[music] Welcome to the Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you are listening to a weekly podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. You can subscribe to the show on iTunes, and you can find past episodes, get on our email list, and make a donation to this ad-free podcast at our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm. You can also find us on Twitter at vmspod@facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow and at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com. Now, I once got advice from the great literary podcaster, Bat Segundo, not to let guests force you to record in inconvenient locations. For some reason, when it comes to the Friedman Brothers, I just keep throwing that advice out the door. Last September, the great cartoonist and artist, Drew Friedman, called out of the blue. He invited me to record a podcast with him at the Second Avenue deli in Manhattan. It was a noisy place, and I compounded the problem by forgetting my XLR cables, which meant we were recording right off of the built-in mics in my Zoom H4. We worked it out. Then, the youngest brother, Kip Friedman, invited me to record with him during a trip to New York. I thought we'd record in his hotel room, but at the last minute, he decided we should record down in the manager's office instead. It was a kind of a tight situation in there, and lucky for us, the sound of the heater in the room kicking on and off didn't make it into the recording. So when Josh Allen Friedman, the oldest brother in this group, told me he was going to be visiting from Dallas, we made plans to meet at his hotel this weekend at record. Then just as I was leaving the house, Josh called to tell me that the hotel was out, and we should meet at the cafe of the Edison Hotel in the middle of Times Square between 8th and 9th on 47th Street. At 2 p.m. on a Sunday, it was kind of packed. I can only assume that someday I'm going to interview their half-sister Molly in like the middle of the Cross Bronx Expressway, or their dad, Bruce J. Friedman, at a construction site. But regardless, Josh and I had a fun conversation. What with his beat reportage of Times Square and its most sordid era, and his really amazing sort of memoir, he calls it an autobiographical novel, Black Cracker, as well as his musical career and his auto-dedacticism and everything else, there was plenty for us to yak about. Still, there's a lot of dishes clattering and tourists kind of just chattering in the background. You'll hear, it gets quieter by the end, so stick with it. And honestly, I find all three Friedman Brothers just fascinating. They're all performers, which is interesting, but they've got unique voices and sort of modes of storytelling. One's a cartoonist, one's a photographer, one works in prose, as well as music. For the most part, they seem to sort of downplay the importance of their dad's literary career on their own work, or at least some notion that they're writing or telling stories in a way that tries to compete with their dad. I'd love to talk with him sometime, both about his own work and how he perceives his kids in relation to it. Josh thinks he can set us up, but I am going to insist on the location this time. And now, the virtual memories conversation with Josh Allen Friedman. But he was recording, but the owners do not tell him that, you know, you tell him three or four specials. You don't tell them 30 or 40 special. Yes, there's a certain point in which, and here at the Edison Cafe, Edison Hotel Cafe, they don't tell you the specials where they might write it in chalk or something. Is there anything special besides us? I'm hoping that they'll have Old Perogan from the Ukraine, Borscht, and you can't get this in Texas, you know, whatever they have. It's actually a little bit Jewish here. You're now the third Friedman. I mean, you're the first two are vegetarians. That's what I admire most about both my brother. It might be the only thing I admire about them is that they're vegetarians. And I consider that to be a higher spiritual level of life here on Earth if you can achieve vegetarianism. I haven't been able to do it for ethical reasons. I don't care about the health reasons. The idea of eating animals has haunted me even before there was an animal rights movement. When I was a little boy, I used to give pause and then have nightmares that an animal was being killed that I had eaten a hamburger of. And it's the only thing I'm a hypocrite about in my entire life is I hate hunters. I collect story, any news items where hunting we will go, when a hunter kills another hunter instead of the bear, I post it up as a victory on my office board. Well, I love that because the idea of I suppose unless you absolutely have to survive, otherwise it's sort of, you know, so my brother is being vegetarians. I have such admiration for that and no respect for them in any other regard. How can you, well, how well does that sort of vibe play in Dallas where you live? Which vibe? The anti-hunting. Not well. The anti-football and anti-hunting, otherwise I'm a full out Texan, I've been there 26 years. You know, I also, I box, you know, I mean that was always my hobby for a long time. I said, well, you're a tough guy, you're a tough street kid, Jew from New York. You know, why should you be against, I said, boxes against hunting and you know, an animal is not asking to be, it's not part of, it's not a sport. The animal. I guess we are. It does not play well in Texas. I have to swallow it with friends of mine and people I know, especially parents, everybody, my young daughters' fathers are all football watching, hunting stock brokers and stuff. Well, when we go down to visit my in-laws in Louisiana, it's around the holidays especially. Well, let's just say Christmas because, you know, it's not a really Jewish world down there. It's just college bowl games. It doesn't matter which, which teams are playing if we're at anybody's house in the college bowl game on, we'll be watching college football and I just, okay, fine, I'll blend in, use my protective coloration, you know. Well, you can, every Sunday and even in Dallas, if it's, you can have the whole city to yourself, it's like the Twilight Zone where the world disappeared out on the streets. It's just me and a few gay guys, you know, out on the streets and you know, every restaurant is empty. They're watching the game, the game, it's what it's all about. So what brought you to Texas? It's, again, I've interviewed three brothers, or I'm interviewing the third brother. What's quite a, a triad? A triad. Oh, I was going to call it capturing the other Freedmen's, but that's kind of still with a child molesti thing. I think it's a little, a little, little... Yes. And also, we lived in Great Neck. Oh, yeah. So the idea of there being the Freedmen's that were child molestirs was, it was, it was outrage and shock. But it wasn't us. I swear. It certainly wasn't. You know. The, well, all three of you live away from New York. What sent you all from New York? We all live, we all live in the states or cities of our wives. Does that make a, tell you what kind of men we are? We were all torn away from New York by our wives, and we all got married about 30 years ago, just totally coincidentally, just, and we all have good marriages or great marriages. Very odd. My parents are very confused about that. They figured maybe they did something right. But it's not their fault to have blamed me the way, it's just, I think, a coincidence. I think your old man of virtue, it has either reverse psychology or reverse parenting at some point in his, uh... We knew exactly what examples not to follow, you know. But we also, you know, uh... It's a good starting point. It's a, it's a dialectic in that, that Hegel thing. At least, you know, a negative example, and then you can try and build something from there. Doesn't usually work that way, you know. You know. People usually follow the, you know, but, I mean, I, I thought my parents would say, you know, my parents had a very happy marriage. I had no idea they were having a miserable marriage until they suddenly got divorced. They, you know, they kept it pretty well. I was 17, I still haven't recovered, I'm 57. My brothers didn't care either way, they were fine, but I was like devastated when my parents announced they were getting divorced, and I was 17. It happens in retrospect, I'm