speaker-0: Good morning.

speaker-1: And good morning. Morning. Robert, thank you for being here.

speaker-2: You're welcome. You finally made it happen.

speaker-1: Book through November.

speaker-2: We are, which is typical. We leave December open for we don't play Christmas week and we don't play we just play good

speaker-3: On it, fellow shit talkers.

speaker-1: Yeah.

speaker-2: I like this guy ⁓ already.

speaker-1: Not at this hour, no way. He's an afternoon gym guy. He's not a morning gym guy. He's not getting up and going to the gym. I can tell you that.

speaker-2: I'm an ocean guy. I walk and split wood. That's my workout. That's me too. That's me too. Yeah.

speaker-1: Yeah.

speaker-3: I don't know.

speaker-1: with his neighbor's wife. Go figure that

speaker-2: My my partner, my girlfriend, I live in a town called West Barnet, B A R N E T, Vermont. And my girlfriend calls me the wood whore of West Barnet. Because if there's a tree down, I'm gonna be knocking on your door to see if you want me to take it away take it away for you.

speaker-3: So yeah.

speaker-2: Here in.

speaker-1: Good morning, Phil. Good morning. I'd like to introduce you to Robert, midlife crisis band member, founder.

speaker-2: Longment. This was video. Yeah, yeah, that is correct. Yeah. In fact, I go by Bob, actually I always get Robert when my girlfriend's pissed off at me, which is I go by Bob. So slide which drop

speaker-1: Well, That's okay.

speaker-3: That might be a theme song for this podcast.

speaker-2: Yeah,

speaker-1: Because the problem is with that license it.

speaker-2: ⁓ it's funny. I have a do I have a duo act up here in Vermont. My band is called Midlife Crisis. I'm thinking assisted living is probably more appropriate at this point. So you may go by we may go by assisted living or poor judgment. There you go. There you go.

speaker-1: Hey let me ask you something. Has anybody ever thrown their back out while you guys were loading equipment?

speaker-2: No, actually we our keyboard player has a bad back to begin with, so we do have to help him load and unload. Some of our stuff is heavier than others. His stuff's particularly heavy.

speaker-3: And listen, you stay strong when you go out and you do firewood and you're a firewood war and and I I don't know if tomorrow or lift equipment, but I've done my share.

speaker-2: People say, Do you have a log splitter? And I say, I am the log splitter. That's right. I'm the same way. This freeze for me.

speaker-3: I don't pay for it either.

speaker-2: Has anybody

speaker-1: When you guys are gonna do loading up your equipment and stuff, do they ever mistaking you guys for roadies instead of the band?

speaker-2: No roadies is the drinks we take with us when we're when we're traveling. We are our own roadies. We are our own roadies for sure.

speaker-1: Do you line up all the gigs?

speaker-2: Ninety-five percent of them, yeah. I do. I will tell you one of the biggest hassles is dealing with club owners. What do you need to get? We'd love to have you here. What do you charge? And I'll give them a price, they'll be like, and then they'll be like, How many people do you how many people will you bring with you? I don't know. I don't have a crystal ball that works anymore, man. I would tell you that our claim to fame is that we keep the crowd. Once if there's a crowd there, people typically will stay till the end of the show.

speaker-3: That'd be my wife. That would be my wife.

speaker-0: Yeah.

speaker-2: I think any musician will tell you, performing musician will tell you that you feed off the energy of the crowd. One of them, our singer, Billy, our lead singer owns a landscaping company. He's still working. Mike Kyle, another guitar player, he's a chiropractor, he's still working. So just just two, really. Yeah. Just two. The rest of us are retired.

speaker-3: You hurt your b if you hurt your back, you get fixed right away. Yeah.

speaker-2: Yeah, that's right. It's interesting.

speaker-1: the table I'll take care of you.

speaker-3: ⁓ early last year and he was horrible. Really? Voices totally shot. I I was like, wow, he's done. He's toast.

speaker-2: Horrible. Really? All I can think of when I see Lyle Love it is this. He's not exactly what you would call a an a good looking man. He landed for a short time, Julia Roberts, right? That's right. So I always figure there's hope for all of us, right? Yeah, we've seen an occasional bar fight, which is always a problem. We it's I won't tell you who this is, but I saw a girl fight. Probably six, seven years ago.

speaker-1: Have we got any good st bars store? Yeah.

