[Tape turns on after a few minutes of talking during which John Peck asks permission to continue listening to the Red Sox vs. Yankees game on his headphones, which he does throughout the interview]
John Peck: I guess you should ask questions.
Isabelle Zaugg: Yeah, so, you were telling me about the way that you as a child would watch TV and kind of deconstruct it.
JP: Oh yeah, well, I mean I guess uh, the first thing that happened was trying, you know trying to figure out what I was watching because in the earliest days of tv it could have been any time since the invention of film, they just threw stuff up, whatever they could get for free pretty much. And then, I started getting bored with certain things, and um..but I didn't always have the choice of what to watch because I had siblings, who were younger than I were and they were more easily amused. So, for example I remember loving Westerns when I was really young---and these are, you know, Westerns like you may have never seen, black and white Westerns from the 30's, real formulaic, like B-pictures. And I learned about cutting because they'd always end the same way. There'd be a big fight among the good guys and the bad guys and then the number one bad guy would try to escape on his horse, and then Jean Autrey or Roy Rogers or whoever would chase him. And as the hero chased the villain they would cut back and forth between the two, you know, galloping along, and the cuts would get quicker and quicker and quicker, and I noticed that they were all that way and I realized, "gee, there's a formula here," and then I started looking for other formulas. Because, I mean, after you've seen a certain number of Westerns, five minutes in you realize that the villain is the guy that rents the room in the back of the saloon, you know, there's no mystery.
IZ: Yeah
JP: You know, cause, a lot of the stuff that I watched was made for…well the Westerns were made for a young audience and early films were made for a somewhat less-sophisticated audience. So, it was almost like being sort of an archaeologist, you know, digging up the past.
IZ: Yeah, that's interesting. It reminds me of the way that my dad talks about taking apart machines when he was a kid. He was deconstructing machines, but like…
JP: Oh yeah, yeah, I did that too, but I never thought of the two as being the same. I mean they're analogous certainly, but….
IZ: Yeah
JP: Oh yeah, I love to take things apart and….then you get panicky because you know, you weren't supposed to be messing with it, and [laughs] you have to put it back together.
IZ: It's expensive or something…
JP: Well less so in my day. [smiles]
IZ: Yeah. So you said you had brothers…you said you had siblings?
JP: Yeah, two sisters. One five years younger and one ten years younger. And we lived in Suburbia, which I found extremely boring except for the television part.
IZ: Where? Where was this suburbia?
JP: Uh, Fairfield, the town, in Fairfield County, Connecticut. We lived way above our station, which, you know, I wasn't really aware of, until in high school everybody started disappearing into prep schools.
IZ: I see. So you went to public school throughout, like, middle and high school?
JP: Yeah, my father worked for the public school system. I mean, from time to time they'd threaten to send me to prep school, then I'd buckle down a little, my grades would get better and they wouldn't threaten anymore. But um, I didn't want to go to prep school because, you know, at that age the main purpose of my life was to own an automobile, so I could get around…
IZ: [laughs] Yeah. Did the other kids want to go to prep school?
JP: I don't know. I never asked them. It was, I guess it was expected. I mean we're talking about old money here. You know, I once went to Mystic Seaport Museum, you know where they have that whaling ship, the last wooden whaling ship, called the Charles W. Morgan?
IZ: mm-mm [shakes head no].
JP: Well it's this big, you know, it's this rather nice tourist place where they reconstructed a whaling village, preserved it I guess and moved buildings of the same type there---so they have this honest replica, it's like Starboard's village up in Massachusetts, it's a little whaling village. And we're traipsing around, we go through this little whaling ship, and one---I guess I was in the fourth grade---and one of my classmates announced, "this ship belonged to my great-great-great-great-grandfather," you know, whoa! [shared laugh] Anyway, you know, maybe he was just a shareholder or something, but that's what it was like. You know, these people were uh, very different.
IZ: Huh.
JP: But being a guy it wasn't so bad because, you weren't, you weren't cut off socially because they always needed guys for, you know, T-dances and crap like that. So, if you could dress half decent, and behave, you know, you could uh….you know, your parents would never be accepted, but the kids would be. And, I never set out to go to Brown, I was a science guy, I was going to go to MIT, but a fellow from my high school went here and he said, "no, no, you don't want to go to MIT, you want to go to Brown. It's easier." [laughs under his breath]
IZ: Huh. So, was the suburbia kind of a new thing at that time? Was that a neighborhood that was just being constructed, or…?
JP: No, uh, it was sort of unusual, it was….it was as far from New York you could get before you ran into a real industrial city called Bridgeport. And, before the war two kind of people lived there, farmers and really rich people with estates. And--in this part of town where I lived in…down closer to the water they built subdivisions and all that, but up where we lived there were just little pockets of expansion, but I mean, there were people who had, you know, 40 or 50 acres.
IZ: Wow.
JP: In fact, we had an acre, because that was the minimum that you were allowed to build on, as things got big after the war---after we moved in they changed it to two acres.
IZ: Okay. So there were some old families that were still living there, and then, they kind of cut up [interrupted]
JP: Well, there were old families…yeah, I mean, a lot of old families went back to the Revolution, you know the Revolutionary War, and some of them were rich because someone along the line had made money, or they had land that, you know…. proved extremely valuable, and then there were, you know, just poor farmers, and then there were people who…well, like the Richard Rogers, of Rogers and Hammerstein, the musical, you know, the musical drama composer, he had an estate there. And, you know, the joke was that people who lived in Westport, which is the next town over, didn't have to be to New York until ten o'clock in the morning, for their jobs, because they were the creative types. But the people from Fairfield only had to be in New York four times a year to clip their coupons.
IZ: Uh-huh. What kind of coupons?
JP: Bond coupons.
IZ: Okay.
JP: Bonds…I don't know if they do it anymore, but they have little coupons, which is…attached to the bond, and you cut them and then you turn them in and they pay you your interest.
IZ: Okay, yeah, makes sense. That's like your receipt kind of.
JP: As I remember, the Richard Rogers Estate was just down the road from the Grange, which is, you know, the organization that farmers belong to, although farming wasn't too serious at that point. There was strawberry farms, and some people had horses and stuff like that, but the real farming had pretty much gone away because the real estate had gotten so valuable. So it was weird, and uh, we ended up there because some vice-president of General Electric decided to build his own house of the future and then he got transferred and it was a white elephant, and, you know, my parents were just able to afford it with a GI Loan. It was unfinished, but my father was sort of handy, so…but, like everybody else on our street worked at an advertising agency in New York, and my father worked for the town as a school administrator.
IZ: So did you get your car at some point?
JP: Oh yeah, the minute I could [laughs]. Cause in those days, you know, hot-rodding was a big thing, like, kids would get junk cars and fix them up and make them go, customize them, make them go fast, stuff like that. And you could get a car for nothing in those days, it wasn't as fraught as it is today. So, that was a big step, once I got my car and my parents didn't always know where I was.
IZ: Yeah, mmm. Yeah, I wonder if that's common now, around here. It's common where I'm from, I'm from Colorado and it's still very typical.
JP: Right, but up in Colorado things are pretty far apart.
IZ: Yeah.
JP: I mean, I thought nothing of telling my parents I was over going to my friend's house and then driving up to Cambridge [laughs], and they wouldn't know, you know. Cuz I discovered a store up there that sold older rock-and-roll records. In the early days of rock-and-roll all anybody cared about was the next big thing, but since I was a little bit older I realized that, "gee, there's a history going on here," and in a few urban areas there were starting to sprout up stores that had um…….they'd keep older records in stock and replenish them……well, you know what Do-wop is? You must have heard of that…
IZ: I've heard of it. I couldn't give you a definition.
JP: Well, Do-wop is mostly vocal groups, with not so much instrumentation, and that was one of the earliest mainstays of rock-and-roll. And those were the people who were the first to find changes in rock-and-roll not to their liking, so they kind of got stuck in that rut, and those were the first rock-and-roll records that were collected and were worth money and stuff. And this place opened in New York City late in '59 called Time Square Records, that became the center for record collecting. I mean records had been collected earlier, people were collecting Jazz records from the '20's, but that was like, you know, older people, much older people.
IZ: Is that the record store that you said you discovered? The one at….
JP: No, this…the place I discovered was more mainstream, it was up in Central Square in Cambridge, but they just…that was a sideline, where as the one in New York just specialized, primarily in groups, they didn't even deal with blues much. And it was a magical place, it was located in…..[sigh] the New York Times Building used to have an entrance to the subway on 7th Avenue where you walked down a flight of stairs and then the stairs doubled back on themselves, and there was a shop right on the landing half-way down the stairs, and, I don't know…it was there ever since the building was built. And, you know, I'm sure it had been a hat shop and various things, but, in '59 this guy opened a shop there and it just became legendary. You know, kids, not only from the city but New Jersey, Long Island, Connecticut, Westchester, you know, everybody who was interested in holding on to that older kind of rock-and-roll just sort-of gravitated there.
IZ: So how did you end up attracted to the music and end up visiting….
JP: Well, I had been buying records before rock-and-roll. I bought pop records, you know, Patty Paige, Joanie James, stuff like that. So, I liked rock-and-roll, but uh…I started to realize that the slower the ballad stuff, which is mostly by groups, uh, was more in the tradition of American music, you know, had a little more substance to it, whereas the crazy stuff like Chuck Berry and Little Richard that in many ways was kind of like novelty, although Chuck Berry turned out to have staying power, but a lot of the stuff you never heard of that was like, in the top ten one week, if I played it for you you'd laugh. But at the time it was…see, rock-and-roll was as much about technical improvement in sound and fidelity, sounds that could never be captured on record before could be captured, and also the records themselves…the price of records stayed the same and the rest of the economy inflated, so that, like…well okay, a 78 record, you couldn't give one to a 5-year-old back in the 30's, they'd break it, but a 45, is this light thing with a big hole in the middle, and, you know, it was like a kiddie record, which had existed, there were little 78's made for children made out of plastic. So the whole market, the demographic of the music market went way down in age. And children are fascinated by weird noises, you know, think back, especially when you're really young you make weird noises with your mouth, or you stick a rubber band between your teeth and do like that [gestures towards imaginary rubber band as if plucking a guitar], and there was a lot of that crazy stuff went on at the beginning of rock-and-roll, it was something that could only happen once, ever, although people didn't realize it at the time……… And, you know, I just sort of liked music, because especially as I went on in school it became impractical to watch television while doing my homework, but I was used to having something go on, so, just about that time rock-and-roll came in so I started listening to the radio in my room as opposed to listening to the music my parents listened to.
IZ: This was in high school, or in college?
JP: Junior high.
IZ: In junior high, okay.
JP: Oh yeah. Yeah, when I graduated from junior high in '56 my parents gave me a tape recorder, I mean that's what I wanted, which was a big deal then, and uh, so I could tape the music on the radio, which turned out to be sort of impractical because once you taped it it was where you taped it and you couldn't move it around.
IZ: You couldn't rewind the tape?
JP: Yeah, yeah, but song B would always follow song A, and pretty soon they would grate, and so I learned pretty quick about, you know, putting things next to each other. You know, some tapes I made I couldn't stand to listen to them after a few times and others I could, and so I started realizing that something was going on.
IZ: Yeah, that there were certain things that fit well together?
JP: Yeah, right, right. But it was just a diversion, I wasn't too serious about it. And the reason I wanted the tape recorder, besides taping the radio, was, so many records were coming out it was just way too expensive, so I would just borrow all my friends' records and tape them. And since I was a science guy, I had, you know, sort-of a feeble high-fi setup at the time, I mean I actually had a turntable and an amplifier, you know, it was the early days of that.
IZ: Yeah.
JP: But, you know I never considered that that would be anything but just a hobby, because I liked math and I liked science and, plus if you did good at that people would pat you on the head and say, "nice kid," and they'd leave you alone and you could go off and do whatever you wanted, you know, like drive around, chase girls, and just get into adventures and stuff. [small laugh]
IZ: Yeah. So how did you….how did you end up at Brown, or if you want to go back further than that, what was….
