Episode Transcript
[00:00:16] Speaker A: We're going along in this season, but say your name.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: I'm Aaron Nathans.
[00:00:20] Speaker A: I'm Michael G. Ronstadt, and you're listening.
[00:00:23] Speaker B: To the Nathan and Ron cat.
[00:00:30] Speaker A: Wait a minute. Not cat.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: Not Ron.
[00:00:32] Speaker A: Cat. Michael Roncat is a cat that my friend has. And Michael Roncat is a thread that's going through all of this that no one knows anything about. It's probably weird.
[00:00:42] Speaker B: Superhero.
[00:00:42] Speaker A: That's for Dave.
[00:00:43] Speaker B: Hi, Dave.
[00:00:44] Speaker A: And the whole family.
You like your cat? Cat's named after me. I got to appreciate.
Have.
[00:00:55] Speaker B: This is the most interesting song on the record.
[00:00:57] Speaker A: I think it's kind of like, got this chill vibe.
[00:01:01] Speaker B: It's different.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: Yeah.
Two chords.
[00:01:05] Speaker B: Two chords. Thank you.
[00:01:08] Speaker A: You know what? The fact that I co wrote this song with Clarence Dan Blatchley, did I get the name right?
[00:01:16] Speaker B: You did.
[00:01:17] Speaker A: Okay.
Sometimes when the record button's going, I worry that I say things wrong. And I do.
Anyway, we interviewed Peter Blatchley, his great nephew. Great nephew in this episode. And like Clarence Dan Blatchley, who was an author, self published.
They had a family homestead that had a lot of history. A lot of family history in general. They're all like Renaissance people. It's wild. And one of the things that you see in the poetry that we took.
[00:01:51] Speaker B: The words well, I mean, we have to first say that this was not a traditional co write with a living person.
[00:01:57] Speaker A: No. Yeah. The person that I co wrote with wrote this piece in 1939 and has been gone for a long time.
[00:02:07] Speaker B: He died before both of us were born.
[00:02:09] Speaker A: And I added two stanzas to this piece of music because it needed something else to make it a song. It was short. It was short. Yeah. And we could have just jammed out for another 20 million minutes. But honestly, I'm hoping that you, as a listener, enjoy the extra words I put in there, and I'm really hoping that you can't tell who wrote what.
[00:02:32] Speaker B: So there's a backstory here. This is not the first time that we have performed a song that has involved Clarence Dan Blatchley.
[00:02:43] Speaker A: Well, we had a co write early on with Clarence. Yeah. And we kept the words pretty much as they were and continue to be in this little book called Stubble Fields, published in 1939. But it's called I stood upon a Hill. And it was in our very first album.
[00:03:01] Speaker B: It started our very first album. And we still play the song.
[00:03:04] Speaker A: Yeah. We performed it last night. We're in Boston right now. We're kind of time traveling, of course, as we've mentioned. But basically, I stood upon a hill. And it was our first co write.
[00:03:17] Speaker B: First co write that we published.
[00:03:19] Speaker A: Yeah. Oh, that's true. We don't talk about the other.
[00:03:21] Speaker B: We don't talk about that first.
[00:03:24] Speaker A: So I stood upon a hill. It's kind of like a fiddle tune, an old timey fiddle tune, I always say, like maybe in the tradition of Gillian Welsh and David Rawlings, who writes these. They write these timeless things, these pieces of music that you'd swear they were written a hundred years ago. And I swear I stood upon a hill could live 100 years ago by the way it sounds. And I, in fact, played it instrumentally at a wedding in Cincinnati recently with Doug Hamilton on fiddle, who you've already been introduced to.
It's amazing because we have this tradition that we're trying to push forward, but we want to remember our past. That's right.
This song has a lot of evening now.
[00:04:06] Speaker B: We've moved forward.
[00:04:08] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. I stood upon a hill was early on, but moving forward in time, just.
[00:04:14] Speaker B: A very different song.
[00:04:15] Speaker A: It's a very different song. And I even set one other one to music which we have not recorded yet.
[00:04:22] Speaker B: Another blatchley.
[00:04:23] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's a really cool setting, but we slowly try to introduce on our albums, co writes with this one little book, stubble Fields. And it's a beautiful description of nature. In fact, we're in Boston and driving here. You see these fields. And this book describes exactly that type of scenery, at least how I imagine it. Evening has a lot of different instruments being played.
[00:04:55] Speaker B: You kind of went crazy on this one.
[00:04:57] Speaker A: Yeah. This is one of the reasons why I played 20 million instruments on it. A lot of great musicians on this.
Wait a minute. And Aaron and I, I think, created a beautiful texture with our producer, Greg, Hugh Brady. But we have cello, some electric guitar. We have some electric bass that I've played going through this. I did the lead vocals, brushes, actually, that's it for so. And then, Aaron, you did guitar. Guitar.
Aaron, I didn't mean to downplay.
[00:05:29] Speaker B: You had a big vision for this.
[00:05:30] Speaker A: I had a huge vision. I just kind of said, I got to do this next. Next. So that's evening. And we just went on a journey. It's a vision quest, quite honestly. I mean, find your hallucinogen of choice and go to town, please.
Actually, our lawyer said not to say that we redact that.
[00:05:52] Speaker C: Okay, sorry.
[00:05:53] Speaker B: Basil, there's a really interesting spot in this song.
When you taught me the guitar, really?
I wasn't surprised that you had me do this. But I was kind of delighted that it has a certain rhythm to it in the way that I play bum, bum bum bum. But, like, halfway through a solo, you have me just change to a finger picking pattern. And it's so subtle. And this whole song is like a dreamscape. And that's sort of the moment where the dream kind of you just fall into a different dimension.
Your production and Greg's production and cello, just the vision. This is a song that you kind of surrender to, that you feel that maybe you're not listening with your thinking brain. Like, maybe you were on the last track about the baseball team, but you're just sort of floating above this song and letting it carry you away.
[00:07:01] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think when we started.
Let's play that segment.
[00:07:06] Speaker B: Play that section.
[00:07:06] Speaker A: Yeah. And we're going to play the transition from the bomb in the instrumental to the finger picking, just so you can hear that's.
There's another section that I think is really neat, is just the start of it. And, in fact, we've used this track as our intro music.
[00:07:56] Speaker B: Oh, right.
[00:07:57] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:07:58] Speaker A: Just a little.
[00:07:59] Speaker B: You've already heard some of the song already.
