FADE to BLACK host: Jimmy Church guest: Richard Syrett
Tonight, Richard Syrett, host of Strange Planet and Coast to Coast AM joins us to discuss the Rock and Roll Twilight Zone!
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Speaker 1: The Smoke Radio for the Masses.
Speaker 2: Headline edition July 8, 1947. The Army Air Force has
announced that a flying disc has been found and is
now in the possession of the Army. If the game
is rigged, change the game. Game changer. I occasionally think
how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish.
Speaker 1: If we were facing an alien threat. from outside this world.
Speaker 2: This is Fade to Black with your host, Jimmy Church,
on the Game Changer Radio Network.
Speaker 1: All right. Good evening.
Speaker 2: How you doing?
Speaker 1: How you doing? It's Fade to Black, Wednesday, September 16th, 2026.
Speaker 2: I'm your host, Jimmy Church. Let's do this, man. This is.
Speaker 1: Host to host AM. Yeah, I did it. I did
it this week on Fade to Black. Let's go through
this really quick. Monday night, Ola Phillips had some tech issues.
Stuff like that happened. So we did a quick AMA, AJA,
where you get to ask me anything. It was a
fun show. Fun show. Always good to change gears 15
minutes before showtime. And last night, Suzanne Ross was with us,
Quantum Consciousness. She's absolutely amazing. Which takes me to tonight.
Richard Searitt is here. And very excited about the show.
He's got a new book out. And the Rock and
Roll Twilight Zone. The title is this long, but let's
just go with that for now. All the links for
that are below and over on our website and throughout
social media. Tonight's... You know, and often.
I say I do this show and I do what
I do because I just want to be myself and
talk about what interests me, which is rock and roll, guitars,
Van Halen, right? The supernatural, time travel, life after death, UFOs, Bigfoot, right?
And food, right? And if I can talk about– and
a good comedy film, good science fiction. If I can
talk about those three things, those four things in a show,
that's me. That's who I am. I'm a happy guy.
And I get to do that tonight with Richard Searitt,
somebody that I have looked up to for a long time. Now,
I'm going to say this before I pull Richard in. Oh,
tomorrow night we've got a programming update. I was notified today.
That they are, for the next couple of, they've already
been doing the construction. They're installing fiber optic. So I
am going to be out of internet world tomorrow going
into Friday. So our guest for tomorrow night was moved
to next week. Okay, so where was I going with
all of that? Oh, so Richard. This is what I
would do with Richard back in the day. I would
listen to Coast when he was on. And the way
that he would do this rock and roll music subject
on a show like Coast to Coast, for me, I
always thought that it was a home run. But I
would sit. And I didn't do this with George. I
didn't do this with anybody on Coast. I did it
with Richard. I would sit and listen to Richard's coast
to coast shows. And it was the professionalism that that's
a given with somebody like Richard, but it was the
way that he weaved the story. He's so good at it.
And so tonight I'm going to take the night off.
I'm going to give Richard the microphone and let him
run with it. It's, This is Host to Host, and
we'll be right back after this short break. That's right.
His new book is Tales from the Rock and Roll
Twilight Zone, Eerie Enigmas and Supernatural Secrets from Rock's Darkest Corners. Yeah,
it's got everything in there, right? Strange deaths. You've got
the occult. We've got Laurel Canyon and what I used
to live on Laurel Canyon. I had a studio there,
and I know about the trippiness of that road. He's
a veteran Canadian broadcaster coming to us live from Canada tonight.
Author of, of course, of course, of course, of course,
Strange Planet. He's been with Coast, we were just talking
before the show, for 13 years. We started at around
the same time. And I always thought that Richard was
there before me. I think he was. by a couple
of weeks. Uh, I don't know. It's strange that I
don't have those dates, uh, programmed in my head, but
he's got and created the rock and roll twilight zone podcast.
And of course the latest book, and you can get that.
And we'll be talking about that tonight. I would like
to welcome for the first time to faded black. I
can't believe it's taken this long, Richard Searitt. And he's
right there. What's going on, young man, Jimmy.
Speaker 2: Great to be here. Thank you so much for the opportunity.
Speaker 1: Host to host AM. We'll be right back. You know
what's crazy about this, Richard, is the two of us
sitting here together. This is rare. Right? Two coast-to-coast guys.
It doesn't happen. It can't happen. There's only so many
of us out there, right?
Speaker 2: It's like an unassisted triple play or watching... Wolves being
born in the wild. It's a rare alignment, Jimmy.
Speaker 1: Oh, wolves born in the wild. Nope, never seen it. Nope,
never seen it. Never seen it. Let's start here, and
feel free to ask me stuff, too, as well. That
would really be an honor and a privilege to get
fielded a couple softball pitches from you. My pleasure. Before
I ask the simple question, what got you into this,
that's always interesting. But I think another take on that
would be, what is it about musicians and artists and
the paranormal that follows them? Why is it so obvious?
What's going on there?
Speaker 2: Well, I think when it comes to rock and roll,
I would approach it this way. Rock and roll is,
you know, what's that old saying? Rhythm and blues and
the blues. They had a baby and they called it
rock and roll. But the lineage is so much deeper
and richer than that. You have this collision of all
of these different cultures. You've got African slaves. You've got Appalachia.
You've got Cajuns. all coming together and they bring all
their different legends and culture and practices to this rich
stew and their superstitions. And it just, it comes together
in such a way. I mean, it's such a rich
vein to be mined when it gets into rock and roll,
because there's so many different layers. As I say, it's
almost like an anthropologist going through, you know, one culture
after another. Um, and I mean, how could rock and
roll not be just filled with, with all of these
incredible legends, again, given its history, given the, the mixture of,
of all these traditions that come together.
Speaker 1: I went to the crossroads in Mississippi with a friend
and I spent a couple of days down there and
I have to say all of that was real. Um,
I came away from that. I remember I was living
in Memphis at the time, and we were driving back
to Memphis, and I was thinking to myself. I wasn't
saying it out loud to my friend Billy, who lived
there and took me down there. I didn't say it
out loud, but I felt like I got away with
something because I was still alive. It was like that.
You could feel it. It's the culture. It's what's, you know,
it's what's going on. New Orleans has got that same
kind of vibe going on with the musicians and what
is happening there, where this is, it's a culture. It's
a belief system. It's a foundation. And you're absolutely right
that all of this kind of permeates and goes back
into the music and into the personalities.
Speaker 2: Well, we were talking about the crossroads. And of course,
we're talking about Robert Johnson, the legend of the crossroads.
But that legend, again, here's a perfect example. This idea
of a crossroads. and making this Faustian bargain. Well, we
first hear about Faust in like the 15th century when
a contemporary of Shakespeare, Marlow, was writing about this German
alchemist who was an actual guy, Faust. He makes this
deal with a German demon, Mephistopheles, and he wants to
be the greatest alchemist and astrologer and all of the
fame and the fortune and recognition that goes with it.
And typically these Faustian bargains are like 24 years in duration.
And then the great German writer Goethe writes about it.
And it's come all the way down to this day.
I think Randy Newman had a musical on Broadway, Faust.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 2: But in Robert Johnson's case, so he shows up at
this crossroads, but the crossroads that goes back not only
to medieval England and they would bury witches that had
been convicted and executed at a crossroads because it was
considered on hallowed ground. He wouldn't bury them in a cemetery.
It goes much further back. It goes back to Africa.
It goes back to ancient Greece. And so that crossroads legend,
I mean, I can't think of too many other bits
of folklore legend that just hang around so long and
become almost like this heavy millstone you know, around our
collective necks. It's just there all the time. And when
in Johnson's case, here's the son of a sharecropper just
living a miserable life, thinking if I can only become
a master on the guitar and play the Delta blues
like nobody and escape to the juke joints and have
the attention of all the fine ladies and all the
free liquor I can drink. Well, he got it, right?
But he was at best, according to A real legend
of the Delta Blues, Son House, Robert Johnson hung around
him and he was mediocre at best.
Speaker 1: That's the story collectively was like, you know what? He
wasn't that good. He wasn't that good. And he disappears
and he comes back and Duke can play. As a
guitar player, obviously, and guitar players in general, Richard, we
all know that Robert Johnson story. We've all seen that
photograph of him sitting on the right. And, uh, it would,
you know, predates Charlie Christian and everything else. Um, we
all know that story. And when you jump into it
and you find out about Faust and then you read
that and it, you know, the movie was actually pretty good,
by the way. Uh, I really enjoyed the movie, uh, crossroads, but, um,
when as a guitar player, you look at you, all
guitar players know the Robert Johnson story, every single one
of them. Now I'll say this, would I make that deal?
I don't know, but we all thought about it. Right. Right.
We all thought about it. So, uh, back, back to
Robert Johnson. I, I, I interrupted you, but, uh, no, no, no.
Speaker 2: Uh, Well, that's interesting to hear from a guitar player
talk about it in those terms. And you all know
the story. And in a sense, I think that's the
ultimate message from this story. Now, whether he, you know,
on a moonless night, Robert Johnson approached the crossroads, which
is the intersection of Highway 61, and I believe it's
State Route 49.
Speaker 1: Correct.
Speaker 2: I think that's right.
Speaker 1: That's right. So.
Speaker 2: on a moonless night. And he, he's expecting to confront
old scratch as the devil is known down South, or
at least in the 1930s, that's what he was called
old scratch. And you, you've, you turn your back to
old scratch and you hand your guitar over your left
shoulder and he gives it this other worldly tuning and
hands it back. And now the deal, the bargain has
been struck. Uh, and Robert Johnson went on to become
kind of the king of the Delta blues. And I,
he only cut about 33 tracks. I think at least
those are the ones that remain. And he never, he
never came out and said, yes, I made a deal
with the devil. He was very coy about it. He
never denied it. Son house insisted. There's no other explanation.
Robert Johnson would say though, that he got so good
because he practiced in cemeteries every night. Uh, he liked
the acoustics apparently. I love the acoustics. I guess the,
the music bouncing off those, uh, gravestones, tombstones.
Speaker 1: Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2: Um, One has to wonder, though, who was his teacher
in the cemetery? That's the big question. But he didn't
get 24 years. He didn't get the Faustian bargain, per se.
It didn't last too long. And a lot of these
details are kind of lost.
Speaker 1: Just two years, right? I think two years.
Speaker 2: I think it was about two years, yeah, give or take.