JP: Oh, well, like I said, I was..[clears throat]…uh, they had convinced me that I wanted to be an engineer from the youngest age, I had no idea what it was, and then later I found out it was applied science and I said, "oh yeah, great, that sounds good," and I kind of liked electronics so I said, "oh, I'll be an electrical engineer." And like I said, I was going to go to MIT, but, you know, they insist you apply to a number of schools, and a fellow one year ahead of me who was really a genius in math ended up going to Brown and he convinced me to come here…which was probably a good thing, because the way things worked out. Cuz, I wasn't really a grind in high school, or a nerd, because it came easy to me, so, you know, I had fairly reasonable social life, just short of really getting in trouble. And um, I didn't drink which, you know, a lot of the other kids did, cuz I'm one of those people whose body doesn't assimilate alcohol properly, so if I tried to drink I would just become a hopeless alcoholic.
IZ: Did you figure that out at a young age, or did somebody tell you?
JP: My grandmother did, and she clued me in. [laughs] She gave me a pamphlet from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company which explained the whole thing.
IZ: Wow.
JP: I mean, apparently this syndrome is known as far back as the '20's and '30's, in fact just recently they've discovered the genetic…how to diagnose it from genetics. But, and my parents gave me alcohol from time to time, I just didn't find it enjoyable. So I was the good kid, and I guess I was the designated driver before there was such a thing. And you know, being in a really rich town, I got to go to deb-parties and stuff like that and be the one that could be counted on to get the drunken kid's sports car home in one piece [chuckles].
IZ: Yeah, that might make you an asset to the other kids too.
JP: Yeah, but also I went to work when I was 14 just out of boredom. I got a job washing dishes at a summer camp, once again just to get out of the house.
IZ: Hm. So did you buy your own car?
JP: Well yeah. I mean buying the car was…..no, I guess my parents bought the car for themselves and then I just inherited it, [IZ shuts door]…but it was, I mean, it was an old…let's see, this would have been in '58, '59, it was a 1950 Chevrolet, but it was a convertible so it had a lot of potential, and I, you know, I fussed with it and got it painted metallic blue, you know, it passed [laugh].
IZ: Okay [laugh].
JP: You know, the tough kids considered me "regula" in high school. Cuz by high school, especially what with all the kids from my neighborhood having gone off to prep school, I went way over to another section of town to a huge high school of 1500 students…..which was, you know, pretty much like the real world, whereas before I'd been sort of, you know, isolated, privileged.
IZ: So that changed a lot of the people that you were spending time with, or surrounded by?
JP: Oh yeah, it broadened my horizons. And I mean, you know, before high school everything was uh---even in those days things were pretty, well there was a lot of regimented activities. There was like dancing school, uh, oh geez….boy scouts, you know, that kind of stuff. But, it wasn't every day, and probably three out of five days it was just like very normal, like kids of any economic strata would…you know, you just get together and you'd just play baseball in somebody's yard. I mean, there was no [laughs]…there wasn't organized soccer, in fact, soccer was just something they sometimes tried to make you play in school, there was just, you know, constant baseball except when it was football. And there was woods, you know, we'd be going out in the woods and stuff like that. But your mom didn't drive you everywhere, you had to ride a bicycle, which was tough because it was very hilly where we were…… But I guess what was most different about myself and the other kids was I had extended family up in Maine, very large, and several of them were mercantile, and so I sort of got what business was all about. And, you know, I guess I did a certain amount of that---well, like with the records, I mean, I found out when that place I was telling you about, Times Square Records opened just before I came to Brown, I realized that I could go to places outside of those normal realm of experience for people in New York, like throughout New England, and go to five-and-tens in all these small cities and find records that had been unsold, sent back, and then put out for cheap, you know, and I would go around and buy them and then take them back to New York and trade if they were the right ones.
IZ: That was in high school that you were doing that?
JP: Well I was just starting, you know, like, after high school, and I get…I know, I collected stamps before that. And um…..I had relatives and stuff that used to give me foreign stamps and I used to go out, actually go trade with stamp dealers, so I sort of understood how money worked. Oh yeah, and I worked in a store, a really upscale store in uh, first in Fairfield and then it moved to Westport—it was a toy store for discriminating clientele shall we say—we never turned people away of lower economic status but uh, but the guy who ran the store was real good about explaining how everything worked, not like working at McDonald's—they give you lots of responsibility, so I got to see how business worked close up. And also I, I paid my own way through Brown from money I earned like when I was in high school, you know, I got some money when I was born and things like that, you know, I did everything, I caddied, and all that, so when I got to Brown I had to work. So, first thing I did was sign up to run the bar in my freshman dorm.
IZ: Wow, they had a bar inside the, inside the dorm?
JP: Yeah, well in those days one of the things you went to college for was to learn how to drink. And the old, the upperclassmen taught the underclassmen how to drink, and the whole—it was actually a pretty good system, and the whole thing broke down when in the 70's they lowered the drinking age to 18, and that wiped out that whole culture, and then they raised it back to 21, but the chain had been broken. And there wasn't this, this responsibility of the older students to be responsible. I mean it was all done with a nod and a wink, the university knew it went on but they wouldn't bust you unless you got yourself into trouble.
IZ: So you were the bartender but you didn't drink yourself?
JP: Right. But not only the bartender, I bought the liquor. There was a place up on Federal Hill, this liquor store, the fix was in, and they, you know, you called up and you placed an order and the guy came around with a truck with cases of beer, two bottles of vodka, a bottle of scotch, something like that. And the first couple times the upperclassman who was working his way through Brown who had to live in a freshman dorm—sort of like a camp counselor, you know, showed you the ropes. But you could make a few hundred bucks at a party and that was, you know, a lot of money in those days.
IZ: Yeah.
JP: Especially since, you know, once I got here I realized that most of my clothes weren't good enough [half-laugh]. Things are a lot more casual now, but….well, for example: until just recently there used to be a place called Hill House over on Thayer Street, across from the service entrance to the Ratty.
IZ: Yeah, I know, they're renovating it right now.
JP: Right. Well, you know, the people from the good families, when you came here as a freshman you'd go over there, I don't know, you know, third week after you got to school, and this guy would come over from England and measure your feet, and then in the spring a pair of custom-made shoes would show up.
IZ: [shared chuckle] Uh-huh.
JP: I didn't go that far, but I mean, I had to get myself a decent blue blazer, you know, the kind of clothes that, you know, which I thought were preppy when I was in high school just didn't cut it here.
IZ: [chuckles] That's funny.
JP: [pause] So anyway, so yeah, I struggled through Brown which, you know, I didn't complete my degree requirements in 4 years, which as it turns out hardly anybody did if they were an engineer, cuz engineering was pretty rigorous for a place like Brown--I mean, you know, the other students didn't have a curriculum that rigorous, so there was a lot going on, a lot of parties, this that and the other thing. Um…so I left after 4 years and went down to New York and worked and took a couple of classes at NYU, and then came back here, you know, after a year, let's see I……spring of 64…..so I must have come back in the fall of 65 to re-enroll—and I only needed a few courses but in those days they made you take at least 3 courses, so I had had brushes with computers before and the computer thing was just starting to really happen here—Brown got the very first real main-frame ever made because someone had the foresight to put the chairman of the board of IBM on the board of directors at Brown. And they stole this hot-shot who's still here, Andreas VanDaam, who created the computer science department which had not existed before—before that computers were just, the small, the earlier computers were just toys that the Applied Math department played with. The Applied Math department is this sort of obscure department with just people that deal with insane forms of mathematics [chuckles]. So that, that kind of busted wide open, so I signed up for that and that just overwhelmed me, and I was locked in for another two years, just got sucked along for the ride—it was like, it was the most amazing thing ever, cause everybody, you know, well except for, you know, the professor, everybody else was on the same footing—the graduate students, we all took the same course—the people grading your papers [laughs] took the same course you were taking, it was all brand new. And uh, there were a lot of bright people, and uh, it all occurred to us, you know, "holy shit! This is going to change everything." And we used to get together evenings, and you know, smoke a little grass and just think about, "geez, what's going to happen when computers get hooked up to medicine or this, that, or the other thing," so, we kind of had a leg up on everybody cause we saw the future [pauses and smiles]...although in my case it didn't do me any good because I was uh, I saw too far into the future [laughing] and I became something of a joke over at the computer department.
IZ: Why is that?
JP: Well, because I suggested things that, well nobody understood how rapidly computers were going to develop, and I kept suggesting things, they'd say, "well no, that's way too far in the future." Cause I remember after I graduated, I think it was in 1972, I was uh… saw "Speed Racer," I don't know if you know what that is—it's a cartoon from Japan, it was really minimal, it's that stuff they call manja—anyway, this cartoon was so simple I realized that, "geez, you know, this is not much more complex than what computers were doing with visuals," although they weren't doing it for that reason—they were doing it to solve physics problems that can only be solved visually—Don't ask, you know [shared laugh]! But, so, suddenly a lightbulb went on over my head and I went over to see this professor-guy, Van Daam, who I had sort of kept in touch with, and I said, "listen," I said, "there's going to be this huge future in computer animation," and he looked at me like I was crazy because the machines weren't quite that sophisticated, they didn't have enough memory yet. And also I saw the whole future about how computers could..you could hook computers up to television, and at that point the amount of information that's on a television screen was bigger than the storage of the computer, so basically he said, "oh, not in your lifetime kid." [IZ chuckles] And then like, ten years later, you know, a bunch of guys graduated from the very same computer department and went out and founded Pixar which is the, you know, giant computer animation, one of the big ones out in California.
IZ: Yeah.
JP: So, uh…I just had a history of doing stuff like that, like, jumping ahead too many steps, which was impractical, so they sort of didn't know what to do with me. So uh, but, I could see everything coming in all these various fields—how computers were going to change banking, and, you know, all that kind of stuff. But uh, not that I ever got into it, it just always gave me a slight edge. [pauses] So anyway, that was half the problem, the other half of the problem was uh…..I couldn't get work as an engineer because they had graduated too many engineers cause of the space thing, you know like suddenly….that was probably another reason that I got into Brown was, Sputnik went up, it was 58 I think, you know, the first satellite the Russians sent up, and everybody got really scared in this country---so there was this big campaign, "oh we've got to educate more engineers," and they educated way too many of them [laughs], and uh, by uh….you know, the space program is very front-loaded, so they needed a lot of engineers at first and then it sort of tapered off and there were all these people, you know, qualified that, you know, that there were no jobs for. So that was another reason I got into computers, cause I figured computers—oh, there's going to be a big future in this!—but it turns out that what with one thing and another…I had gotten a bad reputation with the government, uh, and it turned out that when I graduated like in 67, the avant-garde of computers was all controlled by the government, primarily the air force, and there was no way I was ever going to get security clearance, so there was really no way I could get a job, so [chuckles]…there I was with this fabulous education and no hope of getting a job.
IZ: Huh….so then what was the..what was plan B?
JP: Uh…well, stalling around, falling in with um, you know, artist types from RISD who, you know, couldn't do anything either.
IZ: For the same reason, or..?
