Episode 2: Seth Morris & Brian Soika

Brian Soika: We were in the middle of nowhere along the highway and we saw a sign for a state penitentiary. And then like very shortly after that, we saw a man running for his life across the highway. And I'm pretty sure he just escaped from jail.

Josh Caldwell: Welcome to Atypical Daydream, a podcast about life on the road. I'm Josh, your host, and thanks for stopping by. My first guest is Seth Morris. He's an actor, comedian, and writer. You'll know him from Upright Citizens Brigade, Children's Hospital, Comedy Bang Bang, Funny or Die, and much more. Seth's story reassures us that the Wild West is still alive and fully baked in the heart of America.

Seth Morris: I did a cross-country bicycle trip. Before I ever did comedy, I rode my bike from San Francisco to Florida. And a lot of times, we didn't even go to campgrounds. We were naive, open-minded enough where we would just go to a town and say, is there somewhere we could camp? And we talked to the person in the diner. They were like, yeah, you can set up a tent out there. The owner's usually fine. And it turned out this little, there was like a one-street town, literally a one-street town. And the lady said something like, I can ask the owner of the town. We were like, what? She said, yeah, there's one guy that owns this whole thing.

Seth Morris: And this was the first time I heard the term desert rat. He's an old desert rat. He's lived out here a long time. And he wanted to come meet us. And he looked like some of those Kentucky Fried Chicken commercials where they're all crisped up because he was wearing all white and a white fedora and had the tips of his ears were gone. The tip of his nose was gone. He had a bandaid on his nose. But he was this elegant desert baron who just was giving us his blessing to stay there. It was wild.

Seth Morris: I would see people who had families and they would be blown. They're like, you're trapped. This is your whole life on this bike? And I'd be like, yeah. And to me, I'm like, anybody could do this. And they were so excited. And some people would slip you money or let you stay with them. And I realized it's because they couldn't do it. That part of their life was so done. And they were so excited that somebody was doing it, you know.

Seth Morris: So some friends and I do a comedy festival every year in Telluride, Colorado. It's really just a small little thing that we've essentially sort of taken over and turned into our yearly vacation. So it's like me and Nick Kroll and Jason Mandzukis and Rob Cordray and all sorts of people like that I came up with. And the deal is we don't get paid, but they put us up. We can ski and all this kind of stuff.

Seth Morris: It's amazing because you just ski all day and then you perform at night and it's this beautiful, the place you perform in is Sheridan Opera House and it's maybe like a two or three hundred seat theater, but it's an old timey, it looks like Cowboys would be there. Like Telluride's famous, one of its claims to fame is Butch Cassidy robbed the bank there at one point. It's a gorgeous theater and the crowds are super crazy, super rowdy, especially in the early days. It's become so expensive that a lot of young people can't afford to live there.

Seth Morris: These are like kind of mountain ski bum kids who, and you're coming in the middle of winter, so they've been starved for entertainment and they just are maniacs. And that was the kind of show where it was so hard to get people to shut up and listen to a scene. You just have to kind of spar with them for the first 20 minutes and then wait till the first person gets kicked out and then you can do your scenes and do your stuff.

Seth Morris: But one of the things that was so funny, there was a couple of years where they flew us out and it's always our friend that puts it together as a wonderful guy. Like the way that they pay for things, it's a town where they still just barter to put things on. So like he'll make a deal with the condo company that, if you put these guys up, we'll mention you every night and you'll get a VIP seat in the front of the thing. And even with the airlines, so the flights that they get us are bananas.

Seth Morris: Because I don't know if you know the Telluride airport is one of the like 20 deadliest airports in the United States. It's just on the top of a mountain. But this flight would go from LA to this little tiny airport in Arizona. And somehow the congressman or Senator had worked out a deal to create some jobs through the NSA and the TSA. So you would land at this airport that was just an airplane graveyard. And this was like a, you know, not exactly a puddle jumper, but a plane that carries like 30, 40 people.

