Introducing So Many Steves, A New Audiobook from Steve Martin and Pushkin

00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey everyone, it's justin Richmond. As a broken record listener, you get to hear from some of the most talented and creative musicians around. But every so often a performer feels just a cut above the rest. They're particularly fascinating, and I include Steve Martin in that category. He's an incredible actor, writer, comedic, performer, musician, and it turns out even has an eye for art. For decades now, Steve Martin has been a pure creative force, and now through Pushkin, Steve has his own original audio book that I'm excited to share an excerpt of with you today. It's called So Many Steves, and it's an exploration of Steve Martin's many creative lives and conversation with his friend and New Yorker writer Adam Gottnick. In this preview, you'll hear Steve Martin and Adam talk about Steve's music career. You'll even get to hear them score their conversation on banjo. Check out the audiobook on pushkin dot Fm for the complete conversations, and in the meantime, enjoy this excerpt of So Many Steves, Chapter five, Music Man, you did a whole record that had one whole musical side right in there. Yeah, but that's a long story. That's because I was out of comedy material, just really out of it. And I was at a roadblock of writing more at that time of the early eighties, and I had these songs that I'd recorded like eight years earlier. Oh really they yeah, And I thought, well, maybe this will work. The record Steve is referencing is called The Steve Martin Brothers and it was released in nineteen eighty one. Yeah, And you know, it's not the smartest thing, because if you're buying a comedy record, you don't want a music record, and if you're buying a music record, you don't want a comedy record. But anyway, so I didn't consider myself a music act. And you know, while I was making movies, I just sort of kept the banjo enough. You kept it in the trailer with you. Yeah, I kept it in the trailer, and I think didn't write any song. Steve is a man of many ambitions, but if one electric current or strand of DNA, depending on your pet metaphor, runs through it all, it's his love of music, in particular his love of the kind of American music we more ignorant folks call bluegrass. I have already learned that the banjo, which I had foolishly imagined as a kind of deliberately camp instrument, was in fact a source of passion and satisfaction to Steve. He loved its tone, the American trail, it left behind, its jangling sound and its Civil War campfire integrity. And yet, as you just heard, at the height of his conventional fame, he had stopped playing the banjo entirely. I want to know why he'd stopped, and how this improbable instrument had made him begin again and drawn him back in and then opened him to an even larger world of music and composition. So around two thousand, Earl Scruggs was doing some kind of anniversary record and he said, would you Struggs, master of the American A great master? Changed the instrument, absolutely changed the instrument. And he said, I'm doing a seventy fifth anniversary album. Would you play Foggy Mountain Breakdown with me? You know, we're getting a lot of celebrities. I said, I said, sure, you know, because I can play Foggy Mountain Breakdown. And remember Steve had performed this very same song with Scrugs earlier in his career. So I go to this recording session and they put it on. They have the track I'm gonna play along with. It was so fast I couldn't believe it. Now I could get it back up to speed, but it took him doing, and I thought, I'm rusty. And so I started getting back into the banjo. That began the second period of my musical life. And so I started writing these songs. But I didn't write songs with lyrics because I didn't know how. I thought, Okay, I can write a banjo song with a melody, but I don't understand how the next melody lays on top of that. So if I'm playing in see, I don't because I don't know music. I don't know what note, I don't know what fits. I don't And then I was talking to Earl Scruggs, or heard him be interviewed one time, and he said, well, he said, I just play the melody, And I thought, oh, my songs have melodies. Why don't I make that the melody and just find lyrics that go along with that, and then subordinate the chords the top line, just pick out the top line, and then I was able to write songs. I don't think I wrote some pretty good ones for the genre. With that inspiration from Earl Scruggs, Steve felt newly empowered with the ability to write the top line for his songs. Soon, Steve's next record came out, his first in decades, and it was all music, no comedy at all. Released in two thousand and nine, it's called The Crow New Songs for the five String Banjo. I was very proud that they were new songs for the five string bander. So we recorded him and John McKellen produced it. And then my agent, a great agent, Mark Guy Gray, said you got to go on the road. I said, I can't go on the road, and he said, now, look, you got to go on the road. So here's the options. You're going to either hire a pickup band, which means every time you go on the road you have to find five new players who to learn all the songs, etc. Which is possible because these players are great. Or you just team up with an existing band because they'll either be all available or not all of it. And I said, well, I only know one band because I had met the Step Canyon Rangers in North Carolina at a party. I thought, wow, they sound great, so I asked them if they wanted a team up walking Away. My best friends all had warned walking Away. Even your mom said you were nuts and made you wear a red cape band a pitch walking away. And then I'm talking to this other friend, Pete Wearing is a banjo player, and he would helped me out quite a bit early on with the negotiating the bluegrass world. And I said, I don't know what to do in the show. I guess would just play the song. He