Get Offset Episode 126: We Are All… with Steve Selvidge of The Hold Steady

Episode Transcript

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Get Offset Episode 126: Featuring Steve Selvidge from The Hold Steady

Emily: Zencastr always mostly works.

[00:00:06] Welcome to the good offset podcast. My name is Emily and

[00:00:10] Andrew: my name is Andrew.

[00:00:12] Emily: And we’re here today with Steve Selvidge from the hold steady most notably, I think at this point, Hey, Steve coming at us from a room full of guitars and Memphis, I assume maybe

[00:00:24] Steve Selvidge: in Memphis, I could be somewhere else. I don’t know.

[00:00:27] I’m not telling how’s it going? Y’all

[00:00:31] Emily: it’s going, you know, it’s a beautiful crisp day in Seattle, not wet. Yeah.

[00:00:37] Steve Selvidge: It’s raining here or it’s been raining. It’s lovely and overcast. I kind of like it, but it’s more, it’s warm. It’s like, it’s very cold in New York and it’s very warm here

[00:00:49] Emily: or warmish. How warm is

[00:00:51] Steve Selvidge: it?

[00:00:52] It wasn’t in the seventies yesterday. Wow. Yeah, it sounds nice. Yeah. I grilled some rib-eyes and some shishito peppers. Ooh,

[00:01:04] Emily: that sounds great. That sounds

[00:01:05] Steve Selvidge: like a life man. You know, what has been, I hadn’t grilled in that drills. I hadn’t grilled in a while. So yeah, it was good to, it was good to do it.

[00:01:15] I’ve got this coffee based dry rub that I do on rib-eyes and it’s it’s really good

[00:01:22] Emily: girl. Do you have, cause this, this is actually we talk about this on the podcast a lot grilling these days,

[00:01:27] Steve Selvidge: whoever cattle nicer. Yeah. Classic, you know, it’s got the, instead of just the saucer, it’s got the catcher, you know?

[00:01:36] Yeah. That is an incredible pain in the ass to get on and off. Sure with airflow so much. Yeah. I don’t have a deal with Weber, so I can say that they’re not,

[00:01:51] Emily: I can’t, I can’t, I can’t trash talk triggers. That’s the that’s that’s the rule. Yeah.

[00:01:57] Steve Selvidge: So where do y’all get along with,

[00:01:59] Emily: I have a trigger five 75 pro it’s a wood pellet grill, but I’ve done, I’ve done some work for them. So after it’s an outdoor oven. Yeah. But it makes really great pulled pork. It makes really great chickens.

[00:02:15] Steve Selvidge: That’s right. You’re Southern, right.

[00:02:19] Emily: I’m from Ohio. But like I have lots of family in South Carolina that I was always very, very close with and I lived in Nashville for eight years

[00:02:27] Steve Selvidge: and national for a while. I don’t know how I got that. You lived in Kentucky. That’s craziness.

[00:02:31] Emily: Well, Cincinnati is basically Kentucky North.

[00:02:36] So if you play society, have you played the South gate house? Did you play sell the house? When I was, of course. That’s what a beautiful old trap.

[00:02:47] Steve Selvidge: Yeah. Yeah. I played the big room. I played the tiny room of man. I fucked up my, I cut myself so bad loading up the stairs so that like the small, like it’s like you’re playing it.

[00:03:00] Emily: Yeah. My friends do record releases in that room and it is a height.

[00:03:04] Steve Selvidge: That’s, that’s the big joke that I’ve been making. Like some, we did these Brooklyn ball streaming shows for the UK. Like, you know, my dad joke is like, well, I’ve certainly played a nobody before, so point to an empty room or

[00:03:17] Emily: whatever. Yeah.

[00:03:21] I I don’t know. What’s worse, like playing the, did you play the high watt in Nashville? It’s like the mercy lounge put up another floor.

[00:03:30] Steve Selvidge: Oh, that’s the, is that the whole cannery? Like the complex? Yeah, I played all the rooms in there as well.

[00:03:37] Emily: Oh yeah. I saw Craig and the the high watt once and it was, it was well attended show, but I remember thinking, and I hate to hate to load drums of this, or like a big app because I played the mercy and th that was enough for me.

[00:03:53] Was the cannery the big room. Yeah, the big first floor room. And then there’s some mercy on the second floor with a pool table in the back. And then there’s a high water.

[00:04:01] Steve Selvidge: Yeah. I’ve so I think the last I did, I must have been bashing pop that, do the mercy.

[00:04:09] Emily: That sounds like appropriately sized. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:04:16] Steve Selvidge: Back in the olden days, It shows the before times,

[00:04:25] Emily: but you’re still, you still played a couple of shows.

[00:04:27] I’ll be at, for a virtual audiences. And I just watched a bunch of them. Was that last weekend? Was that just last week? Yeah.

[00:04:35] Steve Selvidge: I mean, yeah, this, this time, last week 1230, I was probably playing a stream for like a radio station or a farm and all Callender or something. I don’t know. Like yeah, that was the last weekend.

[00:04:51] Emily: Oh, it was the soundtrack this time last that’s what, that’s what it was.

[00:04:57] Steve Selvidge: I mean, I was probably listening to the dulcet tones of rock Sheffield.

[00:05:03] Emily: Oh man, that guy’s mask just barely fit on that face.

[00:05:07] Steve Selvidge: Cause a smile is so big because he’s such an awesome.

[00:05:10] Emily: Yeah, he’s a great guy. I mean, I remember when I, when I met my now husband, one of the first things I did was I handed him a Rob Sheffield book.

[00:05:19] I was like, I really liked this book. I think you would like it. And I was like, and then he read it. He had things to say about, and I was like that, that’s a man who reads

[00:05:28] Steve Selvidge: smash.

[00:05:33] Emily: Oh my God, I was just doing something. And I found this random washer on the ground. And now I’m worried about what instrument or what it came from. Oh

[00:05:43] Steve Selvidge: man. Maybe somebody Ford versus Ferrari. Do you.

[00:05:49] That is

[00:05:52] Andrew: 20 minutes of that, I think. Yeah. In a hotel room last year with someone I know who was staying in the next room over, who had pirated a copy. And so it kept skipping chunks of scenes. Oh, wow.

[00:06:07] Steve Selvidge: I’ve seen it. I’ll watch it on the plane on the way home last weekend. And I’ve watched that movie a lot.

[00:06:16] I like it a lot. I mean, ultimately it’s just a buddy pig, but I think Christian, Bale’s great. And I’m a fan of Matt Damon’s yeah, I like racing too. I I’ve been a racing fan since I was a kid. Yeah.

[00:06:35] Emily: I mean, what’s your, what, what kind of racing do you like? Like NASCAR, like F1 car.

[00:06:40] Steve Selvidge: I like SCCA. I like NASCAR, actually, I wasn’t a NASCAR before.

[00:06:46] It was like, you know, still like they, when they showed it on the Nashville network or whatever in the eighties, you know I haven’t followed it in years, you know, since it got so big, but

[00:07:02] Emily: I love about NASCAR is that it’s really, it’s a soap opera, but fast, well, I mean, you

[00:07:09] Steve Selvidge: know, the whole thing is just the next turn left.

[00:07:11] It’s like, that really does not take into account the fact that everybody’s given the same thing and it’s how you fucking, you know, fucking Cracker as shade, tree mechanic, it, you know, to get the most, and then the way, you know and

[00:07:28] Emily: you never watched a, have you ever watched a chump car, race, chump car?

[00:07:33] It’s like, I think that, I think it’s like the, the rules are, you don’t have to buy the car. You have to have bought the car for. $600 or less. So there’s just like all these junky cars racing around like VIR, Virginia international Raceway is there. They used to be a client of mine. So then I was always, I always love like posting about the champ car because it was the fun pictures.

[00:07:58] Steve Selvidge: Wow. I’m going to check that out. It’s pretty funny.

[00:08:01] Andrew: NASCAR. I liked a NASCAR as a kid until the betrayed me

[00:08:06] Steve Selvidge: portray you.

[00:08:11] Andrew: It’s, it’s related to all of this and my hat and I chose my favorite racer when I was a kid purely based on color. Right. And to be a Tony Stewart. Cause he was sponsored by home Depot was driving an orange car. Right. And as I grew older and learned more about the kind of man that Tony Stewart is, I then realized I made a terrible choice.

[00:08:34] Emily: Yeah. I think about Tony Stewart.

[00:08:36] Steve Selvidge: Yeah. I don’t either, but I can’t imagine not do given the demographics of a lot of people in NASCAR. I could probably see where you’re going with that. I

[00:08:47] Andrew: mean he allegedly intentionally ran over a coworker or a coworker, a fellow racer that he had a problem with on the track.