Seth Morris: So you land there and it's just rows and rows and rows of old 747s, old airplanes covered in various states of disarray. And then you get out in the hot, hot desert. You have to get off the plane. You go into this little airport that looks like the show Wings. It's got a diner and that's it really. And you get off, TSA checks your stuff, and then you get back on the plane and you go. And it's like this, everybody's kind of looking at each other like, what is this weird ritual we're doing? And you know, the TSA people, those small towns, they take their jobs so seriously, man. They are like on the front lines of something. And a couple of them got it, or they kind of like be searching your stuff like, this is crazy, right? But then a couple of them would be kind of eyeing you up and down and just like, all right, dude, I think this place is safe.

Seth Morris: Then when we get to Telluride, it's a wild west town. Because it's a ski town and a lot of rich people party there, there's tons of drugs there. When I was in New York, I met this girl who said, yeah, I moved to New York to kind of chill out because I was living in Telluride. She moved to Manhattan to mellow out. It's a beautiful town. It just has an underbelly. And you go out at night and there's these kids that are, like I said, ski bums, but they've got giant black saucer pupils and they're like, hey man, do you want to hang out? And you're like, no, I don't want to hang out.

Seth Morris: And there was a couple of years ago where weed had just become legal, recreational weed had just become legal there. It might have even been the first or second year it became legal there. And the Sheridan Opera House is, it has a balcony that is probably 15 feet high, something like that. We're doing our show and the shows are a combination of improv, sketch and standup. And it's usually like our type group of improvisers that have known each other a long time and then we like bring out somebody cool that's a stand-up.

Seth Morris: So we had this stand-up who, it was her first time out there and she's on stage and she had just started her set and all of a sudden you hear this, my God! And all this ruffling in the back and you know, there's been years in the past where we had to get people kicked out because they were just so drunk and they wouldn't stop heckling or whatever. So we kind of thought it could have been that. Immediately all these cell phones go up. And somebody's like, he fell, he fell. And then you hear this guy go, can somebody please help me? I'm very high. I need some help, please.

Seth Morris: And it turned out that he didn't fall from the balcony. It seemed like for the first five minutes, everybody thought he fell from the balcony, but he was in the back, back row, right? So he's like in these folding chairs in back of the last sort of bolted down rows. And he's in the middle of that row. And he had, of course, eaten a pot cookie and like ate the whole thing and was insanely high. And what he did, he couldn't, he was like, I can't go left, I can't go right. So he tried to jump over the people in front of him because he just wanted to get out. And he's like, I'm very, very high. Somebody please help me. I mean, which was funny.

Seth Morris: But then apparently this guy, this poor guy, he said he was Saddam Hussein and he was gonna, like the cops came and he tried to grab the cop's gun. It could have been real bad. They eventually took him to the ER and he had to pay all this money, not only for fines, but like somehow it's a tiny little place. So you have to pay when the hospital staff, like the ER staff gets there, I think, because they live close enough. And we were like, who is that? And, you know, there's different games of telephone that go on. It's like, oh, it was a kid who was here with his parents and he whatever, whatever, whatever.

Seth Morris: It turns out it was a guy who was like 20 something and he was there with his work. And he had eaten the equivalent of like 20 joints. And then, you know, because those early days, they didn't tell you how strong everything was. So, of course, you did the thing of, eat it, I'm not high immediately, I'm going to eat some more. You're like, this cookie tastes good. I just, my gosh.

Josh Caldwell: This next story comes from Brian Soika. He's a writer and fantastic drummer. He's played with Stargraves and Geronimo Getty, as well as with singer-songwriter Liz Papademos. But we also played together in a band called Les Blanks. That's how we first met. Many moons ago. Here Brian tells us the tale of our enchanted experience with the true rock and roll wizard.

Brian Soika: My name is Brian Soika and I play drums. And this story is about a band I was in called Les Blanks, like the filmmaker Les Blank, but with an S. And we were sort of popular among a very small group of people. And this story is about a tour that we went on through the Southwest, culminating in an appearance at South by Southwest. Although it wasn't, I don't think it was an official appearance. We were just there in Austin during the festival to play some shows. We were like festival adjacent.

Brian Soika: And this was probably 2008-ish. We left Los Angeles and we played a couple of shows throughout the Southwest. As we were driving into Texas, we were in the middle of nowhere along the highway. And we saw a sign for a state penitentiary. And then like very shortly after that, we saw a man dressed in what looked like jail clothes, jail garments, running for his life across the highway. And I'm pretty sure he just escaped from jail. That was a very special tour moment, very special life moment. I've never seen anything like that.