[00:08:13] Speaker A: We've got some brushes with snare drum. We've got a guitar that comes in. We've got a cello bass line thing.
And I think it's a neat groove. Okay. And with that, I want to play the outro. Also the outro. Getting back into the vocals. We go into this dreamland. There's a lot of reverbs swirling around all that stuff. When you hear the whole thing, you'll be able to really dive in. But as it sneaks in, we get the snare drum to get back in there, and then all of a sudden, we're back. And the goal was to lead people back without them being like, okay. Without like a hard.
Now we're here.
I always call those like, well, if you're modulating to a different key, we joke around and say it's a Barry Manilow modulation because you're just going to the next key without any warning. But we kind of nudge you there gently. So here's that little transition back.
Those are all the examples I can think of to play. Any other thoughts on your end?
[00:09:33] Speaker B: You know, when you brought this to me first, before you played it, and you said, I'm going to do another one by Clarence Dan Blatchley, I was a little surprised because I thought that we had done everything that we could with this fellow, but you really took it to a different dimension that this guy was born. I forget exactly when he was born, but it was well, more than 100 years ago. And you've kind of taken something very, I don't want to say old, but something from a different era and combined it with something that sounds extremely modern and it makes for a beautiful effect.
[00:10:13] Speaker A: Yeah. We're going to introduce our guest.
[00:10:16] Speaker B: This was a great interview.
[00:10:17] Speaker A: Yeah.
Again, people that you may not know them at all, we met through this wild web of networking, essentially, but they're the most interesting people.
[00:10:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:31] Speaker A: Because they surprise you.
[00:10:33] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, Peter, we went looking for a member of the family to basically get their blessing to record the first song. And Peter was who we found, and it just opened up. It was like a door to an entirely different dimension and a whole other world of history and Peter's own world as a musician and just so much other stuff. I can't wait for you to hear our interview with Peter Alexander Blatchley.
[00:11:11] Speaker A: Well, welcome, Peter McDonald Blatchley, to our podcast.
[00:11:16] Speaker C: Well, thank you. It's good to be here.
[00:11:20] Speaker B: You're in bath, Maine, right?
[00:11:22] Speaker C: I am on the bath waterfront.
We look out over the Kennebec river and it feels a lot like heaven most of the time. Except last weekend when we had that big storm came through. That was pretty rough.
[00:11:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:38] Speaker C: A lot of damage. But we're okay.
[00:11:41] Speaker B: We're talking in the dead of winter. Michael, you found his great uncle's poetry.
[00:11:48] Speaker A: In a chat book.
[00:11:50] Speaker B: Peter, do I have that right, that Clarence Dan was your great uncle?
[00:11:55] Speaker C: Yes. Clarence Dan was my grandfather's next younger brother. So my grandfather was born in 1880, and Clarence Dan was born in 1881.
[00:12:04] Speaker B: And he lived until roughly when, about.
[00:12:07] Speaker C: 1974, I think 73. 74, right in that range.
[00:12:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:11] Speaker C: The last couple of years of his life, he moved out and lived in Silver City, and that's where he passed away. He actually lived with my family for about a year when I was ten or eleven years old. So I had a lot of personal interaction with him during that time.
[00:12:27] Speaker B: Where is Silver City?
[00:12:29] Speaker C: Silver City, New Mexico, is on the southwestern border, next near Arizona.
[00:12:35] Speaker B: Michael, why don't you just introduce us a little bit to the book that you found?
[00:12:40] Speaker A: Well, I had just moved from graduate school and finishing in Cincinnati, Ohio at University of Cincinnati or at CCM. Not the hockey gear. That's college Conservatory of Music. And I was like, well, what do I do? Well, I followed an ex girlfriend over to Philadelphia region and ended up living in Collegeville, Pa. I don't have a bed, but I have an air mattress. I had a futon. That's what it was. I was like, and I have a coffee table, so I need old books. And so I went to Phoenixville, Pa and went, oh my God, this is such a cool area. And had a small bookstore, which is no longer there. But it was one of know, long time stairwell up the side of the wall, hole in the wall bookstore. And I found a bunch of old books for coffee table stuff. And I found this little book called Stubble Fields by Clarence Dan Blatchley. And two things struck me as it was old and at like 1938. I can't remember the date. I tried to find my copy. It's somewhere on my bookshelf. We rearranged, but it was in the mid to late thirty s and it was tiny and it would catch people's eyes, hopefully, if I had any friends visiting. And then number two, it didn't cost a lot.
It was probably maybe $2. And I didn't have a lot of cash on me. And so I just wanted something that looked really good, but it didn't cost a lot. So I always hope my books cost at least $2 in 100 years. But that's how I found it. And then I started reading it and I really enjoyed it. It was just a beautiful collection of imagery, just short poems that could entertain me for a moment when I'm just sitting down and trying to keep warm and drink a cup of coffee. Histories led to meeting Aaron Nathan's. We ended up co writing, and that was Stubblefield's book. And the tune I stood upon a hill came from the poem I stood upon a hill. And that became the first co write that Aaron and I ever put together. There's the long background of finding the small book and the little gem. And from what we hear, that that was one of his gems among many other books, because some of the books were used more for humor during family gatherings, more so he never knew that. He never knew that. Okay.
[00:15:11] Speaker C: Be very dismayed to know that we were laughing at his outrageously bad poetry. But a lot of his early works, really quite good. I don't know what happened to him. That he got the idea that his muse was never to be questioned. And so that every single thing that he wrote down, he refused to change anything, any punctuation, he wouldn't change anything.
And my father and my grandfather, in fact, were fond of saying that if he had just had an editor who would throw away about 90% of what he wrote, he would actually be remembered as one of the great minor poets.
Because some of this stuff really is great. And you stumbled across a couple of really nice things, which is, it was such a surprise when you first contacted me, because Clarence Dan has just been like a laughingstock in our family on so many levels. He was married to a woman named Margaret, who was probably the most prudish version of early 20th century female that you could find. And they never had any kids. And the family joke was that they didn't know how.
Poor Clarence. Unfortunately, he was really lovelorne. And his later books of poetry are dedicated to one different woman after another.
And as kids, we had no sympathy for what he might be going through as a lonely old man. So we just made fun of. Not to his face, but we made fun of his poetry all the time. And we vacationed in Maine every summer and on an island with no electricity. So he would sit around by candlelight and lamplight reading these poems aloud and just laughing hysterically.
