower deck and he said that's not what that's called it's called a hog nut which i have no idea what the hell yeah i don't know about that i've i've never

i've never tried it i guess i'm gonna have to try it maybe i'm missing out we'll watch uh last night uh callahan was over and we were making some merguez which is a you probably corinne you're uh international enough that what i'm talking about that's delicious making some merguez, which is a, you probably, Corinne, you're international enough to know what I'm talking about. That's delicious. Yeah. Did you have,

you had sumac, right? Not poison sumac. Merguez is normally. No, we didn't put that in there. No, you didn't. Harissa sauce. Yeah, okay.

Roasted red peppers. Okay. Next time you get it. We put it in lamb casings, which is the worst thing on the planet to work with. Why? Is it just dry?

No, they're just like, it's just, they're thin. Okay. They used to make, not even used to, I think you can still get them. Like if you got a latex allergy, they make condoms out of lamb casing. Huh. I wonder how. There's like such a thing as a natural condom. I wonder how effective or not that is.

I don't know. It's bad for the lamb. Different uses of the animal. Oh, speaking of which, man, I haven't talked about this. I have a picture of this. I can't tell if I want to put it on Instagram because it won't perform well and it'll blow my metrics. But we just found, when I was with my kids hunting antelope, we found a coyote dropping. And in the dropping

was a lamb castration band. Huh. For you listeners at home, one of the ways they castrate, you can castrate stuff, is you just take a... I remember this kid I grew up by, Paul Anderson was his name. They did it to their dog.

Oof. with rubber bands. I haven't talked to that dude in a while. He'd be hard to look up on the internet, too, because I got a feeling there's a thousand Paul Andersons. He put rubber bands around his dog's scrow because they knew that they do it in the livestock business this castration band looks like the size of a wedding ring and it's green rubber and they'll just snake it around the lambs they'll snake it around his little scrow and it strangles it and somehow he got tangled up with a coyote and the coyote ate the castration band or whatever or he just ate a castration brand. Or whatever. Or he just ate a castration band, which is hard to picture. I think you're wrong. I think your audience would like that. Are you a band man

or a blade man? Oh, are you a livestock man? That's so good. My father-in-law is. Yeah, we do both. We cut them and band them. Oh, please. Tell me more. Can you walk us through it? What do you guys work with? Cattle or sheep? Cattle. Okay, walk us through the process. I mean, that's. Can you walk us through it? What do you guys work with, cattle or sheep? Cattle.

Okay, walk us through the process. I mean, we just, we process them, and when he buys them, we either band them or cut them. I really don't know why we do one or the other, to tell you the truth. I just kind of do what he tells me to, so. But in great detail. Cutting, everybody can picture, right? You make an incision and snake them out. You still band them. There's a tool, and you reach down and you put it around the testicles,

and then you take a sharp knife or a scalpel is what we use, and you just cut. You make two incisions, and they just fall off. Also, the band works in conjunction with an incision. Right. Over what period of time? I don't know how long it takes them. Probably days, maybe a week, and they fall off off and it's supposed to be better for them i don't

so what's your read now because you're so educated on this let's say you're wandering around with your kids and you find a coyote shit at this time of year but it's old like i don't know how it was a dry area so it wouldn't rot you find a coyote dropping that contains a castration band. That would be a little larger band. In your head, would you be like, oh, he ate a castration band, or would you be like, he ate a lamb and thereby got

the castration band? It could have jaked a nut. Well, does the castration band fall off eventually with the scrotum? What's jaking a nut mean? Did you say jaked a nut? I said maybe band fall off eventually with the scrotum. Yes. What's Jake and a nut mean? Did you say Jake the nut? I said maybe he just ate the nuts and not the lamb.

Oh, I thought you said he jaked a nut. Which I don't know what that, but I'm going to think of something. Hog nut, Jake nut. I'm going to think of something that that means. Yeah. Another positioning of the chew in the mouth. Yeah. I'm going to think of like, I'm going to do some kind of inventive thing and call it

Jake and the Nut and just act like it's always been called that. So you feel that the band, okay, so when you put the band on, and I know Lamb and, show me with your fingers how big a castration band is for cattle. I mean,

it goes down. When you first put it on It's probably that long And you hook it And then whenever you hook it around It probably ends up You know That big So you could feasibly

Pass your fist Through the castration band Like a bracelet I would say so yes Okay Yeah Because like I said This one was like a wedding ring

Right But here's the thing I got so curious about it First I showed it To some livestock people My buddy Doug in particular and he confirmed that that's a castration band and then he sent me a link where i could buy that castration band i could get 100 of them for a couple bucks if i was in the mood um they stick you on the tool

right yeah it's like you buy the tool and get the bands for free basically um so you feel that when he's wearing the castration band like you you put the band on to apply pressure make incisions for him to drop out does that band then fall away it should yes okay so it could be on the ground and the coyote ate it you know yeah how do you know that like was there lamb hair there like how do you know that, like, was there lamb hair there? Like, how do you know it was from a lamb? Because that's the kind of castration band it is. So my wife grew up on a farm. Okay. And she had a cat wander into the yard one time, and they were checking out the cat, looking it over.

They had never seen it before. And it had a castration band on it. And so I don't think they're, like, just exclusive to one critter, especially for rural farmers. You don't think that a farmer threw that castration band, he got into his lamb castration band bin and threw it on a cat? I'm just saying. I'm just saying. Okay. Also.

Okay, I cannot rule out. Especially like, what if it was on a human? What if someone likes the way it feels? In the aid of a person. Like out in ranch country, do I think it was a house cat? No. I don't know. It's a good idea though.

I've talked about this before, but I don't care. I'll talk about it again. We had a cat named Fig. This is kind of a long story. My dad tamed a wild house cat that we named Fig. He tamed it with fish heads because it would come around in the winter and he would just leave out bluegill and perch heads for it

after cleaning fish. And he took a great liking to this cat. And he took the cat. There was a guy named Nels. Nels Carlson. Nels Carlson, I think. He's a hog farmer. My old manels Carlson, Nels Carlson. He's a hog farmer. My old man took fig over to Nels's house to,

so Nils, cause he's castrated hundreds of pigs. My old man takes the cat over there and I went with him. My brothers went with him and they put that cat in a gunny sack, snipped a hole in the gunny sack, and snaked his little scrow out that hole. And that cat fought him off. They got a nick in the cat.

The cat fought him off so viciously that they just said, never mind. The cat healed back up and lived its entire life intact. Fought off a hog farmer. And I remember getting so upset I went into the house because the cat was just making a ruckus. Yeah. When I worked at the fish hatchery, we used castration bands and tools. On fish? No.

Almost. Almost. We use castration bands and tools. On fish? No, almost, almost. When we would ship fish out, say you had like a fry-sized perch, which would be the size of your fingernail. We would put them in these contractor bags or probably like 13-gallon bags. Go water, fish, oxygen, and then to seal it up to make sure none of those things escaped, we would use a castration band with the tool and slide it over the garbage bag. Or to get a good seal on the garbage bag. That's how we would close it. So we use them.

Maybe he ate a sack of fish. Maybe. Hundreds of times a year we'd use that. That's cool. Huh. It sounds like a multi-purpose. Did you ever use the trucks where you just pump them into the lake or anything like that? Yeah, we would do that if we had bigger fish.

But this would be an example where we were shipping it across the country uh to somebody else and these would just go in fedex trucks just like uh all the crap you get from amazon right next to them right could you use castration bands to do the the those fancy silicone wedding rings you guys do no it's not like that because it's um i don't wear a wedding ring at all anymore me my wife both quit nothing about the status of our marriage just like i don't know 10 years 11 years just over it now no i lost mine it's in a it's in an antelope it's probably in this coyote's gut because i lost it got an antelope in wyoming last year and just haven't gotten around to getting a new one no women have talked to me or hit on me i'm sorry well that's the thing like people would say like you're supposed

to you know you wear a wedding ring to say like that you're but i've hit like i've like achieved an age where um it's just not like i don't need to have like an outward symbol demonstrating that i'm i just smell kind of like i just look taken i don't need a ring to help people understand i just look like just played out yeah i don't need a ring anymore um a couple things we got to cover oh i have one last thing do you guys know the Southern writer? He died. Did you know their writer, Larry Brown? You ever hear of Larry Brown?

Larry Brown. I'm not sure. What's his... Father and son. Look up Larry. When you guys wind up looking up Larry Brown's... He had some stuff optioned by the Coen brothers and stuff. He wrote a book called Fire.

Father and Son. Some of the stuff's been made into movies. He was a good dude, man. He was from Oxford, Mississippi. He was a firefighter. And when you're a firefighter, you have all that time between calls. So he wrote

Facing the Music, Dirty Work, Big Bad Love, Joe on Fire, far do you have all that time between calls so he wrote facing the music dirty work big bad love joe on fire father and son fay billy ray's farm rabbit factory miracle of catfish that's what i'm fixing to talk about and tiny love um he was uh he worked at a fire barn and would write when all the other guys were working out and barbecuing and stuff. He would go upstairs and write. He wrote seven novels before he had one published. He wrote a novel. One of his first novels he wrote was about a man-eating bear in Yellowstone Park, and he'd never seen a bear and never been to Yellowstone Park. And eventually got it together like, I should write about a dude i should write about like the dudes that i know here in mississippi yeah and the dudes

i grew up around and instead of writing about bears and parks and whatnot he started just writing about the dudes he grew up around and found like tremendous success he was telling me this story someone mentioned like you mentioned dumping fish out of a truck he was telling me one time about they would have these catfish where they'd raise catfish and they'd have the brood stock or like the big old catfish that would produce the um they would produce all the eggs and now then they'd have to like let them go and people would always let them go secretly and he had somehow gotten a line on where they were letting these old giants go you know they would go and fish for him and then that kind of made its way into a it made a way into his a novel that he wrote a couple things to touch off on you should have

brought your guitar because you know why we could you could have written a ditty yeah to introduce because we had a we wrote it we had a song written to introduce when yannis who's not here right now he's out on assignment um a ditty to introduce when yannis does some reporting for us would have to have been about castration bands and snuff no you could have done us you could have done a ditty introducing spencer's this the ditty that will just play it but a ditty introducing Spencer's. The ditty that, well, let's play it. But the ditty that introduces Yanni's thing is like a little ditty. Then it goes, Yanni's book report.

And you could make a ditty that introduces when Spencer explains something. A show segment. Be like, Spencer's corner. Go ahead, Spencer. Dum, dum, dum, dum. Start with the. He did it. He did it. Oh, you made one up? How's it go?

I just said the dum-dum-dum-dum. That'll work. Start with the flock shooting deal. Then we'll get into the other stuff, because you were telling me about that. Oh, this was just like less than an hour from where we're sitting, you know, distance-wise to drive there.