JP: Well, no, I mean just, you know, they, they, uh…they were people who went to RISD, or they, you know, they were good artists but they weren't interested in going to work for an advertising agency or anything like that, they didn't know what they wanted to do. And, you know, at the time music was hot, so—I never played music but most of my friends did, so, you know, they formed bands and, you know, I would help out and I got into uh….I had always sort of been fascinated by graphic arts although I was terrible in art in school, but…graphic arts sort of intrigued me, I mean I loved looking at cereal packages and, you know, "how do they do that?!" you know, stuff like that, so, uh…I ended up becoming involved and making posters for bands and stuff like that, and..from that, and…some of the artists fooled around with cartoons and like they'd do a cartoon and they wouldn't finish it, so I'd finish it, and before long I'd published sort of a comic book but it was more like a novelty catalogue, because, uh….I fell in with these guys who were not musicians so much as they were, uh…they started out repairing stringed instruments and then they started building them from scratch, and they were, they scoured the area looking for…uh...you know, instruments that people had on their walls that they didn't know, you know, what they were…and uh, haunting junk shops and stuff like that, and I got back into record collecting from doing that, and uh….just, you know, once again, started hanging out with antique dealers, people like that. Also, through RISD connections I met a guy in New York who had graduated from RISD before I came here who had the first…collectible or nostalgia store as opposed to an antique store, I mean he was dealing with stuff from the 30's and 40's as opposed to, you know, early American…..and, you know, I suddenly realized, "oh, this is like record collecting, you just go and find people who have this stuff that don't know what it's worth, and then hustle it down to New York and you can, you know, make, eek out a living." And..I not only eeked out a—I mean, I really did eek out a living, but I also made enough money, I started going to flea markets and stuff like that, and collecting records in earnest this time…and uh….and also through the, through the graphics and, you know, the art community, uh…I found out about underground newspapers that were just starting, and they needed people who could write or people who could do graphics, so I just sort of fell into that, and it was all sort of connected. And then I sort of put some structure to it because I started specializing in certain products—I learned how to silkscreen t-shirts, and uh, so I put out this catalogue of goofy stuff, some of which was real and some of which really wasn't, and then I'd work for underground newspapers and they'd, in exchange they'd put ads in the underground newspapers for my catalogue, cause they never had any money, and so, uh, then people would order stuff from my catalogue, and that's, that was when the whole hippy thing exploded, you know, 1967, the so-called summer of love, and, you know, everybody wanted to get in on this hippy thing, so, suddenly, for the first time in recorded history [half-laughs]grown-ups wanted to wear t-shirts with, you know, stuff on the front. I mean, before that if you were a little kid you might get a t-shirt with bugs bunny or the Lone Ranger on it, but, you know, once you got to be like 12 or something, that was uncool, that was kids' stuff, but, there was this whole, you know, like breakthrough. So I learned how to silkscreen t-shirts and from that I went to doing t-shirts for bands and one of the bands got real famous, and suddenly I had a…a huge business on my hands, but not having taken any business courses I didn't realize when a business expands real fast like that the first thing you do is sell it, take the money and run, so I rode it and it went up and then it went down [half laughs].
IZ: Hmm. So when you were collecting old albums would you listen to them, or like, did you know [interrupted] what was….
JP: Oh not albums, there were not albums, these were 45's.
IZ: Okay.
JP: I mean, albums were very rare, I mean rock-and-roll, I mean there were, there were soundtrack albums…you know, a broadway show, or original cast albums and soundtrack albums, you know, like South Pacific and Oklahoma and stuff like that, and there were Jazz albums, but very few rock-and-roll albums. Uh…only people who had, like, a lot a hits, someone like Chuck Berry who had 4 or 5 hits, or Little Richard who had 4 or 5 hits would have an album. Because it was geared to really young kids, I mean, a 45 was 69 cents, an LP was, list price was $3.98. So, you know, when you're a kid, you know, saving up is hard, so you would just buy one record from your allowance, um…and uh…so 45's were the dominant form of music. I mean, albums didn't really happen until the Beach Boys, and then the Beatles really blew it wide open, and suddenly people wanted albums cause all the songs were good.
IZ: So a 45 means one or two songs?
JP: Yeah, one song on each side.
IZ: Okay.
JP: You never seen one? They're 7 inches and they have a big hole, a 1-inch hole in the middle, and they have their own kind of record-player, uh, which you stacked them up on top and they dropped down one after another. Kind of like a juke-box in a way, cause you could, you could actually sequence, you could play them in any order you wanted, which people didn't really appreciate at the time---I mean now you take it for granted with cd's you can program the order.
IZ: Yeah. Yeah, I don't think I've seen a machine like that, I've seen, we have a normal record machine at my house which...
JP: Right. Does it have a long tall spindle so you could stack up LP's, and they'd drop down?
IZ: Um, it does have a tall spindle I think but I never saw more than…
JP: But it never got, never, never used it…right, right, right, right….well, uh, yeah see…78's used to be made out of shellac, they were breakable and they were 10-inches as opposed to 12-inch, and if you wanted to listen to a concerto or an opera or something like that it would come in a book, which was called an album---that's where the name came from---and it would have sleeves like pages and there would be like 6, 10, whatever, you know, because a 78, since it spun so fast you only got like 4 minutes on a side, so if you wanted to hear an opera you'd stack up 4 records and it would play the first half of the opera and then you'd lift up the pile and flop it over….but they had, they had a small hole just like an LP….and, the 45……um, you know, they were going for a totally new concept because they….I mean, I never really thought about---[tape finishes]
JP: Columbia took the philosophy that, oh…..oh, uh there were such a things as 12-inch 78's….you know, and they played 5 minutes instead of 4 minutes, so anyway, CBS said "well look, let's take this 12-inch record, slow it down to 33 and 1/3 revolutions per minute instead of 78 and we can fit, whatever it is, 25 minutes on a side," okay, and um…they were convinced that was the future of music, and RCA took the exact opposite tack, they said, "well people kind of like records with one song on it, let's just improve that, so…you know, the, the..keep it the same length of time, you know"---they extended it a little bit, it was like 6 minutes, you could buy these things called EP's which had 2 songs on each side, but they said "well, we'll just, we'll only need a little bit of grooves for this and then we'll have this big hole in the middle so that, you know, the machinery can be really crude, it doesn't have to be a fine piece of machinery and the records can be really light, and…" and they went tooth-and-nail for a couple of years and then… it turned out that the public wanted both---you know, older people wanted LP's and kids wanted these 45's which were even smaller than a 78, they were 7-inches, they were really light, they were really cheap, they could be stamped out, you know, they cost the companies that made them nothing….and they could, they could afford to press tens-of-thousands of records on spec…you know, in case the record became popular…so it would be out there, because there were so many competing records that uh, you know, if, if your record got played on the radio and people went to the store, or couldn't get it for a week, they'd forget, and the next week there'd be another popular record…so you had, you had to get it out there.
IZ: Huh, yeah, that makes sense.
JP: Which explains why there were so many unsold records for me to pick up for, you know, ten cents and, you know, five-and-dimes in, you know, backwater cities in New England.
IZ: So you were listening to all the..[interrupted] music?
JP: Oh yeah, everybody was, I mean, there was, there was…in New York there was this guy, Allan Fried, and other people who were playing this new kind of music, and it was like revolutionary. [pause] And it was, a lot of it was black music, which, it started out that there was Rhythm and Blues, which is not a kind of music, it's Rhythm music and Blues music, but it had gotten fairly sophisticated, and… some of it appealed to young white people, so… certain enterprising disc jockeys started playing, you know, figuring out which ones appealed to white kids and playing exclusively that, and then white musicians—and other black musicians, figured out what the direction was and then it became rock-and-roll, I mean, that's an over-simplification, but that's really what happened. And country music kind of slid in there, you know, electric guitars which were already established in country music…..and, you know, people with Jazz backgrounds sort of grocked it, and you know, well like uh…..when RCA got their hands on Elvis Presley they had this very sophisticated guy, Chet Atkins like shape what kind of music he was going to deal with, so uh….you know, it's usual, it was people discovered that something was happening but in a very anarchistic way and they realized how to give it structure. And of course they went too far and, you know, things got kind of um…less exciting---they started manufacturing music specifically for really young children, and….and then the Beatles came along and revitalized it—once again that's, you know, a real over-simplification, but…[pause]
IZ: Yeah, you said earlier that um, that the Do-wop, hmm…..I'm not sure if you were referencing exactly the Do-wop, but that you were attracted particularly to the, some of the slower music that had a more American sound?
JP: [reaches for cookie and chews between words] Well no, no—a more popular sound because a lot of the times the Do-wop groups would sing pop standards, they would just kind of Jazz them up by….singing in weird keys, or two guys singing slightly off-key, but they would compliment each other, and they would not have full-instrumental backing, like the, the background singers would like imitate.. well not really, but they would make, sing nonsense stuff that would fill in where instrument usually would be, and usually the uh, the instrumentation was very sparse, it would be maybe a drum, a piano played in percussive style, maybe a saxophone, maybe not…..but, uh, Do-wop was mostly a--first of all it wasn't called Do-wop until much much later, but it was mostly an urban phenomenon, and uh, popular music was, you know, continuous in the city, so these..they would sing the songs that their parents new or their older siblings new, they would just give them different arrangements, but they were quality songs…. you know, with real lyrics, you know, real chords, and stuff like that, whereas other kinds of rock-and-roll were based on much simpler forms like country music or blues, which, you know, really didn't have much substance musically. But then, you know, enterprising people shmushed them all together—Do-wop was essentially dead by 59 because the elements of Do-wop had been assimilated into other forms, you know, broader forms, stuff that you'd probably even heard of, uh….well, like the Beach Boys—one of the elements of the Beach Boys is Do-wop. If you listen to their albums they do some, like "Why do fools fall in love," songs that were Do-wop songs.
IZ: Uh-huh.
JP: In fact the Beach Boys are a perfect example of like, combination because they were a group of fellows who sang harmony, but they also played guitars, so it was a combination of like Do-wop and Chuck Berry.
IZ: Okay.
JP: And what really made the Beach Boys unique was they were self-motivated whereas most of the earlier combinations were things that, you know, like producers had put together, but they sort of did it on their own—they were pioneers. [pause and rustling of napkin] And, you know, probably the greatest American rock-and-roll group ever, I mean if you look at it, you know, if you try to quantify it. [more rustling] But a lot of this was not apparent at the time….you know, especially their first records were very crude. But I think, I guess it was……..oh…I can't remember anymore, I used to know this stuff when I was a disc jockey...uh, their first really sophisticated record they just took uh, the tune to Chuck Berry's "Sweet Little Sixteen," added their own lyrics, and uh….but they got a sound every bit as full as Chuck Berry's sound even though they didn't have a keyboard, and that was like, you know, "Whoa!" And that was one of the things about listening to rock-and-roll is, you know, a lot of times it would just be the new record of the week, but every couple of months or so there would be something like, "Whoa! That's completely different, that never happened before!" you know?
IZ: Yeah.
JP: And that was, you know, kind of neat growing up in that era. And the grown-ups didn't understand it because……..correctly I would say, they didn't appreciate the main body of work because they were, they were too sophisticated musically, you know, it just sounded, you know, "what is that stuff? That's simple, that's stupid." You know, so, they missed the gems for the, you know, just run-of-the-mill stuff--they just saw it all as, as useless.
IZ: Huh…is there anything now that makes you say like, "whoa, that, that's never happened before"?
JP: Nah. I mean, I had to go…by being a record reviewer I lived through, I…well this is an arbitrary number, but like 7 generations of music and I just got tired. I mean, every, everybody grows up with their own generation's music, and then, you know, some kind of break happens and the whole music business reinvents itself, and it's--you actually have to work at, you know, assimilating the next generation's music. You know, you have to get rid of your sophisticated prejudices and biases and stuff like that to be able to appreciate something that a, you know, a 12-year-old can appreciate. I mean, I didn't get the Beatles right at first, you know, "what is this?" you know? [shared laugh] Especially when they were doing, you know, like Little Richard songs and Chuck Berry songs and they weren't quite as good as the originals but….then, you know, one day I heard one and went "oh yeah, well gee, I guess these guys have something." [sniffs] And uh…but after a while it becomes a strain, I mean it's, you know, being critical is very… difficult because it's hard to lose your self-consciousness, and people like stuff because it hits them, not because they say "oh, I think I like that because it's green and nice and.." you know [chuckles]?