How Clarence would force a rhyme or force the rhythm. He would twist things around in his later works, and some of them are just so banal and so forced that they're just hysterically funny. But like I say, there's some of them really good. And I was so pleased when you guys found the value in some of his earlier work. Again, surprised when you contacted me recently to let me know that another one has now been set to music. So that's quite something.
[00:17:53] Speaker A: Just a small aside.
When I was in high school, I was like, I'm going to write an epic poem. So I wrote this awful thing called the adventures of chicken and big toe. And their whole goal was to go to the moon and find out if it was really made out of cheese. That was the whole goal of this epic poem. And it was awful. But my friend Jonathan got a hold of a copy, and at lunchtime, he would read portions of my not so epic epic poem to our friends.
I got to experience it firsthand, of people laughing at the ridiculous nature of it while I'm turning bright red in the corner.
I took it like a champ. But it was the first thing where people realized that they could get me to turn bright red by embarrassing me. And it was through my epic poem. So there you go.
[00:18:49] Speaker C: Well, then you just have to own that it's ridiculous. And that was the whole point.
[00:18:53] Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah. At this point, I made a miniature version, gave it to my friend Ken Stewart, and he actually still has it and will sometimes quote it to me in conversations. And I'm amazingly know we all have.
[00:19:11] Speaker B: Works that we wish we had never put out there. For most of us, it's our early work. And then we kind of get our footing if we write long enough, and we eventually hope people forget about what we did before. And maybe with Clarence Dan, it was the other way around.
But I think the three of us share some experience as self published musicians, which is not all that different from what Clarence Dan did. I guess he was maybe ahead of his time as a self published person. When we first saw the book, the poetry book we know here is a distinguished dead poet. But what was his life really like? What did he do for a living? Do you remember?
[00:19:54] Speaker C: Well, first of all, you got to go back to his early life.
He and the family were settled on the western slope of the Colorado Rockies in a little tiny town called Delta, which only one year before the family moved there, and he wasn't. Let's see, they moved there just as he was being born. So it would have been about maybe 1882 or 83. And it had only just a year or two earlier been taken away from the Ute Indians. And the ute Indians had been moved to a reservation, and the entire community was living in constant fear that the Indians were going to revolt and attack.
There were bank robbers. There were cattle thieves. There were sheep farmers coming through, gobbling up the land.
Sheep pull up grass by the roots, as you may know, and destroy the land for any other kind of domestic wildlife.
Wait, that's a contradiction in terms. Domestic animals.
[00:21:06] Speaker B: So you actually edited and released a memoir of his father's time out on Frontier.
[00:21:14] Speaker C: It was actually my grandfather, which was Clarence's brother. So it was. My grandfather was Clarence's older brother by one year. And when my grandfather was 13 and Clarence was either 1011 or possibly twelve.
I don't remember when Clarence's birthday is, but what time of year. But on September 7 of 1893, my great grandfather, their father, was shot and killed by bank robbers. And there were eight boys in the family, ranging from my grandfather's older brother, who was two years older, to a little baby who was only, like, 18 months old.
Eight of them and a 9th was in utero. What? My great grandmother miscarried after all the shock of the murder of her husband, and they were raised in absolute financial deprivation. They lived in a two room cabin with a dirt floor. They went through years and years of intense financial struggle, near starvation. And I think you can see the impact of this trauma, literally, in the generations of the family that have followed. So I've never really tried to do a psychoanalytical understanding of my great uncle, but he was obviously a very troubled man.
He tried to commit suicide when he was living in our house in Washington, DC.
When I was about eleven, I came home from school one day and there was an ambulance out front, and he had apparently had taken an entire bottle of aspirin. And, oh, goodness, he was so lonely and so miserable. This was a few years after his wife had died and he showed up on our doorstep after he had sold his house in Tacoma Park, Maryland, with the intention of driving to Florida with his then girlfriend. But apparently, as they got out on the highway in his brand new Packard 1950, it wasn't brand new by then, but he had this beautiful old, beautiful Packard. It was just fantastic car, but he was not a very good driver, and he was weaving all of the road, and his girlfriend made him stop the car. She got out, took her suitcase and said, I'm not going. And that was it. He turned around. He had no house to come to. He ended up driving up to our house, talking to my mother and asking if he could just stay with us for a while. So that was a pretty intense and sad, emotionally really charged moment.
And most of his later poetry kind of reflects that sense of loneliness. At the same time, he has this really wonderful sense of beauty, his appreciation for nature. A lot of his poems, especially a lot of the early poems, he talks about nature in the way that Willa Cather might talk about it in her prose. His poetry, he talks about the beauty of the aspens on the mountainsides and the wind rustling through the sagebrush, and he evokes all this beautiful imagery.
So he is a very complex man. He was a PhD economist. He worked in the commerce department of the United States government. He published the definitive book on tariffs, for what that's worth.
[00:24:54] Speaker A: There's some copies online of that one I've seen.
[00:24:57] Speaker C: I'm sure there are. Well, his older brother, my grandfather, was also a PhD political scientist, and his wife, my grandmother, was also a PhD political scientist, and they both worked at the Brookings institution.
So when I started later on in life, learning about what their childhood was and what had gone on in this family, that they were raised in absolute destitute poverty until my grandfather was about 25 years old, when Clarence would have been 23 or 24. And finally, my grandfather hitchhiked. Basically, he jumped a train, a cattle train, and headed east and ended up at Oberlin College, at which point he tried to get in. And they said, well, how many years of education have you had? And he says, well, I've only gotten through the third grade.
So they sent him down to the Oberlin academy in another part of town. But within six years, he had graduated from Oberlin College. Went on and got a PhD from Columbia, but he couldn't get scholarships anywhere because he was too old. He was 25 when he started, so he was 32 years old when he graduated from Oberlin.
[00:26:16] Speaker B: I'm still on the waiting list at Oberlin, but.
[00:26:21] Speaker C: Well, Clarence went to Grinnell College because Clarence's great uncle and I can't quite figure out what the relationship was there. He was. My great great uncle, I guess, was the president of Grinnell College at the time, so it was kind of a shoe in for him.
But then he ended know they had no kids. So in years and years and years of working in the government and living very frugally, he ended up with over a million dollar estate.
[00:26:53] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:26:53] Speaker C: Which he had promised to my mother. Well, this is how he could afford to self publish all these books. But he ended up leaving all his money to Grinnell College. Instead of his promise, he forgot about the promise to my mother.