And it's just from last weekend, which is opener. But there was a BMA, which is private land that is leased by the state for public hunting opportunity. And there were, it was reported 100 hunters flock shooting at a group of elk, which is hard to fathom. Can I give a little context of how I wasn't there? And I haven't read the article.

Yep. But for instance, we had a very early snowstorm. We had a snowstorm that hit before firearm season opened. And it caused a lot of things that would happen later to happen early. I, the day before that season opened, was aware of a herd of 250 elk that turned up down in a hay field. They don't normally, or an alfalfa field. They don't normally turn up.

And I wonder if it wasn't that a bunch of elk were filling into some area that happened to be a block management, a BMA and word started to spread. It does. For sure. I've seen that. And people are like, you know what? There's a bunch of them.

So tell us more. Yeah. And with that snowstorm, we had like two or three days of record lows for most of the state. Specifically, I know Bozeman had record lows. So I would imagine you're correct in that these elk showed up in a place they normally wouldn't for another few months. We had a record high and a record low within a couple weeks of each other. When was the record high? Wasn't there a record high around that day that the fire blew up?

You're probably right. Yeah, it was really high. I think it was a record high for that. Right around the day the fire blew up, there was a record high. But a record high just means that day. Yeah. It was the hottest that day ever. That seems pretty par for Montana. I follow this, uh, national weather service account that always shows the high and the low each day in Montana.

And it's pretty awesome because there's like a 70 degree difference every day. Get some big swings. Yeah. Between like Hardin, Montana, which is out East and then West Yellowstone. West Yellowstone is like 90% 90 of the time the coldest place in the state that's a cold ass place yeah so with these elk 100 hunters flock shooting a group of elk 50 of the elk die um it had to be like a pretty crazy scene and there was an expectation that it's like it's like a cliff drive yeah i i think there was an expectation that with all this uh shooting going on and wounded elk and what have you that there was just going to be a whole bunch of tickets written out of the whole thing there were only five tickets

written i think it was uh 50 the elk were killed and the citations were fairly minor greg lemon said we didn't write as many tickets as you'd think. Hunters were fortunate that not more elk were injured, but he went on to say unethical hunting, even if it's strictly speaking legal, makes all hunters look bad. It kind of gives the hunting community as a whole, a black eye. So he was, he was saying, despite there only being a handful of tickets, this was not a good deal. This was not on the up and up. This flock shooting of elk. And they said that there were certainly wounded elk that got away. There's just

like, not much as far as citations that can be written at this time. Nice work, guys. I've seen that on the news. Was it an organized effort? Like, I don't even know a hundred people. But that's where... That was my first thought is how did they get 100 people together? I talked to a warden once that worked a case where it was where these guys got onto a herd and were texting, which is illegal.

You can't use two-way electronic communications yeah to coordinate so if someone was saying like hey i'll go around this way you go around that way over text or whatever that's illegal but then you have to start seizing phone records and i don't know there's a couple bmas in that area that i would have in mind like where this took place and there's like major roads that kind of run through them i would imagine that this happened where like a couple of guys started shooting the elk running and just like, they happened to pass by more and more people as they went. I doubt that it was like 100 people within a, you know, a couple of minutes span shooting was probably, was drawn out throughout the morning.

Well, and I mean, I hate to say it, but this is far more common than, than we might like to think. I saw a very similar thing happen quite a few years ago. Um, and I think kind of what happens is like these, these elk get pushed out onto their winter range and then everybody sees them and everybody's got the same idea. I, oh, I've got the, I've got the secret. I know where they're at. And that, that's exactly what happened happened we knew where a herd was we knew where they were going up into the foothills and we hiked in up above at in the in the dark and then as it was getting light you know we're seeing all these elk down in the bottom of this valley but then there's

two hunters over there there's two hunters over there's another guy coming up behind them they're just we're like oh well this wasn't a big secret we everybody else figured this out too and they didn't really come close to us but as first light came man people were just ripping at these things like right into the herd there's probably i don't know 75 elk i think 12 hunters and we probably heard 50 shots in the first hour and there's there's a raghorn bull that got hit in the back legs it was dragging its back legs across the field for half a mile and this guy's just like ripping shots at it 800 yards and miss miss miss miss it was it was awful man

it was the is the worst thing i've ever seen in the field and we just like we got out of there mostly because like people were shooting our direction we're trying to get out and i i mean if i i don't like hunting around other hunters in general but like it was it was appalling uh you gotta one of the things you gotta think about when that happens is for each individual just being present you can't like condemn someone for being present because like you said they, they noticed a good play for opening morning. And so what are they supposed to do? Back out because other people noticed the same thing? But then I guess the actual part would be if you're shooting into a ball.

And when they get scared, they start to ball up. When you're shooting into a ball of something, then that becomes the questionable thing. But just fact that like a bunch of people showed up and you were there too like you can't like damn someone for that yeah and this area where i was in is is is like in the montana hunting culture is known for this near anaconda people call them anacomandos no that's good that guy that guys will like group hunt these, these elk herds on their, on their winter range. So I think a lot of this stuff happens every year, maybe not on this scale, but I mean, Cal just sent me a story out of Washington where they like finally caught these guys who would chase elk with, uh, chase elk with trucks in a very coordinated fashion. That's the story I was going to tell. My buddy, my late friend, Eric Kern, was hunting the bridges one time,

and he was looking down and watched on an opening day, watched guys come out with trucks and corral a herd of elk and kill a bunch of them. And he wouldn't call. He wouldn't report it. Yeah, apparently locals knew about this, knew about these guys for years and years. But there were some kind of prominent ranchers in the group, and it was on private ground. But apparently, it was some out-of-towners who reported it who didn't have the local repercussions. But I got in touch with the warden about that.

I'm thinking about running down that story, writing it for the site. Pretty interesting. Spencer, you ought to – do you mind calling and getting a hold of that landowner and asking if he was like, great, because a lot of guys don't want elk eating their crops. Sure. Is he like, yeah, man, good. That's not a big area. It's probably easy to track down where this happened.

I would love to hear his perspective on it. Yeah. He might be like, yeah, I got no problem with it it yeah he might be like yeah i got no problem with it or he might be like dude i'm not doing this anymore my brother's involved in a uh he's involved in an effort and runs this effort to uh thank to to like appreciation days for people ranchers who enroll in block management. So he's found that a thing people need that's expensive and much appreciated

are calf shelters. So he puts his efforts into raising money to buy calf or whatever else people need. But in certain areas, it's like an expensive thing that people really want or much appreciated. He raises money to buy calf shelters to give to ranchers who enroll in block management.

And then they throw a party for people to come out. And they try to entertain them, feed them, give them door prizes and gifts in order to help encourage. That guy might need a little morale boost. Well, yeah. That guy might need a couple calf shelters. That's a great thing to do, man. And the block – the number of acres enrolled in block management has been declining in recent years. And I know that hunter behavior is one of the leading reasons that people will pull land out of that program.

So anything hunters can do to thank folks who let them on their property is, is huge. And I always, I always try to try to send a thanks, give some meat or whatever you can do because it's, it's, you know, it's, it's a huge benefit to the, to the public. Steve, I thought in the past you've predicted how you will someday die. Was it heart disease that you said that you, your prediction was? Well, yeah, because the number one killer of people my age was opioid overdose. Won't be that. So I'm going to segue now. I'm segueing now into the heart disease thing. There you go.

Like, as people, you know, like making sausage last night, we were answering, like, common sausage questions. It was like, what about nitrates and nitrates? I'm like, dude, put a little pink salt into some corned elk. I just, like, that's not, like, when I die, the doctor, the medical examiner is not going to be like, was he putting pink salt in his corned elk? It's just not going to be what happens. There's a bonus bit of reporting in this Great Falls Tribune article.

This is related to the elk show? Yeah, yeah, that they snuck into the last paragraph. Guy had a heart attack out there? I have many questions about it. It says, Meagher County Undersheriff, Jeremy West. Marr? It's pronounced Marr. You say that Marr? M-A-'s pronounced mar you say that more yeah i butchered that then dude i didn't know montana history thomas marr okay i live to that street and i was calling it meager for oh he long time you need to look into into into thomas marr he he uh he was one of the oh man the first politicians in Montana, but his

death was really mysterious. He got thrown off a paddle boat in Missouri. No, like a... What do you call them? He wasn't doing stand-up paddle boarding back then. No, you know, like the paddle

barges that they take up in Missouri. Am I calling it the right thing? Paddle boat. Yeah, yeah. Stand up paddle boat. Sit down paddle boat. Like on Maverick. Yeah, but he's a fascinating character.

There's a bar in Missoula called the Thomas Marr Bar. Hmm. Yeah, so that's how everyone- Spelled meager. Yeah. M-E-A-G-H-E-R. Dude, I had no idea about this fella. I was calling it Meager for like two years.

And then you fixed your system? Who corrected you? Hold on, you lived in that county? No, no, no, no, no. I'm on Yellowstone Street in town. And one block over is Meager Street or Marr Street. I'm with you now. So whenever I would drive by, there was probably a time I was like, you know, with a friend in the car who knew better saying, oh, yeah, you just that.

Oh, there's Meager Street. And you go down there like, what do you mean Meager? I'm like, look at the sign, M-E-A-G-H-E-R. And they're like, Corinne, sweetheart. That's just not right. Gotcha. Let me hit you real quick with his history because it's way crazier than I was suggesting. He was an Irish nationalist, leader of young Irelanders in a rebellion in 1848, convicted of sedition and sent to Tasmania.

And then he escaped Tasmania and got to the United States. You know this guy liked to pull a cord. Yeah. Yeah. And then joined in the American Civil War, rose to the rank of Brigadier General. What? You know what that means, Brigadier General?

No. That's what Custer was. It means that all the generals are getting killed off and you got to make like temporary general appointments. I think. the generals are getting killed off and you and you got to make like temporary general appointments and sorry i wasn't tracking yeah i'm reading i'm reading about this uh appointed to as the secretary of state of montana of montana territory and eventually became the territorial governor. But he, yeah, was, he drowned in 1867 after falling from a steamboat in Fort Benton. The cause of his death is disputed by historians with various hypotheses, including weakness from

dysentery, intoxication, suicide, or murder. Hmm. Timothy Egan wrote a book about him. Really? Yep Before he started to hit it big Yep Damn I predicted he'd like to pull a cork

Remember that? The immortal Irishman The bio seemed like a drinking man's bio man That's great So the Marr County Undershare So you're talking about the article that you got served below this article. No, no, no, no. Or they work this into the article.

Within this article. They just work it into the end. Yeah, I mean, it's like not really relevant, but it's like interesting. And this is what I have more questions about than the flock shooting of elk. Marr County Undersheriff Jeremy West said one of the hunters in the group later died from a heart complication that was unrelated to the incident. The person's name was not immediately released. That was like a total. So that had to add like chaos on chaos out there.