And a lot of these details are kind of lost
in the mists of time. We're talking about like 90
years ago now. But he made kind of a rookie
mistake one night after playing in a juke joint. And
we have to understand that Robert Johnson was a bit
of a ladies' man. There were lots of jealous boyfriends
and husbands and probably bartenders out there who were gunning
for Robert Johnson. And he made a rookie mistake. He
accepted a swig out of an open bottle of liquor
from a stranger. And according to legend, that liquor was likely...
poison with arsenic or strychnine or something like that. And he,
he died in most agonizing death over a period of
a couple of days on his knees, howling like a
hell hound. And that, that is the legend of, of
Robert Johnson.
Speaker 1: Have you been, have you been to a legit juke joint?
Have you done that yet? Have you done it? I
have not.
Speaker 2: You'll have to take me.
Speaker 1: Okay. So my friend, Billy, It says, okay, man, we're
going to a juke joint. I had no idea what
to expect. I didn't really know. But this is what
happens straight out of the movies. We drive onto a
farm up to this white ancient farmhouse, and there's like
200 cars parked in the dirt, in the mud up front.
And we pull up, and I could hear the music.
It's a farmhouse, man. And we go in, we got
there at midnight, one in the morning, and it's packed.
We go in and there's a blues trio playing in
the corner of the living room and people dancing. And
so I'm seeing this and it's like real blues too, man.
Speaker 2: Like, like, ha, ha, ha.
Speaker 1: Real blues. And over to this side was a blind guy.
It's all black, all black. Him and Billy and I
are the only two white people there. Blind guy, he
had a cane leaning on this table, and you went
up to him and paid him some money for a drink.
He had like two or three different straws.
Speaker 2: He's blind.
Speaker 1: I'm watching all this go down. And he picks the straw.
puts it in a cup, and hands it to you.
Then you go to another table, and whatever the straw
is is what the alcohol is going to get poured
into the thing. And I'm like, how does he know
what straw to pick? How does he know what money
I gave him? Is he really blind? That was like
the setup of the strangeness, right, of the evening. And
it was one of the coolest things I've ever done
and experienced. But what, and I took that with me.
Here's the craziest part. Watching the women dance. They went
into a trance, man. Trance. Trance.
Speaker 2: Trance.
Speaker 1: It was crazy. It was so fun to see. But
the music was part of their body. Right? Are you
picking up what I'm putting down?
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. I think some of the blues artists used
to call them shake dancers.
Speaker 1: Okay. Okay. They were shaking what God gave them. That's
for sure. I saw that. And we left. When we left,
the sun was coming up.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: Yep. We left at like 6 a.m.
Speaker 2: From dawn till dusk.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, I went to a juke joint. I saw
it go down. And this is just something that. Beale
Street was like that, too, in Memphis. A lot of
after-hours stuff going on in Memphis where you could go
and see these musicians that weren't big headliners, but they
were amazing. And they would play all night, all night
until the sun came up. I would leave these places, Richard,
and somebody would be jogging by in their jogging outfit.
And I'm going home, right? You're going home.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we used to call that the walk of shame.
Speaker 1: Oh, man.
Speaker 2: Once upon a time. You mentioned, sorry.
Speaker 1: Go ahead.
Speaker 2: You mentioned off the show, there was a guest you
had scheduled and you had technical difficulties. And it reminded me,
because I've been touring the book and I was down
in Washington. I did a hit on OANN, One American
News Network. John Hines, I think the show is called
After Hours. Very nice man. So we were talking about
the book for about an hour and then we got
to the robert johnson story and one of the studio
lights just went pop and but i anticipated that because
and i hope nothing happens with us because every time
i go on the air or on a podcast and
i start talking about robert johnson it happened On Coast, actually.
I was doing it from the Toronto affiliate, CFRB. And
I can't remember who I had on. It might have
been Matt Swain talking about the Robert Johnson story. And
Matt's quoted in the book. And all of a sudden,
the internet at the Sherman Oaks studio, the whole building,
it just went out. And so right in the middle
of me talking about Robert Johnson. That's impossible.
Speaker 1: Yeah. If you know what I mean. I'm saying it's
the Sherman Oaks building. We were just talking about it.
That is a technical marvel. NASA doesn't have a setup
like that Sherman Oaks building. No, I'm serious. What's that?
Speaker 2: I said I was knocked off the air for an hour.
They had to run re-roll or something. And then another time,
it might have been Matt Swain again, and this time
it was for my podcast. And I recorded about an hour,
and I'm looking at the waveform, and it looks great.
Rookie mistake. I didn't do a sound check, but it
I guess I was being a little lazy that day. Anyway,
we recorded about an hour, but the whole Robert Johnson
story and we hang up and I go to play
it back and it's all gobbledygook. Like it sounded like
it'd been recorded in reverse and turned upside down and
twisted inside out.
Speaker 1: Does stuff like this get you upset in any other
world of media? People would lose their minds in our world, right? Exactly.
It's Tuesday, right?
Speaker 2: Yeah. Another day at the office.
Speaker 1: Another day at the office. The other night I did
an AMA. And what's today? Today's Wednesday. I did it Monday.
And one of the questions, and I just love it
when the audience does this. They're so smart. First time
question for me. Jimmy, is Paul McCartney dead?
Speaker 2: Right? Okay.
Speaker 1: Now, for you and I, this is something that we
have grown up with. And there's a lot of info
out there, but this was my answer. And I want
to talk about this whole thing, if that's okay. My
answer was this. I don't know that Paul is dead.
I do know that if he is dead, the guy
they replaced him with is bad-ass. They picked the best musician.
I go wings at the speed of sound, right? Somebody
knocking at the door, right? Banned on the run. So
if that's the new guy, the new guy's got talent.
Speaker 2: Precisely. That's the argument I make in the book. And
kind of a spoiler alert, I don't think Paul McCartney
died in a car crash in November of 1966 for
exactly that reason. But even, okay, so they find a
guy that looks almost exactly like him, and he plays
left-handed bass. And, okay, so.
Speaker 1: Yeah, rarefied error. Rarefied error right there.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So in 65, Paul McCartney, the original, I suppose,
writes Yesterday, the most covered song, I think, in popular
music history. But then, as you say, look at the
body of work after 65 or after 66 when he
supposedly died. Hey, Jude, let it be the long and
winding road, all his work with wings, all his chaos
and creation in the backyard. I think his greatest solo
album ever, just a masterwork. But that doesn't detract from
the fact that this legend, this mystery, takes off nearly
60 years ago.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 2: Decades before social media, decades before the Internet. It starts
spreading by word of mouth on college campuses. Somebody calls
Roby Young at a Detroit radio station. Hey, Roby, did
you hear about, sorry, not Roby Young, Russ Gibb. Roby
Young was later at WABC in New York. Russ, have
you seen the cover of Sgt.
Speaker 1: Pepper?
Speaker 2: Look at all these clues. It's a funereal scene. Abbey Road,
he's barefoot. He put a body in a coffin in
bare feet. He's smoking a cigarette with his right hand.
All of these clues, the backward masking. Listen to Strawberry
Fields backwards. He's saying, I buried Paul. And from there,
it just like metastasizes. And then WABC in New York,
which reached, I think it was a 50,000 watt station.
I think it reached about 38 states. And it just
takes off. Now, the clues are real. The breadcrumbs are there.
The question is, you know, who put them there and why?
And you can make a, you know, a pretty cogent
argument that it was all about marketing. And I think
perhaps a lot of it was. And I think the
Beatles had a lot of fun with it. They were,
they were comedians. They were so sharp and witty. But
I think there's also an argument to be made that
this was the perfect opportunity for some intelligence group to
kind of nudge this, launch this little dinghy from the
shore and just watch it take on a life of
its own. Because it's the perfect laboratory. If at some
point you want to spread some sort of a misinformation
or disinformation campaign, what better way to study it?
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. They did all of the right things
that were immediately accessible. Like you said, there's no internet
or anything back then, obviously. But the cover of Sgt. Peppers, right?
You have that little Austin Healy, you know, all, all
of the, it's a funeral, obviously, um, the Abbey road
shot with Paul being in, in bare feet, right? It
was all just, you know, everything was just set up
the right way with, uh, stuff that people had access to.
They could see this stuff and then combine everything else
with it.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: And it today, we kind of talk about it back, then? Oh, man.
I think that's what created the word viral was the
Paul is dead campaign. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, it is.
Speaker 1: You're right.
Speaker 2: It's the original viral story. It is the most enduring,
probably the original sort of pop culture conspiracy. And it
still has legs 60 years later. I talk to people
all the time who insist that that's not the Paul McCartney.
Look at the picture of him and And his girlfriend
at the time, Jane Asher, in pre-November of 66, he's
maybe two inches taller than her. And then you see
her standing beside Paul, Jane Asher standing beside McCartney at
the launch of Sgt. Pepper, and he's towering over her.
And then there was some guy in Miami. who did
a vocal print analysis. And I'm told that your voice
print is as unique to you as your fingerprints. And
he selected three different songs and supposedly demonstrated they were
sung by three different people, three different Paul McCartneys.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I struggle with that. I remember all of that.
And then, and I did this last year when the
two Beatles documentaries came out over the last year, year
and a half. One by Paul's daughter, which was amazing. right?
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Really good. And so I'm watching and the, this,
the shot of Paul in the studio, cutting, cutting the
long and winding road.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: And you go and you listen to that. They added
the violins and, you know, whatever, uh, ended up happening,
but that's the cut that's on the record that you
see in the documentary. And, listen to Paul's voice and
that talent of what's going on. That is a singular talent.
That is a once in not in a generation, once
in human history talent. So is that the new guy
they found? You know what I mean? They found Da Vinci.
I don't know. I went back and, and listened to
those back to back. I listened to the, the shots
from the studio of him cutting the tracks. And then
what was on the record? I listened to him back
to back. Those are the same vocals. That's no pro tools, right?
There's no, you know what I mean? There's nothing happening there.
It is just a man and a microphone and a piano.
So that's what I struggle with. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I don't know. It beggars belief. It beggars belief. Um, but, Again,
the breadcrumbs are real. What do you make of the
forensic analysis of these voice prints? How do we sort
out the photographs? I suppose you could say that in
one photo post-1966, he was wearing high-heeled shoes or maybe– 366,
he was in his stocking feet, so he's only a
couple inches above. You know, it's great bar talk, but
it has remained great bar talk for 60 years. And
I can't think, outside of maybe JFK, I can't think
of a topic that people will, you know, pore over
the details this many decades later.
Speaker 1: Now, this is where I want to ask you about
this to you personally. This is where it gets really
funky for me. Growing up, I didn't get the Beatles.