[00:27:06] Speaker B: Oh, man.
[00:27:07] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:27:07] Speaker B: A million dollars back in that time was probably worth a lot more.
[00:27:12] Speaker C: Well, the deal with Grinnell was that. And I wonder if somebody from Grinnell ends up hearing this, but Grinnell made a deal with him. The development officer promised him a permanent shelf in the library for his books of poetry and that he would be eternally honored at Grinnell. Well, a few. About maybe 15 years ago, ten years ago, I contacted Grinnell and said, I'm doing some research on my great uncle and his works. And I understand he left his papers and his books to you guys, and they said, well, let's do some research.
I got in the mail a little tiny envelope with about three or four xeroxed pieces of something. Xerox from the COVID of an old book or something. Absolutely nothing. And I said, well, what about all the books in the library? And they said, well, I can't find any.
[00:28:05] Speaker A: Oh, no.
[00:28:06] Speaker C: So his entire legacy at Grenell was just wiped out.
[00:28:10] Speaker B: Goodness.
[00:28:10] Speaker C: In fact, maybe you guys have one of the books that came from Grenell.
[00:28:14] Speaker A: I wonder, because I can't find stubble fields online anywhere. Quite honestly. I was doing some search.
I just did a quick search, but I thought it'd pop up.
[00:28:26] Speaker C: Every once in a while, a libris or one of those rare book old book marketing companies will come up with a copy.
But it's getting harder and harder to find his work. Oddly, you used to be able to buy it for nothing, as you did for $2. Well, now you go online and you see stuff going for $100 or $150. I wonder what that makes my shelf of Clarence Dan's poetry works.
[00:28:54] Speaker B: Before we turned on the recording, you had mentioned that you have a shelf just above your head of most of his works.
[00:29:02] Speaker C: Yeah, I probably have 95% of what he wrote. Except the book on tariffs. I don't have that one.
But, yeah, I have almost all his poetry, and my brother has whatever. I don't.
[00:29:14] Speaker A: Now, you said that your brother and you have a little competition going on. I'd love to hear about that again.
[00:29:21] Speaker C: Well, that was several years ago, and it was kind of a joke and a good natured delving into the family history, but we sort of had this friendly competition where we would see who could find the most books and the most not duplicates, but who could create the biggest library of Clarence dance works.
And my brother really got into it, and he ended up writing a facetious book of poetry called Word Pictures of the Midwest, which is a takeoff on Clarence Dan wrote numerous volumes called Word Pictures of the west.
Another one he had, I think, ten volumes of poetry titled seasons and days, volumes one, two, three, blah, blah, blah. I think he forgot and left off seven or eight. There's a gap there, but I think between seven and ten. But we just saw it as so self aggrandizing, if that's the right word, and so lacking in humility, that it was laughable, because he really thought that he was a great poet. And the sad thing is, if he had just had a partner, like an editor, he probably would have been as musicians. You guys know, you throw out 90% of the crap you create, which I do. Just the other day, I was in my computer, and I found all these tunes that I had written over the years, and I started listening to them, and I said, oh, my God, I'm so glad.
I'm glad I didn't go into a recording studio with that.
[00:31:10] Speaker A: You know, we always do this February songwriting month, Aaron and I have done a lot of co writes through there, right? And then we have individual songs. So a lot of these songs make the cut, but a good chunk of them don't. And we both have many, many folders of songs that just sit there. But that's where the editing side comes in. It's great to have the editing brain is a crutch, but that's when you're writing, and then you can turn on that editing brain later to help smooth things out. And what I love about songwriting, or composing for unaccompanied cello, or I wrote two string quartet pieces that went through many rounds of editing, is that the end result is just wonderful. And if you never went through that, this is awful stage and brought it to a place of presentability and maybe respectability. I'm not. It's. That's very, you know, I love that. And I wonder if, in your interactions with Clarence Dan, if he seemed like he had humility as a person, whereas the publishing side gave the sense that he had no humility, because I'm always interested in the balance of, like, this person seems so full of themselves, but it's just that first impression, because it might be a t shirt they're wearing, or it might be like, they have really nice shoes, but maybe it's their only good pair of shoes. You never know, right? You find out later, was there a difference between the person in real life versus his Persona that is kind of implied through self publishing so much?
[00:32:55] Speaker C: I think so.
He was a very kind man, and some of my earliest memories are he would show up at our house.
This is before he ended up moving in with us. He would come to visit from Tacoma park. We were living in Chevy chase, so it's not far away.
It seemed a lot further back in those days, but it's not very far. So he would come and visit, and as a little boy, he would have me and my brothers come out to the street, and he would open up the trunk of his packard, and in there we would find all these toys and stuff. So he was very thoughtful and kind.
I didn't see him as egotistical at all as a human being.
That came later, and I think he had very, very poor judgment.
And I think there's something in the family. There's a streak of autism that runs through my family, and I'm pretty sure it started with the traumatic experience of their father's murder, because I see it in all branches of the family.
[00:34:08] Speaker A: All.
[00:34:09] Speaker C: My cousins from the Blatchley cousins, I see it there, and I've seen it myself. It's been diagnosed in me. It's not like sitting in the rain and rocking back and forth kind of autism, but it is spectrumy, where you're not necessarily sensitive to social cues. For example, it can often come off as looking eotistical, but it really isn't. It can look narcissistic, but it really is not.
So it's an interesting diagnosis. My wife is a psychotherapist, so whether I liked it or not, I got plenty of feedback. But because she has met many members of my family and seeing things through her eyes, has been quite a revelation. And to start understanding my uncle Clarence through that lens has actually been very helpful and has given me a whole lot more compassion for him.
The truth, I mean, I started off by laughing at him and mocking his poetry and stuff, but actually, I have a great deal of compassion for him. And he was an incredibly intelligent man. He was super intelligent.
He was top of his game in what he did as an economist, but he lived a strange life. They had no kids. His wife was very prudish, would not let him drink coffee or tea. She would make him a cup of warm water each morning for breakfast, and he would have a cup of warm water, and then they would drive to Tacoma park. He worked at the commerce department. She worked at the Library of Congress. So he would drop her off at the Library of Congress and go straight to the nearest coffee shop and dose himself up on know there was a lot going on there that is both funny but also deserving of a great deal of sympathy.
[00:36:17] Speaker B: Yeah, well, the legacy of trauma can be certainly passed down from generation to generation. I know the impact of autism firsthand. My daughter is autistic.