It's weird that they threw it in though. It wasn't related. Sure. But I imagine like somebody who was maybe also in that area, but like didn't, wasn't aware of what was going on. Maybe like saw an ambulance or an airlifted or a helicopter. Oh, they're clarifying for people. Maybe. I assume so because that had to add questions to this whole event.

And then they're like, oh, someone got shot. Yeah. You got to make some calls, man. You got to do some investigative journalism. Well, now I'm hung up on Thomas Marr. Just work that into your thing. Sure. That trumps the rest of this, I think.

All right. Let's move on quick. We got to get to our guests. We got two things we got to cover. So just recently we had an episode. What was that episode called? Oh, Good People for a Good Country? Yep.

We talked about how Utahans... Is that what you would say? A Utahan? Utahans. I don't see why not. Utahans. Is it Utes? No, Utes is a tribe.

Utes is a tribe. Oh, you're right. That's one of the football teams. That's the college, yeah. Yeah. I think that's what Utah's named after, though, that tribe. But I could be completely wrong. I believe it is.

Utahns at the election have a ballot measure. And it's whether or not to encode, to codify the right to hunt and fish in Utah. And we were talking about when we were covering this piece of news with a guest from Utah, who's, who, who introduced this bill for the state. We were talking about where does this, where do these things find their teeth? Like, let's say a state has a state right to hunt and fish. They have a constitutional right to hunt and fish. Like, what does that mean?

Like, where does the rubber meet the road on that? Just so happens that, that um we now have the first lawsuit in this state this is you know this is local news for us but national news for everybody else i think it's fair to say because for the first time someone's doing a suit suing the state the governor fishing game various people using the right to hunt and fish as their argument what they're doing is there's a conservation group what's the name of that group i've never even heard of them i kind of like them though. Outdoor Heritage Coalition. The Outdoor Heritage Coalition is suing the state,

governor and fishing game office and others, under the right to hunt and fish thing. They're suing the state for putting what they regard as being too conservative of a quota around the wolf harvest. It's infringing on the right to hunt and fish because wolves are decimating elk numbers in these areas. So they're saying by you putting an unnecessary cap on the killing of overpopulated wolves, you are infringing on our right to hunt and fish because you're allowing

all of our game to get decimated, which is sly. We're not buying it. Are they even reaching quotas currently for wolves? I mean, I felt like that was, I felt like the bottleneck for wolf reduction was hunter effort because they're hard as hell to kill. Yeah, that was easy for a couple of minutes and then it got hard. Yeah, they got smart and they have huge territories and they're just sly bastards. You rarely see them.

Just telling you. We'll have to do a follow-up report. That's interesting. But I bring it up only because we were talking about when does it, when does the, when does, like, if you have the right to hunt and fish, when does that actually even become a, like, it's like, okay, that's all good and fine, but where is it exercised? And so this is an example of someone trying to exercise it. Sam just pulled up a little map showing, a map shows which states have a constitutional right to hunt and fish. If you're into conspiracy theories, i think you should explore the fact i would explore the fact that the states when you look at a u.s map where the states that have do you like how they put it in red yeah what color do they use for

when you don't uh gray no what's california uh? That's for legislation on constitutional right to hunt and fish is pending. Oh. I like it that they put red. Red is you have the right to hunt and fish. California is the only blue one. There's also Rhode Island. California is good because it's pending, but they'll never...

This is three years old, so that was probably defeated. If you're into conspiracy theories, though, you might want to look at this map because the states that have a right to hunt and fish form a circle. Let me see, Sam. With a hole in the middle. Huh. I think there's something to be delved into there. That's not accidental.

What are the two gray ones right there in the middle of the circle? Yeah, that's what he's talking about. That's South Dakota, Iowa, Missouri, and Illinois. So, Iowa, Missouri, and Illinois don't have the right to hunt. Those are big questions. Well, the constitutional right. Okay. You know, there's the right to hunt and fish in all of these states, but some states have chosen to say that it's like, you know, it's a God given right that you can, that you can hunt and fish, which yeah,

I've always been interested to know like where the rubber meets the road there. Like how you use it. Yeah. So, I mean, if that were to pass in California, like the only thing that comes to mind is how California, you know, banned fur trapping last year as we covered.

Yeah, but even in Utah, dude. Would that, would that be unconstitutional? Well, here's the, here unconstitutional even in a hard hitting hunting and fishing state like utah um he they didn't put trapping on there because they didn't want to muddy the waters and lose popularity but he said it's actually it's there's an implicate it's like implied to cover trapping and should be used. But if you put trapping on there, it'll lose support. That's interesting.

That's where you got to use it to. Because this says that Montana has a constitutional right to hunt fish, which I did not know, but I mean, it makes sense, but yeah, there's that legislation introduced like every time to ban trapping on public land.

So I wonder where that, where that falls. Cause they're too chicken to put trapping on public land. So I wonder where that falls. Because they're too chicken to put trapping on there. Dude, once I get done fighting Hunter's Orange laws and get the whole everything reduced to just the Hunter's Orange hat is all you need, I'm going to take up right to trap. I'm with you. What else do we want to talk about that?

Not much to say about that. If you're in Colorado and you are one of the, what I'm predicting to be, you're one of the minority of people who voted against making the state draw up a Wolf reintroduction plan, I applaud you. Because they're arriving on their own. They're there now anyway. That's the path to take. That's the path to take. That's the path to take.

So thank you. I'm sure you lost. One last thing, guys. Are you okay? I'm good. One last thing. Okay, hit it. Spencer.

Oh, wait. We need the intro. What thing? The last thing? I don't remember. I don't remember. I't remember i lost it oh speaking of suing people how's that for a segue okay i sent you the article to do a little report on it oh i i don't have anything to report you're going to be able to produce a better report than i

okay one of the things um right now i'm extremely extremely disheartened with the Trump administration over their decision to lift roadless rules in Tongass and open up like half of Tongass National Forest to logging and road building. That's a pisser. Yep. But what I have been applauding them for is opening up a bunch of U.S. wildlife refuges where appropriate, opening up hunting and fishing on a bunch of U.S. wildlife refuges and fish hatcheries and stuff. So creating more acreage for Americans to hunt and fish. The Center for Biological Diversity is suing them so that they can't, trying to stop that from happening. Under the Endangered Species Act, which I'm interested to see that complaint. Because they didn't open it up to hunting

endangered species. I know that's the thing. I think these people haven't read the, I think that the Center for Biological Diversity hasn't read up on what it is. I feel like, oh, they're going to start hunting endangered species. They can't do that.

It's like, no, they're not going to start hunting endangered species. They're allowed to hunt the normal shit that everybody gets to hunt per state rules on refuges where it makes sense, which you can already do in a bunch of them anyway. Yeah. It opens up an additional 3,600 square miles. You can hunt shitloads of refuge land already.

It's opening up some additional ones, and they assume as though this is one of those groups that, like, there are a lot of things. One of the things they are is an anti-hunting organization every you will never i i challenge a listener to send me a thing where the center for biological diversity hasn't taken a knee-jerk reaction against hunting no that's what they do but they're like when i tell friends oh yeah it's like an anti-hunting group. Oh no, they're not. I'm like, okay. They're, they are. It's not their like mission, but they emerge as a nitpicky, like a very nitpicky, like.

And highly litigious. Yeah. Any issues, like, let me guess, let me guess, let me guess. They're going to be, their stance will be antagonistic to the interests of hunters and fishermen. Maybe I'm wrong. Is there any

national fish hatchery that you can hunt on? Well, not that I've ever done, but I know there's some fish hatcheries that have some sizable holdings. It wouldn't be in there if it wasn't. I haven't looked at, I haven't looked at the fish hatchery component, but yeah, there's

probably some fish hatchery that's got a couple thousand acres on it. Yeah, man, there's some giant ones in Washington that I wouldn't be, wouldn't be at all surprised to know that hunting was allowed and totally would fit in with the management. Now fishing a fish hatchery, that could be

good. Well, in Washington, in Washington, that's the whole point. I got another one. People are always piled up right around the hatchery hole. We used to call it, there's one particular one we called the crack pipe because there was just this one cast that you wanted to make because all these steelhead would pull in right below the outflow of the hatchery because they get that scent that they come back to. And if you could make this one tricky cast up into the concrete outflow of the hatchery, you would catch a steelhead nearly every time.

Yeah, and probably be really excited about it. Yeah, yeah. So a bit more on this, then we're going to wrap this up. So in this country we have, in the U.S. of A., we have 550 wildlife refuges. This move, this additional 3,600 square miles,

will bump it up to where you can now hunt on 430 refuges, 430 of the 550. You can fish 430 of the 550. You can fish on 360 of the 550. Has implications for people in 37 states. I think it's a common misconception in the public sphere that wildlife refuges exclude hunting. I mean, and honestly, the naming isn't that great. It seems like a refuge where animals can go flee from us horrible hunters or something. No, it's where they go to flee from development.

Yeah, absolutely. And I've corrected people on this tons of times that like, this is, this is a habitat refuge. This is, this is undeveloped land. This is, but it's, it's, it's meant for the, it's meant for people's enjoyment. And there are, I mean, how, like half of Alaska's national wildlife refuges, I mean, not half, but like giant, giant portions and all of it's wide open to hunting. So I think there's a broad misunderstanding that we could correct, you know, in the public eye that hunting is an important management tool on our National Wildlife Refuge system. Yeah.

You know where I bet I'll be allied with the Center for Biological Diversity? I bet you I can guarantee they're annoyed about the Tongass Diversity. I bet you, I can guarantee they're annoyed about the Tongass ruling. I'm certain they are. So maybe we can find a little friendship and hug over that. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there. OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right.

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onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the onx club, y'all. Here's a question for you, Cody Cannon, Whiskey Myers. Don't tell Corinne I asked you this. Okay. I'm not asking you what any songs mean. But why is it offensive that people ask you what a song means? No, I didn't say it was offensive.

We were talking about. You said you hate it. Yeah. But tell me why. I don't want to know what they mean, but why does that bother you? Because I would feel. No, no, go ahead. Yeah, no, we were just talking about how people take, how you can write a song and people.

I wrote it and I think it means one thing. You got a different idea of what it meant because it meant something different to you. It's all different. And I think there's some magic in that. I think that's neat. So I don't like sometimes. I see what you're saying. They always ask that question and it's like, nah, I want to have your interpretation.

I'm with you now. They're like, when I hear this, it gives me this feeling of, I sent my brother a song. And that's cooler. It's like abstract art. Yeah. It's like it's in the eyes of the beholder. And it could be so far out in left field and you're like, yeah, that's not what it's about. But it means that to them.

And like, what did I say? I said it was like when you read a book and you have a character in your mind and you see the movie and they don't look anything like that. It's like the same thing. That's a great example. It's like – You ever watch the movie The Road? Yeah. I don't think so.