very, it's been a very successful divorce. The divorce is going great, we have anniversaries of it every year. I think it's the 35th anniversary of their divorce, and we all get together. Celebrate. And, and, uh, glary to each other angrily, and that's a great way to say it. Very successful divorce, and of course they should have done it, and they're, everybody's, they're much happier off. But I was very upset about that, very upset. I have a very strong sense of family, I have a strong sense of loyalty, for some reason. I don't know where it comes, I guess it may be, it comes from my father a little bit, but I'm like an old Italian, you know, about stuff like that. Your family sticks together, well in my case we don't really, some of us are estranged a little bit. My brother Drew and I. Can you talk about that at all, or is that stuff you'd rather not get into? Well, everything's, I don't understand it, but, um, I'll never know. You know, we, we brush, brush into each other for five minutes every other year, somewhere. We used to talk, we used to be, um, Drew let, when Drew left New York, he really left New York. Uh, he severed relations with a lot of his close friends, with me and with his mother. Um, and. I have to get it back on the show. We have none of this drama. We don't, um, all under fully understand. I'm sure there are reasons and, uh, I'm sure there are mysterious reasons, probably legitimate reasons. I've never been estranged from anybody in my life. I know a thousand people. You should work on that. I've got a couple of people who, who literally will never want to see me again. No one in family, but still. I think the only one in my entire life that is never wanted to, I'm sure there are a few others down the road, but Drew, you know, my closest collaborator and partner and brother. So I think my theory is that, um, he's, you know, he became friends with Jerry Lewis. Uh, we're pretty good friends with Jerry and I, my theory is that he's trying to mimic Jerry's feud with Dean Martin, um, which, uh, it's means you should have been drunk for this interview. That would have been, and smoking the whole time. Well we can arrange that. I think that he's trying, he's always wanted to have a feud like Jerry and this was with his partner and this was his golden opportunity to finally start one off and if that's the case, we need Sinatra to bring us back together on a telephone, but unfortunately Frank is not with us. So it would have to be Gilbert Godfrey to somebody. Yeah, I still have that image from the, the conversation I had with Drew about in the 80s, Gilbert just dropping in on his apartment so they could watch monster movies online, which, you know, all things considered doesn't sound like that mad at deal as long as he's not doing shit. But he was back away living with his mother, I think. And he'd already been on Saturday Night Live, but he was still living with his mother, so he was a neighborhood boy. Yeah, well it wasn't the most successful Saturday Night Live run, so that's a, so what do you miss about New York particularly? What brings it back? Nothing. The South Bronx. I miss the South Bronx, um, Bedford Stuyvesant and the outer reaches of Harlem, I suppose. You know, I used to, uh, I miss some, you know, you could go up to Spanish Harlem and find yourself a really great knife fight, you know, two in the morning, you can't do that in Dallas as easily. Yeah. I do have to tell you though, my first Dallas experience, um, fall of 1996, I was down for a trade show for a magazine I was working on. I was a cheap drunk back then and stopped at a liquor store, picked up a 40 of cold 45, went back to my room to watch the Yankees finish out the Braves in a 1996 World Series. Game finishes, I'm cheering up, jumping up and down and celebrating. Thanks. And just as Wade Boggs is riding a horse around the interior of Yankee Stadium, they cut to the local news where they talk about a shooting that took place an hour ago in a local liquor store. They show an exterior and I realize it was a local liquor store. I was in Buying Colton for five, about three hours before. I was a cheap drunk, like I said, I moved up to highbrow gin after a while, but that was a lovely experience. Yeah, for a buck 99, you weren't going to get more ripped than that. There's a place called, um, Sam's barbecue in Austin, which is basically in somebody, some old black man's house out in right outside the city of Austin, you go there after gigs and I was there, they opened up three four in the morning and I'd go after gigs and I was sitting there years ago at my table, the only white guy in the joint, as usual. It's like two in the morning, it's crowded, everyone's got barbecue, again, my, I'm not a vegetarian. I'm heading out to pick a barbecue after this thing, so that's fine. And there were suddenly six shots, bam, bam, bam, right out the door, bam, and the whole place froze, everybody was like in mid bite and then when the six shots stopped and then they went back. Everything was normal. I'd say how it's during the actual shots. Oh, yeah. I remember the Howard Stern moment when they had that mob shooting at Sparks back in the 80s because we're New York a bit. That would have been our, um, Harry Paul, Paul, um, bravado Castellano, Paul Castellano, big Paul Castellano, Castellano, we played his daughter's wedding, actually one of my band city limits, but then but Howard called the next day, trying to get a seat in the no shooting section in the restaurant, which was, yeah, well, you know, um, traditionally any restaurant that has a mob shooting in it, businesses goes through the roof for the next 30 years, you know, and actually that would be a good movie plot, you know, some restaurant on it. Stating a shooting. They can't get anyone to come to the restaurant, two young guys, you know, you have to open up and what's, what could be your edge, you know, and they arranged to kill some mobster and have them come in and they know they've got 30 years of sold out, be a great movie deal. I say we call it producer, you know, WGA that's registered as of this moment, I'm declaring that. I think that's a high concept green light right now. I'm, and we got the whole North Jersey thing. So, you know, I've got connections, not really, but, you know, it's North Jersey enough. Seriously, that would be, I think they would green light that in a second. So you had anything produced? Like what, what produced? In terms of plays or, or movies at all? Well, there, I have two movies, I'm ashamed to say. I hate the movie. You know, I really don't want anything to do with it, but every 10 years I get sucked into doing pitches and treatments and shit, which I'm doing right now at the moment. So two movies were, quote, made. One of them is, this director named Paul Stone did "Tales of Times Square" as a movie and this may be the only time in history that a movie was released to the film festival circuit that was unfinished, half made, 40 minutes of it, played 35 film festivals, won awards. It's not that great, but it, it's got some good scenes and he was only halfway finished, but he ran out of gas and just started showing it that way and there it sits as of like five years ago, unfinished. So that's about, that movie experience. And the second one is even possibly worse, although it's a pretty good film that somebody made a documentary in Texas called Josh Allen Friedman, "A Life Obsessed with Negroes." No, it's called "Blacks and Jews," Josh Allen, "A Life Obsessed with Negroes." It's a very good documentary. Kevin Page is his name, he's an actor, he's a well-known actor, he's in a lot of movies. He used to be, he was a regular on "Seinfeld" insert and he did "Made Blacks and Jews." And the reason it only can play non-commercial at film festivals or universities where there's no admission charge because he still owes $50,000 in rights for a lot of photos that we use and little film clips of stuff of me that you have to pay, you know, beautiful shot. We used a lot of shots at Times Square, of course, and each one would cost like $1,000 to use in the film. Well, I use real music for these episodes, which is why I can't actually put advertising anywhere related to this podcast, but you see that you can work around it that way. I just don't even want to get into trouble like that. Right. And also, it's not fair. You know, I mean, it's a legitimate thing. You should have to pay for it. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's why I never tried to steal like that. No. I've got to pal writing some music to use as theme stuff for, so that way I'd be able to do it down the line, but still, for now, it's not a bunch of music. But you use somebody's work, whether it's photo, film clip, book, excerpts, you know, they're entitled to be paid for it if it's a commercial release, of course. Now, we're doing this interview in near Times Square itself. We are in the middle of a baby, this is it. This is the hotel Edison. Does it draw you back? It certainly does. And I was covering the streets here 30 years ago when I was a young lad. And I say, the only writer in New York covering Times Square, the only one for 10 years, there were a few store, you know, there'd be a shooting or a crime story in the Daily News. But nobody was walking the beat and going behind the scenes, because they were sissies and they were afraid and it was considered dirty and they were embarrassed. Oh, it wasn't considered dirty, too. It was dirty. It was. Sex was dirty, then. Pornography was as dirty as its name. Was this for screw or? Primarily for screw, which was the clearing house for all the other men's magazines, because they would lift stuff from us all the time and again, reprint stuff, either uncredited and not paying or, you know, you'd be in wee and swank and, you know, stuff that you did through screw would be reprinted. So it was for all the men's magazines. And this was, I was the guy who was behind what was going on here for about 10 years. So I got my book tells the Times Square out of all of that. So the Edison Hotel was in disrepair at that time. Now it's in like splendid disrepair. It's like polished. It looks gorgeous, but it's how many milliliters are working. But the elevators are broken and they haven't changed the sheets in a few decades, you know. There's still huge rooms upstairs. Yeah. It's a lovely hotel. But I used to walk girls back from the melody burlesque like I was allowed into the stripper's dressing room. I was the only guy allowed in. So I would walk occasionally get to walk the headline stripper back to her room when they'd fly her in to headline the melody, which was like the old days of burlesque, the very end of it. And they'd put her up at the Edison Hotel, which is in its faded glory, then really faded. Yeah. Well, I passed aside for the Penthouse Executive Club on the way up here. There was-- Yeah. Great. And you know, trying to make it all somehow classy, which-- Well, you can't get sleazier than that, you know. It's worse than a-- Well, honestly, my mom used to take us to Times Square. She'd go to the half-price ticket booth for musicals and leave me and my brother in playland in one of the arcades where my brother and I would keep turning the pinball machines on and off trying to get free games, not really realizing what was going on in the whole environment around. It was like '82, '83 or so. It was a good time. Yeah. You certainly would have seen what was going around if you-- As an 11-year-old. Yeah. Right across the street, if you're at the Broadway one at 50th, you know, you were looking right out on-- you'd be looking right out on the whole facade that the mafia had put up all across 47th, 48th street of all the lights and the peep shows and the melody was on one corner and the pussy-cat cinema was there and I forget some of the old names, but-- Now it's all-- Boy, they were hot places. Flashing LEDs and the M&M world store and, you know-- M&Ms was not there in '82. No. Nowadays, it's-- In '82, they were popping M&Ms out of their vaginas at the melody into the audience, literally. Except they used to do cherries, some of the girls. Money suckled divine did ping-pong balls and cherries. M&Ms would have been, now you would have an endorsement, you know, if it's that kind of thing in Times Square. So you'd be endorsed by M&Ms and then across the street would be the Tootsie Rolls. They'd be using them and build those and they'd have an endorsement for that in the old Times Square. So do you miss those days? Of course. Of course. Youngest those days? All of that. Yeah. At the time there was certainly an element of shame in looking over your shoulders and stuff. But I said, "Wait a minute. I'm paid to do this." Yeah. It's like Al Goldstein, my boss at Screw, was the only man who legitimately got to write off hookers as a tax expense. And he got away with it. I'm here, I'm supposed to be here. Yes. You know, I have a yellow pad with me and I'm in the dressing rooms and the peep shows. There were a lot of hot girls back then, too, who didn't know they were hot. They were just like demented young starlets. You know, they didn't know that they were gorgeous. So when you're in your early 20s, obviously it's before AIDS, it's the very end of the so-called sexual revolution. And you have a screw-peck press pass and your job is to do the Naked City listings and cover 250 joints into your head. Stringers work. It was very hot. It got so hot that I got bored. It was like a signing all these plays, massage ballers to stringers. You know, I'd seen it, done it. But it's still, I dream back and it was like the Wild West. Pornography was semi-legal. You could still be arrested for it. There were no landing strips, no tips on the installment plan, everything was real. And some of the girls, the porn stars then, had political reasons. You know, they were trying, there was soldiers, well, Annie was the greatest, you know. I always tell Annie that they really should, she's the only porn star that there should be a Broadway musical based on her. They really should. I said, you can call it Annie. What subjects did you sort of enjoy covering the most throughout your girls, girls, girls, girls? It was Guile. It's Guile. It's Guile. It's Guile. It's Guile. It's Guile. It's Guile. It's Guile. It's Guile. It's Guile. It's Guile. It's Guile. It's Guile. It's Guile. It's Guile. It's Guile. It's Guile. It's Guile. It's Guile. It's Guile. It's Guile. It's Guile. It's Guile. It's Guile. It's Guile. It's Guile. It's upstairs. I covered every, I love covering everything. So I turned it into, I decided to write a column at the beginning of every week where I had, I would update five places a week maybe just the little New Yorker capsule reviews with a rating which they call the Peter, the cop rating or something this way. But I would do a little introductory thing and it became a thing unto itself because I did it for like 300 weeks in a row or something or 400, I did it for like six years. Every week I would now, I was now obliged to write a column and so what would they be? They would be some, I'd be in a stripper's dressing room. I would talk to the priest at Holy Cross Church, I'd be out with the cops for a night. I made it into a thing and in my own weird following of some kind. How'd you fall into journalism? You didn't go to school, right? No, no. And I dropped out of high school. Okay. That's great. The only thing I know about your education is... There is no education. Well, yeah, the... I had a colored education. Yeah, you went to the... I went to... I went to school. I went to school. Yeah. And I learned how to read, write and talk with a British accent. No, they really taught you how to read and write. So I... But you became a journalist? Yeah, I guess well you couldn't, I couldn't get a job at the New Yorker. So... And I was... Got published at Screw, which was like Mad Magazine back then, like a sex Mad Magazine. So it had sex and it was the funniest thing in the world. And when I was 20, I had a piece published that put me over the moon. And then they started assigning me to Times Square because nobody else would cover it. So what started out as just anywhere that you get published, I don't care if it's the fireman's gazette, when you're starting out, you need to be published somewhere and see how a newspaper or a magazine works, that probably doesn't apply in the 21st century anymore. People still... I run a trade magazine by day and people... Which one? Oh, it's a pharmaceutical business magazine. It's a magazine. Yeah, and they see their name for the first time as a contributor. Something about that. Oh my God! I wrote an article. You know, they got to see it in print. It's, you know... Okay, I think it's more powerful than seeing your name online because you could just type your name on a