[00:36:32] Speaker C: Oh, man, I'm sorry.
Is she high functioning or is she.
[00:36:40] Speaker B: She's definitely.
She functions well in her own way.
You know, she's, she's got this great island of ability as a musician, and she struggles in other areas.
[00:36:57] Speaker C: Yeah, I think that's common.
[00:37:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:37:00] Speaker B: But we understand autism to be more genetic than experiential.
[00:37:06] Speaker C: Yes, I think so.
[00:37:10] Speaker B: It's really a fascinating.
[00:37:15] Speaker C: Phenomenon and very much misunderstood.
[00:37:18] Speaker B: Yeah. If you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism.
[00:37:23] Speaker C: My brother is much more autistic. He's very much further along the spectrum, very insensitive, completely oblivious to social cues. So he has to be kind of his wife. We were amazed, actually. He got married and extremely happy, and he's happily married, but she would have to script his social interactions. So if he and I went out to lunch, he would look at his watch and as soon as an hour was up, he says, well, I guess lunch is over, but that sort of thing. But he was and is, I mean, he's still alive and he's incredibly intelligent, the best chess player I ever knew. He was a very good cellist and he excelled in some areas. He worked for the Department of Justice, in the immigration division.
He never had any great ambition. He just worked as a clerk, as a legal clerk. But he knew everything.
And he was like a compendium, like a library of knowledge of everything that was in that department. So everybody depended upon him. He was there for 30 years, just, like, working away. So, yeah, it is a spectrum. Autism is a spectrum issue. I think there's a lot more of it in our society than we're often aware of, certainly.
[00:38:48] Speaker B: And I know that 30, 40 years ago, it just wasn't.
Back in Clarence Dan's time, people understood a lot less.
[00:39:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:39:02] Speaker C: So, I mean, we've seen a huge surge in autism in our country, but we have to question, is it because the diagnostics are better and people understand what it is, or is it because we're actually seeing an increase of autism?
I don't know how this relates to Clarence Dan.
[00:39:26] Speaker B: It's hard to diagnose somebody who's been gone for that long.
[00:39:29] Speaker C: A little bit, but you can get some ideas from him in terms of completely socially inappropriate behavior. The example I have of this is I have one of his books of poetry that he gave to me as a birthday present on my 10th birthday with a little dedication, and I'm happy to have it. But what a completely inappropriate thing to give to a ten year old.
[00:39:58] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:39:59] Speaker C: His book of poetry, of lonely poems to his girlfriends.
Oh, ils when I think of you, I see the mountain blue and I think of you with their peaks of shiny white, but your breast is too fair for sight. I mean, that's the kind of stuff that he descended to in his later years.
[00:40:21] Speaker B: But you're probably glad to have the book now.
[00:40:23] Speaker C: I am.
I'm glad to have a whole collection of his books. I'm super glad that you guys are finding the value in his work and honoring it and saying it to music. I think that's really cool.
[00:40:47] Speaker A: It. Well, we have two people to talk about in this wonderful, splendid, spectacular advertising break, paying our bills with the imagination of fake money, because we're making up the ads as we go. But we have a hat from a special company that we like.
[00:41:07] Speaker B: Yes, we're here today.
They're not technically our sponsor, but suffice it to say, we really like Sparkletown Studios.
Do I call them a clothing company? They don't actually make the clothing, I don't think, but they certainly decorate them with fantastic stuff. You could get a rainbow vision knit beanie with eyes on it. You can get a smash the patriarchy smash the knit cap or baseball cap. But I think the stuff that they do that is really interesting is that they take things that really have never been on a baseball cap before, and they go there. They put it there. It's whimsy. It's excitement. It's fun. My son has been wearing one of their hats, a banana hat, for years. I was hoping that he'd become a baseball fan, but instead he's now a baseball cap fan, which is part of the way there. I'll take.
[00:42:04] Speaker A: He's hitting. He's taking a banana, holding, like, a baseball and hitting cumquats.
[00:42:08] Speaker B: Something like that. Yes. But Nari, a day goes by when he isn't wearing his banana hat. From Sparkletown Studios.
[00:42:16] Speaker A: I see a hat.
[00:42:17] Speaker B: One of their hats is right here. Can you see it? Everybody out there?
[00:42:22] Speaker A: Yes. Take a look.
[00:42:24] Speaker B: Here is a testimonial.
[00:42:26] Speaker D: I'm holding it right up to the microphone so all you listeners could see it. Can you see it? Can you?
[00:42:33] Speaker B: What is this hat?
[00:42:35] Speaker D: This is a hat with a smiling broccoli on it. It is my favorite hat to wear. Charlie and I bought it on the same day, and I like to wear it all the time to keep the sun off me.
[00:42:49] Speaker B: And how does it make you feel to be wearing a baseball cap with a broccoli on it special?
Is it smiling? Is it a smiling broccoli?
[00:43:00] Speaker A: It's happy.
[00:43:00] Speaker B: It's happy. And that's the thing I love about Sparkle Town studios, is that everything is just so gosh darn happy. I mean, even the hot dog on their knit cap is happy.
Anything else you'd like to say?
[00:43:20] Speaker D: I'd like to say my interpretation is sparkle down studios is a local artist who sells online and sells, I know for sure, at Farmers markets, which is where I came upon them. So keep your eye out for them if you're in the Boston area or shopping online. Thank you.
[00:43:41] Speaker A: Thank you. And we've got one more thing.
[00:43:43] Speaker B: One more thing.
[00:43:44] Speaker A: Our friend Phil Henry has created. Has created an album. A new album, as mentioned in the mastering the art of french cooking.
Wait a minute. That's the wrong.
[00:43:57] Speaker B: He's just reading everything in front of.
[00:43:58] Speaker A: No, no. He's created a new album.
[00:44:00] Speaker B: It's a terrific new album. It's called MacGuffin. I can't stop listening to this thing.
Phil. Of course, I co wrote old Joe's chair with Phil, so if you get a chance to listen to MacGuffin, I would highly recommend it.
[00:44:16] Speaker A: Back to our guest.
[00:44:17] Speaker B: Back to our guest.
[00:44:25] Speaker A: Yeah. And what a neat thing to hear that your family has a musical legacy, because you said your brother.
[00:44:32] Speaker C: My brother Alex Blatchley, is a professor at Notre Dame.