You know, in the end, Cormac McCarthy's The Road. In the end, this little boy's dad dies and he wanders out to a road and gets picked up by this guy. And Cormac McCarthy describes him in the book as being being like it looks like he survived many skirmishes and anyways the dude in the end of the movie i'm like that's not who that is yes i was like i had that's way off yeah the image i built with very little information see i read that book after reading the movie or after watching the movie yeah so so yeah so which i hate which i hate doing because then the movie informs it because then you don't have there's less creativity going in on the reader's perspective that's a really

i like that answer i was expecting to be annoyed by your answer that's a great answer i don't hate it but it was just like i like it to be open into interpretation especially on some songs i don't have any specific ones in mind but you know people get different ideas, and I think that's cool. Well, I was telling him this morning that his song Frog Man must be about fishing frog baits for bass. That's what it means to me, and ain't nobody going to tell me different. Yeah. And what did you hear in response? He said, uh-huh.

I sent my brother, you ever hear Sturgill Simpson cover that song, when you need a friend? Yeah, The Promise. Yeah, The Promise. Oh, yeah, yeah. I sent it to my brother, and he wrote me back saying how it reminded him of his first dog. It felt like it was about or reminded him of his first dog dying. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, and I'm like, yeah, you can't say, well, that's not like it was about or reminded him of his first dog dying exactly exactly yeah

and i'm like yeah you can't say well that's not what it's about by god yeah yeah it's it's cool to say i know people want to hear that sometimes but sometimes it's like i just let it just let it be you know especially like before the album comes out we'll do a lot of questions and stuff and i'll be like want you to explain each song and stuff like that it's like nah but that feels so reductive it right it's like yeah tell me tell me literally what the thing is so that this is how i'm supposed to think and feel about it instead of having your own relationship to hearing your music yeah thousand percent that's that's what that's what i meant um do you are you able to share with fans and listeners, like if they say, here's what I think about when I hear it, do you then refrain from saying, that's great, I love it, you're right, here's what I was thinking or do you not even do that

because you'd be pulling the Trump card no yeah it's just I don't remember I probably have different responses to it but it's cool whatever they think or more than that they would probably ask you like hey what does this mean and that's cool you know

but you know not necessarily like an interview telling everybody what it's supposed to mean did that's cool you know but i you know not necessarily in like an interview telling everybody what it's supposed to mean they're like did that mean that and it's like no i was actually about this that's like a little bit different so that's how i would do that i see your um colleague here has a stones tattoo oh yeah did you get that i was right after the show. I got it literally, I got it in Seattle that day. Really? Yeah. After we played Immigrant here in Montana. I was at that show. Went to Soldier Field, played that, and then we circled back around to Seattle at the, I guess, the Neptune.

And then I got it there. Chris, introduce yourself. Chris Pogue, content creator for Whiskey Myers. That was a big deal, huh? Was it cool when you guys tell people a little bit about that you wound up having sort of a sort of endorsement of sorts from the Stones? Yeah, just we got to open up a show for them at Soldier Field in Chicago. And it's just one of those things that's like they say once in a lifetime. That's like a never in a lifetime thing.

And, you know, they pick and approve. I think Mick does all the bands that get to open for them. So just to be able to do that was really special. And they were a huge influence to me personally in the band also. It's one of my favorite bands, if not my favorite band. Yeah, how could the best stuff about America be written by some British dudes?

Hey, but they were right. Yeah, but their influence. They understood America way better than Americans. Well, they were trying to sing the blues, man. Yeah, yeah. And they love blues and country music, and they come from America, come from the South. Yeah, it's really interesting. You think that they were like, you think they had lived like six lifetimes in America?

Yeah, yeah. They're great. Put it this way, like Jamie, our bass player, said, we're talking about how cool it would be. He was like, we could go and play Soldier Field and sell it out, and it still wouldn't be as cool as playing with it. Yeah, as open for the Rolling Stones at Soldier Field. So it was great. Which one of your bandmates is laid up right now from crashing a side-by-side?

What's that all about? That's John, man. And you guys were hot-dogging, not hot-dogging? I wasn't there. You weren't even present. No, he definitely was. John's always kind of been reckless with an ATV. Get a little closer to your mic.

I said, John's always been reckless with an ATV, so he was definitely hot-dogging. It was definitely... Who's this now? What's he play? His name's John Jeffries. He's our guitar player. Oh. So tell, what happened?

It was in the pursuit of game? He was running down a herd elk. He was literally, he went to go cut one donut from a dead stop and he rolled it and he didn't have his seatbelt on. So he's kind of like, watch this. Pogue was actually with him and he was buckled in. Thank goodness. So he, they, Pogue said they rolled three times.

John said they rolled once. We don't really know. So nobody saw it except for them. But there's a dispute about whether it was three rolls or one roll yeah so okay he's at a standstill and he's like let's cut a cookie for no reason he was on one of these like jacked up like it was a it's a polaris razor it's like this big jacked up kind of top heavy top vehicle anyway and so and it's very powerful so he just gunned it and when he did

it just completely flipped over and i don't think he he definitely didn't think it would do that cracked his skull it did it was pretty serious actually he is fine he is fine by the way he'll be he's gonna make a full recovery he's good he's very good uh how what's your what's your guys connection um like how did you get into hunting and fishing were you into hunting fishing What's your guy's connection? How did you get into hunting and fishing? Were you into hunting and fishing before music? Yeah, way before. So talk through that.

You're like, I kind of like to hunt and fish, but I kind of like music. Yeah, music was so foreign to me. It was? Yeah, I mean, I liked it. I loved music. You listen to music. Your parents listened to music as a kid, but nobody. What did your parents listen to?

You know, Skinner, Hank Williams Jr., Alan Jackson and stuff, like the typical stuff like that. Hold on a minute. You're throwing Alan Jackson in with Skinner and Hank Williams Jr.? Well, yeah, I would say, yeah. Liberace. That would probably have been like the. The Beach Boys. They would have, you know, like some, you know, old rock, old country, and then they would have been listening to like the current stuff.

Oh, I'm with you. Okay, yeah. No, no, that was a good job. That was a good job. I don't know why I questioned that, but yeah, that all makes sense. You were conveying like a variety. Yeah. Rather than a style of-

Yeah, for sure, because we have a lot of variety, I think. How old are you? I'm 35. Okay. So, yeah, but playing music was kind of foreign to me because nobody in my immediate family really played music or instruments or anything like that or were ever in a band. But we always fished and hunted. So if you would ask my younger self, I would have thought it would have been, what would you do when you grow up? I would probably be like, oh, I'm going to fish and hunt, not play music fish and hunt not play music and then that just did you grow up kind of poor or what yeah we weren't super poor but i would say you know middle class or lower middle

class like my mom cut hair my dad worked at you know it was like a prison guard so that's not super lucrative jobs but we weren't going hungry or anything how did you how did your dad handle being a prison guard was he the did he get that kind of like anger or was he no well he was cool where we're from not that he won't not that that's not cool i'm saying like that that's a taxing job i guess that's what i'm getting at yeah it can be because yeah they have to deal with a lot of crazy stuff but where we're from that's like i think like everybody in my family worked at the prison cause there's like seven prisons outside of our area. And so when you're from our area, you either leave or you work for Walmart or the prison system. And that's about it.

So we're from, uh, Palestine, Texas around, around there. I'm actually from Natchez, which is about 10 miles, uh, 15 miles outside of Palestine, which is just in East Texas. You two grew up together, right, Chris? Yeah, we did. Yeah, we grew up playing baseball when we were young, since we were probably four or five. Yeah. So that's kind of how we met.

And then bass fishing was always real big for us whenever we were growing up. And our dads would take their vacations around when we were on spring break, and we would go to Lake Fork every year. Just to fish bass. We would camp yeah it was awesome i want to hear uh i want to hear you tell the audience about about your thoughts on eating bass i said it's a sin yeah no i you know people get all you know touchy about that and i don't you know if that's what you want to do i don't care it doesn't bother me uh

but i always throw them back you know but have you ever eaten a large do, I don't care. It doesn't bother me. But I always throw them back, you know. Have you ever eaten a largemouth? I don't remember. I'm sure I have when I was younger, but not recently or anything. So you guys knew each other at four or five, and you were already fishing. Fishing was in your families. Yeah. Did you guys have boats and stuff back then, or were you like bank fishermen?

Yeah, my dad had an old champion that we— Like rigged out for bass. Yeah. I never had a boat until I was older, so it was just pond hopping, unless I got to go with y'all or some of my dad's friends or something. But yeah, fishing and hunting, I mean, that's how we grew up. That was just in our DNA. It's like breathing.

Did you guys eat—I know you didn't eat those bass, but did you guys grow up eating game and stuff around the family table? Yeah, deer, ducks, fish. Yeah, crappie. Catfish. Stuff like that, dove. And then, but your parents

split up when you were young. Yes. Yeah. How'd that play out? I don't mean like, you don't need to tell me what happened between them but i mean how did it impact you how did it impact your interests and whatnot um as far as fishing and stuff that i mean it was still the same for me but uh my mom remarried uh my stepdad now and he was a super big hunter and so we actually hit it off and we've been like best friends ever since and we would go so that wasn't the problem the hunt wasn't the problem no yeah

that it didn't affect that at all yeah i think a lot about i don't want to spend a lot of time on this but i think a lot about if i was to pass away all of a sudden um heart disease like let's say i died right now opioid addiction let's say i already right now. Opioid addiction. Let's say I OD'd right now on opioids. I'm like, would I rather my wife wound up with a dude like my brother or something, right? They're married, but let's say.

Some dude basically exactly like me or would I rather she wound up with some dude way different? Yeah, not near as cool. Just way different. Like, which is more palatable for me? Ooh, I don't know.

I don't think about that. If it was a dude way different, I'd be like, boy, we must have been way mismatched or something. I see what you're saying. But if it was a dude just like me, I'd be like, oh, sweet. So the basic parameters were okay. Yeah. So she wound up with another hunter. Yeah.

Did you feel like if you're growing up and you have a stepdad and a dad and they both like to go hunting yeah was that did that create like jealousy and stuff with your dad no i was real fortunate uh there was never any animosity everybody got along and they still get along in my family so i know then it wasn't a bad thing where you know this side hates that side or anything like that that's one thing that's one thing i would not be able to stomach dude yeah some other guy taking my kid out yeah no everything was yeah they always got along and stuff which is good you know you had chris you had the same situation right absolutely yeah well that uh our parents actually got a divorce around the same time i think our our

dads were roommates there for a while so cody and I kind of lived together when we were in sixth grade. That's so right. You were brothers, like, actually. Pretty much. You guys really stuck together. Yeah. All of us really known each other in the band, for the most part, forever. We're just all from the same area.

