The New Yorker Radio Hour - Kirk Douglas, the Guitarist for the Roots, Revamps the Holiday Classics

Episode Date: December 23, 2022

As the guitarist for the Roots, the band for “The Tonight Show,” Kirk Douglas plays anything and everything. So David Remnick put him to the test on some holiday classics. And two longtime New Yorker staffers, Patricia Marx and Roz Chast, divulge their celebrated history playing together in a ukulele band. As the Daily Pukuleles, they claim, they influenced some of the biggest names in music in the sixties and beyond. But they were always a little too far ahead of the curve for the mainstream. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Now, I don't want to be a grinch, but around this time, when you've heard certain holiday songs for, I don't know, the hundredth time, you get a little cranky. So a few years ago, we invited a musical hero of mine to come join us in the studio to shake things up. That hero would be a man named Kirk Douglas, who professionally goes by the name Captain Kirk. He's the lead guitarist of The Roots. These days, The Roots are really well known as the house band for Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show. But for hip-hop fans, the roots had been one of the most innovative and hard-working acts in the genre for a very long time.

Kirk Douglas is a key part of the band's signature hybrid of soul, jazz, funk, and rock. And I thought he would be the ideal person to put a new spin on some very traditional holiday tunes. It's that time of year. We hear the familiar songs over and over. You're walking through a department store. You're in the backseat of a cab. You're overhearing somebody else's headphones on the subway, whatever it is. Now, this isn't a matter of stump the stars, but I want to ask you, if you, is there something that you can play us a kind of standard in your own way so that we'll love it again?

Should we give it a shot? I've never really sat and tried to do this So there you go I never tried that before Okay that wasn't as bad as I thought was gonna That was off the top of your head Yeah I think it's gonna go downhill from here

I don't think so I don't think Do you give yourself a new guitar for Christmas Or are you guitared out Wow No guitar is this a therapy session Or an interview Um

Yeah, like I'm this week, this time I'm going through a bass thing because I'm starting to do home recording and I realize I don't have a bass. And then I, so I feel entitled to get a bass. But I also realize there's different, you know, there's different bass sounds you can go for. And the next thing you know, you have four new cases in that. Yeah, yeah. So that's what I'm going. There's going to be a Christmas base. All right. Yeah. I'm glad to hear it. Yeah. You are a remarkable musician, and one of the things that's so remarkable about you is your versatility. And I wanted to get a sense of what you were listening to growing up on Long Island, right? Mm-hmm. You know, when I had no control over the music around me and it was all my parents, it was classical music on Sundays, and a lot of reggae, a lot of soul, old soul. A lot of crooners, you know, Johnny Mathis, a lot of ska. You know, my parents loved to throw parties, so there'd always be a lot of, you know, Jamaican party music, which a lot of times was Calypso.

But, you know, my dad, he'd be playing music till late in the night, and he'd play, you know, old funk, you know, like Samande. It was... It sounds like you had the hippest parents in world history. Musically, at least. Yeah, I mean, but he had, you know, my dad liked a lot of stuff. you know that I didn't you know at the time appreciate you know and I only started to appreciate later your parents wanted you to be a classical musician

they wanted you to get they and go in that direction they would have liked that but um the thing that attracted me to the guitar was the the mystique of it with you know seeing kiss you know and when I was at a young age and so you want to the whole notion of a guitar superhero appeal to as well as the music well absolutely yeah yeah Like, Kiss sort of embodied, like, the music, and they matched the visual with the music. And they had these, you know, magical, almost like talisman with their instruments that they were able to, like, conjure these sounds with. And they looked cool.

It was like they looked, you know, a guitar sort of looks like a combination of a spaceship and a surfboard and a car all rolled into one. It comes in different colors. So there's, there's, it's, it's no mistake that, you know, you have magazines that have cars and guitars in the same magazine or the same book, you know, they can be shapely too. You know, there's, there's, it's a very attractive instrument. So what's the, what's the first time you picked up a guitar and made a sound out of it that resembled music that made you think this could be my life? Well, I was, well, there was, the attraction I spoke of and just walking past a music store and seeing, them in the window and just wanting to just hold one, just to touch one. And the first time that I got to hold or touch one, I guess it was in fifth grade or... Sounds like an erotic attachment.