I didn't get the Stones. I paid zero. attention. Okay.
And early seventies, the stuff that I was listening to
and through the seventies, I'm 62. I'm about to be
63 in a, in a couple of weeks. But I
was into deep purple. I was into black Sabbath. I
was in the Led Zeppelin. You know, I was that,
that was, that was my, thing and i just didn't
get it and i didn't care i listened to the
beatles today and i cry i can't believe you know
and i don't have any regrets but man i carry
some guilt for not paying any attention to them um
i i liked i like paul's later stuff i loved
wings i did growing up i no i did i
did but the Beatles, no. And the Stones, same thing
for me. It's just... I don't know.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 1: What was it for you growing up? Did they have
that impact on you?
Speaker 2: By the time I... hit high school at grade nine
and I had made the pilgrimage to the famous Sam,
the record man in Toronto on a school field trip.
Cause I grew up about an hour from here in
a little town called Brantford, Ontario, home of Wayne Gretzky. Um,
and I brought home that first, that double album, the, um,
the Capitol record, the blue album, 67 to 70. Uh,
and that's, so I was a late adopter for the
Beatles or adapter. Uh, but I mean, in my house
we had, you know, James Last and his orchestra. And
we had an album called Montevani Plays the Beatles. That
was my first exposure to the Beatles, hearing an orchestra
under the guidance of Montevani, the great conductor. But then, yeah,
I started filling my milk crates. Did you store your
records in milk crates?
Speaker 1: We all did. That was a rite of passage.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Except up here and we went metric and
then the milk crates changed size. So you could only
fit like two diagonally.
Speaker 1: You're making stuff up. That can't be true.
Speaker 2: No, that is a true story.
Speaker 1: You guys got screwed on the milk crates?
Speaker 2: Oh, I'll say we did.
Speaker 1: Was that a Trudeau thing?
Speaker 2: Welcome to Canada. Yes, he introduced the metric system. And
the day before or the week before that we went
over to metric, everybody went to the grocery stores where
they threw the milk crates out back. We all grabbed
a bunch. But by the time I was in high
school– had a paper route i was spending all of
my disposable income at a place called records on wheels
and i filled those milk crates maybe a nine or
ten of them and i had you know the doors
the complete stones catalog the beetles but prior to that
i i can relate i remember um i found a
45 this is when i'm like seven or eight years
old i found a 45 in our hi-fi set of
hi-fi cabinet and it And it was a Beatles single.
And it said, I am the walrus. I think, what
a weird title. Like, what is my sister listening to?
I am the walrus by the Beatles? Who are they?
But yeah, by the time I hit high school, I
was just isolated in my parents' paneled rec room. I
had 100% access to the turntable. All my brothers and
sisters had moved out to go to school, college.
Speaker 1: What year was this? What year?
Speaker 2: Uh, 70, 78, 1978. I hit high school, 77, 78,
I guess.
Speaker 1: So we are the same age.
Speaker 2: We're the same vintage.
Speaker 1: You know, during that period, uh, everybody will get back
to some paranormal talk here in just a second. But, um,
during that period for me, I went through a really
bizarre Frank Zappa and Jeff Beck. And Santana phase, where
all the other stuff, the heavy metal things that drove
me were there, but Return to Forever, Chick Corea, Casino,
Stanley Clark. Dude, I drove off the road. I really
drove off the road. I couldn't really play any of it,
but I would listen to it. So that's what I did.
It was a weird musical journey for me. Frank Zappa
took over my world, man. I got it bad. I
had it really, really, really bad. And it continues to
this day. Okay. So going back to the Beatles. Today,
I don't want to sound like some old man. you know,
get off my lawn. But today, studying how songs are written, written,
how do you write a song? You go to the Beatles.
If you want to write, if you want to be
in the music game today, with all the editing and
digital stuff, that's all fine, that's all great. How do
you construct a song that people resonate with? And I
would say, the Beatles, I'd say go straight there. Album
number one, meet the Beatles to the end, all the
way to the end. Um, that, that's how you write
a song. Is that, is, do you feel that that's
missing today? I.
Speaker 2: I look at art in general today as, uh, an
attempt to demoralize the population, uh, to make us feel small, um,
And to me, art is about truth, beauty and goodness.
And some of it can be just kind of frivolous
and fun. Absolutely. But it is for the most part
just I mean, I look at even the architecture, not
to get off on a side rail here, but, you know,
the brutalist architecture. We have plenty of that in Toronto.
I know that's been around for a long time, but
just the way they they build schools and hospitals and
these edifices that we have to live through. with for
the next 150 years. And a lot of the music,
I feel the same. Now, if you look really hard, uh,
and you know where to look, you can find some
young bands that have that old sound. And that's what
I really enjoy finding those little jewels. Like I know
he's been around for a while, but a guy like
Marcus King, um, you know, he's just, he's got so
much soul and he's not even 30 years old. I
don't believe he's 25, 26.
Speaker 1: Oh, so those are the guys.
Speaker 2: I mean, they give me hope. They give me hope.
Just pulling a name out of the air is like St.
Paul and the Broken Bones. They've got that, you know,
four white guys sounding like they just got off the
bus from Philly soul town or something. Just it gives
me hope there are, but you gotta, it's like finding
a needle in a haystack and maybe, you know, maybe
more will, will, will emerge. But for the most part,
you know, I think after like, I don't know, Frampton
comes alive, I stopped buying albums and, That was one of.
Speaker 1: The first albums I ever bought. I got $ 10 for
my birthday. I dropped it on Frampton Comes Alive. The
other day I was riding my Harley. This was like
three days ago. Some things you can't make up. I'm
so glad you said that. I pulled up Frampton Comes Alive,
and I listened to that for two hours riding my bike. Man,
lines on my face. The live version of lines on
my face, I would use that for the bumper music
at Coast to Coast. Yeah.
Speaker 2: The ability for music. I mean, the, the oral factories,
the sense of smell is incredibly evocative for me, but,
but a song that's the power of, of music is
a three minute song that can just, it's like a
time machine. It can just take you back. I remember
exactly where I was, where I was sitting, what I
was wearing. The first time I heard John Lennon's mind
games playing on Q and Oh seven in Toronto, sitting
home for lunch from high school, sitting on the sofa
in the living room, and I'd never heard it before.
And it just, I was on my knees.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. The first time I heard Fame, let's talk
about John Lennon. I want to bounce around. There's so
many other things, you know, Kurt Cobain and stuff. Anyway,
the first time I heard Fame, which was probably 73,
like right in there, 73, 74. The first time I
heard Fame, I thought we were blasted into the future.
It didn't sound like everything else that was on the radio, right?
It just didn't. That production, the way it was done,
it sounded like the jet age, you know, like the Jetsons.
It came out of nowhere. And that was the impact. And, again,
it wasn't the Beatles. You know what I mean? That's
when I started to pick up the torch on that stuff.
But Fane definitely had that impact on me. It was
not of this earth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, John Lennon co-wrote with David Bowie, and it's on
Young Americans, which is a fabulous album. Interesting story. I
don't know if we have time for this, but David
Bowie moved to New York. He'd spent a long time
in Berlin. He moved to New York, one, because his
good friend John Lennon is there, and he's working on
Young Americans, and they're working on this song. Two, David
Bowie had just received... starring role in The Elephant Man,
which was playing on Broadway.
Speaker 1: So opening night.
Speaker 2: Night is like two nights after Lennon is murdered. And
David Bowie, he tried. He came out the curtain. He
just kind of peeked through the curtain. He saw three
empty seats. One would have been for John. One would
have been for Yoko. He didn't know why the other
seat was empty. He would later find out. After the
police raided Mark David Chapman's apartment or hotel room, they
found a playbill for the Elephant Man. And he had
circled David Bowie's picture and bio on the playbill. It
appears as if Mark David Chapman, he was the third
seat that was empty. He had intended to go and
kill David Bowie. What? He would have been the second victim. Yeah.
Can you imagine? Three empty seats, John, Yoko, and the
third was the killer.
Speaker 1: Didn't he have something, a fascination with Jodie Foster? Was
that him?
Speaker 2: No, that was Hinkley that shot Reagan.
Speaker 1: That shot Reagan.
Speaker 2: They both had a fascination with Catcher in the Rye. Yeah.
According to the New York Homicide Detective, that's what Chapman
did after he emptied his service revolver into Lennon's back.
He sat down on the curb at the corner of
78th and Central Park West and started thumbing very calmly
and casually through his copy of Catcher in the Rye.
Speaker 1: Well, what do you know? What can you add to
the John Lennon UFO sighting? you know, in New York, which,
you know, it's been talked about and you can hear
it in John's own words. But is there anything else
that you can add to that?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know he's saying about it briefly on Walls
and Bridges. And I think there's a UFO there on
the cover. He was living in Greenwich Village at the time.
He hadn't moved to the Dakota. And I'm trying to
remember whether he was with May Pang or whether he
was with Yoko. Do you remember?
Speaker 1: I think it was May Pang.
Speaker 2: Yes. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It wasn't Yoko.
Speaker 2: I remember, I think it was May Pang. who related
this story that after they saw this craft and it just,
it just floated down, was it the Hudson river? Trying
to think of my geography now in Greenwich village, would
it be the East river or the Hudson? I think
it was the Hudson river. It just kind of, and
May Pang and John Lennon was out there on the,
on the patio of their apartment watching this. And as
they looked across, I guess the street to the apartments
across the street from them, everyone appeared to be just
frozen in time. It's like time had been suspended. Nobody
was moving. And yet John and May Pang were interacting
with another and look at that and watch the lights
and here it comes again and watch it float down.
But the entire cityscape was just like frozen. That's what
sticks out in my mind with that story.
Speaker 1: The way that he described it, Which, I mean, for me,
is the legit side of it. John Lennon's a guy.
He's a man. You're a man. I'm a man. What
do men know a lot about? Mechanical stuff. Planes, trains, automobiles.
We know our cars. We know our motorcycles. We know
our planes. And do you know when a plane is
in the sky? Okay? What he is describing is not
a plane. And he says flying saucer. You know, he
says UFO. But how he describes it, obviously, it wasn't that.
And I just, I'm buying his story. I am. The
other part is nobody else in New York had this sighting.
And it makes me wonder if it was done just
for John.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. maybe that explains why everyone else was frozen
in suspended animation.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Uri Geller told a story, and I don't know, hard
to know, could be totally apocryphal, but he claims that
John Lennon told him this story that years later while
he was at the Dakota, he woke up in the
dead of night and felt an urge to go to
the front door and opened it. And there was some
sort of a, entity, whether it was some sort of
an insectoid type creature who presented Lennon with this egg
and Lennon held onto that egg. And then when he
met Uri Geller, he gave it to Uri Geller.