speaker-2: And we're actually play one of the combatants, we're playing for a wedding on Wednesday or on Saturday, which is really bizarre now that you mention that. Yeah. Down in Connecticut. Yeah, just a lot of weird stuff. I think there are still women out there that don't take this the wrong way, think they're groupies or want to be groupies. ⁓ and they'll be up dancing in front of you. And it's a little, it's almost and half the time my girlfriends in the audience, right? So you try really hard not to look. We all do that. Since we're talking shit, okay. Since we're talking shit. The one thing I will tell you is this we're all old, but there's not one of us that miss a good looking woman that walks in through the door. I can tell you that right now. Like an unlike an unspo we'll look at each other go, Yes.

speaker-1: Yeah no.

speaker-2: My father used to say my father used to say to me, he'd he'd say, Listen, kid, doesn't matter where you get your appetite as long as you eat at home, right? You can That's right, that's right. Just a venue reader these days. That's right. I always tell my wife, why would I go home? I why would I go out for milk when I get a cat went home? She goes, I don't think that that's great.

speaker-3: Look at the menu.

speaker-0: Ha ha.

speaker-3: Hey we have Bob, have you ever had to play him like they do down in Texas and down south in front of behind the chain link fence?

speaker-2: No, we haven't had to do that.

speaker-1: anything in embarrassing happened on the stage that you'd like

speaker-2: ⁓ We have our other guitar player, he'd shoot me for saying this, but he he had gone out the night before and gotten himself in a pretty I'll just say he was overserved. How's that? Well yeah we had to break, we had to break once with him on stage. We were we played a wedding nine, ten years ago. We played a Saturday afternoon wedding at a place called the Warehouse in Holyoke. And great stage. And my amp caught on fire, my blues junior. And it was the funny story with it is I at the time I used to carry, I don't do it anymore and I should, a backup amp. And middle of the song, I could smell smoke and I turn around and my amp is smoking, just smoking. And everybody's everybody, our drummer is is trying to get everybody to stop. And I guess I look, I see the crowd watching us. I said, no, keep playing. I shut that amp off and I'm plugged in and I have my backup amp next to it plugged in and just kept right on going. And I think honestly, I think the wedding guests thought it was part of the show. I really do. And everybody's clapping, they're like, Yeah, smoke's everywhere. Right. It was it was definitely burning up. There was no flame, but it was burning up for sure. I brought it to my amp tech guy. He was tremendous with amps. And he calls me and he goes, What the F did you do to this thing? I'm like, Man, I don't know. It just it just burned up. I don't know. I don't know what to tell you. Sorry.

speaker-1: ⁓ show is called Old Men Talking Shit. Well, you don't have to worry about your link.

speaker-2: ⁓ good.

speaker-1: At our agent and Kevin was showing us before we tend to lose things. You ever forget the words to a song or anybody forget?

speaker-2: Me.

speaker-0: Yeah.

speaker-2: I yes, I do not. But probably every other, maybe every third show, our singer and I and the other guitar player who is just referencing Mike Heilman, he'll start with the wrong verse or he'll be singing. It's his song to sing. And it it comes time for him to start singing. There's there'll be an intro, and he's got nothing. And he'll look over at me and I'll we just start laughing. Because we're at the 16 years, we're at that point where we just somebody screws up. It's not a big deal. We all kind of laugh about it. And I would tell you this, is and I've said this many times, particularly with a seven piece band, when you make a mistake, you're the only ones that know. That's right. That's right. Your audience has no clue all of that.

speaker-3: We saw Jackson Brown ⁓ at NJ Pack in Morristown, New Jersey, twenty one guitars on stage. What was solo acoustic and got about halfway through each song he was forgetting the words to his songs and the people in the crowd would just start singing

speaker-0: Each

speaker-2: Okay.

speaker-1: Bob, were you in a band when you were younger?

speaker-2: ⁓ yes and no. So I I grew up in a musical family. My dad was a pharmacist, but he was a banjo player. I still have his nineteen nineteen sixteen Ludwig banjo four string. Yeah. I can't play it, but I have it. So my mom sang, my sister and I were forced to take piano lessons starting in third grade. And I couldn't stand it because I wanted to I just wanted to be out throwing a football or baseball. And but it in sixth grade my father Stopped beating his head against the wall and bought me a Sears silver tone acoustic guitar for Christmas. And I took lessons for a year and I got the basics down and I dropped it until I got to be about 17, 18 years old, and I picked it up again. I moved to Boston for five years, had two musicians, two roommates that went to Berkeley School of Music, and they would drag me to these Berkeley parties. This is back in the mid-70s. And they'd encourage me to play at these Berkeley parties. And I was nowhere near the level of these kids from Berkeley. And I was I was very intimidated, but they'd keep being like, No man, you can play. Go up and play, go play and I go play, right? And that really helped. I never saw myself wanting to do gigs again or anything like that. And when this kind of took off when we went out and did our first show, it'll be actually 17 years. the Friday after Thanksgiving this year coming up. Those two guys had never been in a formal band. They'd never been on stage where people actually clap for ⁓ and it w it's very contagious.