said, no, no, no, it's just you gotta do comedy. I said, I don't have any I don't have any. Well, if you don't do comedy, they're gonna be disappointed. I said, why it's a music show. Why. He says, because they'll be disappointed if they're expecting to do comedy. And I went, oh, I mean, like I should have known that. Yeah, But it worked out because I loved and eventually just loved working out humor for that touring banjo show. This actually happened. I had a book call it was an omnibus of bad poetry. It was a big, thick book. It's called The stuffed out, Yeah it is. That's right, that's right. So I thought, just as a joke, I thought, I'm gonna write some bad poetry. So I wrote some bad poetry about a kid as dad played the banjo, and blah blah blah goes on and on and on and on, you know. And I looked at it and I thought, you know, this is some pretty bad poetry, but it might make a good country song. It actually did. It was called Daddy played the Bad Joe. Daddy played the banjo beneath the ollow tree. It right across the backyard and old town melody. Bad poetry often makes good lyrics. I mean that, absolutely absolutely. Steve was about to meet someone who would become central to his work as a musician, and that was Adie Brickell. Edie Brikell, as you probably know, is a pop and tree star, and latterly she had gotten married to Steve's friend, the great songwriter Paul Simon. One time I was at a dinner party and Edie came up to me and she said, you know, I heard a song you wrote. I think it was Daddy played the Banjo, I think, And she said, it's so kind of knocked me out, would you ever like to write songs together? And I didn't know anything about writing songs together, and I said, well, sure, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we met at Edie's house and I didn't know anything about collaborating at all, and kind of got a few things. But eventually it worked out that I would send the banjo line line, the form and everything, and then she would lyricize it and often change the lyrics so it'd have the two countermelodies. You'd have the banjo countermelody and her melody on top of it. And that's how we started writing them. And she was the exclusive writer of the lyric. You know. I thought we were going to collaborate on lyrics, but she had an insight. Yeah, she was an insight into lyric writing, you know. So that's how that happened. She had a shout by the man on the bank. He was married with the song all of her families that give that child away shot to we race. We went on a tour with Eadie and the Rangers and worked in comedy and it was a big show and it did well, you know, and the traveling Bluegrass Yeah, but in a bus, yeah, and then one day we were just talking and we've said how much we both like musicals. Now Steve loves musicals. We talk about them all the time. West Side Story, the Bernstein Sundheim Classic, Gypsy, the Julie Stein and Son Time Classic, Wherever I wept through the whole thing just from Oh the song, Oh that song, Oh this song. You know it's so sweet. And Meredith Wilson's one of a kind nineteen fifty seven show The Music Man. Did you ever pursue the idea of playing Harold Hill? You know, it was always in the back of my mind. But I have a big problem. I can't sing there were bells on the hill. I don't have that voice. Steve is a true connoisseur of classic musicals, and yet I still don't really understand Oklahoma in what sense the story is so weird, it's insane. Oklahoma, I should say, was the first Rogers and mr Stein show, and it was based on a play called Green Growth the Lilacs. The spirit of Oklahoma is all very Americana, but the play itself has some very weird and strange turns within it. There's a whole sequence where the hero accidentally murders the very misunderstood villain. I mean, when I saw it recently, I really enjoyed it, and I still thought, so they kill him, and I don't know. It takes such a bizarre turn into darkness and then sort of leaves unrecognized the turn that it's taken at the end, and then it ends with okay. But the songs are great. The songs are great. You know. The song out of My Dreams gorgeous, such a gorgeous men, Oh my god. The musical Steve went on to write with Edie Brikell is called Bright Star. It premiered on Broadway in twenty sixteen. Steve wrote what musical theater people call the book, in other words, the play, and he and Edie Brikell wrote the music, while Edie wrote all the lyrics to those songs. You know, the best part of any of these things is the rehearsal. Yeah, and you're hearing your song sung by really good voice. Yes, you know. I was never happier than when we were working on Bright Star. And I'd get on my bicycle in the summer and bike downtown to the rehearsal hall and get to see things brought to life. And that's the thing. You write a song and you're just staring at it and it's like a banjo melody in your stupid little voice, and then you hear somebody who can really you can really do it, it, can really play it, who could kill it? And you go, wow, I can't believe that happen. I mean to our ears. You know, the writers were going genius. You know, we actually based it on a story that Edie discovered, a true story about a baby in a suitcase thrown from a train in a suitcase, and a couple heard the cries walking along the railroad track, found him, took him home and raised him, and he became the boy from the train. So we wrote a song about it. She wrote the lyrics Sarah Jane and the Iron Mountain Baby. It's called the Iron Mountain Sarah Jane being the mother, who was Sarah they from And that's our big closer, And eventually we cut that song everything. Yeah. Well, the problem of course with the song is that it told the story we just told him. Bright Star had only a short run on Broadway, just about three months, but in the years that followed, a national tour gave it a second Vibrant Life. In twenty sixteen, it was nominated for multiple Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and those awards are