Theme music begins:
“When I was young, my Dad used to say,
‘Son, we’re all going to die one day.
Why don’t you take a little time to do some good along the way …
Take a little time …
(music fades going into chorus.)
Del (low voiceover, speaking intimately into a microphone): Welcome to the Old Rockers Podcast, where a couple of old duffers forget what they are supposed to be talking. I’m Del Watson and this is my partner What’s-his-name. Remind me who you are …
Gregor: And I am Gregor Brewster, and together we are Grendel whose mission is (together with Del) PLAY, LOUD, PLAY FAST, AND GET THE HELL OFF THE STAGE, but not quite yet, because we’ve got a helluva show lined up for you.
Del: Joining us today are Jerusalem Mann, my son, and Greg’s lovely daughter, Samantha Brewster, and I am already aware that I have stepped over the line by referring to Samantha as “lovely.” When am I going to learn?
Gregor: Some dogs are untrainable and need to be taken out back and shot.
Del: Can I have a do-over?
Gregor: It’s our show … why not?
Del: Joining us today are the ruggedly-handsome, toxically masculine, priapic chip-off-the-old block son of mine, Jerusalem “The Second Coming” Mann and Gregor’s butt-ugly, miserable slab of human flesh daughter, Samantha. How’d I do?
(Woman on monitor, forty-ish, with short, dark hair) Samantha: You nailed it.
(Man on separate monitor. He has long dark hair, streaked with grey.) Second-coming of what? is what I want to know?
Gregor: Let’s have you introduce yourselves to our listeners. Sam, let’s start with you.
Samantha: My name is Samantha Brewster. I’m an Adjunct Professor of Law at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York where I live with my wife, Lucy, and nine-year-old daughter, Grace. Jeru?
Jeru: Hey, Sammy, howyadoin’? Good to see ya. I’m Jerusalem Mann. I live in Bodega, CA, and I’m an organic farmer and winemaker. I’m married and have two sons, Liam, 3, and MacRae, 6.
Del: When was the first time you two met?
Samantha: I was seventeen, a junior in high school. Jeru came through Providence with his band, Get the Hook, and you had the giant tour bus that was all tricked out. I thought it was the coolest thing. Except I was too young to get into the club you were playing at.
Jeru: You were so funny with your teeny-bopper friends. Everyone had that deer-in-the-headlights look, even your Dad!
Samantha: Except it was icky because you and all your friends smoked. Ech-h-h!
Jeru: It was different time. I don’t even smoke pot any more. Well, hardly ever.
Del: What happened to your original band, Grendel?
Jeru: It should have been called The Spawn of Grendel. Time happened. There’s a certain age when you want to be just like your Dad, then another time when you want to be anything but like your Dad. After all the excitement of Tried Girls I was in the latter phase.
Del: And, to clarify for our listeners, Tried Girls was a remake of the original Grendel tune I Think I’m in Love that I wrote in my Providence days.
Gregor: … that you wrote, and I refused to play. If you don’t mind me squeezing in a question here … What kind of wine do you make these days, Jeru?
Jeru: We make a variety of fruit wines, but my specialty is blackberry.
Gregor: Why blackberry?
Jeru: It has the complexity and personality of grape, but it’s much closer to wild, so it has an uninhibited quality that you can’t find anywhere else. Also, the berries have to be harvested individually by hand so the care from the harvest finds its way into the finished product.
Del: Spoken like a true marketer. Question for Sam … what do you think of your old man these days?
Samantha: By “these days” are you meaning since moving out from the parental home or since you two have become the darlings of Old Fart America?
Del: (laughs) I would express it slightly differently, but since you’ve become an adult. It’s not lost on my that you’ve become a lawyer.
Samantha: I’m sure there’s some Freudian significance to that, but to answer your question, we’re best buds now, but I also don’t mind saying that the last few years at home were on the chaotic side.
Del: For the benefit of our listeners, would you back up and set the stage for how our lives all intersected?
Samantha: Hm-m-m … that’s a tall order.
Jeru: The proverbial four-beer conversation.