We grew up together, you know. What's it like now know you've had some hat not had having success and kind of like doing this thing that isn't on the radar people you grew up around is it uh challenging is it like that you lost your way and you're not one of us anymore like is that kind of stuff going uh i don't know not to our face at least um we haven't changed very much we're kind of the same i mean obviously we're older and been around the world so you change a little bit but uh i keep my blinders on it sounds fake but it's real i mean we all do like i don't care about any of it i I just go out and do my thing.

You kind of have a little bit of a reputation for – I want to get back to how you got into music, so don't forget that. But you have a reputation as kind of playing by your own rules a little bit. Yeah. And being leery of – not antagonistic to her, but maybe leery of, shy about industry stuff. Yeah. Like maintaining control and all that. Yes. Do you feel that that's kind of like, is that like an artistic thing,

or is that like a thing from growing up how you grew up? I'd say both. Yeah, I mean, we just wanted to do our own thing. We wanted to play our own music. Some people get into music, I think, and they want to be famous. They don't care. They want to be famous. They don't care. They want to be famous. Rich and famous.

That's the end goal. There's nothing wrong with that, but I don't think anybody in our band had that ever in mind. It was like, it's what you did. We played music. We're in a band now. That's what we do. And it was important for us to have our own style and have our own control and i think that probably has to a little bit to do with your upbringing bringing her being a little bit you

know ignorant redneck no hell with that i'm gonna do it my own way yeah uh but that was very important it's still important to us so that's why we've never signed any record deals or anything we've always been independent and we always want to be I think I do I don't it's like why the hell do I want a boss do you feel a lot of calls about signing record deals we have we've had we'd have have had opportunities and stuff like that and we just it's just not for us you know especially with the band like us we're a little different you know we don't fit a certain genre a certain style and I don't think they would even know what to do with this. What genre would you like self-identify with if you had to?

None. I don't even like genres. I think that's just like a thing for selling. It just makes it easier for people to put it in a box and sell it, you know, for marketing and stuff. I'm not big on genres because like all the stuff that i like musically had so much like for the stones for example like they wrote some of the best country songs ever oh yeah blues it was rock and roll it was pop i wanted to get a shirt says my favorite country band's rock band yeah uh skinner so many different influences even stuff like waylon jennings and stuff that

was rock and roll to those people back then in the country scene. So I was always a big fan of people who did different stuff. Isn't it funny with Waylon, that if you read about Waylon, now people are like, oh, I hate country. Except for that Waylon Jennings.

And when Waylon Jennings time, it was like, hey, country? Yeah, exactly. It's really like the... You know, I should tell you this about genres. It's kind of this interesting story. When I was in school, I took this class called the Literature of Natural History. And you read everything from, you know, like Henry David Thoreau, you know, like Walden and shit, all the way up into a book about what was called like bioengineering or something. Basically how engineers can look at cobwebs and make structural, you know,

like honeycomb would give you like ideas about how to make structural design. Okay. And, you know, this guy that taught this class was Hank, I wish I could remember his last name. He died. Him and his wife both drowned in a canoeing accident. Okay. And you know, this guy that taught this class was Hank. I wish I could remember his last name. He died. Him and his wife both drowned in a canoeing accident. Shortly after I took that class,

they had a cabin out on an Island. We're paddling out there and flipped and died. But. It brings up an interesting thing with the genre question, because he was really interested in this idea of natural history writing. And he would find that these books that he loved so much were hard for people to locate and hard to identify. And as an example, he would go into a bookstore and find books that should be together were scattered all around. And he actually contacted the Library of Congress, where they come up with the numerical systems to identify books.

He contacted the Library of Congress and said, you guys have a problem where you're not seeing what makes these books the same, and you need to find a way for bookstores and other people to draw these parallels between this type of literature. And then they actually invited him down he did like a sabbatical and went down to design a to design a genre of literature and you might instinctively like hate that kind of stuff but in in some way it helps people locate things. Yeah, it definitely does, for sure. But just from the artistic side, I don't like to.

I would guess to answer that question, it would be kind of rock and roll, country, and blues would be, I think, our three main influences type thing. That would be the best. But as far as putting a lane on it, I don't think I could put a specific genre. I know you didn't say red dirt country, but I imagine you've had some dealings with that industry. With what? Red dirt country. Oh. Yeah.

Explain that to me. I don't know. You guys would do a better job than me. Yeah, so I guess that would be kind of a sub-genre. Red dirt? How did I never hear this? red dirt very popular in texas yeah texas and oklahoma and the midwest and stuff like that and a lot of those guys it's the same it's kind of rock and it's kind of country it's just it kind of takes everything a lot similar

to like americana it's kind of like that from the outside like uh red dirt country is a lot more wholesome and it's real and it's not like mainstream country, which is, like, super fake and sellouts and stuff. Yeah, it's more gritty, I feel like. Is that the case? You don't think mainstream country is wholesome? Is that the reality, though, that, like, Red Dirt Country is what it seems, and it's, like, it's not like mainstream country? Or do they, like, have the same kind of bullshit that you'd expect? Well, anytime you get into anything at all, there's a little bit of bullshit.

But no, I think it's very honest, kind of pure still. And a lot of those guys, especially when we were younger, like the Jason Bolins and the Ragweeds and Reckless Kell and stuff like that they were they were they were different you know and so i think i don't know if they necessarily i don't know exactly how the name got it you know where it come from i'm sure people even old you know older than them i'm not sure about that but uh i know it's you know called that now but yeah it was just kind of the independent mindset you know but but like for somebody who likes red country they can continue to like it because it is like what it seems right it's not like yeah for sure good yeah i'm not following what you're getting there's some bands i don't know if you'd be no i i get the i get the whole thing kelly barb crow but i'm saying like when you say like

not what you can follow i don't get it it's it's not like Luke Bryan, Kenny Chesney, folks like that. You're saying sometimes in mainstream, you're getting a product that's not even controlled by the artist. Yeah. That's really put together and not even them. It's very manicured. It is independent and it's whatever that band sounds like, it is actually realistically them. I think 100%. Yeah. whatever that band sounds like it is actually realistically them and i think i think 100 yeah like luke bryan would talk about shooting bucks copenhagen pickup trucks stuff like that

right somebody probably wrote that because you think someone was like hey here's some key words sure sure but like red dirt country is just like like i said i don't know a little more honest what if they talk about copenhagen yeah. Then they actually choose Copenhagen. Then they actually choose Copenhagen. Oh. You think you might not like the Cope. Right.

But I'm kind of curious about, you know, what, what, what is going through the minds of artists or non-artists

when they feel more comfortable defining themselves within a genre and what it is you feel like you might be bucking up against or not wanting to accept when people like are trying to right are you this and this do you hit these this category and this like what is that what does that feel like for you and sometimes you can just listen to an artist and you say yeah that's a rock and roll band that's what it is you can say oh that's country that's straight up country you know uh cody jinks great pure country that's country

you know where somebody like us i mean one song might be country the next song's like like mud and we're in we're like drop c or something almost thrashing so that's where it would be hard for me to do that because we do kind of go all over the place. And so I don't think you could say it's country or rock and roll. It is a mixture. Would you say that's more authentic to how you feel in a day and a song expresses a mood and that you're just expressing as a band all these kind of different signs?

Yeah, I think we just had a bunch of different influences and we decided to play whatever the hell we wanted to. And so that's kind of why it's like that. When we saw you guys at the Old Saloon and Immigrant last summer, I know me and all my friends were a little bit taken aback because I think you had, you know, some of your ballads have become a little bit more prominent and popular and, you know, your, some of your ballads have, have become a little bit more, more prominent and popular and, you know, really beautiful, really, really captivating. But you guys rocked out way harder than we were expecting. Yeah. Yeah.

And so it, it, we're, we're going there expecting more, more of like a, more of like a full, you know, country kind of show. And it was a full-on rock show yeah especially live at it yeah we like to rock it's fun especially for the live things people gravitate towards the ballads and slow songs that's just people people like sad songs that's just kind of how it is there's even a song i like called sad songs yeah i think i've heard that lou reed sad songs yeah yeah um it's true it's a true statement man people dig sad songs it's like oh you want a sad song do you i'll call this song sad songs um what percentage and i'm not gonna ask you what any shit means but what percentage

what percentage of your music would you say is informed by hunting, fishing, outdoor pursuits? Even in terms of the vernacular. I think a lot of vernacular. I don't have any songs about hunting and fishing per se, but they'll say stuff in them. Gasoline has a line in it. I think Frogman has a line in it. Ballad of a Southern Man. Has that line in it ballad of a southern man has that line in it

so there's things that you could tell yeah like terminology or references or something yeah but not necessarily like hey I'm going fishing today yeah one of my favorite

lyrics is dude that's a good hook that's a good hook I'm taking that shit man well that one starts with I don't mind work and I love to fish. And I've been known as a son of a bitch.

The first time I heard that, I'm like, yeah, I resonate with that. Do you, this is something I always like to ask people who are like somewhat in the, at least somewhat or all the way in the public eye. Do you, do you, a lot of people who are interested in the blood sports, get to a point where they feel they need to draw some separation because it's a liability. Yeah. I'll never be like that. But do you understand why they do it yeah 100

have you have you been in a situation where you're like god it almost be easier if i just like wasn't associated uh not too hot a little bit it's kind of like uh our european fans are not down with hunting and stuff like that but it's it just comes from ignorance like when i when i had all those pictures of the hogs and stuff like that you know they were like everybody was bitching and stuff and i was like well shit i guess i shouldn't even have posted that but uh but you thought that for a minute yeah but i mean you know whatever uh but not to just be like oh i'm not gonna hunt and all that stuff no i wouldn't i would never do that it's just who i am i'm not i'm not changing i have no interest in changing to be bigger or famous or have more money or

anything like that i'm completely fine with how i am do you where do you draw your main you mentioned like hearing from european fans you mean like in social media comments yeah supposedly they were like up six we killed a bunch of pigs and it comes from ignorance they didn't know that they're one of the invasive species so they shouldn't even have been there and we shot a bunch of ducks yesterday they're not invasive yeah but they probably would freak out about that too but uh that was really yeah i don't think we've had a lot of backlash other than that but But I don't have social media or anything like that. So even if they were talking a lot of shit, I wouldn't hear about it unless somebody told me.

What's the main way you communicate with fans? How do you know what they're thinking? I think Pogue. Pogue tells you. I don't know. So someone says, heads up. It goes back to keeping my blinders on and doing my thing, you know, trying not to be influenced by that.

Yeah, but there's got to be some element of, like, some metric that you look at. No, I don't. Really? Unless they tell me, no, I'm just doing my thing. I guess I should be listening to somebody else. I don't know. We just do our thing, man. Well, I mean, what are they going to tell me?