[00:08:55] Emily: Yeah. He killed that guy. Yeah. Yeah, that wasn’t a NASCAR race. I was like some weird, like midnight oil kind of

[00:09:05] Andrew: race like that. He put the dude into the side on the first lap and came back around and as the do’s getting his card clipped him.

[00:09:14] Emily: Yeah. I was like walking toward the car and all the track. He was trying to be a big, big man that looked like to me.

[00:09:21] Andrew: Oh, was allegedly according to his lawyers. I’m sure it was an accident. But I had long, long before that incident, I did realize that I don’t. So that’s, that is how I both fell in love with NASCAR and fell out of love with NASCAR purely based around my love of the color orange.

[00:09:40] Steve Selvidge: Well, or just tricky, man.

[00:09:44] How do you feel

[00:09:45] Emily: about

[00:09:48] the movie?

[00:09:49] Steve Selvidge: Yeah, it’s top gun with cars.

[00:09:51] Emily: Hmm. I haven’t seen it. Is it a paramount movie? Because I feel like it was a paramount movie because I feel like there was a riot about it at the paramount theme park,

[00:09:59] Steve Selvidge: chase movie that an old person like myself and seen properly

[00:10:04] Emily: days of funder.

[00:10:07] Steve Selvidge: It’s Tom cruise.

[00:10:09] Nicole Cathy was the first movie with Tom cruise and Nicole Kidman. It’s where they met. I believe

[00:10:15] Emily: weirdly, apparently a lot of people search for days of thunder, like in February for the week of February 14th. So I wonder what happened that particular week that everyone was searching for

[00:10:28] Steve Selvidge: data. They wanted to see that sweet kid when Cruz love on Valentine’s day.

[00:10:35] Emily: I think I, maybe I, yeah, sure. One of my favorite pictures is her singing and dancing to herself while she’s leaving her lawyer’s office. After signing the divorce papers to Tom cruise. She’s just jubilant. This is a guitar podcast.

[00:10:59] Steve Selvidge: What’s new with me. Well, I’ll show you that the newest thing, the newest thing is this. You finished

[00:11:05] Emily: it, finished it nice for those, for those listening at home and not watching on YouTube. Steve has a beautiful w what was that? Fiesta red yesterday was nice

[00:11:19] Steve Selvidge: because, well, you know, two years ago, as you, if you follow me on Instagram, you remember that I’ve built with the help of my guitar guy in town.

[00:11:28] I built this sonnet blue Telecaster, and I love it so much. And immediately upon, you know, bonding with it. I was like, I want to look at this next to a Fiesta red Telecaster. Yeah, this, this, this, like, it was like, this is like the happiest thing in the world to me is I have this thing. I mean, I’m sure I’m not unique, but I had this like thing, like in my brain where like I’m obsessed with things that are the same thing in different colors.

[00:12:03] Sure. Like, you

[00:12:04] Get Offset Episode 126 Featuring Steve Selvidge from The Hold Steady: know,

[00:12:04] Emily: Jordans. Yeah,

[00:12:06] Steve Selvidge: yeah.

[00:12:09] Andrew: Gone straight for the gel. You look there, Emily,

[00:12:14] Steve Selvidge: regular Jordan.

[00:12:16] Emily: That was not, that was not an insight.

[00:12:19] Steve Selvidge: That’s completely fair. You know? Save yours

[00:12:32] Emily: boss, boss pedals.

[00:12:34] Steve Selvidge: Boss, just like these things, you know,

[00:12:39] Andrew: like

[00:12:42] Steve Selvidge: I just reorganized about pedals. I just like, totally like just rammed a piece of plywood into the top of this shelf so I can get another shelf. So I have more room for, because my panels were just in a pile,

[00:12:59] Emily: I’ve got, I need to sell some because I’m out of shelf storage and I’m kind of running out of cabinet storage and I have them all kind of, the rest are kind of in a bar cart situation.

[00:13:13] Steve Selvidge: I have moved some pedals recently for that very reason. Like I bought that dirty little secret and I liked it, but it was just like redundant in terms of what I had. And I think I was trying to find another, probably trying to fund this. This tele bill from the week.

[00:13:31] Emily: What’d you got in that guitar as far as pickups

[00:13:35] Steve Selvidge: specialist, pretty much my go-to that’s I’ve got that in both of these guitars and this thing all nine pounds, 15 ounces of it.

[00:13:53] Emily: Yes. Yeah. We were just talking about that guitar last week. Was that the one we’re talking about? Actually,

[00:13:59] Steve Selvidge: no, no, that’s the dialogue. That’s the deluxe. But anyway, you know, 1976, these pickups are shit. I put a Lawler in it,

[00:14:14] Andrew: but you didn’t replace the wide range. Humbucker did. No,

[00:14:17] Steve Selvidge: no, no, no, no, no.

[00:14:18] Just checking. Yeah, this guitar is everything. That’s w people said was wrong with CBS fender, you know, it’s got a thick, thick ass power, your thing finish. It is literally almost 10 pounds. It’s the heaviest guitar that I own. And this, this is one of the best cars I have, like in terms of like meat and potatoes, rhythm tracks, or whatever, this thing sticks to tape.

[00:14:49] Like, I mean, it’s insane or sticks to heart.

[00:14:56] Emily: Yeah, I guess six to tape is not the go-to method of sticking things anymore.

[00:15:03] Steve Selvidge: If you have a budget,

[00:15:06] Emily: expensive, man,

[00:15:09] Steve Selvidge: you know, tastes expensive. It takes up a lot of space, you know, it

[00:15:15] Emily: has to be kept. It has to be kept just right.

[00:15:18] Steve Selvidge: Actually it doesn’t, it does it, I mean, you should, but like it’s also.

[00:15:24] Historically so far today, the most durable medium there is. I mean, I have, you know, because I am of a certain age and have been doing this for a certain amount of time. Like, I’ve got so much like records of two-inch, you know, and they’re all in storage, you know, but and they’re all fine. Now I did a record with a band in the early two thousands, and I would be very surprised at that.

[00:15:56] We’ll see lossy harddrive would spin up right now.

[00:16:01] Emily: Yeah, that’s fair. I mean, I’m sure you put it all in the cloud.

[00:16:05] Steve Selvidge: Yeah, Jesus. So yeah tape it’s crazy. I was doing a bunch of transfers years a few years ago when I did a reissue of one of my dad’s records and Well, I was doing transfers for that record, but my dad had just died.

[00:16:28] So I had like, we were cleaning out stuff and I had all this tapes going back to the sixties and like, okay. First of all, sidebar a tape from the late seventies, early eighties is notoriously shitty. They tried to do a new emulsion formula that was supposed to be lower noise. It was lower noise, but it does not last, like, it’s like if you have tape from a certain era, just like, sometimes you can’t even, you can’t bake it enough.

[00:16:57] It’s just like, it just sheds right off. But anyway I pulled up one, like, you know, four track, like, you know, one inch, four track, real that was engineered by John Fry at Arden. Oh gosh. Four track on a Skully through, you know, fucking Bulletproof man. Like it just, it sounded like whatever, it sounded like a CD or better, you know, it was so pristine and like that, that tape.

[00:17:24] Was from 1966 and they had just, no problem, you know,

[00:17:28] Emily: would be more hope for this principle it’s man, because I heard that they were, they’re not kept in good condition.

[00:17:34] Steve Selvidge: Yeah. I think it should probably be okay. I think they had figured all that shit out. Well, I mean, yeah. I don’t know.

[00:17:41] Emily: I mean, the stuff from the eighties is probably

[00:17:43] Steve Selvidge: yeah, a little dicey, but but, but you know, by the mid eighties, I think they figured it out.

[00:17:50] Emily: They’ve released some good stuff. So obviously they figured they figured something out. Right.

[00:17:58] Steve Selvidge: Did I tell you that I held him one of the cloud guitars

[00:18:03] Emily: that you see me tweeting about the cloud guitars?

[00:18:07] Steve Selvidge: I can’t

[00:18:08] Emily: know the smaller they’re they’re so small. I

[00:18:11] Steve Selvidge: mean they’re regular stealing

[00:18:14] Emily: or whatever. Yeah. Bits of bodies are so small is what I’ve always heard. I’ve never held one.

[00:18:20] Steve Selvidge: I didn’t find it to be, I’m going to picture it.

[00:18:23] I love, I probably, I’m not, I’m not supposed to show the pictures.

[00:18:27] Emily: That’s kind of the rule. You can, you can text it to me. I won’t, I won’t spread them around. Oh is that the white one? Yellow, yellow. Ooh. Yeah. I like the yellow, the peach. I love the peach one though, man, because I have the times it’s such a great one.

[00:18:43] Okay.