I'm holding onto it now. You are indeed. Yeah, maybe I should put it down. Maybe I'll be able to speak more coherently. Who were your guitar gods at that time when you were learning and coming up? Yeah, Eddie Van Halen, you know, deaf leopard was coming at at the time

it's a little sometimes it's a little embarrassing because like you know for Roots fans you know they'd probably want to hear something a little

deeper than that you think people don't want to hear about white metal bands uh it confuses people I think I think there's some there can be some confusion

and I get you know sometimes I get flack for it at times from my some of my bandmates but it's just you know I was some of my a product of my surroundings. Now, when you started with the

roots, they were still a very hard traveling band, right? Yeah. A lot of buss, a lot of van, a lot of... 250 dates a year. So it's almost like BB King level touring. Yeah. Yeah. When they refer to themselves as the hardest working

band show business, it was not an exaggeration. So now you have this gig that probably is a lot better for the stability of life. You're in New York all the time on the Fallon show, on the Tonight Show. How did that change things? And did it change the band in any significant way? Well, I think the band was moving in a direction that would give us the the aptitude to hang in that situation. Because we, I think even before we started doing the

Tonight Show, I think we already did a night of a hundred stars. I'm pretty sure that we did that first. Now, you had an experience with Prince. I think that he borrowed your guitar. What happened? Oh, that's this guitar. This is this. We're sitting in a studio with a white epiphone. Yeah, it's a 1961 epiphone Crestwood guitar.

So he came into play. This is what before the Tonight Show was the Tonight Show. This is when it was still late night with Jimmy Fallon. He came in with his band. And apparently he arrived before his guitar did. So he looked at my. gaggle of guitars and he saw this one which you know he could have been attracted to the purple uh strap on it but it's a beautiful sounding playing guitar and um right before the show

started our music booker at the time jonathan cohen came up to me as like prince wants to use your guitar for the performance and he wants to buy it from you he wants to buy the guitar from me and he wants to use it for the performance i said well prince can use it for the performance, but he can't buy it for me. I'm not selling it. I love the guitar. So Prince is doing two songs that night. He plays the first song, I guess one of his new songs. He plays it with his own guitar. And after he finished the first song, he comes over to me, he's like, yo, let me see that other guitar. And so like a Prince fan, I say, yeah, sure. And I offer it to him, I give it to him, He goes and he plays an incendiary version of Bambi from one of his earlier albums.

It's an incredible version of it. And then at the end of the song, he picks the guitar up. And I thought he's going to play behind his head, actually. But he tosses it into the air and towards no one. No guitar tech is waiting to catch it. No. Jesus. Yeah, and I mean, just, I mean, I was so excited watching him play that.

You know, I was like, I couldn't believe. And then when he threw it, I just, just the feeling, like, feeling, just, it just felt like instantaneous emotional abuse. That's just what it felt like. Where did it land? It laid it on the ground. Like, it felt like on a monitor and it just strutted off the stage and, uh, did you have words after?

Yeah, yeah, I went, you know, they came up to me and it's like, Prince wants to talk to you. I was like, oh, really? I'd like to talk to Prince, you know? And so I had, you know, I had the guitar in like a couple pieces, you know, going towards the... Did it break? It broke, yeah, totally. What happened? The neck broke off from the body?

This part. Oh, my God. There's a big crack on the back of the head piece. Yeah, yeah. But he apologized. He's like, I'm sorry. And he did say, you know, I'll take care of it. And, um...

But the dough wasn't the thing. No, it wasn't. Um, but anyhow, so, but, so like a Prince fan, I'm like, okay, um, you broke the guitar. Do you think you could at least sign it? Did he sign the... I don't see his signature. He's like, oh, I haven't signed anything since the 70s. Wow.

In his own eccentric way, he totally did sign it. He didn't use it, sign it with a pen. He sure did. I can see the giant crack behind it. Yeah, yeah. So in addition to having two kids that you're very attentive to and rehearsing and touring, you've also got a new solar record that you're working on. Yeah. Yeah, I'm doing that.

That's sort of my... guilty pleasure record and that's just to exercise the part of me that likes to come up with music. It's your musical journal, if you will. Is there a song from the new solo album

you can tell us about? Maybe we'll play? Yeah, it's a song... It's just a song called Our Year. I think I wrote it on a New Year's day. Sort of, it's like my own personal All-Land sign. One, two, three. Here's to the first day

Feels a little strange I feel's a little strange I stand in my own I want to change I wish that I could change The moment we all have been waiting for To finding the keys that unlock The door