computer and there it is. And you see your name in print the first time? I never got over that. I felt 10 feet tall. And I'll tell you the story of that was that my mother kicked me out of the apartment. It was the only time she... I think Kip mentioned this in his Barracuda book. I was kicked out of the apartment, which was the only time that ever happened for a week or something. And I went to... I was 20 years old and I... Before Lornley marched down the Times Square and booked into an $8 flea bag hotel. And I had submitted a story to Screw a few months before some stupid piece. I don't even want to get there. And that night I went to see what was going on. I went out and bought a copy of Screw. This would have been 1976. And there was my buy line. And I thought my life was over and I was just another bum in the hotel where they were vomiting out in the window, outside the window space, you know, like Darryl X, so I thought that's where I belonged. And friends with a lot of elevator men anyway, and it was kind of a place where elevator men live. And there I saw my name in Screw and I felt like... You could go even lower. And then I... right, I maxed out. It's a very bottom and it felt... I felt 10 feet tall, you know, it kind of saved my life. So in a sense, just that first time seeing your name in print, 20 years old, and the rest... So within a year... This turned into a recurring... Within a year, they were assigning me to Times Square to just do cover places and it was very scary then. It was very dangerous, scary, but then I found it wasn't. And it became... I became so relaxed in the middle of the environment where... You could have easily been killed or mugged or anything could have happened. I would practically just take a nap on a lamppost right on 42nd Street and nobody would bother me and I was... That's how relaxed I was. Was that a function of just being known as a regular or did you find some approach to just, you know... For some reason, everybody used to assume... And I would never impersonate a police officer, it's unthinkable, seriously. But hookers and street hustlers assumed I was a cop. Nobody else would be a young white boy. I wasn't as big then. I was like, you know, 50 pounds lighter than I am now, at least, you know, I was pretty skinny. And I got mistaken for a cop in Washington Square once, waiting for a pound. You could look like an FBI guy. Oh, I had a short buzz haircut too and I was just sitting down and all the dealers just started moving away from my section of Washington Square and I realized... You look like you could have a little American flag thing. You look very patriotic. It's funny because, you know, secretly I'm, you know, this deviant monster living in Jersey. But nobody knows that and, you know, if I don't say anything on microphone, I'm all sad. You look like all American. But they thought I was a cop. I was told many a time. That's why I could never get laid in a whore in a whore house, you know. You figured you were going to bust it. You can't even get, can't get laid, not even in a whore house. I literally couldn't because they thought I was a cop. They wouldn't believe me. I said, I swear to God, I'm not a, yeah, yeah. Officer, we know, you know. And they could make the great, is this some kind of bust joke that, yeah, never mind. I'm looking for two busts. Please. Bust me. So, do you have good memories of the screw days? Oh, marvelous. Yeah. Marvelous. You know, you-- How Goldstein got a month ago, which would be December before Christmas, 2013. Yeah. So, all right, I went from being a peon. You know, there were 30 people who worked there at Screw Midnight Blue and began noticing my pieces. And then I got closer to them. But, you know, by the time he was out on the streets, I got us a book deal to write his autobiography, I Goldstein, which came out, which we got to deal just as he was coming off the streets. He had actually lived the year on the streets as a New York's most famous homeless guy. Yeah. And he did it to himself. He was not assassinated in his prime, so he was never a martyr for the sexual revolution, which would have made him like Lenny Bruce. But I think he's like Lenny Bruce anyway. Yeah. He was there for Lenny Bruce in every way, not Richard Pryor, not George Carla, nothing wrong with him, not Larry Flint, but Al Goldstein. See, I always think of Howard as one-- Howard Stern is one of those guys who sort of changed the culture in a way that we don't even recognize how much he changed it from before that. Do you see Al as sort of a predecessor to that? Absolutely. Absolutely. I would say no Al Goldstein-- no Howard Stern in many ways. Al Goldstein went to jail. Yeah. For a lot of things that we now take for granted. For instance, I've cited this before. One example I like to cite is he was arrested in 1970 for running ads for dildos in Screw magazine. Manhattan Supreme Court argued that dildos could be used for criminally immoral purposes. So Goldstein was spent a weekend in Rikers Island or The Tunes, who was back and forth between-- for running ads for dildos and paid the fine, went to court. I think he probably won it or it was-- he had to pay some fine. And thereafter, to this day now, your Aunt Murgatroyd can buy a dildo at the corner drug store because Al went to jail for that. He went to jail so that Pew Bicare could be shown in a newsstand publication before Penn House and Playboy in six years before Hustler. He showed full frontal nudity for better or worse. And I think at the time for better, it really needed to be done at that time, kind of regret it now, which we could go back to the '50s. But I have a daughter. Yeah. That's what I was going to ask. You know, there's the upside of that revolution, the downside is going to become a paradox now, and what it's become. But at the time, it was unstoppable and needed to be done. Al really was the sword of the sexual revolution back in the late '60s, early '70s. He took the bus first magazine to ever provide an advertising medium for prostitution. He held onto those ads for 20 years before anybody, before they ran anywhere. All of New York's hookers, pimps, and massage followers were loyal to screw as the one and only place to advertise for years. And then, gradually, the Village Voice in New York Press and even New York Magazine got the, now the yellow pages in every city has those ads. Screw is the first to do that. So a lot of stuff we take for granted, including the right to parody trademarks. When I was at Screw, we ran a full-page parody of the Pillsbury Doughboy, Pop and Fresh gives the Pillsbury Doughgirl a yeast infection. All right, well, we were allowed to do stuff like that every day. It was our job. But Al was the one who had to go to hit the bricks, hit the mattresses on it. He was sued for $50 million by Pillsbury over that. You know, how dare you show pop and fresh with a yeast infection? He won, it cost a pretty penny. One trial after another, George Wallace, Governor George Wallace of Alabama sued Screw for a lot of money because Screw ran a fake ad claiming Wallace learned all about sex through a screw. Things like that, one after another, and they all went down, they all went down in flames in court. One virtually every worker came out, if not winning, he came out on top of every lawsuit and every bust until finally a secretary brought him down when he was old for a simple harassment thing. Yeah, that's like getting Al Capone tax evasion. Right. Right. You wouldn't think that would be an issue at that point. So Howard Stern, who is a brilliant comedian, really brilliant comedian, also I think is a bit of a bully in that he claims that when I've heard times when he claims that he's a victim of the government, big government, and they're going to find him a few, you know, 50,000 for saying a curse, where the liquid, he's just a guy on the radio. He's the most powerful media figure since Walter Wintzel, you know, he's a very powerful, very wealthy man with millions of listeners. He's not an innocent comedian, just, you know, being busted like Lenny Bruce, you know, and being handcuffed and brought into jail for saying a dirty word, you know, it's very powerful. He's a brilliant guy, but he paints himself as a victim sometimes and he's being harassed by the big government. I think that's not neurotic anxiety laden Jew thing, which we can both say. Goldstein really was. I never saw a