Speaker 1: Uh, Uri tells a good story. Oh, he does.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It could be just that it could, it could
be just that.
Speaker 1: Um, I love Uri. I love Uri. He's the crazy uncle.
that you're hoping is not going to mess up the
end of the story.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: That's Yuri. Yuri's amazing. He's been on the show. Have
you ever interviewed him?
Speaker 2: I try to remember, you know, as you would think
someone of Yuri, Yuri Geller's caliber, I would remember that.
I was trying to remember if I'd interviewed May Pang, um,
you know, you get to a certain age and I,
sometimes I can't, I can no longer separate my memories
from my dreams. So, um, I don't think I interviewed
Yuri Geller. I've interviewed some amazing mentalists. Maybe that's who
I'm thinking of.
Speaker 1: You know, because of my music background, I've got a
lot of friends in the business. And some famous, some
not so famous. But the ones that I have brought
on this show that I've known for a long time,
we never talked about UFOs.
Speaker 2: Okay? Okay.
Speaker 1: We never talked about the paranormal. I start doing this
and now they've all got stories.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then they're coming on the air and you know,
Jennifer Batten, right? The guitar player for Michael Jackson.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: She's amazing.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: And, uh, had her on the show and she goes,
so Jimmy, man, I was, I was driving. I was
going to contact in the desert.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: I'm in, I'm in LA coming out to contact in
the desert. And she goes, And I look up, I'm
on the 5 freeway, and I see six triangle UFOs
flying in formation.
Speaker 2: I said, what?
Speaker 1: Now, it's like, where's this story when we're just hanging out?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: And it's because I think people keep the stuff inside
of them. They're embarrassed about it. For sure. For sure.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and your platform serves as a confessional.
Speaker 1: A complete confessional. I've gotten.
Speaker 2: I.
Speaker 1: Had Graham Bonnet on the show. Graham, the great singer from,
you know, Rainbow and so many great bands and hit songs.
He comes on the air and he goes, all right, man, so...
The reason why I have short hair, you know, he's
a heavy metal guy, but he always had this, you know,
business cut and wore a suit on stage, right? Sing
those rock and roll songs. But anyway, the reason why
I have short hair is one night in my flat
in London, I see the ghost of James Dean sitting
in my rocking chair in the living room. So I
go out, I go, what do you mean the ghost
of James Dean? Well, It was James Dean. It was
his ghost, but he was real. I said, okay. And
he goes, I sat and I talked to him until
the sun came up. And I went back in the kitchen.
I came out and he was gone. I said, okay.
And he goes, that day I cut my hair off.
I wanted to look like James Dean. It's like, where's
this story? But they come, you're right, it's a confessional.
They're laying on the couch. And all of this stuff
just comes pouring out. I don't know what it is.
People did it all the time on coast. You know,
they do it here. And I think the way that
the media is starting to treat the subject of the supernatural,
the paranormal consciousness, certainly UFOs today, it's now not crazy talk.
Do you feel that same vibration that it's not crazy
talk anymore?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm worried about job security.
Speaker 1: I know.
Speaker 2: It's all becoming mainstream. Okay, so you saw UFO. What
else do you got?
Speaker 1: Let me ask you. This is something that I've never
asked anybody because I can't, but I can ask you.
What's it like for you when you listen to Giorgio's
music and coast is kicking off and that starts, what happens? Does,
does the adrenaline just come to life? It's a very
unique thing that you and I were able and experienced.
What's it like for you? Yeah.
Speaker 2: Um, just because of the, the, the legacy of coast
to coast and the enormity of its reach. And I'm imagining, um,
you know, I, I, I start the show with thanks
for inviting me into your home, your long haul truck,
your RV, your camper, your taxi, your parents, well-appointed basement.
I mean, I'm imagining my, myself in those places. I'm
imagining someone sitting in a diner. Maybe her name is Rosie.
She's sitting in a truck diner, uh, off the interstate
and she's listening to coast. Uh, and I'm a bit,
you know, I'm a total analog kind of nut. I'm
all about Bakelite radios. I don't have a lot of
time for digital. I'm a dinosaur, yes. So that's where
my mind goes. I'm thinking about people driving their truck, listening.
And it's just this interconnectedness right across the nation. And
it's almost like having an out-of-body experience.
Speaker 1: I didn't know how I was... going to deal with it. Every, uh, when, uh,
you and I started at the same time and George
calls me up and, uh, he goes, kid, come on
into the studio. I'm going to show you how this
thing runs. Okay. All right. So I go over to
the studios and Sherman Oaks and I go in And
you were just there, so you know exactly what I'm
talking about. At the end of the studio, the setup,
I saw your picture with that silver lamp. That silver
lamp has always been there on the desk.
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: I saw it. Anyway, and there's the phone, the famous phone.
So George comes in, and he goes, okay, so, all right,
so that's west of the Rockies. I'm like, dude, that's
the buttons, right? And he goes, down at the bottom.
That's the dump button. Never press the dump button. But
you'll get the rest of it. And so for me,
I would do a lot of call-in shows on Friday night.
And I'll never forget that first night where I got
to say, West of the Rockies, you're live on Coast
to Coast AM. Right? The enormity of it. Right. Because
we all grew up listening to it, but now to
hit that button on the phone and say those words
and carry on the legacy of the show.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: What an honor and a privilege. I never got over it.
Speaker 2: No, it, uh, nor will I. Uh, and every show is,
is like brand new for me, 13 years, almost 14
years later. Uh, I just, I can, I never take
it for granted. Um, Again, just the reach and I'm
sitting here in my little studio. I used to call
it my studio beneath the stairs, but I'm now adjacent
to the stairs. I was like Harry Potter living under
the stairs.
Speaker 1: Right on.
Speaker 2: But knowing that, you know, the reach and I'm now
all of a sudden my voice is inside a truck cab,
you know, driving up the Pacific Coast Highway. And then
I'm over here. You know, like I said, in a
diner in Altoona, Pennsylvania. And, you know, you're everywhere. I'm discarnate.
It's mind-blowing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the other day, and you just never know about
the reach. The reach is amazing. The other day I
had to call an Uber. I had to drop my
Harley off at the shop. So I'm taking an Uber home,
jump in the car. And the guy is, I'm on
the phone. My producer just passed away over for my
TV show for Gaia. So I'm on the phone speaking
with them about it. I'm in the back seat. And
I hang up the phone. I said, man, I'm so
sorry you had to hear that, but I had to
do that phone call. And he goes, hey, man, are
you Jimmy Church? I'm thinking, did he see my name
in the Uber app or something? And he goes, Costa
Costa AM, right? I know your voice. Now, whatever. I'll
never say this again. I'm saying it to you because
of what you just said. You never know about the reach.
And you never know who is listening. And you never
know who you've affected. I haven't been on coast for
four years, right? I left four years ago, five, four
years ago. And he remembers that. And that really made
me feel pretty good. I go, yeah, it's me. Yeah,
I live here in Palmdale. He drops me off. I
came in the house. I went, well, that was real.
I didn't cast the first stone there. He came in.
That was pretty cool. And that's the reach of Coast
right there.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And to put a face to one of those
listeners out there. You know, it just makes it real.
I was at a Toronto Marlies game. They're the AHL
affiliate for the Toronto Maple Leafs. This was like maybe six,
seven years ago. I took my boys because it's a
cheap ticket. You know, you try to price a Toronto
Maple Leaf ticket. I mean, you're in the nosebleeds and
it's like 400 bucks. Anyway, so we went to the Marlies.
Pretty good hockey. Anyway, and the guy that's selling the popcorn,
he recognizes my face from the Coast website. And he said, oh,
I know you. He couldn't put the name to it. Well,
he ran through a couple of people. He might have
even said, are you Jimmy Church? Anyway, he recognized the face. So, yeah,
it's a thrill. I never take that for granted. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I started to get emails and texts and people reaching
out to me. They hadn't talked to him in 20 years,
30 years. Hey, man, it's me.
Speaker 2: You know, we're on.
Speaker 1: We were on the road last night, and I'm just wondering,
you've got to be the same Jimmy Church that I
grew up with.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's crazy. We're going to hit a break here shortly,
so before we get there, we were talking about some
of my influences and Led Zeppelin being huge for me.
And growing up, following Paige, who you know, that's, you
can just leave that right there, but his influence cannot
be measured, right? It's just a tremendous influence on everybody
and me personally. And then I started to read some
of the backstory, the Alistair Crowley stuff, uh, the, the,
and then looking at the imagery and so, so, and, and,
and what else may be going on here, that, That
really added to the mystique of the lyrics, of the
album covers, of what he was wearing on stage, his attitude.
For me, what do you think the influence of the
occult and Aleister Crowley had on Led Zeppelin's music and
Jimmy Page in general?
Speaker 2: Well, I always say, you know, I can't prove... that
Aleister Crowley, you know, caused Robert Plant to get into
a car accident while he was on vacation in Greece
or any of the other horrible tragedies that befell him
personally and the rest of the band, whether it's John Bonham,
whether it's Jimmy Page's spiraling downwards into, you know, heroin
addiction and so forth. I can't prove that.
Speaker 1: Robert Plant's children.
Speaker 2: Carrick dying.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I can't imagine, you know, losing a son at that age. But, Um,
I do believe at the same time, I do believe
in an unseen world. I believe in, um, I believe
in demons. I believe in angels. I know that's not
necessarily maybe a popular, um, position with some materialists and
so forth. So, but if you look at what transpired,
first of all, you had Jimmy Page, who was absolutely
obsessed with Crowley. He opened a bookstore in London called
the Equinox. Uh, he sold his, you know, He bought
his house.
Speaker 1: He bought his house.
Speaker 2: He bought his house, Bolskan House, on the shores of
Loch Ness, which Crowley had purchased in 1899 to perform
sort of the Lollapalooza of occult rituals called the Abramelene Operation. Now,
Crowley would never have described himself as a Satanist. He
didn't have much time for Christianity or organized religion. As
far as he was concerned, he was trying to summon
the ultimate guardian angel. But, you know, I put this
through my own sort of faith filter, and for me—
He was trying to summon a demon.