IZ: Uh-huh.
JP: So to be, uh, to be true to yourself as a critic, which all critics should be, is very difficult---you can't help but become self-conscious, and that defeats the whole purpose of it.
IZ: What do you mean self-conscious?
JP: Well you start thinking, you know "do I like this?" which, you know [chuckles] that, you know…so you start saying, "oh well, I think I like this because I liked the guy's previous stuff" or "I think I like this because I like guitar" or something like that, and… you don't let it sneak up on you the way you would if you were just listening to the radio and it's on and all of a sudden something comes on and it really hits you. I mean, first of all you get the record in the mail from the record company, and, in fact you get a pile and you have to decide which ones to play and you have to physically put it on and then you have to go, and then you sit down and listen to it, and it's not the same as just having music in the background which is the way most people experience music.
IZ: M-hm.
JP: I mean I'm talking about recorded music now. I mean live music is something totally other, I mean that all has to do with the real tradition of American music which is dance music, you know people go up..I mean that's what all, all music was, practically, until…I mean native American, you know, I don't mean Native American, but I mean music native to America, there was uh….I mean the first presentational music I guess was minstrel music where people actually sit down—you know, I mean there was opera in New York, you know, imported, and people would give concerts and stuff, but I mean, for the folks, people's idea of dancing was go to some place or uh…and dance or maybe go listen to the band play in a gazebo in the park in the summer, but um……but recorded music only goes back to uh, you know, well there were cylinders at the turn-of-the-century, but it wasn't really till the teens that records really caught on—it's a relatively new phenomenon.
IZ: So, you said that the catalogue business that you were doing, it kind-of went up and then it went down?
JP: No, no, the t-shirt business—I mean the catalogue business was almost a goof. Um, there was this famous company when I was, well…..existed in America called the Johnson and Smith Novelty Company and they sold everything, whoopee cushions…..you know what that is?
IZ: Yeah.
JP: Yeah, okay. You know, goofy stuff that kids like. And so, I put out a catalogue of stuff that I could hustle, stuff that cost me nothing that I could sell for decent price, and I modeled if after that. And, that tradition had sort of a cartoony look, and…since I was actually publishing this, people who wanted to see themselves published, you know, RISD types and so-forth who do cartoons, and it just sort of evolved into an underground comic-book which was what was happening in other parts of the country unbeknownst to me—people were putting out straight underground, you know so-called underground comics, self-published comic books, like "Zap Comicbooks," and stuff like that. And, you know, we heard about each other. So, eventually I put out a whole comic book called "Ghost Mother", I don't know why, I don't know where that name came from. [shared half-laugh] But the t-shirt business was really big compared to everything else, I mean the other things were like roach-clips, pipes, um….I don't remember what all, a few cute nostalgia items, but everybody wanted t-shirts, everybody wanted you to make t-shirts with their design on it, it just exploded. And the only thing that killed it frankly—you've must have heard about the energy crisis of the 70's right, where people couldn't get gasoline and all that shit?
IZ: Yeah, I've heard just a little bit about it.
JP: Well, it wasn't really a crisis of a shortage of gasoline, it was a crisis of the dollar not being worth what it had been, so people didn't want to give us their gasoline until we devalued the dollar so to speak. Well it turns out cotton is a commodity just like oil, and suddenly the price of cotton went sky high, and that destroyed my t-shirt business--suddenly I couldn't get t-shirts. Because when I started you could buy a dozen t-shirts for 8 bucks, and wholesale them, after you silkscreened them you could wholesale them out for 2 and the retailer would sell them for 4—you know, in those days that was a pretty good mark-up. You know, if all you did was—a lot of the shirts were just one color ink on a colored shirt, you know, you just swiped the thing across and it went straight in the dryer and you increased the um…well something you paid, oh geez, whatever 12 into 8 is, 68 cents of something—something cost you 68 cents and you'd do this thing to it and sell it for 2 bucks, wowee!
IZ: Uh-huh.
JP: And people thought you were cool for doing it!
IZ: So was cotton, the price of cotton going up related to the oil?
JP: No, related to the value of the dollar going down—they were both, both things were happening. [chewing cookie] Because, we had…the government initiated sweeping social programs called the Great Society, and we were fighting this war in Vietnam and we were doing it all on credit, so that economics being what it is, it was inevitable that the value of the dollar relative to other currencies would have to fall because we kept borrowing and borrowing against the future, and eventually they had to pay the piper. Economics is, you know, you either get it or you don't—it's fun to know it, but it's really goofy. So anyway, suddenly I just couldn't get t-shirts because the people who made the t-shirts didn't want to make t-shirts until things got straightened out because they didn't want to buy cotton at these exorbitant prices and make t-shirts. So I screwed up—but I had so many other things going on at the same time so that it really didn't make any difference, except that I wasn't going to get rich big time—I mean I had the cash flow but, once I couldn't get t-shirts anymore I just ran out my inventory which I had built up thousands and thousands of dollars worth of t-shirts to be able to fill orders on demand and then I just, you know cut off most of my clients and then lived off the inventory while figuring out what else to do [cracks open soda]. And by that time I was actually doing alright as a record reviewer, not getting paid so much but tons of records came in the mail because suddenly record companies realized that they could sell albums—I mean, first there was the Beatles, then the Rolling Stones, and then everybody put out albums, that became the dominant thing. And there was all this new—it wasn't rock-and-roll anymore, it was rock—there was hard rock and there was acid rock and all this, you know, bullshit. And all these new publications, which, these rock magazines that were outgrowths of the underground newspapers. And I sort of saw that coming—one of the things I did when I worked for underground newspapers was I would write about music and then you'd get yourself on the list of these record companies and they'd send you these free records.
IZ: So who were you writing record reviews for?
JP: Well at first underground newspapers.
IZ: Okay.
JP: Which, the names mean nothing.
IZ: Okay. Were those cartoons or were those just…
JP: No, prose.
IZ: Okay.
JP: There was one called the "East Village Other"….geez, well they were all goofy…but they were all like newer than the "Village Voice"—the "Village Voice" was this newspaper of the avant-garde from the beatnik era, and this was all in the hippy era—like, you know, "Rolling Stone," although I didn't work for them because they were located in San Francisco—I worked for magazines in Boston and New York. And the record companies were just, they loved it! They thought there was a new market, and at first I was sort of tentative about it, like would write reviews and send them to the record companies and try to get on their list, and then one day this, you know, what do you call it, an RV that people live in, pulled up in front of my house and it was this lady and her boyfriend from California, they had sent her, she worked for Capitol Records and they sent her around the country looking for people like me and she not only put me on the Capitol list but she got me on all the West Coast label lists, and suddenly it was off to the races—it wasn't just a pile of records would show up from Columbia every couple of weeks, suddenly it was every day piles of LP's would show up. So I got a post office box to handle it all. And most record reviewers would sell their records that they didn't want, and at first I traded mine at a record store for records that I wanted that I had once owned and lost or never got—then I got really crazed and decided to save them all figuring that someday I'd donate them to a library, which turned out to be a big mistake because libraries just don't want records because um, record companies are so possessive about their copyrights, and won't…libraries loaning out records doesn't really work because records get damaged and stuff like that and it just….. So I ended up with just thousands and thousands of albums which are now sitting in storage and I'm just getting around to selling them all on E-bay now.
IZ: Yeah.
JP: And then from writing reviews, suddenly that became such a cool thing to do that every kid graduating from college wanted to do it, so even though I was an experienced guy they wouldn't pay me more and there was all this competition—every year kids would graduate from college and they would want to be rock reviewers, so I fell upon the strategy of doing it in cartoon style, kind of…fooling around with cartoons I had done, and that gave me an edge and an identity—so they had to hire me because I'd fill up, there'd would be a visual on the page, the rest would be just type you know—I made myself indispensable. I guess that's the thing that I learned early on, it's like, the key to moderate success is in any situation make yourself indispensable. I mean, becoming a rock critic I'm sure is very hard now, but then, when a magazine starts, that's the time to go to work for them.
IZ: Yeah.
JP: Once the magazine exists it's real tough. So, and then from that I became a disc jockey which was about the most famous I ever was—I was on BRU, but this was long after I had graduated—I was on BRU from 72 to 83. And I basically went against the grain, like everybody was saying, "oh, that old music is no good, only the modern stuff is good," and they were throwing away all their Beach Boys albums and stuff, and I realized, "oh no, [chuckle] this is just temporary madness," so I did, I did, I played oldies, but different than the top 40's stations played oldies, I tried to put a little….a little bit of, you know, historical perspective to it. In other words, instead of just letting the audience request the music I tried to lead them a little bit, and it was just the right time and I was successful beyond my wildest dreams—unfortunately you don't get paid at WBRU, but I mean, by 1980 I was voted the number 1 radio personality in the market. And I wasn't even on the air that much, I produced the show and I did tape segments when people would ask for really obscure stuff that they didn't have at the station library which I helped to build up, I would record it at home during the week and then come back and play it as a small featurette on the larger show and created my Dr. Oldie personality and stuff—so I was really only on the air talking for like 7 minutes a week, but…
IZ: Were you doing any cartoon…
JP: Oh, I was doing cartoons at the same time, that's where all my money was coming from. But I learned to my regret that the radio business is just one of the slimiest businesses in the world—it's where people who can't cut it in television go. I don't mean the people, necessarily the personalities, but I mean the people who run radio stations, sell the ads and so-forth, just not very stimulating people. So when it came to the point where I should have syndicated myself and gone national with the show….nnn, it just wasn't worth it.
IZ: Do you have those old shows taped?
JP: Nah.
IZ: Huh, that's too bad.
JP: Well, it was a 3 hour show, and it was every week. Yeah, I taped a few of my segments, but they're around—I found out later a lot of people taped the shows because I played records that had been popular but had fallen through the cracks of the general remembrance so a lot of people who were also sort of into collecting or musicians taped the show a lot of times just for the music, and later on I started running into these people, I mean, so it exists. You know, I'm trying to think of an analogy…….well, are you familiar with the David Letterman Show on TV? Well a lot of stuff goes on on that show, right? And one of the features is the top ten list okay. Well my segment that I created for myself to star in was like the top, was like the high point of the show and the rest of the time it was like taking requests from the audience except I knew from experience that you didn't want to play just what people asked for, so half the show would be what people requested and then the other half would be songs that I thought, "well here's one that they might not be familiar with but kind of goes with what they requested," kind of try to broaden it. And then the stuff I would play would be requests that were either accidental or from, you know, pain-in-the-asses like myself who wanted to hear this weird old record, and we'd have fun with that. Some of the things that I did have been, exist today as general practice—there's this thing called "Forgotten Hits," I mean that's a popular format now, where they don't just play the biggest hits, they play stuff that was minor hits so that if you want to listen to radio all day long you don't keep hearing the same 12 Beatles cuts and 4 Creedence Clearwater cuts and, you know, other stuff like that, but I never really had the, the um……well either the, I never ran into anybody that was aggressive enough to go out and push what I had put together in the business. Also, being in Providence, it's great if you want to experiment and learn but the rest of the world doesn't take Providence very seriously—I mean you have to go to New York or L.A. or Chicago, you know, be really aggressive…show up every day, you know, that sort of stuff.
IZ: Right.
JP: [takes drink] So in many ways I got away with murder because I got to do what I wanted to do without taking economic responsibility for it, I mean….in many ways BRU is sort of a giant playground, especially then I mean now it's become much more serious since they got straddled with a mortgage and then they moved to the place on Benevolent Street. They used to just be on the top floor in Faunce House.
IZ: Okay.