braver foolishly, maybe, brave, but I never saw a more courageous man in Goldstein and his crime facing down the mob, the government, a 60 year federal sentence in Wichita, which he was convicted and would have, until Harold Ferenger, the great First Amendment lawyer, got it overturned. Al was going to serve 60 years in federal prison with Jim Buckley in the 70s for three years that was hanging over him and he didn't waver, so he had more balls, he was the toughest Jew in New York. And it was just his own internal flaws that did him in? Yes. Pure self-destruction. And I won't even get into that. Now they can make the movie, now we're talking about that so that now they can make the movie when he was alive, as he always correctly said, they would never invite him to the premier of his own movie, and he was right, he was too crazy. I heard you talk about casting ideas for him before he was. Well I was at Saturday Night Live last night back stage, when I went there with a friend of mine from Texas we brought up and presented, I had her present Jonah Hill with a copy of our Al Goldstein book, because it has certainly occurred to me watching Wolf of Wall Street. The first time Jonah Hill comes on with his two middle fingers thrust in the air he goes, if I may. Yeah. Fuck you! I said, "Al, it's you!" He looks like young Al Goldstein. Is it skinny Jonah or kind of plumped up Jonah? He was brilliant last night, he guessed hosted Saturday Night Live, and I realized his range as an actor is really something, you know, he's really so impressive, and I wanted to see that last night and offer him the role. And I hope that he gets word of it through us, and through other people saying you look just like young Al Goldstein, when Al is in his 20s/30s, Jonah Hill looks exactly like that, can look exactly like that, and sound like that. What do you think is a lesson we have to take from Al at this point? Not that there has to be a moral thing, but, you know... Don't fuck it up, you know, capture blessings when you have them. Don't spend every dime you have on Chachkas and TVs and computers, and, well, most people don't. He was compulsive. Absolutely. You name it. Absolutely. You learn a lot of people do spend a good chunk of their money on this festival. If they have it, and with Goldstein having 50 grand a week coming in from the Hooker ads, spending compulsively and beyond his means, from 11 million to the gutter, to Bellevue Men's Shelter. I went out looking for him one night, where we couldn't find him. I went to the far-right, the scariest men's shelters in New York, there's one on shelter out? No, not shelter island. That would be a beautiful thing. Candles Island at night, somebody driving me through, and it was like Night of the Living Dead going, "This is New York City, but it's over a bridge, and it's called Randall's Island." And the island next to it, Ward's Island, I think? That's what we're going to do. That's what we're going to do, the smallpox ward. Smallpox, it looked like the 19th century, like you're going into the Antebellum South, and there's a range where the fire department has trucks that they burned up. Yeah, just testing sites. We do tests on putting out fires, and there's guys wandering in the woods, just like Night of the Living Dead, and on winter night, when it's in the 30s, and there's the old plantation house where they live. Did you find him in one of those? We were actually talking to guys standing outside the shelters, they wouldn't let us in. "Oh, I know Al, yeah, I was here last week, I think he's up in the Bronx now." So we went to about three or four places, and couldn't find it. For a few months, he was absolutely nobody knew where he was or whether he had perished. And this is a man who had previously been on a beautiful townhouse on the Upper East Side next door to Bill Cosby, his neighbor Bill Cosby, and had a chauffeur, a limousine and three or four residences around the world. So it makes for a great story, but a terrible life. Sure. He sounds like he's sort of a paternal influence on you, at least being the-- I have a handful of paternal influences. Yeah. And I guess Al is one of the-- You're your paternal figure of your dad, but go on. Oh, I met paternal influence. Yeah. Actually maternal, I'm-- but main influences would be Bruce J. Friedman number one, John Lennon. I feel within me, every day, since I was eight years old. Do you ever meet him? I brushed past him once, and I almost met him once in '65. I was taken to a meeting. The cover of Black Cracker was actually taken in England and London, that picture. Really? No, no. No, that's before-- there's another picture. At the end of Black Cracker, there's a picture in the back of me at Noah Brian's house, where we spent the week. It was taken to meet John Lennon at the publisher, Jonathan Cape, who just put out-- it was his second book, 'A Spanyard in the Works,' and Tom Maschler was Lennon's editor, and he was also my father's British editor for my father's book. Some other's kisses was a big bestseller that year, or the year before. So they arranged for me to meet John Lennon, and I, of course, looked like him, dressed like him, breathed like him, and I was eight years old-- nine years old at that time. And I would have fainted if you walked into the room. He actually called where Tom Maschler actually called Lennon, and this is in August '65, and Lennon was on the phone with Tom Maschler in front of me, saying that the pool guys were here to set up his pool at his-- you know, they had just-- all the Beatles had just moved into homes in that suburb, suburb of London, that upscale suburb, let's get put it. And he was having his pool put in and couldn't make it give the boys some illustrations. So they gave me a pile of cartoons, the John Adron, doodles, Christmas card, cartoons, original art, and Drew and I, over the years, drew over it, and defaced it, all of it. How much would an original Lennon illustration combine with young Drew's art on top, like defacing if he were-- even that would be where it's something. So we lost all of it. Amazing. Who would have known? And what was your dad's influence on your writing and your choice of career? Just the life of a-- you know, what-- I used to say to my dad when I was a kid, I'd say being a writer just seems like the most honorable thing you can be in the world. You know, it's such-- what an honorable, heroic-- and he would say, "Well, I don't know about that, Josh, but I wouldn't quite say." You know, and it's dead, it really-- so for some reason I thought maybe-- because I looked up to my father as a heroic figure to me, and I looked up to him as being an amazing thing to be. You know, back in the '60s, when I didn't realize that he was one in a million, less than-- you know, one in a hundred million, I mean, when he became successful, he was just-- he had-- when a mother's kiss was a bestseller, and then Scuba-Duba after that became a huge hit in '67, I mean, he made a lot of money, he was recognized on the street, everybody loved him, every head waiter, just welcomed you into the-- and there were movie stars hanging out, and it just seemed like this is the life of a writer. Little did I know that's not what the life of a writer liked. There was the life of a writer, in his case, during those years, so that-- I figured what a great thing to be a writer, and that's not why I became one, but I became one just-- I don't know-- I would have told you when I was becoming one, this has nothing to do with my father, but looking back as a-- through the decades, it probably has everything to do with your father, because we're all so deeply influenced by our-- So it just started happening, I didn't want to, or plan on, I'm a guitar player, I never wanted to be a writer, even like reading books, I thought they were for sissies until I-- When I was 16, I discovered I read Terry Southern's Magic Christian and Blue Movie, and that turned my head around, and I went nuts over Terry. Yeah, I thought you subsequently edited a-- Yeah, and then I became friends with Terry and edited a book with Niall and his son Niall, maybe you might talk to someday, I would actually be a good one. Yeah. Niall Southern, except he's in Boulder, Colorado, but he comes to New York. That's what I do, I commit to Jersey, other people make the longer trip. I should make that connection, actually. Niall runs his father's estate, and he's