Like, oh, you should write this song? You know, like I'm not listening to that. I don't know what they'd tell you. Yeah. Something. Yeah. I feel it's not hard. Someone would say, you know what?

In the position you're in, you know what you ought to do. Yeah. You never get that. Nah. Not too much no what what is a stereotypical european fan like is it like me and sam lundgren or no no they're great fans but they just don't see uh a lot of american fans would understand more of the the gun side the hunting side and stuff uh where they might like our music, but they don't see the same at all. So that would be the only difference, I would say.

I've had those conversations with Europeans, man. And I really feel like many of those cultures have just become so divorced from hunting. And it's the way that hunting has always been managed over there. It's always private land. It's always been kind of the realm of the aristocracy. And it's, it's, it's usually not that people are opposed to killing animals or eating meat, but it's like they, they misunderstand our motivations. It's like dudes and lords and whatnot running around in little suits and shit.

Exactly. And those people are probably never even touching the dead animal. Like maybe if it like arrives on their plate, but they've got like game managers and stuff for that. And I know I've had a number of conversations with people in bars and, you know, in, in France and Germany, England, Italy, where, where I talk about like, you know, how, how hunting is, you know, an integral part of the, our conservation of these species, how we do it for, how we do it for me, how it's deeply steeped in tradition. And it's, it's just, it's our, it's our recreation. It's our, it's our passion and people come around immediately, but at first they're like hunting. Oh, but you are washed.

It's just, it's very foreign to them. It is. Yeah. People just don't get it. It's not as cognitive as it is in America. It's just not, it's not as part of a bigger part of the culture. It's, yeah. People just don't get it. It's not as cognitive as it is in America. It's just not as big a part of the culture. It's such a small minority there. Far be it for me

to be an apologist for the continent of Europe, but it's been pointed out to me by listeners in Europe that when we talk about Europe, we're talking about a large, extremely diverse area as though we're talking about a large extremely diverse area yeah so let's as though we're talking about

england like we say europe but what we're kind of mean is like what i've heard the feedback i've heard from people is they're like you've been to scotland and england and you saw kind of what goes on there in the hunting world and then you extend that to the entire continent right which i've been told is exceedingly ignorant sure sure but i still like to do it because it's fun it's not yeah it's not it's not a monolith it's it's not a monolith no because there are dudes there are dudes right now there are dudes right now hunting moose on public land in Europe. Oh, yeah. Over the counter. And now stomping the freaking marshes for the one bird I want to get. The only bird I want to get more than an oscillated turkey. No, the second bird I want to get.

There's no bird I want more than an oscillated turkey. Second to that is one of them big damn Capper Kelly things. Yeah. It's a grouse the size of a turkey. Yeah, there are dudes out there right now skulking around on skis and snowshoes and shit, bushwhacking around trying to find one of those. It's not like, you know, then in some parts of Europe, the ones I'm more familiar with, like you hire the local poor kids to go out and beat the brush and touch the, because

you don't want to have to pick up any birds. So you hire the local poor kids to go pick them up for you. Then you all go back and have a spot of tea and they clean them all. But it's like, it's a big ass place. Yeah, but there are some unifying

aspects. Tell them what they are. There isn't really a system of public land by and large. Okay. In Scandinavia, there's some kind of de facto public land. That's fair. It ends up being more, and firearms are far more restricted there.

So hunting becomes less of a middle class, lower class activity as it can be in the United States. I mean, it spans kind of the entire American society. But in Europe, it's definitely a lot more targeted towards rich people. And fishing is the same way too. I mean, there isn't an overwhelming amount of, um, of public access to, to water in Europe. I've fished quite a bit in Europe and you, it's always incredibly difficult to, uh, you got to go to this one post office in this one town and pay $30 for the stamp to be on this section of river that day. And you've got, or you, or, or, I mean, in where, wherever it's better, it's, you know, there's one person who gets to be on that stretch of river that day and it costs, you know, 50 euro.

And there will be some public lakes. Usually saltwater is less regulated. But I think some of our early leaders in the conservation movement that allowed us to have these large swaths of land that are open to everybody really created something different. And the culture just diverged wildly from, from over there. And I've talked to, I've talked to European hunters quite a bit about this, who people who are interested, people who are allowed to go shoot pheasants and, and rabbits, but never dreamed of getting to shoot a deer because that's for, that's for the, the rich guys to do. That was a powerful condemnation of Europe. Corinne,

you know, it'd be a great episode. Hey, I love Europe. I've got a lot of European friends. it'd be a great episode. Hun's better here. Hands down.

Get some kind of genuine European. A genuine European out of about 750 million Europeans. Can you find it? Genuine European. 50 European nations. Who's got like a pan-European. He's from a European country. And he identifies continentally.

Good luck. God, we just love to generalize here. Nope. Here's what I want to find. Nationalism is pretty big over here. You haven't heard my idea yet. This is the anti-generalization idea. Just give me a second

okay so here's what you do as a producer you find a european from europe who has who has a pan-european interest set they come on and deliver a crash course in Europe. Meaning like this swath of countries, generally this, and here's kind of what their stereotype is. Like I could go and do it for America. I'd be like, oh yeah, down in the south, you got all these rednecks. All they do is fish catfish. Then over here you got these, they just fish walleye all the time

kind of dumb out here it's like you know i could do i could walk through the u.s you know but through through a part yeah i'd be like utah it's just like you know they just trophy hunt giant bulls arizona they hunt in huge groups of people because there's no tags and when someone draws a tag, 50 of them have to go. And I'll just do a country walkthrough or a state-by-state walkthrough. Similarly, we could do a country-by-country walkthrough

of what actually goes on in Europe. And it would be like very educational for me because I might not be so tempted to say what goes on in this little place I went one time and extend it across the continent. All right. I will look for a single person. I actually have a guy. An expert.

An expert on Europe. Who might be able to speak to that. Because I'll do it right now. In Europe, by which I mean portions of England, they actually... Who sip. Which is now not part of the European Union. Who sip tea.

In England, formerly of Europe. Yeah. They have a thing called a landing mat. You ever hear of this? No. They like to fish carp. Yeah. They got carp with names on them.

Huh. And the carp have names. It wouldn't be like old Bessie. That's what we'd call it. They would call it- Ferguson. Walter. Yeah.

Ferguson. Ferguson the carp. Ferguson. Walter. Yeah, Ferguson. Ferguson the carp. Ferguson the eighth. They'll have a carp and then a lot of people will catch them and they'll always be weighing them. And it'll be like the biggest carp was one day someone caught old Bessie and she was like, or Ferguson the eighth. And he was an ounce more than when some other dude caught him. And so they'll be like, well, when I caught Ferguson, he was 31 pounds and three ounces.

And that'll be like the record. And they have a landing. These guys use a landing mat. When you're fishing, you put out like a little rubber ramp that goes from the beach down into the water. So when you catch Ferguson VIII, you basically pull him ashore. It's like the red carpet. On a landing mat.

And then do your, whatever you're going to do to him. Not eat him. And then you slide him back down into the pond. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law

makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking a high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking.

That's right, we're always talking about OnX here on the MeatEater podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services hand-picked

by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try on x out if you visit on x maps.com slash meet on x maps.com slash meet welcome to the to the on x club y'all did you know that catch and release is illegal in Germany?

Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I fished over there a couple years ago, and we were fishing a trout stream, and it's like a highly managed trout stream. And the guy we were going with, kind of media connection, was like we, we had to go to the post office and get our fishing license. Then we had to be at the fly shop to get it to, you know, to reserve the beat for the day. And he, when we're all done with everything, he's like, well, here's, here's your license

and here's your fish tag. And it was like, it was like a interlocking tag, almost like what you'd put on a, like a deer in Alaska plastic though. And we're like, oh, then that's, Alaska plastic though. Um, and we're like, oh, then that's, that's fine. We're, we're traveling, you know, we're not going to kill a fish. Like what the hell do we do with it? He's like, catch and release is actually not legal in, in Germany. The green party passed that sometime in the, in the nineties. They're like, well, you know, fishing's one thing. Fishing is okay if you're providing food for yourself, but it's animal cruelty to fish just for shits and giggles.

So he's like, you have to have this tag with you. You're not allowed to catch or release, but if you catch a fish and take the hook out and then it happens to get away from you, then that's all right. But I mean, it was kind of like a wink, wink, nudge, nudge kind of thing. He's like, we basically said we never kill fish, but it's illegal not to. They got butterfingers. Yeah. But apparently there was a major prosecution about it. Like a few years before that, there was some guy who's like a big pike angler and there's some great pike fishing in Germany. And he had a video on YouTube of him catching a big female pike and reviving it and releasing it. And he actually was prosecuted for that,

for not killing that fish, which is just, you know, it's just so, it's so interesting how the, how, how, how far apart the cultures are.

See rich and varied continent. Yeah. If in this episode I'm talking about, Corinne, there'd be a part where this individual would be like, and then you got Germany. Okay. Can't let one go. I'll do some research. I was going to ask you guys. I would go to Google and I would type in something like Europeans with a pan-continental interest in the diverse hunting and fishing regulations of the continent.

I will use that research approach. And then see what pops up. Okay. This got really far removed from it. I was wondering how Whiskey Myers music ends up with having European fans. Can I say one more thing, though, real quick? I'm dying to know the answer to that. Can you just hold that?

I was with my kids yesterday. You know, they're like at home all day because of COVID, they haven't been going to school. So they get a little cooped up. And I took them out to check on some muskrat dens we had heard about. And they find a dead brown trout, like a big brown, like a 24 inch brown stone dead, kind of rotten. They insist that it's fresh.

I'm across, I'm in my waders and I'm across the creek from them and they're hooting and hollering about this fish and they're going to bring it home and show their mom and eat it. And, uh, I was like, I wonder, I was explaining to them that, you know, Brown's coming up to spawn and everything. And I was like, I wonder if he's got, if he had gotten a hook in him or something. And that's what caused his demise.

And they're like, they report that, yes, he has a hook stuck in his throat. And I said, really? And they're like, yes, it's a silver hook in his throat and i said really and they're like yes it's a silver hook i go and look at the fish there is no hook in its throat we have a big conversation about there's just like not a hook in its throat like i don't understand that night he's telling the story to Cal, there's a hook in its throat. Just like alternate reality. Certain things that get said in the political sphere made a lot more sense to me after that. It's just like in his head, there is a hook in that fish's throat, and no absence of a hook is going to make him think otherwise.

Oh, you want me to make that make sense? It was a European brown. Great. Brown Shutter from Europe. Very good. Brown Shutter from Europe. Wow. If you wonder why I brought that up. Okay, ask your question. How does Whiskey Myers develop fans in Europe? Is there like a whole group

that likes that sort of music from America? Yeah, they like American music. Most part of them are really like kind of the classic rock sound or the southern rock sound. It's kind of big over there right now. And so I guess the internet. Well, do they view – they. There's 750 million people. Do they...