Moving all down so we can be sure. Let's let this year be your year. That was the Roots, Kirk Douglas back in 2018, and he just released a new solo album last month, working under the name 100-watt-heart. It's called New Unknown. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick. Over the decades, there have been some. very high-profile investigative panels that have looked into national and political crises. The Keefebawber Committee famously looked into organized crime. The Warren Commission in the early 60s investigated the Kennedy assassination, and the Senate held its Watergate hearings, which led to the resignation of Richard Nixon. And yet, arguably, none of those committees has had to tackle a political emergency as profound as the January 6th attack on the Capitol. The basis of the basis of contours of what happened at the Capitol have never really been in doubt, yet the select committee

had fundamental questions it needed to answer. Was Trump's in action during the rioting a failure of leadership, or a real strategy, a way of fomenting chaos to retain power? Were groups like the oathkeepers, just a bunch of angry white nationalists, or were they in fact the armed vanguard of a coup? The committee has just released its official report, and the New Yorker is publishing it in book form, partnering with Celadon Books. The report is comprehensive, let's say, long in other words, and taking in every ugly detail of Trump's attempt to delegitimize this election is honestly a challenge to the spirit. But as one member of the committee, Jamie Raskin of Maryland, told me, the committee's work here was to establish a definitive historical record,

and the rest is up to the Justice Department and the courts. One thing is clear from this report. We cannot afford to look away. Democracy remains under attack. And as I wrote in in the introduction to the volume, a citizenry that can no longer bring itself to pay attention to such an investigation or to absorb its astonishing findings, risks moving even farther toward a post-truth, post-democratic America. We have more about the January 6th report at new yorker.com slash report. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remne. we're going to close the show today with a look back into musical history.

You may know the work of Roz Chast as a cartoonist from her work in The New Yorker or perhaps from her book. Can't we please talk about something more pleasant, which was a bestseller? But here's something you probably don't know about Ross. She and Patty Marks, a staff writer of great distinction, playing a band, not just any band,

a band with an extraordinary influence on pop history. And if you haven't heard of them, it's because they were always too far ahead of their time to break through to the mainstream. Here for your listening pleasure are Patty Marks and Roz Chast. I'm Patty Marks. I'm Ross Chast. And we are the nuclear meltdown. You may not remember us, but you probably do. We were very, very big in the 60s when we were the daily pukeleleys.

Now we're the nuclear meltdown. And we are coming back. We're practicing. For our return tour as ucular or ucular meltdown. Because we don't know how to, we're not quite, we're still debating on how to pronounce it. We've gotten some experts. Yeah. But even they don't know.

So, eons ago, I was playing with Bobby Zimmerman, Bobby Zimmerman. And I was with Joni. You were with Joni. We were both too good for our. the rest of our band. It was very clear. I mean, it's the reason we got kicked out of the bands, really. Well, they were good also, but I felt like in the way that they were good was a different way than we were good. We had personality. They had talent, which okay, each to its own, right? We were really, just didn't belong with them. We had kind of a style. And nobody wanted us in their band.

I would go up to bands, like Iron Butterfly. Yeah. You know, Jimmy Hendricks, experience. I went there. I gave Joan Baez two ideas, which really made her. She was wearing, had a pixie haircut. I said, go long, Joni. And then when she began, she would just say one, two, three, four. And I said, Joni, what you should do is flip your hair upside down the way your long hair, if you grow it, and just say, this song's for David. He's in jail doing what he thinks is right. And if you notice, that's how she opened all the time. Well, so we got together and we realized that we were very simpatico, and we liked the same songs. They were all public domain. We like the same color ukulele. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So we formed the daily pukeleleleys.

Yes, and we got very big for a while. And that was... But then Paul stole all our money. Paul, our manager stole all our money. We didn't have any, luckily, but he stole what we had. He stole our money. He saw all the money we were going to get. Yeah. And that was when things did get bad, though, because then we went, we had to go into rehab. Which we liked. We learned a lot. We had some of the ashtrays from rehab. Yeah. Yeah. We met some interesting people. What was our first breakout hit? Boy, it was a long time ago. Was it Star Spangled Banner? Was it I thought it was happy birthday? Happy birthday, yeah. We wrote Happy Birthday birthday. We wrote Happy birthday. Happy birthday to you. Yeah, yeah. That was, it's so universal, really. Because if you're alive,

if you're listening. Well, except for the people who have unhappy birthdays. That's true. I mean, I don't want to force, maybe we should change it to like, happy birthday. Birthday to you. Yeah, whatever birthday to you. Whatever birthday, because, you know, you don't want to pressure anybody. It's like, you know. Disappointed birthday we could do? Yeah, neutral. Neutral. Neutral birthday. neutral birthday yeah have a birthday too yeah yeah we're also work we're working on wrinkle wrinkle little face yes yes uh wrinkle wrinkle wrinkle little face uh also we're working another wrinkles form in every place right uh will you wrinkles high lines a race you want to play something yeah i do i do we play um camptown The hometown race is also called Campan Ladies.