Samantha: We might need another six-pack … here goes. I was about fifteen, and life at home was … like I said, “Chaotic.” My mother was on every board-of-directors and steering committee in the state while my father was having his mid-life crisis. My two brothers were discovering new ways to torture me …
Gregor: In other words … a typical family with teenagers. It’s not like you were the model of stability.
Samantha: True, I’m in the throes of adolescence, trying to figure out my own identity. Like a lot of teenagers at that age, I looked to music to provide answers that I couldn’t articulate for myself. How about you, Jeru?
Jeru: My situation couldn’t have been more different. We lived on a commune in the middle of fucking nowhere. My Dad had gotten me started in music when I was, what?, nine? And so by the time I was fourteen I was in a band with four other guys, plus or minus the occasional girl, and pretty free to focus on music. While the other kids were obsessing on grades and soccer and pimples and clothes, we retreated into our musical cave.
Samantha: Didn’t you resent your Dad at all?
Jeru: Billy … now, Del … isn’t my biological dad, so there was none of that baggage, and he was a guiding hand for the band, but not in a heavy-handed way. That’s why we honored him by taking the name Grendel.
Gregor: Del, you want to chime in on that?
Del: I grew up without a strong father-figure in my life, so I definitely wanted that closeness, but without the baggage.
Samantha: And it never occurred to you that have a band out there calling themselves “Grendel” might not be a good idea?
Del: Don’t forget, we were in the boondocks, and these were still kids. They were a long way from success. And to tell the truth, there was probably a side of me that wanted to be exposed somewhere along the way.
Jeru: Gregor, what was your “mid-life crisis?”
Samantha: I’ll take that one, if you don’t mind. My Dad was the fucking Attorney General of the State of Rhode Island, and rumored to be in line for a shot at the Governorship. That’s a big deal, especially in a small state. That meant that everyone in school knew who I was, which is not a positive when you are fifteen years old, dealing with a weight issue, and having a complexion that is less than Clearasol-perfect. The only thing that really made him smile was talking about the teenage band he was in and his best buddy, the mythical Del.
Del: “The Mythical Del” … I like that! Before we get into the details of how this all played out, we need a word today’s sponsor. You’re going to love this one, Sam!
Gregor: Millions of Veterans have suffered from nerve damage, respiratory illness, or even cancer. If you served in the US Military between 1962 and 1975 in an area where Agent Orange was used in a combat setting you may be entitled to compensation as the result of a class action suit that was settled in 2016 in which plaintiffs were found to eligible for $975 million in compensatory damages. To see about eligibility, contact AgentOrange.gov, that’s AgentOrange.gov. A public service announcement brought to you by Citizens for Public Justice. Del … sounds to me like you may be eligible.
Del: Maybe, but the last thing I am going to do is to open up that can of worms. Plus, I was in a non-combat role for most of my time in Vietnam.
Gregor: But you must have been exposed, and you must have witnessed the damage that that stuff could cause.
Del: Yeah … can we just move on? Have we done our required bit with the Public Service Announcement? Don’t we have another sponsor?
Gregor: Yes, we’ll be hearing about Elder U. a little later in the program.
Del: And aren’t we gigging with them later this year?
Gregor: Yup. We’re going to appearing with a few surprise guest in Bisbee, Arizona at a session where we learn about “The Not-so-Fragile Desert Ecology.” That sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?
Del: Yes, Elder U. has a bunch of great programs. We’ll tell you about some of them later in the show, but now back to our guests. Today we are welcoming my son, a winemaker and great musician from Bodega, California, Jerusalem Mann, and Gregor’s daughter from Ithaca, New York, Samantha Brewster-McCloud. Gregor, start us off.
Gregor: Backstory … the last time I saw Del was right after he had joined the Army and just before he left for basic. We kept in touch all the time he was in Vietnam, but then — just before he was scheduled to be discharged, poof!– he disappeared. We read about his reported death in the Providence Journal, but we kept getting these tantalizing little clues that he may still be among the living. Then, one night Samantha was in her room, supposedly doing her homework while listening to music at the usual 120 decibels. Sam?