in line with Steve's successful career as a musician. He really wasn't a comedian, just dabbling with melodies and top lines. He won three Grammys, performed a duet with Paul Simon on SNL, and even wrote a song of his own for Vince Gill and Dolly Parton to sing. Nevertheless, when it came to making Bright Star, I think Steve was, if not exactly repelled, then at least a little stunned by how much coordinated teamwork has to go into the creation of a musical. It's the exact opposite of, for instance, stand up comedy, which is essentially you and at most a microphone and an audience. In a musical, every single time you make a change, two hundred other things and two hundred other people have to change with you, because the second bassoon in the orchestra has to change its note, and the singer has to change her syllables, and on and on and on. A musical is a kind of great ocean liner of a work of art, and I think Steve was in some respects. If not short tempered, then at least stubborn in the face of all of that composite resistance. As a comedian, you want everything to work, everything to work, and so you know, you're patching holes and fixing this, and that's why it's always been on everything. By the way, it's nothing made that wasn't fixed to some degree. But like you said, there's so many moving parts to it. If you want to change a line in a musical, the director will say, legitimately, well, we'll get to it next week, and I say, no, it's just one line. It's just one line. No, yeah, because their focus is somewhere else, or it's authoritarian, and often it means, well, we have to change the music, we have to cut two bars, we have to think a scene as longer though, and it goes on and on and on, and you know, if it was a gigantic, monstrous hit. By the way, it's still being done. It's done a lot, but I'm sure I think differently about it. Yeah, but there's a struggle, a struggle, a struggle, you know, and then nine months later you're closed. Yeah. I hate to say this, Steve, because you'll reject at a bit of a Christmas. Three Amigos would make a very effective musical. They're on it. Oh really yeah yeah. John mullaney has been signed up to write them. Is that right? Three Amigos, of Course is a nineteen eighty six comedy directed by Jonathan Landis. Chevy Chase, Martin Short, and Steve star as actors mistaken for gun slinging heroes in Mexico. I had no idea that, but that was my instant response. Would say, would you like to write it? Said? No way, yeah, because I know what that means. Yeah, it's like three years every night down there with heartbreak. Steve is adamant that he does not want to do another musical. So why I wonder had Steve chosen to write a musical in the first place. Some of it, I suppose, was part of his usual search for the next thing. The news self the musical comedy was a kind of great white whale of American entertainment everyone wants to write or perform in one sooner or later. But it also involved a kind of fascination with a particular line of Americana. That kind of music represents an authenticity that largely escapes us now. Bright Star, the musical that he and Edie Brickell would write together, represented an attempt to summon up some of that authentic American musical energy, and it was part I felt, however, subliminally, of Steve's place in what I always think of as the comedy of American Resistance. You see, I have a unified theory of American comedy in the twentieth century, which is doubtless as flawed is all unified theories of anything always are. But it's one in which two kinds of comedy made themselves felt in the first half of the century and then on through the rest. One was the comedy of invasion, and the other the comedy of resistance. There's the immigrant and yes mostly Jewish comedy of energy, entrepreneurial mischief, Anything Goes anarchy, a comedy of enterprise and noise. The Marx Brothers are obviously supreme here, but it's a vein that runs right up to Phil Silver's Sergeant Bilkos swindling the simpleton officers at the army base. And it's telling that Steve trying to become Bilko never really worked. But in response to that comedy of invasion comes the comedy of an older American resistance to all that immigrant energy and explosion, struggling to hold on to order and decency and gallantry. It's a comedy exemplified by W. C. Fields struggling to sleep on his sleeping por chain. It's a gift while the neighborhood around him explodes refuses to quiet down. The division extends even onto the written humor of the period, with James Thurber the model of the uncomprehending and baffled midwesterner nostalgically watching Civil War values passing, and S. J. Perlman, the cynical navigator and of necessity commercial participant in the endless ocean of American vulgarity. Steve Martin has a place in this story, I think as the model of the modern wasp resistor. It's there everywhere. It's in the double takes he offers at the accented extravagances of the Martin short wedding planner character in the Father of the Bride series. Kick Frank has made of flower and water my first cardd and cost twelve hundred those welcome to the nineties, mister. It's there in the dumb doggedness of his character in La story, who accepts the absurdities of La as a fact to be coped with, not something to be polemical about it. It was a great lunch in Animal Thanks. It's there in the weary, beautiful bafflement he offers us again and again. It's there even in the underlying, cheerful premise of the guy in the white suit, an entertainer who doesn't know that what he's doing no longer quite counts as entertainment. Because I'm a wild and crazy making a bluegrass musical might be a way of, at however unconscious a level, a way of participating in this tradition. It referenced the mystic past to Lost America trains and banjos and steamer trunks another time, not at all in a reactionary manner, but out of deep affection for disappearing sounds and stories, Or at least that's what I chose to think.