[00:18:44] Steve Selvidge: So I have it. All right. I have a question. I’ve always thought about this. Was he thinking about his color scheme for the tour and the record while he was writing the record?

[00:18:54] Emily: I think so. I think

[00:18:56] Steve Selvidge: she was. Why? Because you got the look right? The color, me peach and black color, me taking it back. So

[00:19:07] Emily: that’s, you know his, his then fiance, his favorite colors were peach and black.

[00:19:13] Yeah. So I know he was thinking about that when he wrote that line, the dress that cat Glover wears on the cover of that record was originally Suzanne Melville lines. So and it was a peach dress. So obviously he’d had this whole vibe definitely set when he, at the very least like started tracking these songs are like tracking the record, you know?

[00:19:37] I think so. Oh man. The times that you can record and just over the, like, somebody talked to me, what to do with you, Andrew?

[00:19:46] Andrew: No, I’m, I’m, I’m fascinated. I hadn’t considered that as a question before. So what’s new with me

[00:19:53] Emily: though.

[00:19:58] What is the, Oh, it’s your green screen? Andrew. Is that a green screen?

[00:20:02] Steve Selvidge: Oh, right.

[00:20:06] Emily: I need to get a good, good picture of this background so I can align it just right. To make it look like you’re like over here

[00:20:13] Andrew: somewhere. Yeah. That’d take, take the picture with your webcam and then five minutes and OBS and you’d be all set. I mean, I really have no excuse for not having had it set up this morning.

[00:20:24] I meant to do it and I decided being relatively on time was more important than showing up with a green screen

[00:20:34] Steve Selvidge: will turn well, I still

[00:20:38] Andrew: had to finish eating. Yeah. You

[00:20:41] Emily: Well, I mean, yeah, you apparently are a very slow eater.

[00:20:47] Andrew: I mean that, that admittedly was a lot more potato than I thought it was, is in terms of ratios.

[00:20:54] Yeah. So I got the green screen, got it from our friend Guan, Ching, who I met

[00:21:04] Emily: the one who knows you as a little little buddy,

[00:21:07] Andrew: the whole, the hold steady show. I don’t want to say a couple of years ago, but year and a half ago now,

[00:21:13] Emily: 2029, eight,

[00:21:16] Steve Selvidge: 2019.

[00:21:18] Andrew: Yeah, like August, September, 2019. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:21:28] So yeah, no, we met him at that show and then a couple of weeks, a couple of weeks after the show, I went to go start my new job.

[00:21:37] Emily: You look, I guess. Yeah.

[00:21:39] Andrew: So he sold it to me on the the, the friend steel. And I set up the other night. I had a little bit of fun with it and yeah, I’ll have to have some fun with it in the future.

[00:21:52] I’m moving. I’m moving all of everything. That’s in this room to another room in the house sometime in April and I might have to set that green screen up behind me more permanently. So we’ll see. I don’t know. I don’t have set plans. It’ll just be fun, endless possibilities.

[00:22:12] Emily: Most possibilities. People always ask me if my background is a green screen.

[00:22:15] So then I have to go and interact with it, like on zoom calls and stuff, interactions,

[00:22:22] Andrew: you know what you should do, you know, Emily, you know, you should do is you should you should take a photo of that background and make it a patron tier to get access to the height so people can use as their zoom background.

[00:22:37] Emily: Should I, should I do, should I make a $2 tier and try to get all those $1 tiers? The $2 tiers. There you go. Double your investment. We’re on patriotic. Please support us at patrion.com/get offset. I’m pretty sure I need to thank some people.

[00:22:52] Andrew: Let’s thank people.

[00:22:54] Emily: Let’s bring some people shout out on the show, eat to do Steven Gridley.

[00:23:00] Thank you.

[00:23:08] Steve Selvidge: Is that Stephen with a pH or a V?

[00:23:10] Emily: I have already marked it complete. I think

[00:23:13] Andrew: I should know this.

[00:23:16] Emily: Matt Williams, $1 a month. Thank you know, Larry du Preez, five Euro a month. Thank you, Phillip Carter. Carter’s Carters from the 40 watt podcast. Thank you, Russell. No last name. Thank you, Joe

[00:23:35] Steve Selvidge: hazy. Definitely Russell Wilson.

[00:23:43] Emily: Oh, man. I would not be as happy with that. I feel like you should be giving me more money. You can afford it, Joe. Hi-C. Thank you, Mike premier, O P R I O R I E priori, and someone whose needs her name is grant app. Is that as you, I sent you a message because you need to Does it invite to our discord server?

[00:24:13] We have a patron only discord server at the $5 a month and above tier. And it’s a lot of fun. And you get to hear me talk about how I cried because I realized I would never, I realized I missed an opportunity to buy a guitar.

[00:24:40] What amp was that through?

[00:24:42] Steve Selvidge: It’s my harmony H four 10 a, which I’ve had it literally since my dad got it possibly before I was born. It’s been like, as, there’s probably like little desiccated kitten turns from when I was, we had kittens as a kid sometime around 1980 600 corrosion of conformity skull on it.

[00:25:04] It’s one of my favorite amps. It’s so good as a it’s a tough Tweed champ killer. Yeah. Awesome. I’ll stand by it. I’m not in the ripper channel right now, but I dunno what it’ll sound like over the

[00:25:20] Andrew: early

[00:25:37] Steve Selvidge: wow.

[00:25:49] Emily: well, yeah, that was great.

[00:25:52] Steve Selvidge: Or

[00:25:52] Emily: whatever.

[00:25:56] Steve Selvidge: Yeah. Again, just thinking I have recorded on tape with that. And it’s just like, it sounds so massive, which is the way was small ants. Anyway, I’m a firm believer of the one speaker phase, lack of phase cancellation.

[00:26:22] Oh, nice. Nice.

[00:26:24] Emily: It’s cute. I like it. Play through it in a while, but when I did play through it, I played through it with a, so it was just announced on the day that this episode drops, this defender, acoustic Sonic jazz mask

[00:26:48] can sponsor

[00:27:05] Steve Selvidge: sponsored content music.

[00:27:07] Emily: I Oh, I, I could. It’s really cool. Cause it has this. Yeah. These multiple voice, little a selector here, they pull up the notes on it. And then a, this tone knob is actually a blend knob between each of the different sounds for each pick up position. So you have the, this row Rosewood Dreadnought, and then you turn it and it has sounds more like a mahogany slope shoulder.

[00:27:35] There’s also a mahogany jumbo sound, all mahogany, small body Rosewood auditorium body sensor pickup. So you can get some percussive stuff in there. Ooh,

[00:27:53] khaki King, maybe dude, if only she’s a genius. And then you just got some electric more electric sounds. Yeah. So

[00:28:06] Steve Selvidge: contemplating what life would be like if I played while I was thinking about building an offset and I’m playing one with the whole study. Oh,

[00:28:18] Emily: I feel like I’ve never seen an offset get like six string onstage with the whole steady

[00:28:25] Steve Selvidge: you did.

[00:28:25] Yeah. Recently 2018, I think.

[00:28:33] Emily: What was it? What’d you play?

[00:28:35] Steve Selvidge: It was like a MRJ I think it was, it, it was in bad need of a setup. Might point me to get ahold of it. Yeah, I, I enjoyed that. I mean, I hadn’t, I was like shouting at my computer and like drinking beer and eating snacks. It was great. I had a lot of fun.

[00:28:59] Shout out to Mike.

[00:29:00] Emily: Mike Adams is the best man. He’s a gym,

[00:29:05] Steve Selvidge: but yeah, I was thinking about getting some Novak wide range guys and I mean, I’ve got two of those Squire maskers. Yeah, but I was thinking about buildings. I dunno. I dunno. I dunno if it would work or not for the whole study, but I could see it working.

[00:29:29] Emily: Yeah.

[00:29:32] Andrew: So Novak’s got the wide range of offenders also been doing wide ranges again.

[00:29:38] Steve Selvidge: Yeah. I’m really just like to build me one, but nobody will call me back.

[00:29:47] Emily: If my guys listening

[00:29:49] Steve Selvidge: I talked to a guy and, but then, I mean, it was also like right when the pandemic was happening, so I don’t

[00:29:54] Emily: know.

[00:29:58] Steve Selvidge: Yeah. That’s right. I still get it. Hello from Lawler. They’re still nice to me.

[00:30:09] Emily: Yeah. You talked to Jimmy, is it Jimmy over there?

[00:30:18] Steve Selvidge: Yes.

[00:30:19] Emily: Yeah, Jimmy Davis. They’re

[00:30:24] Steve Selvidge: really great people over there. Like you, you can feel like the straight up, like home vibes, like, you know,

[00:30:31] Emily: yeah. We were supposed to go do an episode from there and then the pandemic versus snow storm and then the pandemic. Yeah. So that’s been kind of on hold for awhile. Cool.