[00:44:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:44:36] Speaker C: And leads the Notre Dame Chorale. And his son, my nephew James, is the music director of the Johnstown Symphony Orchestra. In.
No, my great grandfather's on my grandmother's side. My grandmother's. Clarence, Dan's sister in law's father.
[00:44:57] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:44:58] Speaker C: Was a very famous hymn writer.
His name was Johnson Oatman Jr. And he wrote over 5000 hymns.
He died in 1922. So this is the hundredth anniversary of his death. And you probably know some of them. Higher ground.
Another one, his most famous one, which I just set to new music, is called count your blessings.
Count your blessings. Count them one by one. Count your blessings. See what God has mean.
[00:45:31] Speaker A: I love that kind of along the.
[00:45:33] Speaker C: Same lines as what Clarence Dan might write, actually. But I never liked the music. The music was from, like the 1890s or something.
[00:45:42] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:45:43] Speaker C: And it was a style of music. The old square puritan hymn, entirely predictable.
[00:45:50] Speaker A: Wrote all the four parts with voice leading and everything.
[00:45:53] Speaker C: He didn't write the music. He wrote the lyrics. And other people wrote that. He recruited other people to write the music.
[00:46:00] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:46:02] Speaker C: Just the other people who I had trouble with.
I'm on a campaign now to set his better hymns, his more famous hymns. I'm trying to set them to more modern music.
[00:46:15] Speaker A: That's wonderful.
Aaron. Did we meet?
[00:46:23] Speaker B: We met his father, yes.
[00:46:25] Speaker A: Okay. Who played cello.
[00:46:27] Speaker C: He was a cellist.
[00:46:28] Speaker A: Yeah. And really lucky to meet him and play music for him. And it was just an honor. And as a cello player, I'm always really happy when there's other cello players in the world that I guess, in this case, he played with the Baltimore Symphony.
[00:46:46] Speaker B: This is Fred, your late father. So after we recorded I stood upon a hill and we knew that your father was still living at the time. He was in his, what, 90s?
[00:46:58] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:47:00] Speaker B: Well, into his 90s, we knew that he was the nephew of Clarence Dan. So he was living in Washington. We had a show in Washington and we stopped by to see him for an hour or so and play him a little music and interview him. And somewhere around here, I've got the recording of that.
[00:47:18] Speaker C: Well, it was so cool that you guys did that. It's just a wonderful gift that you guys could find the time to do that. It meant a lot to him. It meant a great deal to me. And you ask about the musical nature of my family. It goes back a long way. Clarence's mother was Adele Bradley Blatchley. She died in 1927. Visiting Clarence, she came for a visit in Tacoma park. And Clarence Dan lived in this little bungalow with one of these classic stairs that go down to the street. We lived up on a like you may have seen.
It's like a Buster Keaton movie or something where they're trying to move a piano up at this huge set of stairs, and they're just having a terrible time with it. It was a set of stairs like that, and there was no railing. And she tripped and fell down the stairs and died of her injuries in 1927. But she was a pianist. And when her husband was shot and killed by the McCarthy gang in 1893, they had to sell everything they had to survive, or it was repossessed by the bank, and the bank came and repossessed her piano. And for decades, she practiced her fingerings on the kitchen table. And later on, when she moved to Boulder, all the boys sort of got together and provided some support for her, and they bought her a piano. And she was able to sit down and play it because she'd been practicing on the kitchen table all those years. So, yeah, there's a lot of music in the family. It goes back generations.
[00:49:03] Speaker B: That's really a fascinating book. I read a good deal, at least the beginning. And the house that they lived in was made of wood that had been set on fire by the Native Americans on their way out of town.
[00:49:22] Speaker C: Is that right? Well, something along those lines. It was scorched wood.
It came from a burned area, so the wood was very dry and very hard. But, yeah, they built their own places. And in the book, it's called my first life becoming a man on the Colorado frontier by Frederick Frank Blatchley. I just think it is a fantastic tale. Oh, it is. I'm glad you have a copy of it. I don't think it's gotten anywhere near the attention that it deserves because it has such a personal history that is untold. And it is talking about the society. He goes into great length talking about the society and the economy and the challenges, the water systems, the irrigation systems, how the farming, the boom and bust of the farming world out there in the late 18 hundreds and the early 19 hundreds. And it's a unique book. And honestly, it should be in every Colorado library there is. But so far, there hasn't been much uptake. So I'm glad you guys.
[00:50:24] Speaker B: How did you come upon this memoir?
[00:50:27] Speaker C: I found a letter in my father's belongings. Let's see, when did this first happen? When I moved my father out of his apartment in 2008 and into the retirement residence. I had to clear out this double size apartment across from the Watergate in Washington, DC, this huge amount of stuff. And I came across a letter addressed to my father from the University of Colorado, saying that they didn't have the funds to be able to publish the book as they had promised they would. So they're returning the manuscript. Well, so I said, pop, where's the manuscript? And he says, I have no idea. He said, I think my sister has it. So his sister was living here in Maine, and I bugged her for it for years, and she couldn't find it. She didn't know where it was. Well, she died a couple of months after my father did in 2016. And I told her daughters, my cousins, please keep your eye out for this manuscript. They found it in a box underneath the stairway in the garage, and it's just a miracle that it wasn't water damaged. And I got it, and I made copies of it and sent it to my daughter, who transcribed it into a word document so we could manipulate it and edit it electronically.
And then I found, also with that box and the manuscript were all the photographs that he had intended to have published with the book.
And that's an amazing resource. So the book has many of those photographs in it which tell an amazing story by themselves.
It's a pretty cool document.
[00:52:11] Speaker B: Can you tell the story about Frederick's grandfather and how he found God?