Samantha: It was the early days of the Internet and MTV rules the day, but if you really wanted to listen to was new and exciting you could swap mixtapes with your friends, and there were a few websites you could go to to hear new stuff.
Jeru: I can’t remember whether this was before, during, or after Napster, but our bass player was a real tech nerd, and he figured how to get our stuff online at a very early stage. We put up “Tried Girls” and “Just Like I Know” on a site called Recrrdlbl.com and started getting some plays. Then we were contacted by a punk label called Fourplay and they put us on a few more sites. We were still kids. We didn’t know what we were doing but no one else in the record business seemed to, either.
Gregor: and This was as “Grendel,” right.
Jeru: Right. We didn’t change our name to Get the Hook until about two years later when we started touring.
Del: It was right at this time when things were getting heavy on the commune, and I became scared that my time underground was coming to an end. We very quietly made plans to split for Vermont. We wanted Jeru to come, but we knew that the band and music were more important to him than his parents.
Gregor: Meanwhile, in my role as Dad, The Enforcer, I am prowling the hallways of our house in Providence try to make sure that homework assignments weren’t being completely blown off. I hear this music coming from Sammy’s room. It’s loud, it’s thrashing, but I recognized the chords. It was Del’s tune, “I Think I’m in Love.”
Samantha: I remember you busting into my room, demanding “What’s that song? Who’s that band?” You were so-o-o agitated. You were saying “I know that song! Who’s that band?” And I didn’t know, but I knew how to find out, so I just told Dad to not have a heart attack, and I’d find out. It took a few days of asking around, but I eventually found out it was “Tried Girls” by a group called Grendel. I knew that would trip his trigger. You should have seen Mom when I told her.
Jeru: I had zero knowledge of any of this until about two years later.
Gregor: Information was really hard to come by. There was no Wikipedia, no Google. I had great contacts in law enforcement and official channels, but they were useless when it came to the punk or Indie music scene. Eventually I was able to trace the copyright to a “Jerusalem Mann,” and found that he was playing in a band called Get the Hook in the San Francisco Bay Area. I got in touch through their record label.
Jeru: I get a call from our contact at Fourplay saying the lawyer dude from Rhode Island wants to meet me.
Samantha: At this point you knew nothing about your Dad’s past, right?
Jeru: Right. As far as I knew, he was my Dad and he had been with Mom and I since the earliest days I can remember on the commune. I never heard of Del Watson, but I was enough of a commune kid to know that you never talk to cops or lawyers, so I wasn’t about to give up anything to this dude.
Gregor: By this time I was in full-fledged obsessional mode. It was Cassandra who said “Get your ass out there and see what you can find out. I went up to the commune, I talked with last week’s guest, Chief Bucky, and finally I went to this rat-hole punk club where Jeru’s band was playing. I met him about a half-hour before they were set to go on, but it was too loud to hear yourself in the club, so we went outside.
Jeru: Gregor was all friendly and re-assuring that he wasn’t looking to cause trouble, and it’s not that I didn’t believe him. I just couldn’t see anything to be gained from trusting him.
Gregor: It was a dead end, just when I could sense myself getting closer. I flew back to Rhode Island pretty discouraged. I think that’s when I decided I was going to abandon politics. Hang up my shingle and play guitar for fun.
Del: What did you make of all this, Sam?
Samantha: I was going through my own turmoil at the time, figuring out my sexual identity and all that. I remember arguing with him once about “Tried Girls.” ‘You don’t even know what it’s about,’ he said. “It’s about masturbation, and I countered with ‘No, it’s about being comfortable in your own skin and loving yourself.’ You want to weigh in on this Jeru?
Jeru: As we say in California. It’s about “whateva'” (laughs). I think the song was way ahead of its time.
Del: Told you so, Gregor!
Gregor: You’ve just made him more insufferable! I will admit that attitudes have changed pretty dramatically in the last generation, including mine.
Del: I like to think I’m the one who started the Sexual Revolution …
Gregor: See what I mean!