[00:30:43] Well do we have any sponsors this week?

[00:30:46] Andrew: Andrew speaking of sponsors and pickups another brand that is full of lovely people and also makes great sounds is Lambert tones pickups based out of Yakima, Washington, Curtis is the owner proprietor and overall Hypebeast over there. Not to be confused with Paul David’s now I’m not saying I haven’t now I’m not saying Curtis Lamberton is Paul David’s, but what I am saying is I haven’t seen both of them in the same room and the resemblance is uncanny.

[00:31:15] Just go look it up. Trust me on this. I

[00:31:18] Emily: don’t know. Okay. I’m fine. Not knowing actually. Nevermind. Okay.

[00:31:24] Andrew: I knew it was the may great pickups, also great people and yeah, go check them out.

[00:31:30] Emily: Yeah. Building a Strat and he’s going to put some Lambert tones in it.

[00:31:34] Andrew: I’m building an

[00:31:35] Steve Selvidge: offset strap.

[00:31:37] Emily: Okay.

[00:31:38] Steve Selvidge: Okay. Let’s talk about stress.

[00:31:44] I mean, what, what are we crazy guitar, right? Like how do you feel about strengths? I mean, just like Australia makes trainers in the straight up stretch stretch straight of SSS

[00:31:56] Emily: my strap more than I thought I would. I really do.

[00:32:01] Steve Selvidge: All right, hang on. Yeah. Wait, I’ll, I’ll play the song.

[00:32:10] Yeah. But like, it’s crazy. So I played a strap exclusively for years, right. This one. But like now I don’t and like I’m fascinated by people that can just gig with a strap. Like, that’s all they do. And like, and they’re not playing like SRV bluesy or, or, you know,

[00:32:35] Emily: blues guitar.

[00:32:37] Steve Selvidge: People will just like play the bridge pickup.

[00:32:39] Like, and it, it works for them.

[00:32:42] Emily: Like just the bridge pickup. That’s my least

[00:32:45] Steve Selvidge: favorite. They don’t do it.

[00:32:51] I mean, he’s a massive dude. So maybe that has something to do with it, but like he’ll, he’ll just, and it doesn’t sound like, it sounds great. And it doesn’t sound like he’s doing like Budweiser blues and you know, it’s like, I’m kind of fascinated by people to do that. Like, I love the strap. It’s like, I don’t think you, you can’t find anything.

[00:33:13] That’s more quintessentially mid century American. Like, I mean, it’s a struggle. It is such an important thing. The strata Castro is. You know, the, the shape and the functionality of it. But I’ve tried like going, just to gigs here in town. It was just like, I was sitting in with somebody or whatever, like, you know what, I’m gonna bring a strap.

[00:33:37] And it just says like, it’s, it’s hard, man. I

[00:33:40] Andrew: don’t know. Definitely different. There’s nothing else really sounds like a stretch, I think is so, cause I had a strap for a little while there and I sold it and I just, I can’t get the same sounds out of it out of anything else I’ve got and it’s killing me.

[00:33:57] Steve Selvidge: Yeah.

[00:34:03] super strap. Yeah.

[00:34:07] Emily: I mean,

[00:34:10] Steve Selvidge: that was a, it was a Robert plant song from the eighties.

[00:34:28] yeah. Big log is that song probably just blew out the audio again,

[00:34:38] Emily: lot better.

[00:34:42] Steve Selvidge: But yeah, that’s, you know, I will say that when I was playing a Strat and mostly I spent, I’d say 80% of the time on the neck pickup.

[00:34:54] Emily: Yeah. I liked the next pick I have I have an offset Telecaster and I just have the Lawler royalty in the neck.

[00:35:02] Yeah, because I liked the tele bridge. I don’t really like the tele neck and I like the strap neck, but I don’t like the strap bridge. So, and then it’s like a jazz master shape and I’m about to put like a baritone conversion neck on it. It’s going to be venture of a guitar bass be on it.

[00:35:24] Just the big melting pot. It’s a melt. It’s my melting pot guitar.

[00:35:31] Steve Selvidge: So I’ll put a four way in this Fiesta. Red tele that’s a new thing. Yeah.

[00:35:35] Emily: Yes, yes. How you like it?

[00:35:39] Steve Selvidge: Okay. So the parallel or whatever, there was a series of parallel, but one

[00:35:45] Andrew: is like, it’s the last, I don’t

[00:35:47] Steve Selvidge: know. It’s okay.

[00:35:53] I really liked the specialty neck pickup, but Lawler, especially. I mean, it’s, it’s better than it is different than a normal tele. But anyway,

[00:36:05] what I came to the party for was this out of phase thing.

[00:36:15] yep. I love that Hawk, man. That’s super cool.

[00:36:18] Emily: The first time I installed it, I messaged my friend, Sean from gunshot wiring and I’m like, is this how it’s supposed to sound? He’s like, yo, I’m like, okay. Because I like it. I just wasn’t sure if it was correct.

[00:36:28] Steve Selvidge: It’s all it’s. I mean, it’s weird because these are, you know, single Cole is almost kind of Peter Green.

[00:36:42] Yeah. I feel like there’s some Megan that well.

[00:36:48] Emily: So I think we’ll be there. I think we’ll be there. We’re not going to ask you about the hold steady gigs coming up. Cause I just am. I’m hopeful. I’m hopeful for at least September

[00:37:04] Steve Selvidge: time. Right? Massive nights, Brooklyn bowl,

[00:37:08] Emily: as a people have been saying,

[00:37:11] Steve Selvidge: honestly, I wouldn’t, I’m not going to rule out that not happening either. Well, I

[00:37:19] Andrew: mean, if we do want to look positively at things, it’s not like.

[00:37:26] Emily: I’m so sorry. I’m

[00:37:27] Andrew: not, no, no, don’t be sorry. It’s not like not having gigs have stopped you guys from topping any shirts. So there is that.

[00:37:35] Emily: Yeah. So let’s, let’s, let’s talk about this past year because we had Steve on last year at the beginning, beginning of the pandemic, and it’s been a year of, you know, big highs, massive highs, crushing lows, that kind of thing.

[00:37:50] But yeah. Congratulations. The whole city’s newest album, open door policy, debuted it in the top 10 of the album shirt on billboard. Is that right? Yes.

[00:38:00] Steve Selvidge: Number six. I had absolutely no warning of that. Like literally, like there wasn’t any like, Hey guys, like it’s doing well. We might look to see that, you know, it was like, literally I was on the plane finding New York, which is weird enough in and of itself.

[00:38:17] And it was like some logistical emails are flying back and forth, you know, group email. And I think it was froms just like. Yeah, by the way, this is amazing. And I was like, what is it? Oh my God. I was like, well, is this on like the, you know, the Dooky ass, like, you know, Off brand chart or something, like

[00:38:41] Emily: get the chart with 15 asterisk.

[00:38:43] Yeah.

[00:38:45] Steve Selvidge: Flashes like food fighters, Taylor Swift. It’s like, Jesus,

[00:38:52] Emily: that’s a real chart.

[00:38:54] Steve Selvidge: That’s a new one for me, man. Like that’s, that’s not something I’ve experienced.

[00:39:00] Emily: Yeah. I mean, or do anything nice. Do you get like a flower basket from billboard or anything? An edible arrangement perhaps.

[00:39:10] Steve Selvidge: Yeah.

[00:39:16] Yeah. I mean, people seem to be really stoked about the record has been kind to us for the most part. People either really love it or they’re just like, these guys are getting old and mellow or whatever.

[00:39:30] Emily: Or are they blue?

[00:39:33] Steve Selvidge: Oh yeah. I like the Wiz. Yes, but lots, lots of talk about the woos

[00:39:42] Emily: who is arc divisive,

[00:39:47] controversial. I think, I think most people are like those grow on you, but at first you’re like, what the hell is that?

[00:39:53] Steve Selvidge: Well, you know, look we’ve had, yeah. I mean, look, we, we, we lived at cause it’s just, I don’t know if you saw the sound chart where it’s a scent. Oh yeah.

[00:40:02] Emily: I had no idea. I just, I really thought it was just like process, not

[00:40:06] Steve Selvidge: a single living, being carbon based life form made a Wu sound on that record.

[00:40:13] It’s like a little Casio keyboard. That’s so funny. I mean, there was a lot of debate about them when we did pre-production and it was like, you know, and there’s people dying on Hills and, you know for the losers.

[00:40:30] Emily: Do you want to share your position on the Wiz

[00:40:35] Steve Selvidge: water? You know, like they’re

[00:40:40] Emily: going to be so weird. Live did

[00:40:43] Steve Selvidge: no fronds hooking up. First of all,

[00:40:46] Emily: when the crowd starts wooing.