JP: [takes drink] The whole music business became big business. I think they carry a debt now, something like a half-million bucks or something. Well, they had to get real equipment, you know. I mean originally BRU was AM and could only be heard on campus and then they got an FM license in 68 or 69 and that's when FM hadn't really happened yet and they just happened, once again in the right place at the right time. I mean sometimes I—have you ever seen the movie "Zelig," Woody Allen? It's about this guy that shows up at all the important points in history—I sort of feel that I was fortunate, got to just be at the right place at the right time when things were happening—not particularly because I went looking for them, but I did appreciate them when they were happening, you know, "oh yeah, oh gee, this is going someplace!" [takes drink] And after a while I just got so good at faking it financially that I sort of lost any interest in making money except enough to get by on, just what's going to happen next, and then finally I got old and it turned out I was the most responsible member of my family and I inherited money from a maiden aunt and so now I just do volunteer work over at the John Hay Library with their comic book collection. [takes drink] And I guess my one claim to fame among the community is I did that thing called the Providence Poster, which, well it used to keep me in cigarettes before the price of cigarettes went up so high. So yeah, I don't know really what this has to do with the avant-garde in the sense that, except that I guess I was on the cutting edge of change, but I soon discovered that the more things change the more they stay the same, like that whole hippy movement which is hard to get away from being of that era, those people weren't so much going forward as going backward, into tribalism and getting in touch with things that had sort of been winnowed out of our society in the name of efficiency and sanitariness [chuckle] and all that kind of stuff. It was, you know, a lot of things were misunderstood, and even a lot of the art art was kind of retrogressive, I mean, well like Andy Warhold, "pop art" right? Well that seemed very cutting-edge except the Campbell's soup can was very old graphic design, they'd been making that soup can for god-know's, 30, 40, 50 years with hardly any change, you know? So there's a real contradiction there. And, you know, the music going—Blues has always influenced popular music, especially in this country, but all that music—the British invasion, and the American answer to it, was really heavily Blues-based which is going back to a musical form that's only fully realized a hundred-so years ago.
IZ: So at the time that…that those things were coming about did you not think of them not really as new? Would you have described them in the same way as you do now at that time?
JP: Not so much because I don't think people would have been receptive, but I was kind of aware of it. Once again, from watching TV and having seen….well, this is an example that doesn't really fit the time-frame, but it's a good example….when I was a kid, when those Busby Berkeley movies, like "42nd Street," "Golddiggers" of 1931, 35? Do you know what I'm talking about, you know, the giant tap-dancing numbers, hundreds of dancing men and women on staircases—you must have seen at least photos?
IZ: Yeah.
JP: Well, there was one guy named Busby Berkeley who was really good at choreographing and filming this stuff, and my mother liked it so when they'd show these movies she'd let me stay up late—and this is when I was fairly young and we'd watch them together, and seeing those movies made me anticipate what music videos were going to be because he discovered the secret: you cut the film in time to the music, not make the music fit the…you know. So I was always seeing stuff from the past that had been developed as far as it could be and then couldn't go no further, but when technology or demographics changed the answer was already there if somebody just had the industriousness to go back and look for it. It was just like in science, um…I'm a little weak on the history of science but….I guess it was in the 1700's, yeah it must have been in the 1700's—okay, in the 1600's Newton invented calculus which was like this giant breakthrough and then suddenly people realize wooo there's prestige in inventing new kinds of mathematics! So people, it was just this big fad for like a 150 years, people inventing new kinds of mathematics for which there was often no use. But as practical science advanced people said, "geez, we've got this problem, how do we solve it?" and some guy said, "oh yeah, you know, I studied this weird kind of mathematics that some guy in Minsk invented in 1782." "Hey, it works!" "Oh, yeah, great!" So often the abstract people or just the futsers invent stuff which either has no use or limited practical use, but you never know, and that's really how society advances is lots of little connections like that. Even in these days of corporate giants, still a lot of that goes on. [takes drink] The corporations try to make it happen inside themselves, that's why they have what they call "Research and Development Divisions," but it still happens on the outside. I mean, IBM never thought that people would want personal computers. It took some crazy dope-smokers to say, "geez, what a pain it is to always have to go over here, I bet we could design our own little computers!"
IZ: Yeah [laughs]. The important element of laziness is…
JP: And also those IBM typewriters were getting pretty smart, I mean they were almost getting to be word-processors. I don't know if you ever heard of the Selectric which had a ball instead of things that came up, and then things got a little heavier and you could…you'd type it in and it wouldn't type until you finished a line in case you wanted to make a correction, I forget what you call those—that's what we used to set the magazine, with that kind of a machine. So the idea….for all practical purposes it was almost as good as a computer for word-processing. I mean, you couldn't see the stuff on the screen and you couldn't move it around, but as you typed it you could tape it on this little tape unit on the side and you could reproduce it and make changes, you just couldn't see it visually. But, you know, [laughs] it's one of the biggest jokes of the second half of the 20th century that IBM couldn't see that everybody would want to have their own little computer. And Bill Gates is as rich as god, the guys from Apple aren't doing too bad either. [chuckles]
IZ: Yeah.
JP: So it's a…..and you know the uh… all those little cars like I drive, Toyotas and all that stuff, I mean that's an idea that went back to World War II and American industry didn't get it. I mean the Japanese flew a plane when they fought us in World War II that was philosophically the engine was just the opposite of our engines, and Detroit said, "who wants that?" And it wasn't until the price of gasoline got up high people decided that they wanted cars more efficient that they went and rediscovered this. And it wasn't even…Detroit still didn't get it—they had to have the Japanese come in and sell their cars here and then design cars to be sold here and set up factories for them and everything. It's a goofy world. [takes drink] But it's easy for me to talk because I think the last time I had a real job was 1969 that I ever had to go to every day, and if you don't have to go to work everyday—you know the old metaphor, "you can't see the forest for the trees?" –if you don't have a regular job you can sort of see these things happening. If you can just, when you're starting out if you can just figure out how to survive, once you see how things are going you can just sort of make a little money here and there on the side when you see things happening you say, "oh, this would be a good year to open a gelato place!" or to loan someone money to open a gelato place, you know! [shared laugh] Just make sure you get out before there's too many gelato places [laughs].
IZ: Uh-huh.
JP: And in many ways that's what they teach you at Brown—it's very bizarre considering it doesn't have a business school. But they've always, Brown was always very good at allowing people to go into business for themselves….I mean even in an academic sense, if you…even in my day when, if you went to a professor with a good line of BS and say "I want to do this," and they thought you were really going to do it, they'd let you do it. You don't get that so much other places. [takes drink] So I'm glad I went here [half-laughs].
IZ: What do you do with the comic books in the Hay?
JP: Well, well….this guy who was also in the computer business made himself a really a lot of money and he achieved his boyhood ambition, I guess, of buying every comic book that came out over a period of years, and then he got married and his wife said, "get them the fuck out of here." So first he donated them to this museum that folded that was specifically for…so Brown grabbed it and they sort of got in over their heads, I mean 80,000 comic books is a lot of comic books, they're still not catalogued properly—in fact they're only finishing [tape finishs]
JP: Yeah okay, so they got 80,000 comic books and they really didn't know what they were doing, and I got brought in because they needed them appraised because the guy, you know, wanted to get his tax credit. And I noticed that it was just like with rock-and-roll, comics had gone from comic books for kids, and then people introduced underground comics which were only limitedly successful, but then the next generation of people started all these independent comic book companies to compete with Marvel and DC which were the two big companies, and it was—this always happens in popular culture, I mean, people who produce popular culture—it goes from like a small bunch of very big companies and then it becomes sort of moribund because they kind of only talk to each other and lose track of what's going on on the outside, and then suddenly lots of little independent guys realize they can make in-rows by doing what the big companies aren't doing, and suddenly there's an explosion of little independent companies and then the big companies figure out what's going on and they imitate, they try to imitate the little companies or buy up the little companies, and then it all gets concentrated again and it just ebbs and flows like that. And this guy just happened to buy all the comic books during this period when the independent publishers flourished, and so that really attracted me, and I encouraged them that by concentrating on that they'd have a unique collection. Because there's no way they can compete with established collections that go back further, like for example Michigan State where they have all the way back to Superman 1 which are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. So it's sort of a speculative deal, but, I mean the whole library business has changed to the extent that with the internet and interlibrary loan every library doesn't have to have the same core of stuff, libraries can specialize, like this library can be the world's greatest library for such and such because that library can be accessed from any place in the world now, so it really pays for libraries to specialize. And, as I said, I noticed this pattern of independent producers of popular culture, so whoever nails that down, any specific one of us, kind of wins, so, you know, I'm trying to help them along in that direction. And, you know, the Hay's a funny place, I mean they're really really rich because they have just really tons of valuable stuff, but they don't really have much money to operate with. So the trick is to try to make any of the collections pay for themselves by attracting patrons who endow the library specifically as opposed to giving money to the university—that's the big time game when you get to be my age. Because, not being part of the rich crowd at Brown, there's no place for me to going around asking rich alumni to give to Brown, I have to figure out a way for Brown to attract money not from the normal places, which would be the alumni.
IZ: So is that, is that your main motivation to be working there, is to attract money to Brown, or…?
JP: No, that's the ultimate, you know, what I hope to do—that's how the library business works. No, it's just the idea of trying to give shape to this huge massive lump of comics. And also filling in the holes, where the guy missed something or small areas—I mean this guy was primarily attracted to all the super heroes which is to me mundane because that's mainstream. But he also, because he got one of everything he also picked up the independents which many were imitations of super heroes but they also went off in other directions. And also I'm very interested in comic books that were non-fiction or instructional, there's religious comic books. It's an under-appreciated form—it has a very bad reputation among educators, comic books, and yet especially among males it's a real……….they make boys want to read….a lot of, a lot of boys, that was….they weren't interested in reading books but they wanted to learn how to read comic books, so, you know it's…..it's hard to know exactly what place they're going to hold in our society. Right now the weirdest thing is comic books are extremely influential in the film business and the reason is very simple: a comic book that some guy puts out costs at most a couple thousand dollars to produce because the guy is doing it himself—to get to that stage in the development of a motion picture would be hundreds of thousands of dollars, it's called the story-board stage—first some guy makes a proposal, then a treatment, then a script, then a story-board. So the film industry, you know, "oh, look at all these people churning out these comic books, maybe we can make one into a film and it's a real bargain." But that's just a fluky thing, but right now—I don't keep track because I don't go to movies anymore—but seven, eight, ten movies a year come right straight out of comics and it's….where as a lot of people I guess used to dream of writing a screen-play, a lot of people now, young-people, think in terms of a comic book is closer to the realization of a film without having to take the next step to get involved in the collaborative effort, I mean cuz you can control—or maybe one guy writes it and another draws it, but it's still a very small collaborative unit.
IZ: Who, who were the other people you were working on your comics with?
JP: Uh, mostly just me. At very first, oh, let's see……well there was this one guy who was, just one of those guys, and he taught me most of what I knew, and I crossed paths with people like there was a guy named Justin Greene who became a relatively famous underground comic—cartoonist, he went to RISD, Marty Mull fooled around with art but now he's primarily an actor. I'm trying to think..have you ever seen Roseanne—oh you didn't watch television, Roseanne?
IZ: I've seen it, yeah.
JP: He played the gay guy towards the end of the show.
IZ: Yeah, I don't know.