Brian Soika: So we played in El Paso and then we made our way down to Austin and we woke up one morning. And I got a call from a producer of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno because they were in Austin shooting segments for the show. The setup was Wayne Coyne from The Flaming Lips was covering South by Southwest for The Tonight Show. And they were looking for bands to come be interviewed by Wayne. And I got this call. I knew it wasn't completely out of left field. I had a friend who was a writer on the show. He knew I was there. So he set it up.

Brian Soika: We got a call asking if we wanted to be in the segment with Wayne Coyne. And of course we said, yes, please, let's do this. So we got into a car and started driving because they needed us there in like an hour. And I'm not even sure we knew what we were going to be doing as we left the house. But pretty quickly we came up with an idea of us three adult males playing tiny little children instruments.

Brian Soika: We drove around Austin trying to find a toy drum set and toy amplifiers at 10.30 in the morning on a Tuesday. We went into a few different music stores and finally we found them with the toy drum set being located at a Toys R' Us, which really should have been the first place we went to. We went to downtown Austin and initialized with the film crew. Wayne came over, introduced himself, and he was just the nicest dude. And he was like, from another dimension, like everything that you know about Wayne Coyne that you suspect might be true if you've never met him is true. He's not like you and me.

Brian Soika: And he was giving us some tips and pointers on what to say. I think we were a little nervous to be on camera. So we were talking to Wayne and trying to figure out what we should do on camera. And I think we pitched him the idea of me tall lanky drummer man will destroy this kid's drum set and won't that be hilarious? And Wayne was like, no, what you need to do is set that on fire. So we're like, yes, we need to set this drum set on fire, man. And so Wayne, of course, knew exactly how to do it. And he gave us some pro tips on how to properly light a drum set on fire.

Brian Soika: When we shot the scene, we were playing a song and then the time came for Josh to set the drum set on fire. Using Wayne's tips, the drum set lit up. It was a beautiful sight. They got it all on camera and then they yelled cut. The crew quickly went away and then we talked to Wayne for a second and we gave him one of our records and he looked at it thoughtfully and then he was looking at the cover art and he was like, this kind of looks like a Sun Ra album. I was like, that is a very nice compliment, but we sound nothing like Sun Ra. So I don't know if he was very disappointed when he listened to it or if he listened to it at all. Then he just kind of disappeared into a van and the van vanished.

Brian Soika: Later that day, we were very excited about this event because we were like, we're going to be on national television. We're going to get so much exposure. We were waiting to watch it. It came on. They introduced our segment. Wayne came on. He introduced the bit and then they rolled the tape. We were part of essentially a super cut, which was just interviews and soundbites and short clips of a bunch of different bands and weird performers. We did appear in it, but we were in there for like nanoseconds, just like the briefest of brief appearances.

Brian Soika: But it just so happens that while that segment was being filmed, a photographer from the Austin American Statesman was just walking by and taking photos. And he got this great picture of the segment where Josh had set the drums on fire. I was playing the drums. Parker was playing next to me. And it was like a perfect photo. It ended up getting picked up by the New York Post, I think, or some national outlet. And so the photo itself got a lot of attention and it became like treasured by us in the band. And I think a lot of people got a kick out of it.

Josh Caldwell: The photo is amazing, but Josh is not in it, and I think he harbors a grudge about it. And I'm hoping that through many years of therapy, he's able to finally move on. So that was a great experience. And of course, we got to meet a legend named Wayne Coyne.

Josh Caldwell: I wanna thank Seth and Brian for sharing their experiences. Make sure to check out Seth in full throttle with Bob Duca and the Seth Morris Radio Project, both on Comedy Bang Bang World. Also check out the drum stylings of Brian Soika and Stargraves, Geronimo Getty, Liz Papademos, and of course the one and only Les Blanks.

Josh Caldwell: This podcast was created and produced by me, Josh Caldwell. Music by Visual Aid, General Support, and Copywriting by Miranda Caldwell. If you like the show, please follow and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you for listening, and I hope you come back next week.