[00:40:50] Steve Selvidge: Yeah. That’s going to be, you know, there’s a lot of talk about that too. Like there there’s, there’s going to be a lot of not, what’s not cosplay, but what’s it called? There’s a word for it.

[00:41:02] When like people act stuff out. I don’t know. But anyway,

[00:41:08] Emily: when they dress up,

[00:41:10] Steve Selvidge: no, I don’t know. So I don’t want to be it’s something else. Cause plate like is rockabilly like hardcore rockabilly is, is that cost plan?

[00:41:25] Emily: No, but I do think it’s what skin heads turned to after they stopped.

[00:41:29] Steve Selvidge: Yes. I’ve seen it. I literally hit, when I was in the hardcore scene in the eighties, there was a huge warning to kill me and which wouldn’t have been hard because I was tiny and he was part of mash, Memphis area skinheads.

[00:41:44] And and then, you know, I saw him however many

[00:41:49] Andrew: years ago.

[00:41:53] Steve Selvidge: And it was just for certain anything else, but yeah, totally. I mean, like he and his girlfriend looked like fucking, you know, Betty Page and they all had tattoos and, you know but I mean, Hey look,

[00:42:12] Emily: I mean, the bar is in hell, but it’s better. Like, there’s there few, you can go lower bar than skinhead, but it’s like hard.

[00:42:23] Steve Selvidge: What will be lower margin?

[00:42:25] Emily: Just the literal Nazi.

[00:42:26] Steve Selvidge: I think total fascist, like

[00:42:30] Emily: literal Nazis T like any kind of terrorist, skinheads or terrorists. Somebody who

[00:42:37] Steve Selvidge: might want to, I don’t know, break into the Capitol building.

[00:42:41] Emily: I’m losing, we’re losing our skinhead audience today. Andrew. I hope you’re okay with that.

[00:42:46] Steve Selvidge: I’m like, cause

[00:42:47] Andrew: I’m the, I’m the Christian in the audience.

[00:42:51] Emily: No, I’m just saying just cause you’re the quiet one in the crowd right now.

[00:42:55] Andrew: Yes, I I’m the one who’s at risk of being a skinhead here.

[00:42:59] Emily: No, no. I’m saying that the skin had listeners we have are now quitting the podcast.

[00:43:04] Steve Selvidge: Right. I brought it up.

[00:43:08] Emily: That’s fine. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t feel like anti skinheads should be like political, but yeah, that’s

[00:43:13] Andrew: not political and

[00:43:15] Steve Selvidge: Yeah,

[00:43:16] Emily: by Nazi, it’s also not political. Almost every good Indiana Jones movie is political

[00:43:22] Steve Selvidge: God again, with the Indiana Jones, this is like,

[00:43:27] Emily: Oh, last week we did, they just got Harrison Ford on the mind as always,

[00:43:34] Steve Selvidge: Andrew was like, he had a question and y’all just try to call him. It took so long to get through the Indiana Jones thing. And I was just like, Andrew’s question.

[00:43:47] Emily: Andrew’s question.

[00:43:49] Steve Selvidge: I can’t remember. Now.

[00:43:52] Emily: I feel bad.

[00:43:54] Steve Selvidge: I

[00:43:54] Andrew: would try it. I think I remember I started to talk about like what it was like talking about colonialism and whatnot, and then it kind of just went,

[00:44:04] Steve Selvidge: yeah,

[00:44:05] Andrew: I was trying to bring it back to like, but there’s, there’s not colonialism.

[00:44:08] And I, when we’re talking about vintage vendors,

[00:44:12] Steve Selvidge: right. That part of the time I was shouting at the screen

[00:44:25] I definitely agree with Mike that like something like you know, the, the, the gold sparkle or whatever it was Jaguar, like, you know, it doesn’t need to go out and just be demolished on the road or anything. I mean, cause like, is it going to sound that much better than it? It might be a really shitty Jaguar, you know?

[00:44:42] I

[00:44:42] Emily: mean, if it’s in great condition, it’s that old case,

[00:44:46] Steve Selvidge: the reason that’s the sort of the, the. Whatever, not joke, but like, you know, really clean apart, just clean. Cause it didn’t get played was wouldn’t be good. I actually went to the songbirds museum. It was remarkable, but I also, I had to really sit on my hands, not to be a know it all asshole.

[00:45:09] Okay. He’s working vintage guitars and, and I haven’t, you know, a lot to say. And like the one thing, the one thing is like that we’re looking at the Corrina guitars, like the explorers and the flying bees. And he was talking about the story, you know, that, that they made them in the fifties and they were popular and stuff and he was pointing to them and holding them up.

[00:45:30] But the one he was holding was had nylon saddles and nickel hardware and you know reflect or knobs, which is so what happened. What happened was they had some leftover bodies, Explorer bodies, and in the early sixties, they just threw some hard war, like gives, you know, Sally’s get rid of, so they have, they have hardware and, and I couldn’t help it.

[00:46:03] I was just the, the nylon saddles. That’s not fifties. Right. Like trying to like pitch it to them, but, you know, he was doing his tour. I didn’t, I didn’t want to fuck his vibe up for whatever, but anyway. Yeah. I I mean that whole thing, that bike, you know, who deserves to have it and that kind of thing.

[00:46:28] I don’t know. Yeah. You can cut it all kinds of different ways. I mean, you know, are you, this is like, are you being classist or, or what, you know, I mean, I’ve been hearing these stories for decades. Like, are there’s this guy who’s just got a tucked away in a vault. Nobody ever sees it, you know,

[00:46:46] Emily: Yeah. As long as the guitar guitars out there,

[00:46:52] Andrew: I personally deserve to see every single one of them.

[00:46:55] Oh my God. Yeah, because the government doesn’t give me rights. God does.

[00:47:05] Emily: I don’t

[00:47:05] Andrew: know. Sorry. I spent, I saw one too many of those posts this week on social media, but just wanted to scream.

[00:47:14] Emily: Yeah, you have a different soda. I bet your feed looks a lot different than mine.

[00:47:22] Andrew: Yeah, I haven’t did a lot of people. I’ve just instead started to realize that I just needed to spend less time on social media. So I’ve just taken the habit the last couple of weeks of just turning off my phone for hours at a time entirely.

[00:47:39] Emily: Probably good for good mental health decision. There is my guess.

[00:47:43] I

[00:47:43] Steve Selvidge: applaud you

[00:47:43] Andrew: for that. It’s been a lot better actually. Cause it’s it’s so if I, if I really need to check something or like like need to turn on for two factor authentication or whatever, for whatever I’m working on the computer, I can wait a couple minutes for that, but I’m not going to sit there and wait for two, three minutes for my phone to boot up, just to scroll my Facebook feed for, for 30 seconds and move on.

[00:48:05] So

[00:48:06] Steve Selvidge: yeah, I spoke off my phone. I still have it on my iPad. So like, you know, whatever, but I feel like not having it on my phone has been a small step. I

[00:48:18] Andrew: can take it off my phone cause I need it to authenticate for my Fox Cairo social media to manage that.

[00:48:26] Steve Selvidge: Yeah. And she says just communication too. It’s the way some people are going to get choose to get in touch with you.

[00:48:31] You know, I took everything off a while back. And then I had to put it back on for some reason. And I reinstalled Instagram and pulled it up. And there was a DM with an offer for a gig, like a festival gig for me to pay like 2,500 bucks. And I was like, well, shit, I should probably keep this. I mean, like, I, I need for, for my livelihood or whatever, I need to do it

[00:48:58] Emily: unless you can set up auto responders on your personal Facebook message that says, please email me instead.

[00:49:03] Or something like I have to steer people away from like Instagram messages because I’m awful at them. And I just prefer to not communicate like that. But Yeah, you can’t just ignore them because sometimes I’ll log into my Instagram and be like, I have 15 messages and people all want, I should not complain that people want to talk to me, but at the same time I would prefer them to communicate.

[00:49:32] I just, I’m just so sick of having like to check like 15 places to check, to check email, like my five email accounts, like I’ll check Slack. I gotta check Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, DMS. It’s a lot. I love just Steve, just like going through his guitar collection. Wow.

[00:49:51] Steve Selvidge: Yeah. Well, see this, this is me.

[00:49:56] Emily: Tell us about it.

[00:50:01] Steve Selvidge: You should put the link in the description. Do you wanna hear a long story about the K value leader? Yes. Okay. So there’s a piano player named Otis Spann. He played like a lot of like the chest stuffs, like muddy waters, you know, he’s one of my favorite piano players, one of my favorite musicians period.

[00:50:24] He, he did a number of solo recordings. There’s one record that I have is like one of my desert Island records. And it’s all just him singing and playing piano, except for one tune that has a guitar on it. And for decades I’ve been like, I didn’t know who the guitar player was. It’s not credited. And then.