Yeah. Which we should say that we rewrote, and if you listen carefully the lyrics, if you can hear them, you will see why. And I usually introduce it because I don't have a singing voice, but I have a talking voice. You have a very good talking choir. My talking voice can get kind of like panicky and screechy. Okay. So this is on. your mark. Get set. Go.

It was on our first album, Ucular Accidents, which was our breakout album, really. Yeah. We had a lot of records. Duck and Cover. Right. Famous Duck and Cover. Learn ukulele in your sleep. You two can play ukulele. But not as well as we can.

Yeah. That was the subtitle. How to Make Love to a Man with a Eucaleli. Right. That wasn't Beethoven. That was us. Really crazy because then we were touring all the time. And, you know, being on the road, it's really rough. Right.

And also confusing, you're always like, do you turn left? Do you turn right? That is the hard thing about the road. I know. And you know how I feel about driving. I mean, I didn't learn until after we were on the road. So a lot of times when we were on the road, I didn't... We were lost a lot on the road.

We were lost. And I would be like screaming while we were like merging into traffic. because when I merge into traffic, I have to really scream. And I was taking a lot of drugs back then because being on the road was so scary. It made me very, very nervous. Sometimes I didn't even know if I was on the road. Am I dreaming or are we actually driving on the road? Or are we really on the road?

Or maybe we're just blowing in the wind. Yeah. An episode. Oh, that was something. We had something. Well, we did. We had fights. We did.

We did. Our manager, Paul, who took our money, said we had to go electric. So we went to your house and we set up in the driveway. And we didn't really know how to, you know, if you've seen a ukulele, there's no place to really plug it in. There's no place to plug it in. Yeah, exactly. We went to the hardware store. We went to the hardware store. We bought extension.

Batteries, extension cords. Everything electric that we could buy. So you know what we did. We were pretty good students in elementary school. You can make a battery. with a baked potato or a raw potato. A raw potato. That was our first mistake, baked, but okay.

At least we didn't go mashed. We got a raw potato. We set up the wires, and we tried to go electric. We tried to plug the potato into ukulele. Then our manager told us, all right, if you can't go electric, you should break some ukuleleys on stage. So we're a little afraid of that because of our shoes. Yes.

We didn't really want to damage our shoes. I also didn't want to get like a cut. No. Because I had read about sepsis. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Eucalele disco? You don't remember that?

Yeah. It was like, we were at Studio 54 every night. That was like we were very heavily into that whole scene for a little while because ukuleleys were like, there was this brief moment. Somewhere around like November 18th to November 20th, 1974, where ukuleleys were kind of it. Yeah. I think that. And then we tried, was it Saturday, not Saturday night, it was Sunday Night Rash.

Sunday Night Rash. Sunday Night Rash. Yeah, yeah, we tried. We tried. It didn't really, you know, I don't know why. Maybe, like, it passed its peak at that point. People were too busy with, I don't know, Casey and a Sunshine Band. We couldn't get into some of the discos because of the bouncer. That's true. You were too short. Yeah, we were too short. Yeah, we were too short. And the glasses. I think that was troubles. You should not have worn the glasses. Right. And they were always inspecting our ukulele. For drugs.

Because we did use to keep our drugs in the ukulele, along with the gum and the tissues. Right. You know, change of underwear. Pencils, sketch pads. You could put a little sketch pad in there. You can carry this as a purse. Yeah. We never broke up.

That's probably why we were in a bigger head. Yeah. And I do really hope that. that we peak yet again as ukeler, ukeler, whichever we decide it's going to be. Right. Well, we're doing the best we can that doesn't involve work. We have. You want to play a weima, a we ma-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a. Yeah. You say weima-wack. I say weima-way.

It is weema-way. Oh, I didn't know. That's wrong. We didn't know for the longest time what weima-way was. And actually we still don't, but I had the theory that it's what you do all the do-da day. Chorus on your mark, get set, go. A wing away, a wing away. Verse two.

Back to the chorus. A wing away, a wheel away. The end. We're working some new lyrics for this that was near New Jersey, the Great New Jersey. Chris Christie sleeps tonight. Because we like being topical. Yeah, we like being topical. We have a great rhyme with Obama and pajamas,

but we need a story to go with it. That was Patty Marks and Raj Chast on vocals, and yes, ukulele. Our story aired in 2017. The disco ukulele remix came to us courtesy of Terrence Bernardo. I'm David Remnick. Have a wonderful holiday weekend and the best for the new year. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. See you next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Breda Green, Calilea, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, and Gauphin and Putubuellae. Along with Adam Howard, Jeffrey Masters, Will Coley, and Michael May, and we had assistance from Mike Cutchman, Meher Batia, and James Napoli. The New Yorker Radio Hour,

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