JP: He's become a—he's a very popular character actor, and sometimes he still does art, he was a painter at RISD. And I have a friend who's a much more serious record-collector than I, and I go to him for hard research, sometimes I'd give him a by-line. I worked for various people at various times, but I was always the producer. I mean there's one period in there you can see when, they're called "Flash-Burn Funnies," when I was working with a young lady who saw what I was trying to do and she went to RISD and she was able to formalize the whole thing—because I don't draw anything, everything was like swiped, like what you would do on a computer now except I did it with pen and ink and tracing paper. And she sort of formalized the process and then she went off and became an art director for various magazines in New York, but she got me to the point where I could do it myself. And then from there on I mostly just collaborated with people who their input was the writing end. With the exception of, the one contrary example is a thing called "Donna's Diner" where I kept getting grief from editors saying, "well your cartoons aren't funny," and I never thought of them as necessarily being funny, I thought of them as like political cartoons only about, instead of commenting on politics, commenting on culture, but people see cartoons and think they gotta be funny. So I said I was gonna take, force myself to take a self-study graduate course in "funny." So I teamed up with a guy who was the "funny" type of cartoonist and he drew them and I wrote them and I would write structured scripts and I did that for a couple of years. And I guess that's when I really got serious about it—I got these two humongous books called "The Rationale of the Dirty Joke," by Gershain Legman, he was a disciple of Fiedler's—this is new criticism from the 30's and 40's stuff. Anyway, this guy catalogued every dirty joke ever, ever told, and it was a good way to study because clean jokes have the same mechanism as dirty jokes, and…but this guy was really serious—he figured out where the joke came from, gave a Freudian analysis of the joke, gave its number in the Joe Miller joke book—it turned out that some guy named Joe Miller wrote down all the jokes in England during the Renaissance when music hall first—and sometimes you'd even…and he gave them all numbers. So I just ploughed through that and studied structure and collected jokes and figured out how to string jokes along, and at the time I fancied that I might get up off my ass and go to work doing sit-coms, but I never got that desperate [laughs], didn't need money that bad, and there was always something. Well, I mean for example, one of the ways I supported myself was for many years is I'd get up at 9 o'clock Tuesdays through Fridays, or I'd be on the road at 9 o'clock, and I'd go down to the Salvation Army on Pitman Street, and that was back before everybody was hip to it, and I'd see all the stuff they'd bring in, and there'd be stuff I could sell here or there—like I say, I'd take stuff down to New York… and that was more exciting than going to work, well cuz for one thing it's over after an hour, it's like, "well, I done done it, it's play time!" You never knew what you might find, every day was a new day, "what the hell is this, oh!" Gee, so….but that's the other good thing about Brown is, when I found that I wanted to learn something they taught me how, and there was always somebody I could go and ask about—I mean I don't know where I found out about these books, "Rationale of the Dirty Joke," but I mean, it obviously was the right thing to do because now if somebody held a gun to my head I could write for a sitcom. Because once I figured out how to structure a four-panel cartoon, watching sitcoms now I could deconstruct them, I could see how they were doing it, I could see stuff coming, stuff like that. So…so anyway, that was the one time that I didn't draw, I wasn't responsible for the visuals, I would just write a script, 4 boxes with the dialogue and maybe a little stage-direction. It was kind of interesting to see it from the other side—the other guy would get to interpret and add comedic visual flourishes. It's what's known in the cartoon trade as the Bigfoot, I mean it was popular before super heroes in the 30's—they call it that because the characters often had big feet. And the people look cartoony, they don't look realistic.
IZ: Right.
JP: These ones here. Here's an example [pointing at Mad Peck Anthology], here's just four gags, but put together in a sequence so that each one tops the previous one and yet it leads to a dramatic line of action. And you know, it's a skill just like anything else, but if you don't…it's one that you don't appreciate until you put yourself in the position of how would I do it. Like if somebody said to you, "you know I want you to sit down and write a sitcom episode," you'd probably be at a loss, like, "how do they do that?"
IZ: Yeah.
JP: But, you know, going to a good school like Brown they teach you, "well, read a book, chances are you'll figure it out!" So I don't know if any of this helps you with the avant-garde, but…..are there any other, any questions—you've just got me talking here.
IZ: Yeah, um….were you reading comic books, like other people's comics during [interrupted]
JP: Well I read them as a kid, and in the 60's when Marvel comics came along it was…well Marvel and some other stuff where they tried to capture an older audience, I found that amusing briefly, although it was aimed at older readership than previous but I was older than that so it didn't hold my interest very long. And um…..also, just like with music I became sort of fascinated by the origins of comics and did what I could to get older comics or find what little had been written about the history of comics. And in fact I teamed up with this fellow from Brown who was the class behind me and we wrote, depending on how you figure it, the second or third book about the history of comic books because it was just starting—because of Marvel and the interest of older readership, suddenly it was perceived as something not just for little kids anymore, and suddenly everybody realized that, "gee, it would be nice to have books about comics," and now they're a staple, I mean every year coffee-table books come out with regurgitated history and examples and stuff like that. And we kind of boot-strapped that project, I mean we were able to do it because with my graphics knowledge we were able to reproduce stories from older comics, you know, like in the book so this other guy mostly wrote the text with real serious literary analysis and then there would be example stories, full-length stories right in the book—this was considered academically sound, I mean we had an index and all that stuff, and we hit it just right—we sold about 50,000 copies which was fairly decent for a book. I tell you what, why don't you shut off the tape for a minute [tape shut off for cigarette break].
JP: But you know, popular culture is very difficult, and as it becomes bigger and bigger business and the stakes get higher and higher, there's more and more pressure to succeed quickly which makes it very difficult to create because so much of it is trial and error—you don't really know something works until you try it, especially things like film which means television as well, because it's collaborative and the money involved is just wicked big. And it inevitably goes from some guy sitting across the desk from someone else, you know, bullshitting him about a vision he had, trying to get money out of the guy behind the desk to try something that there's no guarantee—the closest guarantee there is to success is whether the person had a track-record, but the most exciting stuff always comes from somebody who doesn't have a track-record, so it's hard to know how to teach that. And the best sort of you can do I think is to create an academic atmosphere where people can get their feet wet. It's like show-business, it used to be when most show-business was live people could go out and play the small towns and there were—the cliché, the way it was explained within show-business, were places where you could be bad and learn what worked and what didn't. But, there's no sticks anymore, there's no like third-rate audiences that have to put up with taking the chance it might be good, it might not be good, everybody wants instant success. So you get focus-groups and market-testing which have their limits because the minute you sit people down in a room you get into that self-consciousness I was talking about before. I actually went to one of those once, as a goof with some other people, and they got a bunch of us down at the Marriott Hotel and they told us they were going to show us a sitcom to get our reaction to it—it was all a lie, it was a phony sitcom and what they actually were testing us on were the commercials, and we saw through this and we wrote obscene things on the commercials and stuff [shared laugh], but they did that because they didn't want you to think about the commercials, they wanted you to think, they wanted you to focus, they wanted to divert your attention to this phony sitcom so you would be unselfconscious when you were viewing the commercials, and then they would—I forget how they hooked you into getting a response about the commercial, but it's a real problem, you know the self-consciousness and evaluating popular culture—I mean the only evaluation is how many people tune in and come back, or how many people buy the product—and there again you have a dichotomy, I mean some media you pay your money up-front, like a movie, and if you didn't like it too bad. Serial fiction, like sitcoms, it's all about duration, you know, you watch it once, you don't like it, you don't watch it again, but you don't pay for it—what they're working for is to get you hooked on the sitcom so that you watch it over and over again so they know they can deliver a certain audience—a certain size audience, certain demographics, and then all the money that they've invested they know they're going to get back over a period of time because they have this loyal audience. Now how to teach this stuff? School of hard knocks, that's the only way. I mean, you know, maybe…I don't know, I shouldn't prejudge. And I'm sort of intrigued by just the name of what you said, but being 61 years old I think I'll pass on checking it out. [during the cigarette break I mentioned the Modern Culture and Media Department at Brown to him] I mean, going through it once with the Am. Civ. Department [American Civilizations Department] was kind of interesting, but…. I don't know.
IZ: So you were teaching there? Or you were taking classes?
JP: No, no, I uh—when they started the Am. Civ. thing I sat in on a class...and lectured, and directed study. And I sort of did that last year or the year before at—do you know what Engin. 9 is, the entrepreneurial class? I took that to brush up because I inherited this money and there was a lot of stuff I didn't know about investing money and securities and stuff like that—and it ended up sort of being the same, like the professor would call on me for real-life experience, and by the end of the class I gave a lecture for half the class about what it's like being outside the corporate world, sort of explain what the corporate strategy grows out of just plain mercantilism, which is what I am—a one man operation. But yeah, I'd be sort of intrigued to know about it, but right now I'm so….for the first time in my life there's something that I'm really wrapped up in, the thing at the Hay, that is, you know, people trust me [laughs] with something really big to be a part of—primarily because they're so poor and they don't pay me, they sort of had to take me. And also I have a couple long-range projects that if I ever get around to them I know they'll be successful—like one of them is writing a book on how to drive in Rhode Island, which they drive differently here as you may have noticed.
IZ: Hmm, yeah I don't drive here so I don't think I'm as aware. I ride my bike around [half-laughs].
JP: There were no bikes when I was here, no…..well, they drive very strangely here, because it's so old, the streets were designed for horses not for cars, and the culture that built up around the horses persevered because the streets are so nutty that normal laws of traffic control just don't work—I mean you have 6 streets coming together at once and the streets are narrow, then they get wide, then they get narrow again—you know, it's not like Manhattan where everything's laid out on a grid, where stop and go…..and people being people they had the tendency to resist getting rid of the old ways, and since there was a negative reinforcement to get rid of them they hung on to this—well the primary feature of Rhode Island driving is when you come to an intersection—unless it's a major intersection with a real stoplight, downtown or something like that, the signs mean nothing, you make a deal with the other people at the intersection, like you decide amongst yourself who goes first. And this isn't immediately apparent on the East Side because the East Side has so many people from outside of Rhode Island, but you go into any other neighborhoods, you get off the main streets, every intersection it's like you, you make eye contact with the other driver, if you both arrive at an intersection at the same time and you decide among yourselves who goes first, and people from the outside world find this totally alien [shared laugh], and it just drives them nuts at first. And then there's other things that grow out of this, and nobody's ever written about it, so I know if I write a book about this with funny pictures and stuff like that it will be an immense success, and I'll also be crucified by the powers that be because uh, the people that run this state are very defensive about this state being defensive about this state being different than most of the other part of the country.
IZ: They won't like that [interrupted].
JP: They don't like the fact that Rhode Island is a little on the silly side, like it has this wicked streak of anarchy and…..the people in Rhode Island are as sophisticated as people you'll find almost anywhere in this country, but they have rejected the idea of being cosmopolitan, they like the idea of being kind of…….you know, simplistic, I mean.. and a lot of times its fiction, but they just like the idea of, "well we don't have to take life all that seriously." And once again you don't get much of a sense of this until you get off the East Side. But they're very lackadaisical about a lot of things, their work habits, their pursuit of wealth, very laid back and they take their pleasures, you know, according to their individual tastes—and they're also extremely……accepting of each other, I mean they may not agree with each other's philosophy but they're very willing to live and let live—they don't say, "well you can't be that way," "oh, yeah, well that's an interesting way to live." And a lot of it has to do with, until the 60's—like for example the whole just state closed down the month of August and everybody just went down to the seashore and drank beer and ate clams, well they're not clams, they're mussels, you know, quohocks. It's almost a childish attitude—and you know that the state was founded by a religious anarchist, right?
IZ: Yeah.
JP: And in those days the church was the state, so there's always been this streak of anarchy that runs through it, and in fact until 30 years ago even though we had a state government nobody paid attention to it. We just had one because the rest of the country said you had to have one, and they didn't pay them anything and they'd pass laws and everybody'd ignore them. [IZ laughs]You know, during prohibition, prohibition of liquor, I mean, had no effect here—in fact it became a fairly major industry, smuggling contrabrand liquor various places around the bay. And even back in the days of slavery, I mean the state was one of the first states or colonies I guess to outlaw slavery, but people still did it, this was one of the major—not owning slaves because there was economically not much point to it, but dealing in the slave trade was, you know, big business. I mean people sort of get it wrong, I mean—the Brown the place was named after, he only actually was involved in two expeditions, but he financed a lot of it, I mean the Brown family was in the finance end. I mean, just everything weird goes on in this state—counterfeiting of [half-laughs]…you know when the Beatles were popular they turned out all this Beatles crap? People still manufacture that stuff and pass it off as originals [half-laughs], cuz it was made here in the first place and people just kept the molds and they just keep turning it out.