[00:50:45] A while ago, somebody put up on YouTube, this live performance in the mid sixties of Lonnie Johnson and who I was a fan of. And I listened to Lonnie, Johnson’s acoustic playing from like the twenties and thirties, by the way, Lonnie Johnson, like is the seed for so much stuff. Like there’s so much that can be traced directly back to him.

[00:51:07] Like Elvis took so much from a lot of people, but, you know, speaking of colonialism. Yeah, yeah. That’s, that’s a whole thing here, but anyway I never heard his electric playing, so this is from the mid sixties and he’s playing electric. And as soon as I heard that guitar, I was like, that’s the, that’s the guy like, I mean, there’s no mistaking it the tone.

[00:51:33] And like, when I. And the phrasing and everything was like is the tunes called another night to cry and it’s so amazing. It’s so good. So at that point I became obsessed with, he was playing this K value leader, one pickup, they made one, two and three pickups, but this is what he was playing. And you know, unfortunately I don’t sound like Lonnie Johnson when I play it, but

[00:52:01] it’s got this really cool, like hollow sound. Oh, this is an open G sort of

[00:52:18] But yeah, I guess these are called the Zippo pickups.

[00:52:24] Yeah, I suppose

[00:52:31] Emily: I can see them being called Zippo pickups.

[00:52:34] Steve Selvidge: Yeah. Right. So, yep.

[00:52:41] Emily: There was one for 500 bucks on reverb. They tend to sell around like the $300 range. Yeah.

[00:52:47] Steve Selvidge: I wouldn’t pay over 300. I think I got this for retreat change. Some people, you know, they think they’re like some kind of crazy. You know thing, but they’re really, but

[00:53:01] reflectors, they’re probably just rich bankers.

[00:53:16] there’s this, I mean, I guess it’s the pickup, the certain sounds it’s really nasally and I’m convinced that he like really gets like right.

[00:53:31] Was a downstroke. And like, you know, he holds a guitar like this, like parallel to the floor kind of thing. Watch the video, man. He is such a beautiful, beautiful person liking his, his speaking voice and his singing and his playing it’s it’s it’s

[00:53:47] Emily: it’s gorgeous. That’s what I haven’t dug into enough. Some of those old, older players like that.

[00:53:53] It’s it’s, I don’t want to call it a blind spot because it’s like an awareness, but just like digging in and listening and learning is something I would like to make a little bit more time for these days. I’ll make a mix tape. Yes, please. Don’t just don’t do it on Spotify because I don’t have

[00:54:10] Steve Selvidge: Spotify. No, I don’t either.

[00:54:11] I, you know, I have ceremoniously stopped paying for and deleted my Spotify. I’m sure. At corporate they’re freaking out that I deleted Spotify.

[00:54:21] Emily: We should title. It’s not much better.

[00:54:24] Steve Selvidge: And you know, it’s a real, I mean you know, look, I’m not Mr. Giant famous rockstar person, but I was definitely my, my BMI bottom line was very much a misery.

[00:54:38] I mean, it’s just like everybody, you know, but like, I mean, it’s tough, man. So I just, I just like, I mean, I don’t like through the interface and Spotify anyway, I was just like, why am I giving them their money, my money when they’re taking it away from me or whatever.

[00:54:50] Emily: I basically use Spotify to listen to music I bought, but like on the go and stuff, I like it for discovery, but like would prefer to pay for things.

[00:55:06] You

[00:55:06] Steve Selvidge: know, I had so much weird shit that wasn’t ever available commercially like that. Like there was a glorious moment where I had my airport extreme. And the little expresses around the house. And I had, you know, a hard drive with all my music that was in iTunes and like I could it, but then like, you know, I switched computers and I lost all the metadata and because everything was just track one, track, one track, one, et cetera.

[00:55:33] And then but I’ll have it on an iPad and that iPod finally died. But like, you know, I just have always weird recordings of like, you know, my dad, his friends playing on the floor, the local community radio station. It’s like, you can’t, that’s not going to be on Spotify unless I put it out. But in the

[00:55:53] Emily: cloud, in the cloud goes, everything goes into the cloud.

[00:56:04] Oh my God. Which one is that from?

[00:56:11] That’s my favorite Schwarzenegger movie. My favorite part is when Jamie Lee Curtis is doing the strip team and then she falls and you can see Arnold start to get up to help her because that was not in the script. And she just jumps back up. Like that was all I’d love. I will forever love her for that scene.

[00:56:30] Steve Selvidge: She’s very agile person.

[00:56:32] Emily: Yeah. So forever love her for telling me about activity. Yeah.

[00:56:48] Maybe let me Google that.

[00:57:01] Some it might’ve been Like Crohn’s or something too. I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not actually going to click on any of these Google

[00:57:18] to talk. While we just have a little bit more time left. I want to talk about these these live streaming gigs that the whole city did for the Brooklyn bowl, massive nights, and the weekender because of people who don’t know it’s done through a cycle of fans that live and you pay, you get a link, you get to watch the band play in real time, and you can also join a zoom room.

[00:57:44] And if you have your webcam on, so you can have the show on one screen, the zoom on the other screen, and sometimes your video gets featured and you get to see other fans in the zoom room. And then the band sees you live sometimes. Cause you can put up on the screens. What’s that like,

[00:58:02] Steve Selvidge: man? It’s so many things.

[00:58:06] I mean, it felt it’s weird because like for the weekend it was like, we’d done it already. So we sort of knew what to expect. Oh, I don’t want to say it felt normal, but

[00:58:16] Emily: you know, it wasn’t a surprise.

[00:58:18] Steve Selvidge: Yeah. It’s funny. Cause like it can be distracting cause I’m just like flickering image is gonna, you know, get me distracted or whatever.

[00:58:29] And so, you know, I could be just playing along. It’s like, Oh there’s so and so, and then fuck up, like, you know, just like really had to like, just focus on, you know, kind of looking forward. I mean it was sweet. To see everybody, is it the whole study? Like we have a pretty beautiful community and we’re in like, you know, we know people and not just nameless faces or whatever, there’s people that might be kind of gone, you know, sort of lived our lives with to some extent.

[00:59:06] And so it’s just good to see their faces, you know, and emotionally, no human connection from a

[00:59:15] Emily: fan perspective. That’s great too, because obviously we all know each other as

[00:59:19] Steve Selvidge: well. Yeah. I mean, but it’s, it’s all it’s. I just told her about the SQL parts. Absolutely beautiful and totally dystopian. Yeah.

[00:59:29] Yeah. Images and faces moving. It’s like it’s like super blade runner in some respects.

[00:59:36] Emily: And then sometimes there’s like a two turtles doing it.

[00:59:40] Steve Selvidge: Some people say that that was not the bottom turtle.

[00:59:45] Emily: It’s not much better. So it was turtle and turtle sex doll then? Yeah.

[00:59:49] Steve Selvidge: Yeah, exactly. Definitely.

[00:59:59] Emily: Let

[00:59:59] Steve Selvidge: me back up just like to anybody who might have a sex doll that like, I didn’t mean to in furniture, desperate, cause like maybe like ditch or kink and you want to have a sex doll. It’s like, it’s fine.

[01:00:07] Emily: There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s really nothing wrong with that. It just, it was it’s it’s funny when it’s a turtle doing it.

[01:00:13] So one of the, so people would like put their pets on the stream cause Craig put their patch on and some, one of these, a turtle. And then it just like a very, it was like they stuck with this turtle mounting, what appeared to be another turtle. It was another

[01:00:30] Steve Selvidge: trip. I thought it was to live terms,

[01:00:33] Emily: close to turtles.

[01:00:34] And it became like the, the, it was just from the massive nights back in December, it became like the what’s the mascot almost of it. And someone very, and y’all very quickly released a shirt that was two turtles.

[01:00:52] Steve Selvidge: It also happened right towards the very end of the last night, the night three. Well, yeah, I mean, that was the thing too.

[01:01:01] Cause like, you know, you’d be playing like you’d look and you’d see like, cool, cool, cool. And you look at the end of the golden retriever, just like completely asleep

[01:01:12] Andrew: in two seconds. I got to fix the fix the tele for the kiddo

[01:01:18] Emily: television, not guitar, unfortunately. Yeah. So yeah.

[01:01:26] Steve Selvidge: What your experience was.

[01:01:28] Emily: I think it’s really great. I’m very glad that you all did those and were able to, it sounded really good. It looked really good. It was a lot of fun. And I think that within probably the first few minutes of experience, like any, any like doubts I had about whether or not this would be fun or cool or good, like my doubts were gone immediately.