Jeru: I’ve got one for Sam … what do you make of this late-in-life success of our dads?
Samantha: You mean this bolt of lightning that turned them from obscure old duffers into household words? I think it’s a testament to everything that is wrong with this celebrity-obsessed nation, but I’m happy that they have something to do in their dotage. It comes with a price, though.
Jeru: How so?
Samantha: There are incredible demands on their time. That’s just the nature of celebrity in our culture. Plus, there are the usual suspects clamoring for handouts. This is the time of life when they should be kicking back and taking afternoon naps.
Gregor: Gawd! Talk about a toothless old lion …
Del: The worst part for me is the … I guess you’d call it “survivor’s guilt” … the sense that so many others deserved the success that was just handed to us.
Gregor: We’re flukes … lucky flukes, but, nonetheless, flukes, which reminds me. Do you know who are guests are next week?
Del: Remind me.
Gregor: Two of the people most responsible for our flukey, late-in-life, unexpected, and undeserved success, Foster Hughes of the Trinity Square Playhouse and the Artist Formerly Known as Drama Dude.
Del: No shit, the Dude himself. Let’s not forget today’s guests. What’s next on your calendar, Jeru?
Jeru: We displaying at the American Fruit Wine Festival in Santa Barbara, and I will be disappointed if we don’t come home with a medal. Then, you guys are coming out later this spring, right?
Del: We’re doing something at the Burbank Center in Santa Rosa with Bonnie Raitt. I don’t remember the date, but we’ll be there. How about you, Sam?
Samantha: Jeru, by the way, thank you for the gift box you sent for Christmas. This year’s vintage was superb, a medal winner for sure. Next on our docket is school vacation and a trip to Disney World. Grace is a perfect age for Mickey and Donald, even if it makes me sick to be giving money to the Disney Corporation.
Gregor: Fantastic. Thanks for being with us today and talk to you both soon. Don’t leave us. Today on Stories and Tunes we’ll be talking about some tunes written separately when we were lifetimes apart. But, first, we have to thank someone, don’t we Del?
Del: Yes, a big thank “U” to Elder U, where you will Discover Yourself. The Non-Profit Adult Learning Center holds Discovery Adventures on all six continents, twelve months a year. With over 200 educational offerings amidst an environment that is both nurturing and joyful. Surrounded by by fellow voyagers in wisdom, you’ll select a curriculum and setting that suits your life goals whether it is observing penguins in Antarctica or sampling Mezcal at artisan Mexican distilleries … Damn, these sound like fun, Gregor.
Gregor: Whether you fancy nature photography, needlework, or mountaineering you’ll be able to follow your bliss with one of our well-qualified experts, all at a price that’s surprisingly affordable. How do they keep prices so low, Del?
Del: It’s not by cutting back on the quality of the food, that’s for sure, and there’s even free wine and beer with every meal. Elder U keeps prices down, because they’re a non-profit and the venues are not staged at luxury hotels but rather educational facilities during off-session times.
Gregor: So you might have to share a bathroom.
Del: Sometimes, yes. It’s like going back to college, but without the dope smoking and frat parties.
Jeru: But plenty of sex, I bet. I just read that the town with the highest rate of venereal disease in the country is The Villages retirement community in Florida.
Del: Wha-a-a-t? I don’t believe that.
Samantha: I heard the same thing. No one bothers with protection, because no one’s afraid of getting pregnant.
Del: I still don’t believe it. Well, we don’t have to worry, because we’re going there with our wives.
Samantha: Well, bring some condoms just to be on the safe side!
Gregor: Ahem … on that note … returning to our podcast. … Remember, there are no hidden extras at Elder U, just good company, good instructors, and great times. Pick a time and place that are just right for you. Learn more at http://www.elderuniversity.com. You think they’d like us to teach a course at Elder U, Del? Something like “Learn How to Avoid Paying Taxes?”
Del: Or, “1500 rock ‘n roll songs you can play with the same three chords.” Thanks for tuning in to The Old Rockers’ Podcast.