[00:52:17] Speaker C: Well, it comes from a very long line of ministers. I mean, the Blatchleys first came. Thomas Blatchley came, I think, in 1636, I think, is when they first settled in Guilford, Connecticut. So they were on the next boat after the Mayflower, the next group of pilgrims after the Mayflower, and they settled in Guilford, and they became ministers and doctors and farmers. That was all. Three vocations passed through generation after generation after generation. So my great great grandfather, that was Clarence, Dan's grandfather, was a minister. His name was Reverend Ebin Blatchley, and a farmer and a doctor. Long family tradition. And his oldest son was a soldier in the Union army, who apparently was captured and was in a confederate prison, which were notoriously horrible because they had no food. I mean, they were miserable. But back in those days, apparently, you could also ransom out a soldier. So it often happened that you go and ransom out your son, who was captured by the Confederates. So my great great grandfather left his farm in Dane County, Wisconsin, on horseback and rode down on his way to Vicksburg to try to find his son and ransom him out, and was picked up by a small contingent of confederate soldiers who accused him of being a spy, a Union spy, and gave him a hasty field trial and put him on his horse, put a noose around his neck, hung it over a tree, and they were about to kick the horse and leave him dangling. When he asked if he could say a few final words, and they granted him that wish. And he started praying for the welfare of their souls because they were about to kill an innocent man, well, he prayed so fervently that they got the point. They took the noose off, untied his hands, and sent him on his way. Well, that was in 1865, right at the very end of the war. And he was so moved by this experience and by what he had seen riding south, riding then through the deep south, that he sold the farm in Dane County, Wisconsin, and purchased land outside of Kansas City in a little community called Old Kondaro, also Wyandott.
It's right on the river. It became, for a while, the city dump, but for the city of Kansas, city, Kansas. And he started a college there as the first college west of the Mississippi for former slaves and displaced Native Americans. So the Kundaro tribe was part of the Delaware Indian tribe, had been displaced to this same place. So this is where he settled and created. His life's work was to run this little college and to educate these people and give them a chance to have a life. Well, he was on his deathbed in 1877 when my great grandfather Clarence's father came from out west because he had tuberculosis. So they had sent him out west in the drier climate, so he came rushing back.
His father had already died, but his cousin was there, and she was a student at Oberlin, had grown up in Bangkok, Thailand, and they immediately fell in love. They were first cousins, and they immediately fell in love and got married. And I just got this notice from genealogical sites. I'm on too damn many of them, but apparently they got married on September 5, 1877, which was just a few days after his father had died. But then, because they were first cousins and because he had tuberculosis, they went out west and basically were away from the whole family and the judgment and the condemnation of the whole family for marrying first cousins, although that seemed to happen a lot back then. On my other side of my family, maybe this might explain something about me, but on my mother's side, it's the same thing. My great grandparents on my mother's side were also first cousins. But anyway, they moved out west, and they had all their children in Colorado. So my grandfather was born, I think it was Gunnison and Clarence was. But they moved around quite a bit as they followed the railroad as the frontier was moving. My great grandfather was a pharmacist, among other things, and they just had to follow where the development was going. And it was one boom town that went bust after another, and they just kept moving around until they finally settled in Delta. That's where my uncle Clarence grew up, in Delta, Colorado. And reading the book that you have, my first life by my grandfather, probably could give you a great deal of insight, especially if you read between the lines about what they were going through, because it was a really hard life.
[00:57:41] Speaker B: Well, it's a fascinating book, and you've got such a fascinating family, and I'm so glad that you are both in a position to and interested in cataloging, capturing and telling these stories about a really interesting set of characters.
[00:58:07] Speaker A: Some of.
[00:58:08] Speaker B: Whom you knew firsthand.
[00:58:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:58:10] Speaker C: Well, one of my projects, my musical projects, was to create songs that sort of focused in on the major life event or events of each of these ancestors of mine. So I wrote one about my grandfather, my great grandfather, who was shot and killed. And I wrote it from a point of view of him being a ghost and telling the story of how the bank robbery and the murder took place. And then I wrote another one about his father, my great grandfather, and that one's called Vicksburg, and it actually won an award here in Maine.
[00:58:48] Speaker B: Since we're speaking about your own music, why don't you tell us a little bit about your own musical journey and what part it's played in your own life?
[00:58:56] Speaker C: Well, my mother was a pianist and my father a cellist. And every night I would go to sleep hearing them playing cello sonatas, piano and cello sonatas. So it was a Beethoven, Mozart, Tierney Chopin. It was a beautiful way to be kind of indoctrinated with this musical sense, a lot of it subconscious. I'm sure. My mother sat me down at the piano at the age of four and started me with piano lessons.
By the age of ten, I was studying with Norman Fraunheim in Washington, DC, who was extremely well known concert worldwide known concert pianist. But I didn't really want to play the piano. I wanted to play rock and roll. And I convinced my parents that I wanted to play classical guitar. And so they got me a really simple Gibson classical guitar and got me lessons with Aaron Shearer, who is probably one of the foremost authors of guitar instruction in the world at this point. He ended up being recruited by Peabody Conservatory to start their guitar department. So I studied with him from the age of ten until 17. But as soon as I had this guitar in my hands, I was in my bedroom learning budy Holly songs and George Hamilton IV, some of the great old classic 1950s era rock and roll and then I went on to become a rock and roll musician. I dropped out of college after one year at St. John's College in Annapolis and started a rock band that became very well known in Washington, DC. Was called Claude Jones.
We were a bunch of stoned out hippies. We didn't know what to call our band, so we named it after our equipment.
[01:00:49] Speaker A: Oh, there you go. That's good.
[01:00:54] Speaker B: That was the name of the mascot at American University. Where I went was Claude, because he was Claude the eagle.
[01:01:00] Speaker C: You went to american university?
[01:01:02] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:01:03] Speaker C: No kidding. Because my daughter graduated from there.
[01:01:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:01:08] Speaker C: And we used to perform there quite often. I played there with Tim Harden. I played there with Poco.
We played there often. We were very popular on the american university campus in 1969 and 1970.
[01:01:24] Speaker B: Oh, wow. Yeah. That was a little bit before I. Yeah, I figured.
That's great.
[01:01:30] Speaker A: You know, one of the other things I noticed, I think, from your website is that you do watercolor. Is that correct?
[01:01:38] Speaker C: That's true.
[01:01:39] Speaker A: Okay. And my grandfather was a very amazing watercolor artist, and I dabble badly, but looking at your work, it's beautiful.
[01:01:49] Speaker C: Well, thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate that.
It's an avocation.
For a while, I thought maybe I could be a professional watercolor artist. So when I came back from a musical tour of New Zealand that I did with the former league guitar player of the animals, Vic Briggs, we had a great time, but I took up watercolors while I was there or retook up watercolors while I was there and had a body of work. When I moved to New Mexico, I got the Taos gallery to represent my works. So I went in one day to check to see how they were hung and met a young woman who is now my.
Wow, that worked out well.
[01:02:32] Speaker A: Indeed.
[01:02:37] Speaker C: I still paint.