got a new documentary that he's hopefully finishing. It was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts on his father, on Terry. And then Nelson Aldrin became my favorite writer, so-- and Mario Pizzo, my father's best friend, became a favorite writer. I loved his books, and his-- and even his non-fiction, he became very important to me. And the proletariat writers of the 1930s, mostly the Chicago ones, became-- suddenly he started having a huge effect on me when I was in my late teens. Richard Wright, the black novelist, particularly Nelson Aldrin, even Upton Sinclair. A lot of Chicago-- iceberg slim years later, I didn't discover him until late until he was dead. And then I was just knocked on my ass, you know, as a book. Why did they keep this from me? You know, a lot of guys from Chicago. But they were a realist, what they used to-- you know, Steinbeck was that-- was known for that somewhat as being-- writing about the common man. And social realism. Social realism. Yeah. The man in the street. That always is what I somehow related to, even below the man in the street, the man below the street, the elevator-- The man in the gutter. The man in the gutter, I related to because of my own inferiority complex. That's why I think one of many reasons I latched on to Lenin and over-identified with him is an inferiority complex, which Lenin also had, no matter how famous or great you seem to the world, you can really feel like very small and insignificant, even while you're being applauded by the world. I think there were times when Lenin was like that. Did you find the roots of that? You've done therapy or anything? You've looked into-- Yeah, it was a waste of time. I've never tried it. So I just figured I'd do it. I went through some of that, sure. It's better in my condition just to push it all down into a really tiny ball. Absolutely. You know. We've learned that we can medicate this brand of stuff. And it's like Robert Crum said, many brilliant things that he said. I hope you do a Robert Crum, though it comes down a little. I hope you're gone. I hope you're gone. I can do that. But he said about his obsessions with women and fetishes and why he's so horny about big legs and climbing on top of women, and he said, "I suppose I could spend 10 years on the couch with an analyst and maybe get to the bottom of it. But let's just let it ride." You know. You made some great art out of it. Now, who you're reading nowadays? I read a lot these days. I love books more than ever. I should ask, what are you doing nowadays, actually? What's your beginning? I supposedly started a new album, which would be my fifth album. I enjoyed Blacks and Jews. I've listened on the drive here. Oh, I sent you that. I forgot about that. It's another atomic acoustic guitar album. I would like to do a lot. There's a number of albums I've always wanted to do, but just to be able to do one and get everything together to do it and the energy to do it is a miracle. For me, it's a miracle to finish a book. I don't know how I've done it, but each time it's taken me to the edge of existence, insanity, endurance, strength, to be able to pull it off and then get it out somehow. It feels like that, almost with every album. The only one that wasn't like that was the Goldstein book. It was written in a fever, for some reason, iGoldstein. And I was able to just go round the clock for three months and just meet a dead-- deadlines are wonderful. Oh, yeah. If you have a deadline, what a difference. And it's got to meet that deadline. You can do anything. The advantage of having that magazine as my job was the issue's got to come out. I can hem and haul about writing something, but this is the day everything goes into printer. The training that you get from a deadline, if you have enough years of it can hold you for the rest of your life. I don't think I had to have a column every week for screw every Wednesday morning. It had to be in there by like 9 a.m., 10 a.m. to get into press for the next come out the next day. It was three in the morning and I didn't have a clue as to what I was going to write about and I had to-- because I was a wise guy and I created the thing on my own to make it-- I had to keep the consistency every week. It was three in the morning on Wednesday night and I got in late and I had to have it in at nine. I would come up with something 300 times, 400 with our element at the last second and just do it. You can't do that without a deadline. Wonderful training. Besides, yeah. Well, I'm working on a book, you know, about the broadest terms, which doesn't say anything about it. It would take place in the hippie era and I've never addressed that. It's very-- Nonfiction or novel? I'm going to have to call it a novel. Okay. As you did with your memoir of your-- With black crack, yeah. I'm calling it a novel so I can't get busted on Oprah. Right. Like all those guys who had to call their books off, you know, the-- Yeah, James Fry and the end of it. Yeah. They got busted. You know, so-- All right, here it's a novel. Yeah. And it is. Yeah. You know, it is. But it's very close to what it was exactly, like, very close. It's a pretty harrowing book. I mean, it's entertaining as shit, but-- Thank you. You know, the-- as I mentioned on Facebook, I was in England last week and it's when I read "Black Cracker," which is all about your-- I'm sorry that we didn't get you the cliff notes and save you from having to read the whole thing. Well, the embarrassment was that it was Martin Luther King Day when I started reading this book, "All About Your Experience," as the one white student in a black public school elementary school, which is really when we first get beaten up and traumatized by the public school system. It's really the wrong time for you to be in that kind of scenario. You know, one way that I look at it, that book means a lot to me in many ways, because I started it when I was in high school. Yeah. And that's how long it took me to finish, you know, to deal with your own childhood, wrap it up in a package and put a bow on it. That's how I look at every subject or every book. It's taking something off my chest and off my mind that's been weighing on me for years, thinking about taking notes, finally finishing it, putting it in a package, wrapping it up in a bow and sending it. That's how my wife sees what I do. And I finally did that with my childhood, with "Black Cracker," it took 35 years to finish it. What was my point, the lost train of thought? Writing, finishing the new book you're working on? Well, to deal with the whole hippie era is another thing that I need to wrap it up my own way. And that's my self-therapy maybe, maybe all that's what writing means if you're a serious writer, is to organize and explain and come to grips with everything, and maybe you can change it a little bit so that it's not as painful or that you resolve what's writing. One of the many things that writing does is it gives you a chance for revenge, clarification. There are a lot of basic human emotions that are addressed by being able to write about it. Money, you know, you want money. That's a perfectly good legitimate, you know, a lot of great writers, some of the greatest work ever done were short stories where the writer did it for the money, and out of it comes the great Gatsby or whatever, you know, but he needed an advance, and I don't literally mean the great Gatsby I happen to not, I think he's a crap. I don't get it at all, you know, I'm sure it's great, but I just, I don't have a long island. Right. So I'm doing another book, the second book out of "Great Neck" will be my book. It will also take place where Gatsby took place in the hippie era, though. But it takes me years. I don't know if I'll ever, ever finish, you know, but there'll come a time where it'll kick in into a high octane, and it just comes alive on its own, and then you go down the stretch, it may take a few months, so that any year now I'll finally finish that. That's what I'm working on, plus about ten movie pitches at the moment. I've got another one for you, which we can collaborate on after this. We already came up when we had the one, I have a basketball one that I've been holding off on for a while. No, no. I'm not going to say a word. You let that thing out, and somebody steals it. No, no. That's not the thing. We'll talk about it afterwards, but, you know, and we'll have it on tape, but