IZ: Huh.
JP: And you know, some of it's illegal but most of it's just sort of gray. And coming from an upstanding place like Connecticut I found it very refreshing here. Also being broke with no prospects it was an easy place to get going—because people are really friendly and you want to learn something mostly people aren't very possessive about their knowledge. You say "hey, show me how to do that," and they say, "yeah, sure," you know, everybody's really friendly—once they think you're not an outsider, they're very…you know, there's that New England thing about being wary of outsiders, but once you're accepted here you're accepted no matter what your beliefs are—unless maybe you're a Yankee fan and then they don't like you so much [shared laugh] but almost anything else! When I came here in the 60's there was practically no racial tension even though there were black folks—partially because of the acceptance and partially because a lot of the black folks here weren't the traditional black folks that you find in most of the other parts of the United States, they weren't all from the South, there were Cape Verdeans from—you know it was a Portuguese colony and they…it was just a very free and easy place. And as time has gone on and as the federal government has gotten stronger and gives more money to the state, part of that goes away, but if you get deep enough into the middle class, especially lower-middle class, they just don't take it seriously, they do what they want, you know, the rules are meant to be broken. [laughs] This guy was telling me a story the other day—this guy wanted to get rid of a piano but it was too big, bigger than what you're allowed to put out on the curb, right? So uh, his friends says, "ah, no problem—just put it out on the curb, put a six-pack in a paper bag on top of it and they'll take it." [shared laugh] Now, now, you know, somebody who didn't understand the Rhode Island way of doing things would just call up and yell and scream and say, "ah uh, they didn't take my piano!" and then the guy, you know, that he called up would yell at the garbage man and then the garbage man would get all pissed off and from then on they'd give the person a hard time, strew the garbage all over their lawn. But just something as simple as you take a six-pack, which you know you're not supposed to do, and you put it out for the garbage men, and "oh! What a nice fellow!" and they'd make the extra effort to take away the piano. And that's the way the state is always run. In the early days they were very down on taxes and all that stuff—if they wanted to build a bridge they'd hold a lottery to raise the money to build a bridge. And it's not a very efficient way to do things but it kept you from having a big government.
IZ: Hmm.
JP: Rhode Island was the first state, the first colony to rebel against Great Britain. We burned one of their ships, called the Gatsby, before the Boston Tea Party. And Roger Williams founded this state as a free religious colony but almost immediately Newport was taken over by pirates because it was a nice place where the British couldn't get at 'em—so one of the earliest industries here was piracy. And the local population tolerated it because they laid off the local ships.
IZ: Hmm. What were the pirates dealing in?
JP: They went out in the oce--the sea and captured merchant men and stole all the stuff.
IZ: Oh, okay.
JP: But they just wouldn't mess with the ships that were running out of here.
IZ: Right, okay.
JP: They would prey on British ships not colonial ships. Then they'd come back here and spend the money, see [half-laughs]. New Orleans is similar in that respect. Also the fact that Roger Williams set it up as "any religion goes," it attracted not just British and Northern European immigrants, you know, people came from everywhere because they had all different crazy religions—it was one of the first places Jews came. I think the first synagogue in North America is down in Newport.
IZ: Huh.
JP: It's, you know, a magical place. But the Brown community is sort of insulated—not as—actually in my day there was actual antipathy between the local population, especially the young males because they thought we were all spoiled brats. And mostly we were I guess. I was one of the few people that ever from my, from when I was at Brown who ever went downtown. Because I was used to cities and I wanted to see what kind of records, old records were selling in the five-and-dime, stuff like that. But it wasn't exactly encouraged, I mean for one thing the deanery did not want Brown kids to go downtown drinking in bars because then the police would catch 'em and they preferred that the illegal drinking took place on campus. It's a funny place! Just goofy—and you must have heard of our mayor that got sent away, mayor Cianci, right?
IZ: Mm-hmm.
JP: Well he was one of the few politicians that appreciated that and he like turned that into a tourist attraction, and like turned downtown into a sort of like real-life Disneyland, like a fun park [both laugh]—people could come and look at the wacky natives and the wacky things people did. I mean when I came here this city was dead. And he didn't do it, he just appreciated all the crazy people here that wanted to do things and encouraged them, and if they were creative he saw to it that they didn't have to pay political graft to do what they wanted. And he revitalized the city, and the powers that be in the state had given up on the city, they built malls down in Warwick—and when they found out the city was a going-concern again they had to do something about this guy, so they framed him pretty much.
IZ: Why would the state be unhappy with him revitalizing the city?
JP: Well because they wanted to take control back now that it was making money………because they're small-minded people. And also because the guy had a bit of an ego, and when they, you know…….they um…..having almost single-handedly overseen the revitalization of the city, why should he deal them in? So he was not particularly responsive to letting them come in and force out all the people that he had helped make money here. Because except for a couple of banks and I guess a couple of insurance companies there was really nothing going on here in the 60's, I mean there was..….I had a—well granted it was a run-down piece of shit that was built around the time of the Civil War—but I was paying 20 dollar a month rent! And that's what attracted a lot of, I guess what passes for the avant-garde was it was cheap, I mean people came about it and they came here, people went especially to RISD and instead of having to go off to New York and take on responsibility and get real jobs they could just live here for practically nothing and fart around and try stuff out. No more! Rent's like 800 dollars a month now, it's very scary. And within walking distance of Brown was what you would consider slums, I mean not urban slums like New York with big tall buildings, but all these fine, spiffed-up old wooden buildings were all in terrible shape with really poor people living in them with bad heat and rickety plumbing and stuff like that. In fact the, what's called Fox Point, you know what I'm talking about right, south of campus down to the water? That was mostly populated by Portuguese people who came here during the Second World War because they built ships down in the bay for the war effort and Portugal was a neutral country so we encouraged, the country encouraged all these people to come in and work in the shipyards because the regular population was all in the armed forces.
IZ: You said that the book on Rhode Island driving is one of your projects and that there's a second project, is that right?
JP: No, that's the, that's the project that every time I mention it to people they get all enthused. People who came here from the outside sort of noticed the same thing and when I explain it to them they get all excited. But I've been slowed down by working in the Hay and then having to move, and also I want to do it right because I mean I have a very specific vision—I want it to look like the book was written in like 1935 using old illustrations and stuff like that. Because the poster has sustained really well so I want to do something that I know will not…you make out much better if you publish something yourself that sells over a long period of time than if you do something that sells a million copies and somebody else publishes it. You know, you want to hang on to as much of the money as you can, and that' s what they teach you in Engin. 9. But most people who get successful overnight [coughs], especially in show-biz or the arts, end up with very little to show for it—for one thing they never pay you for the first one, and you often don't get paid for the last one, I mean the only way you'd make any decent money at all is to have a bunch of hits in a row, and that's tough, I mean it's tough enough to have one hit and to have a string of them is very difficult. And if you can do that you might as well have a real job anyway. You know, the American dream is to do something fantastic, get a pile of money, and just fuck off for the rest of your life and it just doesn't work that way, and invariably you end up in the gutter. Cuz while you're being a hit the people—even if they're not nasty, mean, evil people, they just want to keep you happy because it wouldn't do for someone who has a hit on their hands to walk around saying, "I'm unhappy," so they tend to give you more than you even need just to……[tape ends]
JP: You know the people being a big success and then going off to into oblivion—I think that was Fitzgerald who said "there's no second acts in America?"
IZ: Yeah, I don't know.
JP: That's a famous quote, but I'm terrible with them. But that's not really true because—well Mark Twain for example had success after success—but it's tricky. One of the famous, famous, most famous media fables that they push all the time is, "oh, the star twisted her ankle and you'll have to go on and become an overnight success," and this idea of overnight success, just life doesn't work that way and popular culture doesn't work that way. It goes back to what I said before—you've got to be bad, have places where you can be bad to learn your craft, and it's really a tough thing to teach in schools unless it's someplace like New York where there's such a huge population base that they can have like the School for the Performing Arts where nobody knows how they do it but they do it. Or a place like RISD that attracts weirdoes from all over the country. Except for, and I don't even know if they do it... they used to have a thing called Freshman Foundations where they made you learn how to letter, made you learn how to draw, made you learn how to make little sculptures out of balsa wood, I don't even know if they do that anymore—but then after your freshman year it's all up for grabs, and that's the only way you can do that—it's like giving you a chance to have experience in a, in a environment where if you fail all you did was fail and you didn't waste somebody's money, except for your own tuition but, you know, you learn from your mistakes. So…now what did you say the name of that was again?
IZ: Modern culture and media.
JP: And was it its own department?
IZ: Yeah.
JP: Phew, wow.
IZ: And they actually do look at theory of modern culture and media, and then they also do production—they have like film production and radio production, and you can tie in photography and some different kinds of visual, visual and performing arts.
JP: Just for example, how do they do radio production?
IZ: I don't really know.
JP: They're not tied in with WBRU are they?
IZ: Um, I don't know—I know there's some kind of radio class this semester, I don't know what they're doing in it. I don't even know how tied it is to radio, it might just be working with sound, working with recording.
JP: Right, right, right. The history of radio is really fascination. Over the years as—well I told you I have this friend called Big Al who's really into music and he keeps me grounded and uh, he shamed me into reading everything that was available on the history of media and it's just so amazing the immense changes that happen every once in a while. Like at one time all electronic media was controlled by the sponsors—the radio companies, and even in the early days of TV, they would just sell time, blocks of time to the advertising agencies and the advertising agencies would create the programs. Isn't that weird? And the only thing reason it stopped being that way is they had these quiz show scandals. There was this big fad of quiz shows back in the late 50's and it turned out they were rigged cuz the advertising agencies couldn't leave well enough alone—they'd see that the audience really responded to this contestant so they'd rig it to keep him winning. And when the public found out they were really indignant. So the networks took the control away from the agencies because they were afraid that people would stop watching television, which of course is absurd [laughs]. But uh, yeah, I mean there's these tremendous swings in uh, dominance of various forms of popular culture which aren't always but sometimes driven by technological advancement. And sometimes it's just because nobody ever thought of a certain thing before and then one day they did and it just changes everything. So I mean, I would think that would be the most, or at least to my way, the way I look at the world, that would be the most important thing to teach—the history of media. Because 999 people out of a thousand have no idea about media before their lifetime and they even forget the changes that take place during their lifetime.
IZ: So you think through cr..through teaching the history of media that would…
JP: Well you start to see patterns, you know?
IZ: Yeah.
JP: But I mean, like kids today…I can't…well, I was born before there was TV and I got TV just after I was cognizant, which makes me kind of weird and people my age kind of weird, and then kids after me—there was TV in their house before they were, you know, when they were just like little infants and TV was always there, and they treated TV very differently from their parents because their parents were people who spent a large portion of their lives and then finally they got this magic thing TV! And I used to wow people by pointing out that the young people would come in the house and turn on the TV, and see what was on. Whereas the old people would wait for something to come on before they'd turn the TV on—to the young people TV was just this continuum, to the old people it was a discrete collection of programs. Now I'm so far removed from it, I know there's a difference between kids who are born before and after major penetration by cable and remote control. Because remote control didn't really work with television until cable, cable made it work. I mean people were resistant to buying remote-control TV's, they thought it was extravagant, and at first it was mechanical so that didn't work at all. And electronic tuning cost more—to buy a set with electronic tuning—they used to have a knob that you turn, people resisted that because it cost more—anything new innovation always ends up costing more, it's just an inescapable rule of technology. But then when cable came and the cable people had to give you this, so suddenly little kids know how to work remote controls and little kids know how to work VCR's and their parents don't, it's very weird. And this causes, well they called it a generation gap during the hippy period, but there's always these things—the children are more, the younger generation is more attuned to the new media than the older folks—they just take it for granted, they take it in—well they don't take it for [muffled] but they take it in stride. And the older people are conscious because they can remember a time when it wasn't there, so they're not dealing, they're not quite on the same page. And those are the sort of things that if you're a creative person you can riff off it or if you're a mover-and-shaker you can make money off it by exploiting these differences. Because controversy is always a good thing to exploit, it gets you noticed, gets a buzz going. Do you know the show "Friends?"