[01:01:52] Yeah. It’s not a show, but I mean, I have also always liked watching music, DVDs and stuff, and that’s just something, I, I dated a guy in college. I was like, Hey, you want to come over and watch, watch something. He’s like, yeah. As long as it’s not like a music thing, I was like, Hmm, I’ll call somebody. Yeah.

[01:02:15] Cool stacks DVD. I really

[01:02:17] Steve Selvidge: wanted to watch, I mean, probably 300,000 times this point. Yeah.

[01:02:24] Emily: For how many people have watched the last waltz, 15,000 times. Right.

[01:02:28] Steve Selvidge: They overdub 15,000 times on the music

[01:02:31] Emily: to do for Austin city limits too. So it’s fine.

[01:02:36] Steve Selvidge: I mean, honestly, there were times where I got very emotional, you know, seeing people and, and, you know, I don’t know.

[01:02:49] And, and also just sort of thinking about. Oh, I was sort of thinking about like, this sounds like really corny and high-minded or whatever, but like there’s a disco ball. And so the lights were on the disco ball and like, you know, yeah. It is beforehand, like, you know, like there’s just all these little dots and I just saw all those little dots has all these people that aren’t there.

[01:03:16] You know what I mean? I got really emotional, you know, but, but then, then there they were, you know

[01:03:27] Emily: I mean, I think I was probably crying within the first 15 minutes of the first show, at least like, and people would post like in the chat cause zoom also had a chat things like I’m not crying, you’re crying.

[01:03:45] I did that one. I did that joke once

[01:03:48] Steve Selvidge: and it’s weird because like, Because I wasn’t looking at an audience and whatever, you know, whether you choose to, you know, how you choose to interact with like, look at somebody or not look at somebody or whatever else. Like, I just, I would look at my bandmates, you know, maybe more so than the show before or whatever, you know, and like just the, the killer parties.

[01:04:22] I mean, the end of the week, it was surreal. I couldn’t help, but just don’t look at Finn. And it was, it was heavy. I mean, it was it’s it was moving and like just, it was a lot of things, you know, like I just put in a every night it was the same thing. It was like, because it’s just, there’s nobody there. I mean y’all are there, but there’s nobody, you know, there’s a physical, you know, it’s, it’s, I don’t have the language for it.

[01:04:53] Well, I mean, there’s

[01:04:54] Andrew: just like a palpable, like something in there, like more than just the people when, when it was the live show, there’s, there’s a palpable connection within the entire room. Just, I don’t know if aura is the right term as on super hippy of me, but

[01:05:12] Emily: yeah,

[01:05:14] Andrew: that’s exactly. You can’t replace that digitally.

[01:05:17] I don’t think no.

[01:05:20] Steve Selvidge: You know, and also, I mean, we’re just fortunate to be able to do it, you know, if we, I mean, if this is all we can do, like, I mean, it’s better than nothing and I just don’t. I mean, I think the fan base allowed it to be as good as it was.

[01:05:38] Emily: Yeah. I mean, like, I, I know Marin Morris did one, like I think around the time you were doing and I’m like, Oh, I would like to see that.

[01:05:45] But I also, like, I don’t know if it would feel the same.

[01:05:48] Steve Selvidge: Yeah. I mean, I that’s what I mean, cause like the community aspect of it, it’s not just like, Oh, here’s, I’m watching the slick show and like, you know, we’re, we’re sending out to you. It’s like, and there’s crowd shots or whatever. It’s like, you know?

[01:06:08] Yeah. There’s, you know, there’s so much more of a coming together. We can get together,

[01:06:17] Andrew: but that’s kind of along the same lines of what a lot of people like take issue with. Like digital church is like you go to, unless you’re just really detached from your church community, like you go to church, you, you sit through the sermon worship service, and you talk to people, you go out to lunch and you’re like, you get to connect with everybody.

[01:06:34] And like a, a healthy church community has to have that aspect. And. I remember when we sat down back in 2019 after the show, and I had just experienced a hold steady show for the first time it was kind of processing. I remember thinking, like, I don’t know if like the right word is to describe it was like, it’s a cult or if it’s a church or if it’s a little bit of both is kind of the thoughts that were going through my head, because there’s just, there’s very much that palpable community that honestly is stronger than a lot of churches I’ve attended regularly.

[01:07:09] Th there’s truly something magical you guys got going on there.

[01:07:13] Steve Selvidge: It’s it’s true. And it’s, it’s it, you know, I mean, we make the music, but like the, the community does so much of the heavy lifting. I feel like it’s, it’s just it’s just a whole, it’s a loop, you know, it’s a, it’s a symbiotic relationship.

[01:07:33] You know, and there’s yeah. It’s, I can’t imagine. What kind of puddle it’s going to be when everybody gets in a room together,

[01:07:45] Emily: you know, Oh, everyone’s going to go so hard and cry so much. So drunk just gets so drunk. And then some people are going to have to get carried out.

[01:07:55] Steve Selvidge: You’re going to be like, you know, halfway through the sentence, just like

[01:08:01] passed out on the ground.

[01:08:06] Emily: We’ll be throwing confetti fly quite right. Cause he’ll just be wedded to go up and straight down.

[01:08:13] Steve Selvidge: I really like, I can remember, you know, like doing hood rat and just like being like, there’s no confetti

[01:08:22] Emily: and now that’s like my, I would li I would listen to that was on my songs on my running playlist. So I would do runs and I just be running and then it would get to that point.

[01:08:31] I would just like. Raise my arms up, like I had.

[01:08:38] Steve Selvidge: Yeah, right. No, no. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I don’t know. We’ll, you know, thorough what we’re doing next, but like in the immediate future, I mean, you know, we talk about some stuff, but I guess just continuing, continuing to do sort of remotely remote promote remotely.

[01:09:04] So, I

[01:09:04] Andrew: mean, there’s a promote promote, but you guys also have a global audience I guess, has there been any discussion about what it would look like to travel to quarantine and then play a show at a country that’s showing that it’s miles ahead of where the U S is at such as like,

[01:09:22] Steve Selvidge: yeah. Australia in 2020.

[01:09:27] I haven’t heard anything. I just think that well, Are Americans allowed in other countries? Any, yeah. I mean like you

[01:09:35] Emily: have to, I think Australia, you just have to quarantine for two whole weeks. So that’s like a law that’s expensive

[01:09:43] Steve Selvidge: viable for us. I mean, like, that’s, that’s a lot of, you know, cause you’re talking about per diem and you know, that, that would, that would be, we wouldn’t make any, nobody would, we would hemorrhage money doing that because I mean, you know, like Australia was going to be like, you know, pretty lean situation anyway, from an overall standpoint.

[01:10:04] So, you know, I mean, from what I’ve seen, you know, everything just keeps getting pushed back. I mean, you know, I don’t know, what’s officially canceled and what’s. You know, I mean, the, the dates just keep changing.

[01:10:18] Emily: Yeah. I know. First is scheduling shows for September announcing shows for September.

[01:10:24] Steve Selvidge: That one hurt man.

[01:10:25] Cause we were going to do the 50th. You know, that’s a special stage, obviously.

[01:10:33] Emily: You might have to tell Andrew, you don’t have to tell me,

[01:10:38] Steve Selvidge: well, they, you know, they film purple rain there. Do you know if I told you my story about like the first time I played first and all that?

[01:10:46] Emily: No. You told us when you saw Prince on the love sexy tour. I think it was

[01:10:50] Steve Selvidge: right. He busted. Yeah.

[01:10:56] Yeah, so it was like 4th of July weekend and you know, I was just, you know, I had just joined the hold steady and so like, I’d never played for his dad before, you know, so, you know, and it was a big day, you know, cause like I was at that point touring of my old highway, they kind of blowing up.

[01:11:14] So like they knew the guys at twin town, twin tone the music store there and it was Sunday and it was July 4th. Like, you know, you couldn’t be more closed as a store. Then on Sunday, July 4th. And the dude opened up the store and I bought like a 50 watt Marshall or the band bought it and I paid it back, but like 50 watt Marshall plexi Hendrix Marshall cab from the, like the slant cab from the Hendrix fucking amazing cab and a white AC 30 hand wired.

[01:11:46] So like I had this amazing, we loud rig. I was so glad to be allowed to play that shit anymore. Like

[01:11:58] Andrew: over the dream’s over man.

[01:12:00] Steve Selvidge: But anyway, I was just running my mouth about being excited about playing first Avenue. I was just to my many Politan friends, you know? And they’re like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was like, God damn, man, it’s gonna be so crazy.

[01:12:13] Like to go down that hallway and like, see all his dressing rooms and their in dressing rooms. I was like, Oh, really? He’s like, yeah, that was all in Los Angeles. I was like,

[01:12:27] Emily: fair enough. Okay.

[01:12:31] So that was, they had the princess parking space or something.