Speaker 1: He said it was the most complex ritual in the
history of planet Earth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is why he chose this isolated location. It
took months and months of preparation and fasting. And there
was a series of rituals. You would summon sort of
an ever-creasing number of demons in different hierarchies. But the
idea was that each time you summoned them, you were
supposed to bind them. So, you know, that they wouldn't
run rampage around the house. So he gets a phone call,
not a phone call in 1890. He gets, I guess,
I don't know, a cable or a telegraph. He's called
away to Paris and he leaves. He leaves the Abramelin
operation incomplete, unfinished. And almost immediately, there are all these
reports coming back to him from, I guess, the estate
manager who was at best kind of a teetotaler, suddenly
becomes this raging alcoholic and tries to, Butcher history. family.
Speaking of a butcher, there's a butcher in a nearby
village where Crowley would frequent to buy meat. And one
day he receives a letter from Crowley and this butcher
very calmly pulls out a meat cleaver and deliberately chops
off his own hand. Flash forward to several decades later,
late 60s, early 70s, and the house comes up on
the market. And of course, Jimmy Page has to buy it.
I mean, he owned all his manuscripts. He owned everything
relating to Crowley. He buys the house. And at some point,
he hires an estate manager who also starts reporting some
strange things going on. Enormous pieces of wooden furniture being
stacked up in odd ways the morning after. and the
strange sounds in the house. At a certain point, Page
summons the other members of the band, thinking that if
he can perform sort of a Crowley-esque type ritual, he's
going to ensure the band's success and good fortune. Bonham
shows up. Robert Plant shows up. John Paul Jones says,
I'll take a pass, which is interesting because as far
as I know, you would probably know better, but I
don't think I think John Ball Jones pretty much escaped
a lot of that, you know, the nonsense and the tragedy.
Speaker 1: He was he was the straight guy. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So but the rest and I don't think Bonham
and Robert Plant really understood what was going on. They
just thought, let's keep the boss happy. You know, if
this makes him feel better, let's do it. He assigns
them sigils.
Speaker 1: Do you know Michael Monarch?
Speaker 2: Michael Monarch.
Speaker 1: Michael Monarch was the original guitar player for Steppenwolf.
Speaker 2: And, uh, yeah. Mars bar fire.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 2: Yep. Yep.
Speaker 1: Yep. Yep.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: So Michael and I very close friends and I produced
him and we're just friends and, uh, uh, an amazing individual,
but he was Jimmy page's best friend. Okay. He's the
only guy to play on stage with Led Zeppelin besides
the band. All right. He's just an unbelievable guitar player.
And he's in the band right now, Rock and Roll
All Stars, and they tour. Anyway, so Michael, we're sitting
in the studio. I'm mixing some songs for him. And
I turn to him and I go, dude, tell me
some Page stories. He goes and he gets his photo album,
a photo album, brings it out, flips it open, and
it's him just– a thousand pictures of him and Zeppelin
and on the plane and all that, all that crazy stuff.
And I said, okay, but what about Alistair Crowley? He goes, look, man,
I'm not going to talk about it. I go, wait
a minute. You're telling me this. You're telling me that
you look.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 1: How crazy is that? He didn't say it didn't happen.
He didn't say he, or it did. No, he said,
not going to talk about it. If Michael ever listens
to this, he'll know that I'm absolutely being straight up.
I couldn't draw it out of him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the list of accidents and sort of mysterious
deaths surrounding the band, not just what happened to Robert
Plant's son and the near-fatal crash in Greece and John
Bonham dying, but other members of the entourage, people falling
down stairs. you know, driving into trees, different things. And, and, and,
you know, it happens coincidentally or not, you know, after
this ritual and he assigns them all their sigils. And
of course, when Led Zeppelin four comes out, they decide
we're going to make this music is going to speak
for this album. We're not going to put our name
on it. Just these Led Zeppelin appears nowhere on the album.
John Bonham's name isn't it? Robert plant. They just put
these sigils. So, so as you mentioned, and, John Bonham,
I think, has his as the feather inside the circle.
And then there's, you know, these occult sigils. And whether
they designed them or whether they were, I don't know,
communicated to them from the great beyond, not really sure.
And then, of course, on the inner groove of the record,
it's that Crowley saying, do what doth will is the
whole of the law or something like that. That was his,
you know, hey, we're not confined to morality. Whatever you
want to do, as long as you're not hurting anybody else,
that's your business. I guess the ultimate libertarian back then.
But I mean, imagine now that's playing on and with this,
the sigils and infused with all of this occult ritual magic, uh,
that's playing on millions of turntables around the world. It
had to amplify something.
Speaker 1: Uh, it amplified something in everybody there. And, and going back,
we were talking about Robert Johnson, then we have to
take our break, but, uh, Robert Johnson. And then you
listen to, uh, When the Levee Breaks, or listen to
the way some of the stuff is done on that record,
which was definitely Delta Blues influenced. I mean, to the extreme.
Most of the world listening to this record, it's a
heavy metal band, and it had its moments of that,
for sure, right?
Speaker 2: Of course.
Speaker 1: But there was all the mythology there, all the Norse mythology,
the Crowley stuff was there, Tolkien mythology. of course, and
Middle Earth is all there. So you had that fantasy
occult mysticism that was interwoven on that record. So, yeah.
And if you're not saying anything about it, the public's
going to write it for you, won't they?
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. Stay right there. Richard Sears, our guest. I almost
said coast to coast. It almost came out of my mouth, Richard.
This is Fade to Black. I'm your host, Jimmy Church.
More with Richard Searitt when we come back after this
short break. Richard, stay right there. We'll be right back.
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I am the host of Beyond Belief, Gaia's long-running talk
series exploring the mysteries of our world and beyond. Featuring
conversations on UFOs, hidden dimensions, science, ancient history, and the
nature of consciousness. In each episode, I dive with the
best and the brightest into paranormal phenomena, suppressed knowledge, ancient mysteries,
and emerging discoveries that challenge conventional thinking. It's what I do. Seriously.
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All right. Welcome back. Faded Black. I am your host,
Jimmy Church. Tonight, Richard Searitt is here. Coast to Coast AM. And,
of course, Strange Planet. So cool to finally sit down
with Richard after all of these years. And it's like.
We've been friends forever. It feels that way. Yeah. Yeah. Well,
we have. I can't believe it either. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't know why we waited this long to do this.
I can't wait to do it again. But welcome, Richard.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Do you live in a haunted house? What drive is it?
Do you have a ghost?
Speaker 2: My late mother-in-law passed away in this house. And we've
had some strange goings on.
Speaker 1: Such as?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a complicated one. It involves technology. So our
neighbors on the side of the house, I'm pointing to
my left, a lovely young couple with two kids. And
so my mother-in-law passed away October 30th, 2023. And I
was away in Greece at the time, so I cut short, obviously,
my holiday, and I flew back to be with the family.
And my wife and sons discovered my mother-in-law. She was
in her mid to late 80s, and she was not
in great health, but it was still an incredible shock.
And maybe six months after her passing, Helen, next door,
calls one of my sons over to the fence. They're
talking across the back fence. And she said, I have
to tell you something. He says, I was walking around
the house and I was singing some song. Um, it
was something I think like Connie Francis or something from
the early sixties. Excuse me. My nose is running a
little bit here. And my, my, uh, mother-in-law loved music
from that era. Um, not just Greek music, but she loved, um,
Connie Francis and Bobby Darin and Elvis and all the rest.
So she said, I was walking around my house and
I was singing this song. And then all of a
sudden on my phone, your mother-in-law or your mother's name,
or sorry, she was talking to my son, your Yaya.
That's what we call grandmother in Greek. And Helen knows
that's the name. Your Yaya's name came over my phone.
Vula Sekelaropoulos. What? I mean, there's, there's not too many
Volus of Coloropolis on the planet.
Speaker 1: No, no, no.
Speaker 2: So that it was on the phone and as if
it was responding to her like singing. And so we thought, well,
that's really bizarre to say the least. And then it
happened again a couple of months later. And this time
she was out in the front of the house and
she called somebody over. It wasn't me, but she called
and related the same story. I was just kind of,
I don't know. doing some housekeeping and singing something from
her favorite era. And again, the name came over the phone.
So there's that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's strange planet stuff right there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. And since I've been doing a lot
of promo for this book and I've been talking a
lot about the occult, and I had a woman on
the show a couple months ago. We were talking about Baphomet.
And while we're in the middle of the show, our
internet connection went down. And when I got her back on,
she explained to me that while we were talking, she
had a picture of Baphomet on the wall in her studio.
And it's been there for like 15 years. She said
it came crashing down and it hit the modem, the
internet modem and knocked her offline. And then after that,
and then talking about the occult nonstop for the last
six months, I started having all of these technological snafus.
I use OBS to record interviews, OBS studio. And it
just went haywire. And then my camera, within a couple
of days, then my camera stopped working. Then I took
the dog out for a walk and he's an 80-pound
golden retriever. He's a pup. He's not very street smart.
And he lunges at cars. So I have to be
very careful. I get down to the end of the
driveway and his leash, his collar breaks. And he rushes
out into the middle of the street. thank God there
were no cars coming because that would have been a horrible,
tragic ending. So after all of this, and we'd been
feeling this real heaviness in the air. And quite frankly,
I was kind of in a pissy mood. I was snippy.
And one of those moods where I was almost tempted
to kick the dog, which I never did. Thank God.
What the heck is going on here? So we called
in the parish priest. I'll call him father H Orthodox,
Greek Orthodox priest. And he came into the studio with
the holy water and prayers and then Down the hall,
our little production office is down here in the basement
as well. Bless that. All of the entire basement. And
the next day, I just felt like this veil had
lifted and this heaviness was gone. And everything started, you know,
operating according, you know, or properly again. So, yeah, there's
a lot of activity going on in this house and
probably has a lot to do with, you know, what
gets discussed. what gets poured into this microphone on almost
a daily basis. How about you?
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, my house is completely haunted. But I had
lots of weird stuff being moved and things and constantly.
For a couple of years, it was every day. I've
gotten to the point now, because I live alone, I've
tapped out. I don't freak out. It's just like, what's
the alternative, right?
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Do I freak myself out or do I just live
with it? And I've chosen to just live with it. Um,
you know, Dave Schrader.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 1: So Schrader was on, he's on with me a lot.
We do a lot of things together. Love that guy. And,
this year, I think we did a new year's Eve
show together, or we did something towards the end of
the year, maybe Christmas, a Christmas show. And he was
talking about his mom dying. And it was at the
end of the show, Richard, you can go back and
listen to it. You can hear it yourself. It's the
last minute of the show we're wrapping up. And, And
he's talking about the ghost of his dead mother. And
as I live and breathe, it sounded like somebody tipped
over a refrigerator.