who do you read among your peers? Who are you, do you have, you know, writers? Who I even have peers? Seriously. What kind of level am I? The worst phrase in the world is mid-list. Somebody a friend of mine who's a writer. This whole podcast is called The Curse of the Mid-list. That's been my subtitle for it for a year or so now. A novelist friend of mine just had a book rejected, and the rejectionist said, "Too mid-listy." Great. And then he was called a mid-list writer. I'd rather be, you know, a gutter writer, you know, and another thing would be like, "God, I'm so grateful I've never gotten one of those little pocket reviews in the New York Times book review where they do a paragraph before the end." I've never had that. I'd either get no review or in a couple of cases they've got a fairly big one. If I were to get that paragraph for a book, I'd make a suicide. Yeah, really. That's just the, you know, almost many notice, but not quite beneath notice. Oh, geez. That's the mid-list. Yeah. Now, I'm sure a lot of guys would dream of getting that paragraph in the Times because only one in 500 books gets in there anyway, but I got news for you. Even a good review in the Times these days is not going to sell that many copies. It would have, in the '60s or '70s, it could put you on the bestseller list. Now it would have to be a rave on the cover in order to do that. It's a different world. But who do you read? I mean, who? You're a living author. I'll tell you who I'm reading. I hate to say, amongst non-living authors who I recently discovered and went nuts over. Jim Tully, T-U-L-L-Y, he's the predecessor to Nelson Aldrin. He's been out of print for 75 years. He's an Irishman from Ohio who wrote about 15 novels in the World War I era that are so wonderful. He probably was the creator of hard-boiled, tough street writing that would have influenced Nelson Aldrin and the social realism movement to come. He was the first writer to ever move to Hollywood in 1912, and there after worked for Charlie Chaplin for quite a few years. But he published about 15 novels that are some of, I think, they're magnificent. Not that he was a wizard with language in the way the bulk of or evil in law was, he was a street guy. He had been a boxer, he had worked in the circus. How did you discover it? Just some reference. Some reference somewhere brought his name up a couple of years ago and I ended up, I've now read seven of his books, one better than the other. He wrote a book on the circus where for years he was just like a tent rigor, just one of the tough guys on the train who would have to get up in the mud down in Alabama when the circus came through and put up the tents. You want to talk about the most contemptible, low-level con men that ever existed. You think there are guys today on Wall Street or in the real estate market that are con men? It all comes out of the circus culture of turn of the century or never, but the cronies, oh my God. He has one thing in there where they have a stripper like Little Egypt comes out and they con the audience in the tent show before the big tent circus and she comes out and the announcer gets like 30 guys to pay a quarter to come in and she does a quick little dance, but if you really want to see what she did for the else club last week, you got to cough up another quarter and they do that and she comes out and they get them up to like six or seven or eight dollars, which in those days is like $800, and there's 30 horny guys, and then when they're finally she's about to come out and show it all, which in those days would have been amazing, the sides of the tent fall down, everybody melts into the crowd and the suckers are left standing there. He routines that the circus used to be and his best book is Shanty Irish, Jim Tully, about growing up Irish poor, a family of dirt diggers in Ohio in the 1890s, and he has one book about a whorehouse in Chicago and it's a fat woman who's the madam, the matron, and he spends a year there, I suppose, in the 1920s, reminded me of Elaine's, the old Elaine's, it was a salon where politicians and Matt in Chicago, and did you ever live out there? Never. I would love to. Yeah. It just seems from the number of authors you cited, I know the writers tend to be from Chicago, even Mamet, you know, some of the couple of few of his plays, you know, to this day talking about who do I like today? It's a tough thing, and one of the aspects of doing this show is that I'm reading so many more living authors and I used to, I'm used to, you know, reading guys who've been dead a long time, but, you know. I don't differentiate between living and dead, I guess. It's alive when it's on the page. It doesn't matter when you read it, if it was written 50 years ago. The idea of someone's voice coming from the past and connecting with you, and there's a thought that only the only other human being has ever thought of that agrees with some thought of yours that touches you from 100 years ago. How important is Judaism? I mean, you guys weren't raised Jewishly exactly, and yet... We didn't know what... But you're all Jews. Culturally, you guys are all Jews. So we've been told. So we've learned. Yeah. Who would have known? I just thought I was a kid, you know. I thought I was a Negro until I was 10 years old anyway, but aside from that, that sounds kind of... But the cracker and bacon. Precentious and obnoxious to say such a thing, you know, if you're not Mez Mezro, you know, Johnny Otis or Dr. John, you know, those are the only guys who really could say, "Yes, son of a... As you get older, you somehow, as you get closer to meeting your maker, maybe. I remember Groucho became a little bit religious when we came all of a sudden, and you become more ethnic. Everybody does. Italians become more Italian when they get older. They start looking like an Italian grandma. Right. Even men do. Men do. The time they're in their 40s. You know, young, handsome Italian guys, and all of a sudden, they look like their own grandma and say, "Would you like some spaghetti?" Tony, come into some spaghetti. You turn into that. So I'm waiting to turn into an out-the-cock or something. You know, I keep looking in the mirror every day, trying to ward it off. Inevitably, I've seen a number of friends of mine turn into their grandparents. But again, your Jewishness, isn't they? Was there any sort of cultural genius as opposed to... You had your grandparents, so we'd go to the Bronx, my father's parents, in the Bronx for the Seder every year. That was the only Jewish thing we did. You'd meet family for the Seder. And it's almost like if there was a game called hide the masa, because... Yeah, the outcome. That's the... We hide the masa. It's like hide the watermelon or hide the chit-win if you're a black person or something, it almost sounds like... It almost sounds like... There was very little Jewish... There was no Jewish upbringing, really. And then all of a sudden, my brother, Kip, in high school wants to visit Israel and live in a kibbutz one summer. I don't know where that came from. And Drew is doing old Jewish comedian faces and making a whole... His whole stick is Jewish. Yeah. I don't know where that comes from. I guess I do know where it's in the jeans, right? I assume. When you get older, it starts coming out. Because all of you, in particular in your family, all of you are storytellers of some kind or another. I think Kip is discovering it later, but I'm sure even the act of photography that you've been doing for years is some form of chronicling and storytelling. So I really wonder how much of the performance gene there is versus just the upbringing and having these parents who are in theater. I don't know, man. It's very... I never thought of myself as a storyteller at all, and I guess I do that, but I never thought of it, such a thing. It's... You're never... Never thought of that. Oh, I mean, I've obviously considered it sent before you just saying it now, but I mean, I never said, "I'm a storyteller, I'm going to tell a story." Fuck that. You know, just... But it's what reporting is. It's still a way of narrating the fact that I put things together. I suppose so. I suppose so. So yeah, just didn't know if there's any sense of that, you know, that you're all carrying along some strange tradition like this. Well, I really got to get your dad on the show sometime and beat it out of him. I suppose we have to find