Okay, if I like a band, I might like them for years, and then one day be like, oh shit, I didn't know they're from wherever. It doesn't change. Okay? Like, I like some stuff. I like an album by M83. I didn't know they were french or the guy

was from france then later i'm like oh i didn't know that guy's from france now you don't like them no love i'm just saying does it even matter like do if you have fans in europe are they like uh you know i like music and then there's some American music I like. Or would it just be like, you know what I mean? Does it even like a thing? I think it's a thing. Like they recognize, I like music from the southern United States. Yeah, I think so.

At least a big part of our fan base over there, they're looking for that. They like the idea that we're from Texas. Not only America, but that part of America. Like cowboy culture and shit. I like rock from southern France. It just isn't something I would ever. There's one of our distributors over there that explained it to me one day. It was just him and I.

And he was like, he's like, you know, he said over here, he said, they don't have a south. He said they're like infatuated with the way y'all talk and how it comes out and all that. So it's really cool. You know, they don't have that over there. They don't have a bunch of, you know, the way we talk and stuff just shakes them up. Did you guys grow up hating Northerners? No. No?

Can you goof on how we talk? Yeah. Go ahead. I'd love to hear it. I'm not going to goof on how you guys talk. I can't do it. Oh, come on. Come on.

You want a Steve impression? Is that what you're doing? No, no. No. No. Okay. When I was growing up, if we wanted to talk bad about a dude from the South,

we had a way we would do it. Right. Right? So ours would just be like, oh, or the A, like your O's are different. Yeah. Yeah, we had a guy there

and he's like, oh, yeah, big bucks. I'm like, dude, I don't know anybody that sounds like that. So anyways, if I tell him how they sound, they're like,

but I don't know anybody that sounds like that. But do for us, when you were a little kid and you were shit-talking Yankees, do for us how they would... Let's say I'd be like, shit, I can't do it now, man. It's hard. Let me think about it for a minute. Do goofing on Northerners. Don't act like you don't goof on Yankees.

Okay, here's a good example. We had a bus driver that was from Wisconsin, and he had a real thick accent, and he drank a lot of Mountain Dew. I don't know why. That's a northern drink. Every time we were going to bus call, he would call me, and I would answer the phone. I'd say, hello, hey, Chris, you think you could drop by the store and grab me a cup of Mountain Dews, bro?

And I'm like, yeah, dude. So that's what we sound like. Yeah, and the fact that and grab me a couple of Mountain Dews, bro? And I'm like, yeah, dude. So that's what we sound like. Yeah, and the fact that he wanted me to get his Mountain Dews for him. I'm like, why can't you do it? He was cool, though. Go catch some walleye. Yeah, some walleye. See, when we're talking about Southerners, my favorite story is one of Yanni's stories.

I kind of stole his story. So Yanni's turkey hunting somewhere in the South. I don't know what he's doing. He's turkey hunting somewhere in the south or something i don't know what he's doing he's turkey hunting somewhere and a guy pulls up rolls his window down hocks out a like cascade of chew spit and then says y'all hear any turkeys gobble and that to us um that to us symbolize you're not far off you're not far yeah mine sucked yours was good well i hit a couple more like goof on northerners for a minute oh that that was kind of like what's the impression right i had a guy the other day you tell me oh yeah like he says he's kind of like a northerner he's kind of pretentious yeah right i mean like southern heart a little bit more

homey friendly yeah i mean i don't i don't know i mean honestly we didn't really know about northerners whenever we left our county until we got a plan oh we haven't gotten into that hold on real quick so you grew up hunting fishing yeah how did and you grew up your parents listened to music. Yeah. But how did it ever occur to you to play some music? That was the first damn question we were supposed to talk about. Yeah, so my grandfather on my mom's side, he was kind of wild.

He wasn't around a lot. You didn't see him a lot. Because he was what? He was just out there getting it. Kind of like the biker and just a little bit edgy, so you wouldn't see him a lot. He'd go away for long spells of time. Yeah, kind of like that. I don't know that I understand, but I kind of understand.

But he kind of played the guitar a little bit, or he had a guitar. And I guess one time I had told him when I was younger, like, you know, that's cool. I would love to learn how to do that. And then years later, when I was about 16, he left the guitar at, like, my grandparents' house. Like, he just showed up and left that guitar there. I thought he was your grandparent. Well, yeah, so it would have been her mom. So he would have been my mom's dad, which way they were divorced.

But he left it. I'm sorry. No, I'm not saying you're being complicated. I'm just saying. Okay. Your mother's father. Yes. But he was divorced from your grandmother and grandfather were divorced.

Yes. I understand that. Yeah. So he just kind of came by. I don't even know if he even talked to anybody. Why did they get divorced? Oh, I don't know. That was way before I understand that. So he just kind of came by. I don't even know if he even talked to anybody. Why did they get divorced? Oh, I don't know. That was way before I was born. Probably because he's wild.

But he just, years later, for some reason, he left that guitar on their porch or something. And I don't know if he told them or I can't remember. Because it was for you? Yep. So he remembered that time. Yeah. And so I picked it up and kind of started learning how to use it yep so he remembered that time yeah and so I picked it up

and kind of started learning how so he didn't come over and show you how to use it he just left it yeah it was just left for me yeah

and uh I went and got it and I started learning how to do little chords and things like that and then um John Jeffers

our guitar player um I took it over there one day and I don't even know if he knew but like his his dad played guitar for a long time. At what age is this? Teens?

16, 17. Okay. And I took it over there, and his dad actually knew how to play guitar and stuff. And I don't even know if we knew that. And evidently, his dad always played music. And his mom, his mother had been in a band. And he probably knew that, but I didn't, you know, when they were younger. And then his dad showed us how to play guitar when we were like 16 or 17.

Like, showed you how, as in you started really focusing, or he's like, it basically works like this? A little of both, probably. But yeah, just showing us like, hey, this is like this and he was playing and and just taught us some stuff and then it just kind of grew from there really but that's that's how i got into music because my grandpa left a guitar you still have it it got stolen what yep guitars get stolen a lot so I don't have that anymore. Where'd it get stolen from? So it was in my, we had a Suburban that we toured in at that time. How long ago was this, Cody? Years and years ago when we first started.

Seven or eight, probably. Yeah. So I'd left it in there and went inside the house and the window was messed up on the Suburban. It would always fall. You remember that? Oh, yeah. It wouldn't. And like, I'd went back inside the house and the window was messed up on the Suburban. It would always fall. You remember that? It wouldn't. And like, I went back inside the house and our dog died. It died that day or something. So I went and was like messing with the dog, ended up having to bury it and stuff. And I went back outside and somebody stole the guitar. While you're in, burying a dead dog.

My daughter's fish died last night. Yeah. And that's how that happened. And it was gone. So the window was just like it would always fall down i don't know if somebody just had it was in a neighborhood at that time i lived in tyler slipped out of the track and it yeah it was around the time they were they were stealing a lot of stuff so somebody was just walking by and maybe seen it and just i just

left it in there wasn't even very long what a shitty day and they they had stole that guitar and they never found it never found it we looked it. We looked around in pawn shops and everything like that. And so it was one of those things where I was like taking stuff in and then ended up having to deal with that. And I was like, oh, shit, I got to get my stuff out of the car. Stole your grandfather. It was gone. What kind of guitar?

What did it look like? What's the mix? Maybe any listener of this podcast. It was a super expensive one. Yeah, it was just an old Takamani guitar, and it did have a cigarette burn on it. All right. I guess it would be from him.

So it did have a cigarette burn on it, but it didn't have any unique features other than that. It was just, you know. It's so depressing, man. Yeah, but that's a true story, man. So for any listeners out there, be on the lookout. What color was it? Just the regular. I don't that's a true story, man. So for any listeners out there, beyond the lookout. What color was it?

Just the regular. I don't even know what color. Just like. Classic guitar. Whatever the hell guitars are. It was like a black pit guard. It had a cigarette burn under, I believe, under the pit guard. You know, like where your fingers would sit if you were holding a cigarette.

Dude, man, we should do like a national effort to get you. Seriously. That was what I'm saying. Like contact me either if you find a guitar you want to hear another alarming theft story we reported on this my brother and his buddy were fishing

in Alaska and they got their they had some engine problems and they got their boat flipped and swamped up against a log when the water was real high and they hung a buoy off it, and the rain kept coming, and they were waiting for the water to get down so they could go back and retrieve their boat,

and they just went back to get it. It's gone. Only thing left is two T-posts sunk in the bank where someone had rigged up some leverage points to jack it out of there. Stole their freaking boat. Are you sure that person thought of it as theft, though? They might have thought it was

a salvage deal, but they sure as shit didn't call the police and say, we found a boat. If you found a boat sunk against the log with a buoy tied to it, and you had to go out and get some T-posts and sink them in and come along and off there, you wouldn't get a slight feeling like, I wonder whose boat this is.

You're getting a reward in that case. On my brother's road. So he used to live down, he used to live by this little, that's kind of a weird story, never mind. I was going to tell you a drug car theft story, but it's just a long ass story without getting into too many details. My brother's buddy gets his truck stolen and he's suspicious of a little meth house down the road. He's suspicious of the inhabitants of a little meth house down the road, But he does a police report and all that. Eventually gets a call from the cops.

His truck's been abandoned a couple hours away at a gas station. And the cop says, oddly, they abandoned your truck and stole the gas station attendant's car. He says, what do they drive? They drive a whatever the hell it was he goes and looks out his window he's like yep it's parked scooby-dooed that thing man it's parked down the road at the house of the people i suspected of stealing my truck did they upgrade or was it insulting like that i don't remember the details but it was just some sly burglary.

Not as sly as they thought. So what happens next? You guys are screwed because you can't tour and make money doing everything. Are you like, what happens now? How do you be an independent rock band in the time of COVID? Well, we can be that because we are independent and we get royalties. We own our masters. So you still have income?

I think we would have a lot harder time if we weren't independent. Is that right? Yeah, we're going to hopefully start up next year. We stopped in February when everything started closing down. They started canceling shows. And then we were going to go back on the road in like July. Everything was supposed to kick back up in July and all that. And they had shows still booked throughout the year.

And we would get close two or three weeks out, and they'd cancel. And it just kept happening. Kept happening. Kept happening every time. We'd have to cancel right at the last minute. And I was like, this is stupid. Like, cancel the rest of the year. We'll get back at it next year.

We're just going to move. And so we just moved everything from this year to the next year. Yeah. Because it was just obnoxious being like, oh, you got to come back to work. You know, telling people they had to come back to work at certain times and things like that. And then it canceled. And then you're telling the fans we're going to be here. They buy tickets.