[01:12:37] Steve Selvidge: I didn’t see that.

[01:12:39] Emily: So I don’t know. That’s true, actually. No, that’s not true. That’s not true. They didn’t have that. That was a Paisley park. That picture.

[01:12:47] Yeah, I though, I remember seeing you at the seventh street entry and that was pretty cool. That was very hot

[01:12:55] Steve Selvidge: start contrast to the, the surly Fest gig. That happened.

[01:13:01] Emily: That was so cool. And my friend, my friend just cut in line in the bathroom after he got upstaged. And I was like, Lily just walked right in.

[01:13:13] Steve Selvidge: I had like a, you know, like a leather jacket and a peacoat on top of that. And like, yeah, I remember like, you know, I had a drink on stage. Jackie and like the ice never, it was like, it was the ice was the exact same.

[01:13:33] Emily: If not more, it’s

[01:13:36] Steve Selvidge: more of a slushie by that point.

[01:13:40] Emily: That was a fun weekend for a lot of reasons. Hope we have a lot more of those really soon. Cause I can’t keep living off the fumes of past things like play shows with my band band I’m as I’m, as planned chose to, they might have smaller and less dedicated people. But yeah.

[01:13:59] Steve Selvidge: I mean, look, when I play in town, there’s like, I’m lucky to have 20 people there, but like it’s in a tiny little bar, but I’m missing it.

[01:14:06] I missed that as much. If not more. You know, I’ve played a few gigs here and there. I do this recovery service. We’ve been, you know, forced to kind of keep it going online. And, you know, it’s good to play with the people still, not quite the same, but the church gig is kind of on and off as well. And yeah, you know, and I did some streaming shows like everybody else in the summer.

[01:14:39] Emily: Yeah. We need my band’s trying to do another one of those because you just can’t do them very often. Right. We really have to space them out because it’s the same audience every time.

[01:14:49] Steve Selvidge: Yeah. You know, I, I just I’m really lost, not nerve, but like, I’m really just could not bring myself to do another one. And it was also like I was set to do a third one.

[01:15:01] I mean, they went well enough. I mean, you know, playing by myself on what we, little drum machines and shit, but I was set to do another one. And then like, we just kind of went straight into the. Summer of racial work, you know? And I was like, I didn’t feel like I, I just didn’t want to be like, Hey, what does I’m going to do?

[01:15:22] Like, here’s my Venmo. No,

[01:15:25] Emily: I tell you, we literally, we delayed our album release to November because of everything that was happening.

[01:15:33] Steve Selvidge: I just wonder like how, like how, if things like just full stop, open, back up, like how, if that one person is going to be like, Hey, I’m doing a streaming show. Fuck you.

[01:15:46] Like,

[01:15:50] I mean, what I liked about it was like, cause I did mine on weekdays and you know, I liked the idea of. You could have your iPad open in your kitchen while you’re cooking, you know, and then hooked up your speaker, vice playing. Like that was cool. You know, but I don’t, I don’t know. I just don’t see it continuing.

[01:16:09] Sure.

[01:16:13] Emily: I mean,

[01:16:17] Andrew: continuing to also like just the degree to which it’s been able to take off has been so limited. I think, I mean, one of the reasons I, if we’re being really honest is for the folks that have remained gainfully employed in a remote situation. I mean, we spent so much of our time in meetings, on teams, on zoom, on Google, meet in WebEx BlueJeans, insert conferencing platform here.

[01:16:41] You’re just, you’re staring at, you’re trying the whole way. You’re just staring at people talk. And it can be, I mean, there’s a fatigue that comes with that. And so you don’t want to, you don’t want that to then also be your source of. Yeah. Entertainment of relaxation. It’s cause it’s melding the two in a really kind of uncool way.

[01:17:02] The same way. Like I’ve, I’ve become increasingly very relaxed. Like before the pandemic, we have come in here and sit down and play guitar and like, this is my fun space. Now I’m like, this is my office. This is where I get work done. This is how I feed my family.

[01:17:19] Steve Selvidge: Right.

[01:17:21] Andrew: Like I sit down in this chair now I feel like the sense of like, okay, well I’ve got this presentation on Tuesday.

[01:17:26] I’ve got to prepare for it. Yeah. So in the same sense of like, just how much believed there is, I can’t imagine people wanting to maintain that, that bleed-over

[01:17:38] Steve Selvidge: Yeah. Like am I at work or my weight, like, wow. Yeah. And just literally from a physical standpoint, I mean, it’s just your eyes, your, your eyeballs, you know, it’s like

[01:17:48] Emily: those blue reflect lenses got to get him.

[01:17:50] Yeah.

[01:17:51] Andrew: They’re not prescription, these are blue

[01:17:53] Steve Selvidge: blockers, but

[01:17:54] Andrew: wow. I get headaches at this point. If the amount of time I spend in front of screens

[01:18:02] Steve Selvidge: Yeah, I mean, you know, I, my, my daughters, you know, doing the virtual learning, although I think she’s, she’s going back to in person learning, but yeah, it’s, I dunno anyway, just who knows where we’re going to be at, but

[01:18:20] Andrew: I’m cautiously optimistic.

[01:18:22] I mean, I’m cautiously optimistic that it’s going to be okay. Here sooner rather than later, but I’ve also felt that way more than once. And so I, I definitely feel like I’ve gone through the stages of like fool me once, shame on you fool me twice, shame on me. And then like, if you a few more steps past

[01:18:39] Steve Selvidge: that.

[01:18:40] Yeah. Yeah. He was funny. Cause I was like, you know, all this. Facebook memories shit’s coming up and it’s like, you know, it’s a year, we’re in it here, you know? And I remember you know, we were all talking about loss, gigs and stuff, and I remember somebody commented thinking, like, I think it’s going to be made like, we’ll be back in may.

[01:19:08] Emily: I don’t know. Oh

[01:19:11] Steve Selvidge: I’ll, you know, God I’ll yeah. I might, you know, come on stage with a Walker by the time we get full full steam ahead. But yeah, well, you know,

[01:19:28] Emily: the steel James Brown’s shtick

[01:19:32] Steve Selvidge: with a Cape and everything. Yeah. Your story about that. My dad was a big fan of that routine, so we, yeah. And when I was in the third grade, We had, there was a talent show. Here’s what you got to do. And he explained the whole thing. So I was like, okay. But like, it got a little lost in translation.

[01:19:55] So when it came time for me to do my thing, there was no James Brown music and there was no other people. There was no Cape. I just kind of like made these grunting sounds and like get down.

[01:20:13] It was sort of like

[01:20:24] the audition. That was the audition. I did not make it didn’t make it.

[01:20:35] But you committed.

[01:20:39] Emily: I

[01:20:40] Andrew: respect that.

[01:20:41] Steve Selvidge: I respect God. I remember like, I remember that so well, cause I remember this, this one girl, she was like, she was so sweet. She’s saying, which was really cool. She made, she made the cut. I did not make the cut. But, yeah. So I don’t know. Maybe I’ll revisit

[01:21:04] Emily: that

[01:21:09] Steve Selvidge: propolis James Brown imitation.

[01:21:13] Emily: Amazing on that note. I think it’s about time to, to, to wrap it up. I actually have to be somewhere at 11. Yeah. So it’s everyone else, Steve. Firstly, thanks for joining. What do w where can people find you? Where do you want to promote?

[01:21:32] Steve Selvidge: Yeah. Well now I don’t know. We’ve probably fallen off by this point.

[01:21:36] I feel like I don’t have it. I don’t have a YouTube channel. I don’t have a podcast. I should do that. So I can promote that. I don’t know what my YouTube channel would look like though. Just. Me being scattered, I guess. Yeah. You know, Instagram, Steve salvage, follow me, say, Oh, say hello, you know you know, social media by the whole steady record.

[01:22:04] I am actually just to get this into the last minute revamping my dad’s old label from the seventies Peabody records and I like every other single living musician in the world found myself in the middle of a pandemic project. So with my friend Luther Dickinson and our friend, Paul Taylor.

[01:22:24] So I am going to put that out on Peabody records, hopefully sometime in the summer. I’m not sure that that remains to be determined, but we’ll keep an eye out for it. But look to my social media at, at, at Dawn.

[01:22:49] Well, cool. Just find me, just find me, reach out,

[01:22:54] Emily: find Steve

[01:22:55] Get Offset Episode 126 Featuring Steve Selvidge from The Hold Steady: reach

[01:22:55] Steve Selvidge: out.

[01:22:58] So thanks for having me again.

[01:23:01] Emily: Yeah. Everybody out there. I’m watching. Thanks for watching everybody out there. Listening, Andrew. Thanks for listening. And thanks for understanding until next time. My name is Emily. My name is Andrew that’s. Steve. Bye.