Speaker 2: Boom!
Speaker 1: And I pull off my headphones. I thought it came
from in here. And there's nothing out of it. And
I leaned over to Dave. I go, Dave, was that you?
And he goes, what are you talking about? I didn't
hear anything. What do you mean you didn't hear anything?
And then I was watching the chat. The chat lit up. Oh, man.
So we wrap the show. I get up and I
walk around and I look and my house is clean.
All right. I'm not a germaphobe, but I just like stuff,
you know, in its spot. Got it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: There's nothing.
Speaker 2: Nothing.
Speaker 1: I walked around the whole house. I went back. So, uh, Bill, uh,
one of my moderators, I've known Bill for 10 years.
He sends me the audio the next day. He clipped
it out and it, I, I still, I don't have
an explanation for that. And Dave didn't hear it. That
was the other thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Just totally. So, you know, and again, I halfway
expected to see like a guitar has fallen or something, but.
Speaker 2: Nothing, nothing.
Speaker 1: So I don't know. I don't know. And it's loud,
whatever it is. So that, you know, the opportunity to
terrify myself and get scared and call in a Greek
Orthodox priest and do those things, the temptation is there,
but am I stirring the pot? You know, that's the others.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, yeah, I'm becoming more mindful of that. I mean,
I talk about it for a living. I mean, I
certainly don't celebrate it. I don't engage in necromancy. So, yeah,
it's important to be discerning for sure. I don't know
if we have time, but I'd love to share a
story that's related to what we're talking about right now.
Speaker 1: Richard, let me tell you something right now. You can
do whatever you want.
Speaker 2: Okay. All right.
Speaker 1: All right. All right.
Speaker 2: How about shadow puppets?
Speaker 1: I love a good shadow puppet.
Speaker 2: So the book is dedicated to my late friend and colleague, R.
Gary Patterson, who wrote, I think, the definitive. We were
talking earlier about Paul is dead legend. He wrote, I think,
the definitive book, which kind of debunks the Paul is
dead legend. It was called The Walrus Was Paul. And Gary,
I called him Gary. The R stood for Rudolph. And
so I understood why he never used the Rudolph. Rudolph, Gary. Anyway,
Gary was also a fixture on Coast to Coast for
many years.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's a great guy. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So we got together. Well, he started appearing on my
various platforms starting around 2005. He wrote a great book
called Hellhounds on My Trail. Tales from the Rock and
Roll Graveyard. Anyway, so we decided we were going to
get together and work on a radio show, a terrestrial
radio show, and it was going to be called The
Spirit of Rock, talking about everything we're talking about right now.
We were about to launch it, actually. He had a
station down in Knoxville, Tennessee. He lived near Knoxville. And
just before we were to meet with this general manager
by phone, Gary died. It was May 26, 2017, coincidentally,
the 50th anniversary of the release of Sgt. Pepper in
the UK. And it was nothing Gary loved more than
to talk about the clues on the cover of Sgt. Pepper.
But the night Gary called me, he called me on
the Friday night, the 26th. And I remember very distinctly,
I'm in the basement where I am now, and I'm
wandering around with the phone to my ear. And he
used to call me quite late sometimes. And it was
pitch black. It was dark out. I remember that. And
this is late spring, so usually the sun goes down
here maybe around, I don't know, 8 o'clock. And Gary
was talking to me about how the meeting that we
were supposed to have with the general manager at the
station in Knoxville was postponed because Monday was going to
be Memorial Day. And one of the last things I
said to Gary was, oh. when I think of Memorial
Day in the United States, I think of parades, military parades,
and family barbecues. I said, are you having a barbecue
this weekend? And for the first time I'd known Gary
by this time, probably close to 15 years, he got
kind of curt with me. And he said, there'll be
no barbecue. I thought, whoa, did I just step on
a landmine or something? Like, is there something going on
with his family I don't know about? And That's all
I remember, actually. After that, I don't remember how the
phone call ended. I was so stunned by that. There'll
be no barbecue. So that night, I go to bed,
and typically, the mighty Aphrodite, that's my lovely bride, we
always listen to Coast to Coast, but we both fell
fast asleep into a deep sleep, and we missed it.
And your buddy and mine, Dave Schrader, was guest hosting
that night, and he announced that night, along with Chris Jericho,
from the WWF who produced my, my podcast. I'll get
into that in a moment, but Gary, Chris Jericho interviewed Gary.
It was the last interview Gary did. They announced that
Gary Patterson had died that night, that day. And, but
I missed it. I slept right through next morning. I
get up and I'm getting a Facebook message from Schrader.
And he says, Richard, I know you and Gary were close.
I thought you'd like to know he passed away yesterday.
And I laughed. I said, come on. I just talked
to him last night. I immediately call Gary, get his
outgoing message. Ha ha ha, Gary, Dave Schrader says you're dead.
Give me a call. Well, it was true. I fly
down to the funeral. It's in a little, Gary lived
in Oliver Springs, Tennessee, a little coal mining Civil War
era town outside of Knoxville. And I walk into the
funeral home. There's his older brother, Mike, standing in front
of the casket. There's Gary's Fender guitar on a stand,
beautiful stainless steel blue casket. I walked up to Mike,
and it wasn't the time or place to say, hey, Mike,
I talked to your brother the night he died or
the day he died. And I just said, Mike, I
got to ask you, first of all, what time did
your brother pass? And he said, oh, we think it
was about 5 o'clock. And I'm thinking, wait a minute,
5 o'clock? It was pitch black when he called me.
I just kept it to myself, not the time or place.
Then I said, Michael, I said, the last time I
spoke to your brother, That's all I said is I
asked him if he was going to have a barbecue
on Memorial Day weekend. And he got kind of cross
with me. I said, I don't know if I said
something wrong. Was there something going on? I wasn't aware of.
And he looked so confused by that. He said, he
said that to you? Yeah, there'll be no barbecue. And
he said, well, that's weird because the day he died,
he was driving all over town looking for a brand
new grill. He ends up spending $ 500 and he spent
the rest of that day up until he died, basically.
putting it together on the back porch of the house.
Of course, he died before the family barbecue. So there
will be no barbecue. I am so conflicted by that.
I don't know how to explain it. Let me just
back up. The moment I found out, well, Dave Schrader
messaged me. I ran upstairs. The Mighty Aphrodite is just
getting out of bed. And she looks at me. Like
I'd seen a ghost. Maybe I had. And she said,
what's wrong? I said, Gary's dead. And she said, without
me prompting her, you talked to him last night. And
I said, I thought I did. Oh, man. She said,
check the recents on your phone. I checked the recents.
Nobody called me on Friday. What? There was no incoming calls.
There were no outgoing calls. Nobody loved me on Friday.
Nobody called me. I talked to no one. There was
a call from Gary on the Wednesday. I remember I
was sitting in the parking lot at All Saints Church
waiting to pick up my boys from Greek school. Gary
called me saying, hey, I've got a meeting with the
program director in Knoxville on Monday. I'll call you on Friday.
That was on the Wednesday. There was his number on
the Wednesday. Nothing on the Friday.
Speaker 1: What's going on here? I know you've thought about this
a lot. By the way, I did a bunch of
shows with him.
Speaker 2: Always.
Speaker 1: Entertaining. I love that part with Gary, but I learned
so much from him. His knowledge was just incredible. And
his influence on me. I think I got the same text,
by the way, from Schrader. I do remember that. In that,
could that be it? The influence on you and your
connection that this was channeled? It was real to you.
You know what I mean? Channel's the wrong word. But
it was a real conversation that you had. It just
wasn't on the phone.
Speaker 2: I've had that explanation actually handed to me by a
friend of mine who's a remote viewer. We call him
Canada's Edgar Cayce, Dr. Douglas James Cottrell. We did a
show together a couple of months ago, and I told
him that story, and that's exactly what he offered up.
as an explanation. There was no physical phone call coming in.
And yet there I was wandering, you know, as I
think back and I think about this, like this is
going back to 2017. So nine years ago, this past
May and not a week goes by, not every day now.
Initially it was every day. I was so just absolutely
floored by what had happened. I mean, I talk about
this stuff, but this stuff doesn't happen to me. I've
never seen a UFO before. Um, so this is like,
this is the Lollapalooza telephone call from the dead.
Speaker 1: Come on. Right now.
Speaker 2: But there it is. Am I misremembering it? It, Hey,
I'm open to that. I would welcome that because, you know, uh,
I'm so conflicted by it, but then I get that
corroboration from the mighty Aphrodite. You were talking to him
last night. And as I remember back to that phone call,
it was so eerie and so strange. I was, like
I felt like I was floating around the house going
from room to room with the phone to my ear.
And all of a sudden I'd realized, Oh, I'm in
the kitchen now. And she saw me wander into the kitchen.
That's how she knew that I was talking to somebody.
She saw the phone to my ear, but she didn't ask.
She assumed it was Gary. Cause we, we were getting
ready for this to launch this radio show. We were
talking three, four times a week, either email or texts
or phone calls. Next thing I know I'm in the
basement and I'm sitting down. I was like, I realize, Hey,
I don't remember moving down here. Here I am. And
he would say some strange things during the phone call
as well. At one point, he said, Richard, you're a
really cool dad. Why would he say that was so
like random and out of context? I mean, he knew
I had two young sons at the time, but and
I thought, OK, that's just Gary being Gary. He was
always trying to build you up and make you feel
good about yourself. And then a few minutes later, he goes,
you know, Rich, we're a really big deal. And I thought, OK,
here he goes again. We're getting ready for this meeting
with the Knoxville general manager. He's just trying to build
this up. And then the call ended with there will
be no barbecue. Wow.
Speaker 1: You know what happened to me last week?
Speaker 2: What?
Speaker 1: Something very similar. All right. So my producer for Beyond
Belief is Tarek McCarthy. And my producer, but also a
very good friend. All right. And the producer of a
TV show, especially the way that he did it, he's central.
He's a central figure. And so I was flying out
last week, last Tuesday, to go tape four episodes. And
on Monday, and I didn't hear from Tarek all weekend,
which was unusual because we're gearing up to tape and
there's always details, right?
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: And so Monday... For some reason, and it lasted all
day long, this is 10 days ago, last Monday, I
had this daydream that wouldn't stop about Tariq all day.
And it was so strong and so vivid that I
even started playing with it. I had a show to
do that night, and it was a very specific thing
that I won't get into. I'll never discuss it. publicly,
but it was strange. Okay. So I have an eight
hour daydream about Tariq.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: Weird. I wake up the next day. I'm on my
way to the airport, uh, to fly and see Tariq and,
and tape. And I get a phone call from Gaia.