speaker-1: Hey, do the kids come to the shows these days? I've enjoyed the shows.

speaker-2: ⁓ absolutely. I think some of my kids are in their thirties and forties now, like all of us, right? And every day. It's funny. I can't remember what I did yesterday, but I can tell you what I did on any given day fifty years ago.

speaker-3: Yeah. I always tell this story, but my wife she my wife she's ⁓ I don't remember. I don't remember. I said, Yeah, I bought a ginkgo bolobo, but she forgets to take it.

speaker-2: Yeah, so I always I my dad was a pharmacist and ⁓ so I ended up going to pharmacy school. That's what sent me to Boston to start with. It was the mid seventies and their idea of chemistry and mine were quite a bit friggin' different. I'll tell you what. Yeah. So when I start thinking about my memory, I think I did some shit that probably wasn't real good to me. It wasn't really good for me, like a lot of us, right? And you know what? Here I am. You know.

speaker-0: the knife.

speaker-2: I'm here and I'm very healthy and I can't remember shit, but that's all right. I had one because I had to buy one, right?

speaker-3: We wanted to make sure that we were getting what we paid for.

speaker-2: ⁓ geez. They made it two and a half years. And the third year was particularly funny because Mass College of Pharmacy, where I went to Boston, you guys are gonna kick out of this, did not have their own dorms. So they rented dorm space from women's colleges for women and men's colleges for men. We would they rented space. And but the third year I was there, they they rented space from a school called Wheelock College, which was an all girls elementary education teaching college. All girls. And for the first time ever, they were gonna have boys, men from MC Mass College of Pharmacy living on a half of one floor. And they selected 12 outstanding students, of which I was not one of for sure. But they selected my roommate, Lee, who I'm still great friends with. He called me and he said to me, He goes, Brown, are you still looking for housing? I'm Yeah. He goes, I got I'm in on the lottery. I'm gonna be living at We Lock in an all-girl store. And he goes, They told me to pick a roommate. He goes, You looking I said, I am now, brother.

speaker-1: I I went to Pace College in Westchester. they had a they had to do the same thing. And our dorm was a three-floor dorm on an all-girls college, Firecliffe College at the time. It was all girls, very upscale. We had three floors. The first two floors were empty. The top floor was 32 guys. The top floor on an all-girl campus. I'll tell you.

speaker-2: ⁓ yeah.

speaker-1: I'd never wanted to leave. I wanted to live.

speaker-2: I dropped out. I dropped out halfway through my third year, but I stayed in the dorm. You kidding me? I got a job working construction of the city. And I stayed in the damn dorm. I'm like, I'm not giving this ride up. I'd be going out the door. My roommate would be, Hey, where are you going? I'm going down to Sue's room to borrow an album. And I'd come back like two days two days later, but I'd have that friggin' album in my hand. ⁓ I got it. That's not all I got, but I got the damn album. Good days, man. Good days. Absolutely. You know what? If you see it's how we're talking shit, right? I y I like to say if you couldn't get laid back then, you couldn't get laid in a whorehouse with a hundred dollar bill, right?

speaker-3: That's right. I could I could plenty of models on it.

speaker-1: ⁓ man.

speaker-2: ⁓ man. No. Get in. Okay. ⁓ those are good days. Holy shit. I have to do that now without beer for Christ's sakes.

speaker-3: Me too.

speaker-0: You

speaker-1: So so we gotta bring this to an end. Bob, it was great having you on. I gotta tell you, very engaging. I enjoyed it a lot. I look forward to seeing your band again.

speaker-2: Again. It was great having you there the last time, Bob. And hope I didn't embarrass you too badly when I introduced you. But and let me just close by saying thank you very much. I appreciate you guys. This has been very entertaining. And it really is old guys talking shit, isn't it? Absolutely. Thank you very much. And again, look forward to seeing you guys out out there somewhere and at one of the shows. Well

speaker-1: Fun. But maybe we can have a few other guys on.

speaker-2: ⁓ yeah, let me it's tough to get seven guys to it really is hard to get seven guys to even even for practice it's really trying to get a practice, is it? Trying to get seven guys lined up is really hard. Yeah, it's crazy, but everybody keep on playing. Don't stop. Every day, every day. But attay, good for you. I'm gonna go do that right now, actually. All right, gentlemen, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. Take care, man. Like I said, we look forward to seeing you again.

speaker-1: Laverne. Thanks guys.

speaker-2: Take care.