My creative life goes through spurts, and I wonder if this is something that you guys experience too. I'll go through a phase. Maybe it's manic depression or maybe it's a function of autism. I don't know. But, like, last year, I spent four months doing almost nothing but watercolors. So I ended up with probably 60. Pretty decent. I mean, I tossed out a bunch of them, but I try to edit myself, keep only the ones that are worth showing. But then I just stopped. In March last year, I just stopped doing Watercolors because I had to focus on doing an audiobook version of my own memoir about the 17 years I spent in the cult of the American Sikhs. For 17 years, I had a turban on my head and was a devotee of this con artist named Yogi Budgen. And there's a whole nother story there which doesn't relate to your music. But during that time, music was my salvation.
Those 17 years I did lots and lots of music. I started a rock and roll band called the Colsa String Band, and we toured all over the country, which was really amazing.
We had some amazing experiences. So it wasn't all negative. It was profoundly adventurous.
But from a psychological point, it's pretty challenging stuff and gave me and continues to give me a lot of insight about cult mentality, which our society is struggling with in a big way. Right?
[01:04:17] Speaker B: Sure.
[01:04:18] Speaker C: Politically, look what the political cults that are going on out there and the religious cults. I was just reading a book.
I think it was Stephen Hassan, who was a cult expert.
He was in a cult, too. He was in the Moonies for 14 years.
There's something like 3000 cults, religious and otherwise, that have been identified in the United States. As of now, it's a pretty relevant topic. So I'm working on book two of my memoir right now, which is the process of recovering. I left the american Sikh community in 1987. So it's been what, 35 years?
And I'm finding still remnants of the behavioral norms and the worldview and stuff that was indoctrinated into us by this cult.
And amazing stuff.
I find out almost every week. I find some new revelation. I said, oh my God, that came from being in that cult, this behavior I did, or it's really disturbing and exciting at the same time and probably.
[01:05:44] Speaker A: Amuse for all your artistic endeavors. So I can see why your creativity goes from painting to music to memoirs to writing all this stuff. It's pretty amazing to see how much of a renaissance person you are with your.
[01:06:03] Speaker C: Well, thank you. That's the nice word for it. Other people might say diletante, but I do have a vast spectrum of interest. So last year, for example, from my birthday present, I got a course in marine captaincy. So I became a sea captain.
So I'm a certified coast guard approved sea captain, on which I haven't really used for anything except a couple of times I've taken people out on my a, and this runs in the family. I think it's a very wide range of interests, though. You might find it with Clarence Dan's poetry, in fact.
[01:06:53] Speaker A: Definitely. Yeah.
From the western landscapes to the women he was infatuated with later in his life. Every week.
[01:07:04] Speaker C: Almost every week. And the books of poetry that he translated from the Italian, French and German.
He was quite something and a very handsome man.
If you look at the pictures of him in the fly leaf of the various books of poetry, he was incredibly handsome.
And this is something else that ran through the family. And I think it was a problem because my father, as you met, you met my father, he looked like at the age of 94, 95 when you met him. He still looked like a movie star. I mean, his shock of white hair pulled back, his square jaw, sophisticated, very intelligent face.
He was just an amazing guy. And I think it got a lot of the men in the family into deep trouble.
[01:08:00] Speaker B: Well, on that note, we're coming up on an hour here.
[01:08:04] Speaker A: Wow. I think really thank you.
[01:08:06] Speaker B: It has wonderful, these are great stories and you've been incredibly generous with your memories and with your time to share it with us and with the people who will be listening to this podcast. Hopefully there'll be at least a few.
[01:08:22] Speaker C: Well, I hope that it adds something to the appreciation for who Clarence Dan was and how what you're doing musically is honoring him and honoring the past, which I think is something super important that we draw from the past and we honor our ancestors. It's something that I didn't figure out until much later in my own life that, wow, I had this incredible connection to my ancestors and who they were and what they went through has an impact on my life and who I am and how I think and how I am physically and emotionally and mentally. It's all informed by generations. And Clarence Dan was an important piece of that, and he left a record with all his good and bad poetry. So thank you for what you guys are doing.
[01:09:11] Speaker A: Oh, our pleasure. And it's our pleasure, Aaron. And I want to thank Peter Blatchley for letting us interview him and thank him for being the Renaissance person who does so many things. He's an author, a musician, a boat builder. You go down the list, you probably can do it. And thank you for being our guest.
[01:09:41] Speaker B: Thank you, Peter.
[01:09:42] Speaker A: We're going to play the song for you. So here it is in the entirety of its fantastical awesomeness. That makes for a hallucinogenic journey without the encouragement from drugs.
[01:09:57] Speaker B: Put on your broccoli hat.
[01:09:59] Speaker A: That's right.
[01:10:00] Speaker B: Here we go.
[01:10:23] Speaker E: A soft wind bends the slender blades of the dune grasses in the west a pale cloud turns to pink and.
[01:10:36] Speaker A: Fades.
[01:10:55] Speaker E: Breezes sing a song serene dancing round the ancient trees it brings our hearts the joy of dreams coming from the darkened seas I hear the sea call out to me luminescent glow, the brightest green from soft winds into harmony we join in song heading west with farsi croons itself to rest? A soft wind bends the slender blade of the doom grasses. In the west a pale cloud turns to pink and fades across the fields the dying tones of bells are born? The herdsman calls a scattered flock? The village drones? The voice of sleep and evening falls? The voice of sleep and evening falls? The voice of sleep and evening fall?
[01:15:33] Speaker A: Just take a breath.
You've gone to the town that had a village drone. That's not mechanical.
We've got a word of the day.
[01:15:46] Speaker B: Word of the day. What's your word of the day, Michael?
[01:15:49] Speaker A: Mitochondria.
[01:15:50] Speaker B: Oh my God. You win.
I just should go home right now.
I'll never top that.
[01:15:57] Speaker A: No, I insist. You should at least give your word.
[01:16:02] Speaker B: Really?
[01:16:03] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:16:03] Speaker B: Okay.
[01:16:03] Speaker A: I want to hear it.
[01:16:05] Speaker B: Feedback.
[01:16:07] Speaker A: Like microphone feedback or like advice?
[01:16:10] Speaker B: Why don't you give me some feedback about my word of the day?
[01:16:15] Speaker A: It could use work.
[01:16:16] Speaker B: Okay.
[01:16:17] Speaker A: Thank you. Well, on that note, you've been listening.
[01:16:20] Speaker B: To the Nathan's and Roncast.
Peace. Ciao.