Tariq died. And that was right, that's how the phone
call started. Jimmy, I've got terrible news. Where are you?
I said, I'm on my way to the airport. Tarek died.
And my answer was, what, what, what, what, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
It didn't even compute. Later on, about an hour later,
I get a text saying, I don't want to get
specific here, but from somebody at, well, I'll just say it. Julie,
the executive producer, she sends me a text. And her
text was about the daydream I had the day before.
Speaker 2: She's describing it?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm reading the text,
and I'm serious, man. Talk about rock and roll Twilight Zone, right?
Had the pullback, the Alfred Hitchcock, high anxiety. Like what? WTF?
Like a real one. And I can't explain that. So
I don't understand it, Richard. But when things like this happen,
like with you and Gary, who was just a lovely dude,
by the way, just incredible. When things like this happen,
you just have to back up and go, well, you
know what? We don't understand this reality. There's something else
going on. Let's try to figure it out. But the
phenomena itself is real.
Speaker 2: No question. No question in my mind at this point.
I mean, there could be a prosaic explanation. I would
love it. I'd love it if there was. But at
this point, I'm pretty much scrambling around in the dirt,
lost with it. But I guess I should just kind of,
as you say, sit back and maybe a different perspective,
just look at it as a gift. But gosh darn,
it is so conflicting. Wow.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's change gears. You know, in a weird way,
it's just life. The other side of it is that
it's melancholy and it can be very sad. And the
other part is our brain protects us, right? So when
you're going through that trauma, like finding out, you know,
you get a text from Schrader and suddenly all of this,
is it just our brain working with us, right? Do
you understand what I'm saying? You know, throwing up its
protective shields because if it didn't, you could really go
into a bad place. And I'm thinking about all of
this stuff that I've been through, especially Tariq over this
last week, where this element of the unexplained comes in.
What is actually happening? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know.
I just know that it's real. I just don't know
what causes this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I've always felt not only about what happened
with Gary, and that's the last chapter in the book, actually,
and Gary's throughout the book, because we were working on
this radio show, which later became a podcast after he died.
I took it to Chris Jericho, who I mentioned earlier.
He was the last person to speak to Gary, at
least in terms of an interview setting, and then we
launched it as a podcast. We did about 40 episodes,
and 60 made it into the book, but um, what
happened with Gary and I, and, and, but just in
this arena in which we, we toil, the questions are
always more important than the answers. And that's, people say, well,
what have you decided? What, what is, what does it
all mean? What are UFOs? You know, who's piloting the craft?
What is, what's behind these EVPs? I don't have any
more answers than when I started. I only have more questions. And, um,
I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Speaker 1: People think that you and I and folks like us,
that we have the secrets and we figured stuff out.
It ain't that kind of party. I've certainly, just like you,
I've done thousands of interviews with the best and the
brightest on the subject, and I've learned a lot. But
the questions are to a magnitude different. larger than those answers.
It's crazy. It's crazy. I just have more questions. Let's
talk about Laurel Canyon, the freakiest street in all of
rock and roll. I lived on Laurel Canyon. I lived
on Selma Drive and Sunset Boulevard, where that's the start
of Laurel Canyon. And everything is on that street. All
of the talent is on that street. Houdini... is on
that street. And I would hear these stories. Now, this
is in the late 80s when I had my studio
and I lived there. 88, 89, 90. And I would
hear the stories about the occult. This is where it
gets strange. And what was happening on top of Laurel Canyon.
Because there was a government installation that was a multi-use property.
I'll say that was a multi-use property. And I was like, no, really?
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: What is going on with Laurel Canyon? It's got 50, 60,
maybe 70 years of history. Houdini, right? It goes back
even further. What is it about Laurel Canyon that, and
the talent, and the fame, and then the possibilities of
something else very strange going on. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I'm probably going to lean on you more for this discussion.
I think that's one of those things where the publicists
put that into the prep notes, but I don't actually
address it in the book. However, whether we're talking about
Jim Morrison or Joan Baez, not necessarily part of that scene,
but Another example, this military background in these people's lives.
Jim Morrison's father, of course, was a rear admiral, was
in the Pacific Theater during the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
You had, I believe, let me see, Crosby Stillson.
Speaker 1: Crosby Stillson.
Speaker 2: Stephen Stillson.
Speaker 1: Linda Ronstadt. Jackson Brown, all of the Eagles, the Mamas
and the Papas, Frank Zappa, right? On and on, all
the way up that street.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. And all military background, which may pertain to
that installation you mentioned earlier. And I'm thinking, I didn't
write about this in the book, but there'll probably be
a volume two, if people like this and they want more, uh,
I'll get into MK ultra a little bit. I mean,
Joan Baez has intimated that she was MK ultra, um,
a victim of MK ultra, um, Leonard Cohen, our great,
bard from Montreal, was allegedly involved in the MKUltra program.
I think it was at McGill University with Dr. Ewan Cameron.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 2: In which he took these unwitting women poor souls who
were suffering from postpartum depression, and he subjected them to
electroshock therapy, massive doses of LSD, and something called psychic driving,
where you play an endless message on a loop over
and over and over. It's psychological torture. And this was
all funded by the CIA. And this is not fantasy
or a conspiracy theory. It was proven in court. Damages
were paid. The Canadian government was complicit as well. So
you just, I mean, that's just one of those common
threads you see.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the production, the facility at the top of Laurel
Canyon was a CIA movie studio. It's like in the neighborhood, right?
Right there. And I've been up to it. It's, it's,
And it was used for a lot of different things,
but it's central, you know, the germ in the Petri dish,
if you will. It was a CIA propaganda movie studio,
right in the middle of Hollywood.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of stories there. Who was the great author, director? Oh,
I met him a couple of times. Dave, who wrote
about the Laurel Canyon.
Speaker 1: Gosh.
Speaker 2: Oh. Passed away from, I think he had pancreatic cancer.
Senior moment here.
Speaker 1: Hold on. There's a new thing. It's called Google. I
use it a lot. It's amazing. You can even hear
me typing. David. Coming up right now, Michael Walker.
Speaker 2: Oh, that's not the one I was thinking of.
Speaker 1: Laurel Canyon, the inside story of rock and roll's legendary neighborhood.
Speaker 2: Dave wrote one as well, but I'll think about it
probably at 3 o'clock in the morning and I'll sit
right up in bed.
Speaker 1: Text me.
Speaker 2: Shout it out.
Speaker 1: Text me. I will. It'll be a phone call that
never happened. Exactly. So there's Okay. Well, anyway, there's two books.
But you were going to say?
Speaker 2: Oh, just that he wrote, I think, one of the–
I'm not sure about this other fellow who wrote a book,
but the fellow that I'm thinking about kind of wrote,
I thought, the definitive book about the whole Laurel Canyon scene.
So that's something I'd like to revisit as well as MKUltra.
I mean, I wrote a book about Charlie Manson. In
the book, the entire first section of the book is
all about the Beatles. And, of course, Manson claimed that
the Beatles were communicating with him telepathically through the White
Album and McCartney's song Helter Skelter, which was about a
British amusement ride, a fairground slide. All of a sudden,
Manson twisted that into his warped theology, and it was
about the coming apocalypse and a race war and the
song Blackbird. McCartney was inspired by the civil rights movement
to write that. But for Manson, this was about the,
you know, the black man rising up and, um, the
beginning of this apocalypse. Now, um, I didn't get into
MK ultra. I think, you know, Thomas O'Neill, Tom O'Neill
wrote probably the definitive book on that. And with chaos
talking about, you know, how it's just, kind of coincidental
that Manson was recruiting his family in the same, very
same neighborhood where MKUltra, uh, Dr. Jolly West, you know,
was experimenting, uh, with one of the, in one of
the local clinics, um, dispensing, uh, LSD, uh, and experimenting
on people, unwitting participants. Uh, I've, I've talked to MKUltra survivors,
one of whom claimed that Manson was right there, along
with Michael Aquino and others. I didn't get into that
in this book. I was focusing on the connection between
the Beatles and the White Album. Now, one could argue
that Manson made that up, that he wasn't being influenced
telepathically by the Beatles. That was just cover. I mean,
it was revenge, revenge killing. He got scorned or he
got spurned by Terry Mulcher. and Dennis Wilson of the
Beach Boys because he wanted to be a superstar, a
rock and roll musician, and it just didn't happen for him.
And Terry Melcher was living at 10,050 Cielo Drive, but
he had moved out by the time Manson and his– well,
Manson's family arrived to do their massacre of Sharon Tate
and Abigail Folger and the rest.
Speaker 1: I've been up there, by the way.
Speaker 2: You've been to.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I have a friend. He's been on the show
a few times that lives in the house next door. Oh, yeah, man.
I've been up there, man. I've ghost hunted. Very trippy street.
Very trippy street. And even today, that is very expensive property. Okay?
No doubt. Okay? And the houses that line that street,
I don't know if I could live on it. you know,
and I know.
Speaker 2: That too much bad juju. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1: I've been, I've been right up there to it. I
wanted to ask you before we, uh, uh, speaking of
strange things.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Um, Chris Cornell, you know, I know that you write
about Kurt Cobain. Um, Chris Cornell is someone that I,
I knew very, very well. Uh, I toured with sound
garden on, on their first album. I was out with
them for almost a year. And, uh, Which is like
touring with the Beatles on their first tour. Or Van Halen.
You know what I mean? Watching them just take off
and blow up. He was somebody that I really enjoyed
being around. Very cool dude. Gifted singer. The craziest death.
One of the craziest deaths in rock and roll. What's
your take on that? How you go from singing... a
concert and saying, love you. Good night. Walk off the
stage and go back to your hotel and, and, and,
and do that to yourself in the back. What's your,
what's your take on that?
Speaker 2: Yeah. According to some reports, he, and I think Chester
Bennington as well, who also died under other mysterious circumstances.