out. We can arrange that. I'm hoping. I think we can arrange that. Is short fiction changed my life a month or two ago? No. Just a month or two ago? I did not. We're going to get you hooked up with him as soon as we can. I'd only read his nonfiction before, a few years ago. Even the rhinos were nymphos? Yep. Did you come across... A pal gave it to me as a present. This last summer, I read Lucky Bruce's memoir and enjoyed the heck out of it. I should start reading his fiction. I loved it. Lucky Bruce. I did short fiction and realized that everything I'd been procrastinating about writing fiction over was wrong. I realized just in the voice of what he was writing, I thought, this is who I should have been modeling my writing after as opposed to 10 million different authors who I put on a certain lofty plane. I finally had this moment of, "Oh shit, I was meant to be Jay Fried in 20 years ago." Luckily for me, I didn't do it because there's no market nowadays, I guess, for this sort of narrative, entertaining stuff. You don't have 25 magazines that buy five short stories a month for $5,000, or for $5,000 as Playboy paid. Imagine what that was like in the, you know, and that doesn't exist anymore. Now if you write a serious short story, it's got to be in a scholarly journal or online somewhere. But it's not about money, it's about whether you have to do it or not. And that was what I've been fighting for. Where did he get? His father worked at a petticoat factory in the Farman District at a sewing machine cutting out forms for 50 years. So where did my father decide from a lower middle-class family in the Bronx that just barely had enough money to get by and eat, become a writer. His heroes, when he was a boy, became Hemingway in Fitzgerald. The typical Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, et cetera, and they became his greatest heroes. And he went in the Air Force and had to write when he was there. And it just evolved from that. But by all means, he would have seemed, he would have gone into the stock room at one of the Seventh Avenue garment factories, which is where his father was. And his mother wanted to get him out of that and like, have him rise to the level and become a press agent. She thought that was the highest thing you could be in the world as a broadway press agent. Right around the corner from here, there used to be the spice of broadway was all on these streets. There were press agents and little acting practice schools. All I had in my head reading that part of his memoir was the sweet smell of success that Tony Curtis and Bert Lancaster flick and what the press agent life would have been like back then. 50 years ago, at this point, 60 years ago, in this neighborhood, and this place was here. And it looked just like this. So what work are you proudest of? I am equally proud of everything I've released with the possible exception of the book when sex was dirty because I don't believe I think everything you release should be your very best work. I have friends who've been under contract and have had to put out albums because they're under contract said you must have an album a year and were ashamed of the albums they put out and most people put out shitty albums anyway. I want my list to be lean and mean and everything was urgent and had to be done. Nothing to just play the market or for money or for, I mean, my family has had to suffer for that. My wife probably that I'm not doing commercial projects just to bring home the bacon. I'm very fortunate that my wife is successful in the fashion business and as a designer. So it's a great blessing which allows me to not have to do something just as a commercial. I'm very blessed in that. So I can be a quote artist and do what I need to do and what's urgent. I feel that about every album and every book I release. I said sex was dirty because that was came at a time when I hadn't had anything out in a long time and it's a collection of stories and it wasn't essential and urgent and didn't absolutely need to be done. I'm the proudest of Black Cracker and Tales of Times Square. I'm proud of Goldstein. When I say proud, I mean deeply proud. I stand by every word. If I was ashamed of something or didn't feel it was my best work or didn't feel it was like, and I use the word urgent as a word rather than, I like to use that word because it means that I felt like this really needs to be done. Not just for me but I need to put, I don't feel that way about a lot of things so I won't release it or do it unless it, like I said, unless it really, so if you pick out anything of mine, any of my four albums or books I think each one represents the absolute very best I killed myself to make it the best I could. I can't do it, couldn't have done it any better so I feel a sense of pride about that. I'm ashamed of everything else. I'm ashamed to be sitting here right now. We'll let you go. So it's not to say that, you know, to be proud of something for me is no small thing. I mean, I really need to, I wouldn't release it, at least I haven't yet. The comic strips with Drew, people don't realize that there's a Howard Stern says on his show sometimes when he talks about our comic strips every now and then, of course, Drew gets all the credit and he says, "Oh, and his brother wrote some of the funny captions." Well, if you saw a script for anything we did, it's ten or twenty pages and every panel is, Drew doesn't like to hear this, every panel is described in detail as a movie scene. There's the story, there's the idea, the concept, the balloons, the narration, and the description of the action, sometimes having given Drew pictures to use because I would search out news clippings on Joey Heatherton and Wayne Newton and Joe Franklin before the internet, where you had to go to small sources and libraries and it would take years to get a file enough on Wayne Newton or Joey Heatherton or Frank Sinatra Jr. to even do it investigative reporting biographical comic strip like the movie of their life, you couldn't just look it up online. So when people say, "Oh, you wrote the captions," I always like, "Oh my God, if you only knew, it's the way." The narration, it's, yeah. Now, Drew's a genius as an artist and there's nothing better than working with somebody who's brilliant and when you make your stuff come alive like that, how many times do you have that in your life? Very few. How many great editors have I worked with? Maybe two and the other 98 were idiots and made it left their footprints on your work. Yeah. Josh Allen Friedman, thank you so much for coming on The Virtual Memory Show. Virtual Memories. That's what it's all about, man. I'll never forget it. And that was Josh Allen Friedman. Check out his books like Eye Goldstein, Black Cracker, Tales of Time Square, and Tell the Truth 'til They Bleed at your favorite bookstore. He also records and performs as an acoustic guitarist as Josh Allen. He dropped the Friedman from his stage name because he frequently performs with kinky Friedman and I think he was sort of tired of being asked if they were related. Seriously. It's not like he's embarrassed about being a Jew in Texas. You can learn all sorts of fun stuff when the mics are off and we had a long conversation about that. For more information on Josh's work, you can visit joshallenfredeman.blogspot.com. That's J-O-S-H-A-L-A-N-F-R-I-D-M-A-N. And that's it for this week's Virtual Memory Show. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next week with a conversation with Paul Gravet, British Comics' Man at the Crossroads and author of the new book Comics Art. We recorded last week in London and it's a pretty neat conversation, especially if you sort of like global comics. Until then, do me a favor and go to our iTunes page and post a review of the show. Or hit up our website, chimeraabscura.com/vm, and make a donation of this ad-free podcast. As I mentioned last week, I quit my job, so in a few more weeks there'll be no more paychecks coming in, so it would be lovely to see a little money trickle into the tip jar at chimeraabscura.com/vm. And if you've got ideas for guests, drop me a line at Groth, G-R-O-T-H at chimeraabscura.com, or VMSPod on Twitter, or at our Facebook page, facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow. Until next time, I am Gil Roth and you are awesome. Keep it that way. [music] [music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