You cancel. And so it was just one of those things where it's like, and I don't want to deal with like the 25% capacity and all that. It's like, let's just wait a couple months and maybe we can go back at it full steam and have good shows where you can rock and everything and you're not sitting out with mask on, spread out at your table and it was just like why not we've been on the road non-stop for 12 13 years i think you know we can take a few months off have you been enjoying the time off yeah i have been probably

doing more uh more hunting and fishing than normal yeah i have i've been fishing a lot and then yeah i just been started hunting. You know, hunting season just opened a couple weeks ago. Did you fish in the summer a lot? Yeah. Yeah. I don't fish a lot in, like, August because it's just, it's miserable. Too hot down there.

Yeah, I think so. And then the fish start kind of suspending and doing some different things. They're just kind of funky. You know, that August and September kind of, the transition in there, it's just a little bit funky, and i needed to like start writing again and working on the the new album gotcha but when bow season rolled around i've been hunting a lot so um tell people because they can't come see you right now tell people like what like what what works for you best for people to want to go explore your music. Just go on Spotify, man.

Yeah, Apple Music, our website, just all social media outlets. Tell people your website. Yeah, whiskeymyers.com. Just really what's ever convenient for them. They want to buy a record, they got a record player, buy a record. They want to stream it, do that. Did you guys get your ducts cleaned yesterday? Yeah, we did.

Wouldn't you like to have a place like that place? Yeah, they had it going on, man. I've never hosed down a room before. That was just set up for cleaning ducts. He had it going on. Yeah, he's got a, he's got a pretty special place. A lot of, a lot of love and attention went into. Yeah.

Just the amount of game. For making, making, making duck country. Yeah, we've seen, I mean, how many deer and pheasant and everything else did we see just besides the, I don't even, I tried to explain how many ducks we've seen and I was like, I have no idea. We're saying it makes it hard to like get up at three in the morning and go and put your boat in and drive up and get to fight with some other duck hunters and get two ducks and. Yeah. This wasn't like that yeah well it was it was so funny in the morning too that we were all set up in that blind all get our dekes out all our all our stuff nicely stashed and then we have the side by side roll up you're on the wrong blind get in with me we're going to the other one yeah we're all they already have limits and we're like what we thought we were kicking ass we're

doing good yeah me too i'm like, we're talking a couple in here. We're getting some okay shots. We got a couple ducks in the blind. He's like, oh, they already got like 21 birds. Yeah. I was like, oh, I think we're doing fine, man. I'm having a good time. We're seeing a lot of birds.

He's like, oh, no, y'all need to move. I think we got over there. We got it. Yeah. Real quick. They wanted to be right there. Was that your first duck, Corinne? That was my third duck. Oh third yeah i went on my first uh duck hunt or actually no

well i went on a duck hunt with some of y'all yeah i knew you went but i didn't know that you got my first my first actual duck uh i went out with um honzy did he let you hose one off the water or did you has you only done trying to wing shoot them? Well, we were, I mean, I loved it. I was, we were in the muck. So we, we canoed in or canoed out and set up a bunch of decoys and we were hiding, you know, underneath the reeds. And so they were, there were some, God, I had missed a bunch. And then we were all taking a break and eating. And then a couple were kind of flying high.

Maybe I shouldn't have taken the shot. You hail married Adam. I just like, I didn't even tell anyone I was going to take the shot. I probably should have. Like everyone had beef jerky in their mouths and they were chatting. And I just saw a bird come from left to right and I just shot it and it went down. What was it? A ganzer?

No, it was. What are you looking at? You got it written down? No, I'm thinking about, I'm staring into space and trying to get it from my mom's, my mind's eye. The black feathers with kind of the white outline. Wigeon. That's a wigeon, right?

Yeah. So. I was down there a couple of days before she was there getting a outline, widgeon. That's the widgeon, right? Yeah. So, um, I was down there a couple of days before she was there getting a lot of widgeon. Yeah. So, and then my second one was,

was also widgeon. It was like coming to land. It was, it was, it was pretty low. It was coming to land among the decoys. And, uh,

it was almost like it was, I mean, it was just a couple of feet off the surface of the water when I got it. It was a pretty easy shot. But I just, you know, it was kind of like I felt like that duck was landing in and about to be like, hey, Bob. Hey, Joe. What's up? And then they're like mannequins not saying anything.

Oh, I always wonder about that. I always wonder about that interaction when a duck lands in a spread. And after a minute, he's like, these people are all dead. Yeah. Yeah, everybody's like, because they kind of get like a very, they land and they start to get like an uneasy feeling. They start looking around. Yeah. So those are my first two the other weekend.

They're like, I don't know, something just seems a little weird. And then the lights go out. But no, yesterday was my third duck. I missed a shit ton and Chris had to, Chris finished off a handful of my birds for me. But there was one

that was just a clean shot. How are you going to cook up the ducks you got yesterday? Yep. Do you have any, from your mother, do you have any Chinese-influenced duck recipes that you try or do you just cook like whatever everybody else does? Yeah, my mom was not. My mom did like a certain number of things well. Never like Peking duck. That's a couple day effort.

But I do have like an old school chinese cooking cookbook um are you gonna try something like that i may um dude you're you're i think your groove should be like chinese wow game man yeah i mean i have a friend i have a friend in town uh dear friend in town linda who is who is a chef from Shanghai. And I was going to ask her to maybe help me out with a thing. But yeah, maybe that's what I have to do with at least one of my ducks. I don't know if these have enough fat on them. I haven't processed them yet.

Yeah, they're not like they get a little bit later. But when you say your mom did some things well, do you mean that cooking wasn't one of them or she did some dishes well? Some. Yeah, no, some dishes well. She did some dishes well but did not do Peking duck. Yeah, no, I don't really know how many people do that at home. That's kind of like you go to Chinatown and you buy them. What's that Chinese preparation for duck that you see in Chinatown in New York where

they have them, they're glazed? Yeah. That's the Peking duck. Oh, that is. Where they're hanging up glazed? Sure. Holy shit, is that good, man. That's the, you know, and-

I used to buy those things. They'd kind of cut them up with a cleaver. Yep. Yep. Exactly. It's like you have all these ducks hanging. In the window. Shiny.

They're crispy. They're fat. Oh, my God, that's good, man. So good. And then you, like, stand in line, and it's like the guy with a freaking huge-ass cleaver just like, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop. And then it's just like they pile all this greasy, just delicious duck with sauce. And, like, there's some slight um i would say like different spices

some some folks might do more of like a five spice and they're you know slight variations um but i think i think we need to think about a recipe like that yeah holy shit is that good man um that used to be what uh that was like a favorite thing to do when good to go you know in new york we'd go find those ducks yeah totally yep when you guys were uh playing in new york did That was like a favorite thing to do to go in New York, to go find those ducks hanging in those windows. Yeah, totally. Yep. When you guys were playing in New York, did you do some Peking duck in Chinatown?

It's not like a wild duck, man. Yeah, right. No. Yeah, whoa hop, yep. Whoa hop, yeah. And what'd you do? Whoa hop. This restaurant called Whoa Hop, it's in Manhattan.

That's the one you like? Chinatown, yeah. It's very awesome. If you're ever there, get some duck there. Hey, something just occurred to me, Chris. That's the one you like? Yeah. It's very awesome. If you're ever there, get some duck there. It's great. Something just occurred to me, Chris. With no touring and you being the tour manager, time's getting hard? Oh, yeah.

But like Cody said, I mean, we've been enjoying it, hunting and fishing. It's been great. I mean, yeah. Yeah. All it just hit me is like, oh, that's a tour manager. Yeah. You look healthy. You're a tour manager.

I'm probably healthier than when we're on the road. Well, they toured all the way up here. We've been hanging out on their bus every day when I picked them up. That's good. It's a cool-ass bus, dude. Man. Steve asked Corinne about shooting a duck off the water before and referring to like Northerners making fun of Southerners

and Southerners making fun of Northerners. I'm from South Dakota. We would refer to that or like shooting a dove off a power line is Arkansasing something. Well, that's because of the old Arkansas boats. Is that what you guys? That's from the old market hunter days. That's not like a goofing on the side. Like the punt guns?

But like would you guys call? What would you refer to that as? I would be so tickled if you said that that's arkansas i like that though you guys don't know about calling it arkansas on a bird no or i never like that either that's michigander and that's sluicing where i'm from yeah but dude we'll we'll report back on this the etymology but i i understand from my father it has something to do. It's like a reference to a type of rig used by market hunters. It's not like, you know those idiots down in Arkansas. That's not that.

I would prefer these guys from Texas. We still say Arkansas. Yeah, I know, but I would prefer that they call it like, oh, that's Sconean something. Someone from Wisconsin would do that. I'm going to call it Arkansas on it. I got a lot of friends in Arkansas. Do they call it Arkansas on an Arkansas? We can call it Clay Newcomb. Clay Newcomb Newcomb.

You know what? I can message him right now. Maybe we'll have an answer by the end of the podcast. No, because I'm wrapping it up. You got to come back on, Spencer, and report back after you talk to that dude who got all the elk shot off his place. Whiskey Myers. Find him at You got to come back on, Spencer, and report back after you talk to that dude who got all the elk shot off his place. All right. Whiskey Myers.

Find them at whiskeymyers.com. That's a good URL for you guys. Yeah, it works. It's not confusing. Spotify didn't go find you? Yep, Spotify. Do you got your own playlist on there? Yep.

You're talking to the wrong person about internet stuff, man. I don't savvy. But we got an affirmative. We got an affirmative from the other Chris. I think we got everything, man. All right, guys. Thanks so much for coming on. It was fun hanging out.

You should probably quit chewing that tobacco. Yeah. It might be in the next life. Well, yeah, because if your lip gets a whole ride through it, you're going to sound way different. Yeah. I might whistle more when I sing. You're going to become one of them professional whistlers.

All right, guys, thank you very much. Take care. I don't mind work and I love to fish And I've been known as the son of a bitch When life gets tough I roll my sleeves up Yeah, I get it done, it's always the move I tore real hard with nothing to show Now I'm up to the same as them all So break our backs and make us slaves

All for the love of the USA Time can't hide it, give me a fast start Drench myself up in holy water Speak the things, the hot air bleeds I need a bottle of good gasoline Ain't nothing more to do in this town The industry's gone and the mill is closed down And up on the hill Is a jazz bell She's got some insane

And some pills to sell So no need to lie With your open eyes When you've got a script There's no need to hide Bitchin' alone And dancin' the street We'd rather have bombs

And food to eat Time, get out of here Me, faster We'd rather have bombs than food to eat. To me And you think that you really gonna make a change Maybe you went down the wrong stone Time can't hold it, get me fast I've drenched myself up in holy water Spin your face, I'm laying bleeds I need a bottle of good and gasoline Time to give all and give me a false dollar Dress myself up in holy water

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