And I, I, I don't have the smoking gun document
to prove this, but it has been, sort of floating
out there for years that they were working on a,
some sort of a project might've been a documentary film
chronicling the plight of sex trafficked kids, which of course
is just, I mean, it's just, it's a dark world
relating to the surface. It is a dark world. And we're,
we're all sort of living with that realization. You know,
we woke, we're waking up to that horrible, horrible fact. And,
you know, imagine your worst nightmare and then, multiplied by
10 and then realize it's probably all true. And it's,
that's only the part of the story. So they were
supposedly working on this project and then they both die. Uh,
as you say, totally uncharacteristic. It just doesn't, doesn't seem
to add up. Um, Anthony Bourdain has also been mentioned
in that same conversation that he too was involved in the,
and likewise, uh, you know, suicide, it has become a
very popular term in our business. Um, yeah, I mean, I, I, uh,
I haven't investigated it, uh, in any meaningful way. Um,
quite honestly, I mean, that's not my sort of my
generation in terms of musicians that not that they, they
weren't incredibly talented people. I just haven't focused on them. Uh, Cobain, um,
my gosh, I mean, it's in the news now because
earlier this year, there was an independent, not court appointed,
but an independent group of forensic analysts who went to
King County and they petitioned either the police department or
the medical examiner's office asking them to reopen the case.
And much of the evidence that they laid out, actually, I,
you know, I talk about in the book and these
are not my theories. I didn't do, you know, the,
the boots on the ground kind of research. I, I
interviewed people like Rich Lee, who ran a local cable
access channel in Seattle, immediately following Cobain's death. I mean,
every day he was on there following this story. He's
a great investigative journalist. And Lee Wallace, a great author.
And they point out all of the inconsistencies in that
story and the rush to judgment. Something I learned after
the book was written, and that is that the person
who performed the autopsy on Kurt Cobain He died in
2002 in a base jumping accident in Switzerland. But before that,
he basically went public and said he should have recused
himself from the case because you can't make this up.
He had a relationship now. it's kind of inferred, but
he doesn't say it sort of in black and white
that he was Courtney Love's lover, but it's kind of intimated.
He had some kind of a relationship with Courtney Love.
I mean, what? He's performing an autopsy on victim and
you're having relationship with i.
Speaker 1: Would say you recuse yourself of that and you definitely
you go to hr and disclose at a minimum right.
Speaker 2: I would think i would think uh and then there's
the the testimony of kurt and courtney's lawyer rosemary carroll
she was secretly recorded by a private investigator by the
name of tom grant uh there's the matter of the
suicide note Um, 95% of it is written in Kurt's hand,
but it doesn't really sound like a suicide note. It's
more like, you know, I'm stepping back from the music industry.
I don't like the way I've been branded. I don't
like what's happening, you know, with the recording industry. I'm
starting to resent, you know, and feel guilty and so forth.
Then there's that 5% that's tacked on at the end,
which definitely sounds like, you know, Courtney and Francis Bean,
you'll be better off without me. That writing does not
appear to be the same handwriting. and getting back to
Rosemary Carroll again, in that secret conversation recorded, she said
she discovered, um, handwriting practice sheets, allegedly reportedly in Courtney
loves backpack. Why would she be practicing Kurt's handwriting allegedly reportedly.
Speaker 1: That I've got a hundred questions immediately. I've never heard
that before. Um, And thinking about, you know, I was
thinking about this last week because I started to hear
some stuff. One of the things that I always found strange,
I don't know Courtney, okay? I don't. But the way
that publicly, publicly facing, everybody handles grief differently, and I
don't know her. But she just seemed very strangely silent.
To this day. You know, and that never sat right
with me. I'm not insinuating anything because I don't know.
And maybe she just, that was her way of dealing
with things. But very strangely quiet.
Speaker 2: Right, right. And then we have the testimony of Eldon Hoke, a.k.a.
El Duce, who was kind of a colorful character. He
was the front man for a band called The Mentors.
Speaker 1: I've known him for 40 years, by the way.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: I've known him a long time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, kind of a shock rock performer.
Speaker 1: He's great.
Speaker 2: Maybe one might argue not the most reliable of witnesses.
He was a bit of a character, let's put it
that way. So he appears in a documentary film called
Curtain Courtney by Nick Broomfield. And in the film, Eldon
Hoke is announcing, testifying on the film that– Allegedly, reportedly,
Courtney Love came to him and offered him X number
of dollars to shoot Kurt with a shotgun. And he
laughed and he said, you're not serious. And she responded, allegedly,
I'm as serious as a heart attack. A couple of
days after that was filmed, and this is 1997, I think,
Kurt and Courtney came out. Eldon Hoke was found dead
on a railroad track, apparently hit from behind by a
freight train. What does that prove? Maybe nothing. But it
is kind of an interesting coincidence.
Speaker 1: Bodies are piling up, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, allegedly, reportedly. None of these things have been proven
in court, and Courtney has denied any wrongdoing in the
death of Kurt.
Speaker 1: I remember it was a crazy day. On the Soundgarden
tour bus, I vividly remember this. Chris Cornell, I'm in
the back in the lounge, right? Chris Cornell gets on
the bus and goes, dude, I got it. And he
holds up this videotape and it was a video.
Speaker 2: Of Nirvana.
Speaker 1: I'd never heard of Nirvana. Nobody had at this point, right?
But they were, you know, these are their friends. And
I remember that. I remember them putting in the video,
and we watched it. And Soundgarden, especially back then, Richard,
it was still big hair was the thing, right? Sunset Strip, Warrant, Poison,
you know, whatever. Rat. Yeah, those were my boys. So anyway,
but I saw the writing on the wall. when I
went out with Soundgarden and listening to it, I didn't
get it at first, but they really educated me. And
Chris would, I never heard of sub pop. I never
heard of mud honey. I didn't know any of this
stuff and they would just play me the music. And
we talked about it so often, but I remember them,
you know, popping it. And Chris had, had the video
and we popped it in and I saw it. I
saw it in that this is going to affect people.
This is going to resonate. And that's what happened with Cobain.
People got him, you know what I mean, in a
worldwide phenomena sense. And his death affected everyone in the
music business because they resonated with him so much. And,
you know, other things that came after, You know, Soundgarden
was the first. They were the originator of all of this.
And I think anybody in that, and Mudhoney too as well,
anybody in that grunge scene will tell you, man, it
was Soundgarden. That was it, right? And so, but Nirvana,
Soundgarden never got there. Nirvana went like this. Right? And so...
Kurt's death and the way that that happened, it affected everyone.
It's something that's never going to go away. A lot
like Morrison and other greats that we have lost so young.
Kurt Cobain is always going to be there. He literally
connected with a billion people, which is a rare thing.
Speaker 2: And my understanding is he absolutely hated that label, the
voice of a generation. And that was part in perhaps
what he was running away from. I mean, I can't
imagine the burden that must be, you know, to put
that on a young man. You're the voice of a generation.
You represent us, you know, millions of us. You know,
you give us a voice. That must be absolutely crushing.
But it's interesting because Courtney, after his death, she sort of,
seemed to be creating this narrative that he was hopelessly depressed.
He was suicidal. There was, um, his near, uh, fatal
overdose in, in Rome just a few months earlier. Um,
although the physician in Italy swears up and down, there's
no way that he was trying to take his own life. Um,
and it was, it was Courtney allegedly reportedly who sort
of tried to create that narrative. Well, he was suicidal. Um,
I mean, there was some mental illness in the, in
the family, obviously. I think he had a grandfather and
a great uncle who both either successfully or attempted to
kill themselves. One of them in front of their family. Um,
he was also portrayed as this hopeless heroin addict. And
he used to play that up in the, in the,
in the press. I think there was a, an interview
we did with the LA times or Rolling Stone magazine.
I can't remember which one it is. It was, it's
in the book, but asking about heroin use. He goes,
oh yeah, we fill up the turkey basters. I mean,
they would take him seriously. He was having them on.
He did self-medicate because he had a horrible stomach ailment
that went undiagnosed and untreated for many years. And I mean,
anyone who's had poor health for a number of years,
that can really just grind you down. I mean, it
takes a special kind of somebody to withstand that, but
he did. And then all of a sudden we're expected
to believe that with two to three times the lethal
dose of, um, well, heroin metabolizes as morphine in the blood,
two to three times the lethal dose in his bloodstream.
And yet he manages to handle a very, you know,
cumbersome weapon. Um, I mean, I've, I'm not a hunter,
but I've held a shotgun. I, and I've, you know,
try turning that around, putting the barrel in your mouth
and reaching the trigger with your finger, unless you've got
arms like Abraham Lincoln. Mm-hmm. But it gets even more
complicated because add another six inches because there was a
flash suppressor attached to the shotgun. So now it just
becomes just totally impractical and implausible that he would have
been able to reach the trigger. And then they've looked
at the blood, what they call back spatter, blood pattern analysis.
And the blood back spatter on the barrel doesn't match. the,
there's no back spatter of the blood on the, on
the hand that was holding the barrel. Um, I mean,
that's just the beginning, you know, it's just, did.
Speaker 1: You ever see as we wrap up or at the
end here, do you ever watch the, uh, the devil
and Daniel Johnson? Uh, don't think I have watched that documentary.
Watch that documentary. Daniel Johnson was a singer-songwriter of, you know,
but he was also an artist. And the documentary is incredible.
I don't want to just, The Devil and Daniel Johnson.
The T-shirts that Kurt Cobain wore with that character on it,
Daniel Johnson drew that. That's Daniel Johnson's artwork. Go and
watch The Devil and Daniel Johnson. Watch that documentary. It's incredible.
Speaker 2: Go check it out.
Speaker 1: Absolutely incredible. Incredible. So, Richard, thank you so much. I
know the book is out. Where can everybody go and
get it? Amazon?
Speaker 2: The usual suspects. Online, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million.
I think even Walmart online is selling it. And you
can get more information if you want. There's a couple
of sample chapters, therockandrolltwilightzone.com, and there's some very nice endorsements
from people like J.J. French of Twisted Sister and Mark Farner,
the founding member of Grand Funk Railroad, and George Knapp
and George Norrie and Steve Lukather from Toto have written
some nice things. You can read all about it at therockandrolltwilightzone.com.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Richard. We've got to do this again, man.
A lot of fun.
Speaker 2: Jim. it was a great fun and a great pleasure.
Thank you.
Speaker 1: You're the best Richard Seward, everybody behave, Richard. We'll talk
to you soon. Richard Seward. What a great conversation tonight.
Thank you so much, Richard. Um, he's the absolute very,
very best, uh, strange planet. The links for that are below.
And of course, uh, rock and roll twilights on the
links for that are here over on our website and
throughout social media. Uh, tomorrow, uh, we have to take
the night off. We had to move things around. There's
going to be some technical installations that are going to
be going on here in the streets of our neighborhood
for the next couple of days. So I'll see everybody
right back here on Monday. Behave and be well. I'm
Jimmy Church. All I've got is go Beckley Tepe. Fade
to Black is produced by Hilton J. Palm, Renee Newman,
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