IZ: Yeah.
JP: Well it's really kind of a warm, cuddly show right? People are really nice and everything, nothing bad ever happens. Which might make you overlook that they're….there.. a very modern view towards sex, they're all sexually liberated, and it's a pretty new thing on television. And it's just, it's not, it's unremarkable within the context of the show, it's just a part of their normal life. And it might lead to, you know, comedic complications, but it's not, it's not a big deal to the young people who watch it—and yet there are people with an older outlook who think that show is shocking.
IZ: Yeah.
JP: So, it's exploitive to the point where, to the people who think that sex per se is not a shocking think, it's just something you have to deal with like eating or one of the things that you have to cope with in modern life—that makes that show special to those people, so it's their show, so it's a bond with that modern audience, which is why they get to charge about twice as much for commercials on that show as on almost any other show.
IZ: Yeah.
JP: And in a funny sort of way it's not very revolutionary because what it is is it's, it's a softer version of "Seinfeld." You know that show right?
IZ: Mm-hmm.
JP: Which is a very revolutionary show on many levels, not just the sexual permissiveness. In fact, I don't think, I don't think I've ever read a decent analysis of Seinfeld—there are some very strange things going on there structurally.
IZ: Yeah, I've only seen maybe three episodes.
JP: Right, well if you haven't watched a lot of TV in your life then it'd be hard. But most sitcoms were three-act farce with restoration comedy. But "Seinfeld," and actually also "Roseanne" also, were Shakespearean—five-act, and much more complicated form. Plus which "Seinfeld" has some other bizarre stuff going on that I couldn't even begin to explain to you, partially because of your inexperience but partially because although I understand it I don't have the verbal skills or the jargon to explain it, but…….just, you know, lots of different things going on that all kind of tie up in the end, which even goes beyond Shakespeare—because some of them have nothing to do with each other, but they tie up in the end almost like the way a pun works, like two, like the same word means two different things, but somehow on an experience level that dovetails in that show. It's……before I, before I stopped having a television I kept watching those episodes over and over again, I never got tired of it. Because it was always such a complicated mix, you could never remember which parts of which show went together, it was always a little bit fresh, unique in all of television. And it's also kind of ironic that critics understood after a while that it was a very important show but they never really got a handle on it, and it's not been reproduced, you know, nobody's ever attempted to do it again. I mean except very…..what you say about yogurt—"non-fat" [laughs] it's like "Friends" is sort of like a non-fat "Seinfeld," most of the magic stuff isn't there, it's just like going through the motions—with some nice characters and some fairly talented people, but the bizarre element of "Seinfeld" is just not there—except in that one girl, Phoebe is her name, she's also one of the creators of the show. You know who I'm talking about, right? The one that often delivers the line that's out of left field?
IZ: Yeah. Yeah, I think I know who you're talking about—she's tall, right?
JP: Yeah, right right right right. And she's obviously on another wavelength than everybody part of the time [laughs under his breath]. But on "Seinfeld" they're all on different wavelengths, they're just, you know, the only bond is their friendship which is completely arbitrary. You know, the crazy guy that lives across the hall—he'd be friends with whoever lived across the hall, you know—which is really true about New York, I mean sometimes—I mean I had that experience in New York, that you live somewhere you inherit the guy that lives in the building. Part of the culture [laughs], swheeew, that's really a throwback!
IZ: Yeah.
JP: Well, anyway, I've gotten off on you know, craziness. Anymore questions and I should probably hit the road cuz I got—for somebody that doesn't work I've got an awful lot of responsibility tomorrow.
IZ: Uh-huh.
JP: I actually have to do a cartoon for the 20th or 25th reunion of the local give-away paper. And I'm only doing it to get even with one of the local TV channels who just fucked me over really bad—just to be sensational, nothing personal, but can't let them get away with that.
IZ: [half-laughs] Do you know what you're going to draw? Or what you're going to write about?
JP: Oh yeah, yeah. In fact, I can't…I don't even have a graphic set up anymore so I just took this cartoon, one of the cartoons in here [flipping through "Mad Peck Anthology"] which is sort of a standard and I blocked out all the words and I gotta write new words to fix the balloons, which ain't easy. [flipping through pages] Hard doing this upside-down [shared half-laugh]. This book was a horrible failure by the way, for the very reasons you had trouble reading it.
IZ: Yeah. Where did those characters come from, I mean the book is kind of, it plays with the idea that they're real people, but are they people that…
JP: Yeah, to a certain extent. [still flipping] Jesus. You know what might help—if I found my glasses—oh, here we go! Yeah the book's too dense for one thing—this one here, I'm just putting this guy down here and the rest is just taking the words out. Um, this was me on the radio, it was an outgrowth of the radio guy Dr. Oldie, and this is the name I wrote under originally because we thought it would be nice to have, to make it appear that there were women writing along with the men since women's liberation was coming in [pointing to Masked Marvel]. This guy was made up out of old cloth. He's an imaginary son of a fictional character that was originally on radio and then on television called Froggy the Gremlin. This is my former wife. This is a fellow that went to Brown after me, this is a famous guy, I can never remember his name, oh Jesus……..Robert Benchley, American humorist from the 30's. This is just made up…..and this here, this is supposed to be the Blues Brothers…..that's President Reagan! And sometimes you'd, it was a device—sometimes you'd do a car—if a caricature was available of a real person, you were trying to do a real person you'd swipe the caricature, but if they weren't—like..what's a famous example, people loved this……..are you familiar with a group called "The Eagles?"
IZ: Yeah.
JP: Okay. Uh….well they, there was no, they were just a bunch of musicians, they didn't really have individual personalities, even when they went solo. So to represent them since there was no caricature, I used, well we used I guess—I was collaborating with a writer at the time—you remember funny-face fruit drinks?
IZ: No.
JP: Well it was like kool-aid but slightly better [half-laughs]. And each flavor had these animated characters and they were just like completely corporate, generic, you know there was rootin-tootin raspberry, it was just like put together for the sake of the product—and, so why not have them represent "The Eagles," which was just a bunch of musicians that some producer put together not unlike "The Monkeys" in a funny sort of way, except not so obvious.
IZ: Yeah.
JP: I mean like somebody outside the group said, "Hey, you guys would go together good," so the more sophisticated people got the real inside joke there that we were comparing "The Eagles" philosophically to the funny-face characters. Which were not—the funny-face characters were amusing in their own right, a lot of commercials, especially animated commercials, far from being bad influences that people say they are on children—most children have enough sense to, if they love the character representing the product and try the product and don't like it they'll, you know, they just won't eat it. But they'll still love the character [shared laugh]! So the character in itself is not evil, the only evil is if they hook the kid into buying something he doesn't want, hopefully only once. And yet people run around saying that this is a bad thing—well I don't think it's such a bad thing, you know, kids learn! You know, you get burned you learn!
IZ: Yeah.
JP: I have a very low tolerance for do-gooders, like people that want to make the world a better place by protecting people from themselves—it doesn't work.
IZ: Yeah. Yeah, I can follow your argument, but when they're…when the hero is selling something that addicts you right away, like cigarettes, do you think that makes any difference? Like that like the first one will….
JP: Well….people smoked cigarettes, cigarettes came first the advertising came second and there's a lot of truth to the fact that when there was cigarette advertising it was primarily to sell you a specific brand, not to get you hooked you on smoking. Society hooked its members on smoking because it was just a thing that everybody did, and it was not without its positive aspects. For one thing, if you lived in a city and you smoked you didn't smell how bad everybody else smelled, it was like a social lubricant. And also it has positive medicinal effects. I think a lot, I'm pretty sure that a lot of the bad effects of smoking comes from really crappy cigarettes—that's why I smoke Camels. Most cigarettes they take a tobacco leaf and they chop it up, turn it into a paste and then shoot it out of a machine like pasta into this long thread. Whereas good cigars and good cigarettes they take a cigarette leaf, uh a tobacco leaf and they cut the stem and the veins out so it's just the real fine part, and I think that that's much less harmful to your body. Because the nicotine doesn't hurt you—you know, nicotine has, they're starting to realize has very valuable properties like it wards off, oh I always get this wrong—it's either Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. It's the tar that may have detrimental effect on your body and it just sort of makes sense that, well you know, you must know from experience that if you ever smell the smell of smoke from burning leaves it's much more pleasant than smoke from burning a log.
IZ: Or burning a tire.
JP: [laughs] Yeah, right.
IZ: Yeah.
JP: So…..in fact usually it isn't the product that's harmful, it's the greed of the people pushing the product. You know, this country has a lot of trouble with alcohol, and alcohol in-and-of-itself isn't bad, but people do abuse it. And so they pass laws to try and regulate it and that just screws it up even worse—like for example they don't let you drink till you're 21, well, by the time you're 21 your capacity to learn is not very much, I mean you learn best when you're young. So how are people going to learn how to handle alcohol if they don't do it like they do in Europe, where when you're a little kid they give you a little bit of wine and a lot of water and they bring it on gradually. But the trouble with this country, one of the main troubles with this country is everything's got to be black or white—that's the worst kind of conformity. Now granted smoking is a filthy habit, I mean it makes stains on the walls and smells up people's clothes and stuff like that. But, I don't think they should restrict it the way they are [clears throat]. I mean if it annoys other people you really shouldn't smoke in their presence, but to try and get everybody to stop, stop smoking I think is a bad idea, they should try and figure out what it is about the smoking that is hurting people. And like I say, I think it's that they're giving you not just tobacco but the stalk and god knows what chemicals they use in the ground to grow the tobacco and stuff like that. And even more ridiculous is they gotta make marijuana legalized, it's just ridiculous. For people like me who, you know, alcohol is not the right drug. Because for some reason marijuana doesn't seem to have the same bad effects as even tobacco in terms of lung cancer and stuff like that, it's, you know, really harmless drug, it's all political reasons, and there's hundreds of thousands of people put in prison for it—it's just a joke. But on the other hand I sort of agree with things like tobacco and alcohol and other so-called drugs probably shouldn't be advertised. Because the tendency with advertising is to overstate the value of your product and understate the downside, and people shouldn't deal with things like alcohol and tobacco and other drugs without realizing that there's a downside, that they can be abused. So, it's a hard thing to say in a country where you're supposed to have free speech, but I really don't think that…well there's no real word for it nowadays, but what they used to call "vices." For example, I'm for the legalization of prostitution, but I don't think there should be, there should be ads to encourage people into it, you know. But it's ridiculous, I mean it goes on, prostitution that is, and the cops are all over the lower economic levels of the industry, but the fancy call-girls and escorts in New York city make out just fine, nobody bothers them, and the tourists love them, so…….There's a lot of hypocrisy in this country that goes with everything being black and white, and we have this screwed up idea of what morality is. Most recently the so-called Christians, who mostly quote the old testament [half-laughs]…..I mean I was raised with a pretty serious religious background and I thought that the teachings of Jesus were very enlightening, and yet now there's all these people running around calling themselves Christians and they ignore pretty much what was in the Gospels and they preach this stuff from the old testament which had to do with a really long ago bunch of people that were trying to keep their culture together, keep the tribe together—that's where a lot of those rules come from. And the other part of the old testament is cautionary tales which they tend to overstate. I'm getting very pessimistic.
IZ: Alright, well, what do you say we call it a night?
JP: Sure.
IZ: Alright, thanks a lot.
JP: Absolutely. It's fun and you were a good audience, and the Red Sox seem to be winning, against all odds, it's the damndest thing.
IZ: [laughs] How many [tape cuts off]…