Episode 3: Parker Brooks & Aaron Kyle
Aaron Kyle: The thing about touring is that you're basically on a weird vacation with no responsibility. I mean, you really do revert back to being like a young kid. You'd get to explore the country in a way that you would never explore it otherwise, and you're hanging out with your best friends. Probably the greatest thing in the world.
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 Parker Brooks. He's a musician, creative, and tech innovator. He helped launch Beats Music, Apple Music, and Apple Music DJ mixes, and is currently the VP of NFTs at Ledger in Paris. In my many years of knowing Parker, we actually grew up together in Austin, Texas. I've seen him travel the world on a mission to change the music industry for the better. His story takes us to Berlin, Germany, a city that is full of wonderfully odd nooks and crannies.
Parker Brooks: When I started traveling to Berlin for Apple, I reached out to Horst, the CEO of K7 Records. And I'd asked him, where do I stay? So he's like, look, you should stay at this place. It's called Michelberger. These are all my artists' stays. You should stay there. So as a little aside, working at Apple, there's a list of hotels that you go to the website and they go, these are the hotels you can stay. The big joke is that if you're new at Apple, you stay at the hotels they tell you to stay at.
Parker Brooks: So I booked the room on the east side of Berlin. It's an insanely cool old building and it has modern design on the inside. It has a great bar, has a sauna outside, and a really cool hangout area. The first time I go there, I get a room and it faces the street. It’s a very small room and it has a ladder that goes up to a bed with a net. It's very brutalist, very Bauhaus mixed together, very cool.
Parker Brooks: The second time I show up, I told them, I’d really love a room that faces the inside because of the train station right out the window had buskers all night. I show up late at night and get my key. I go up and I open the door. Everything is gold. I don't mean gilded gold. I mean everything. The ceiling, the blankets, the mirror, the tiles. I sit on the bed, I'm like, dude, I hate being this guy. So I look up and in every room in this hotel there's a book about how to make the moment good. Taking the opportunity that you're in and make it good.
Parker Brooks: I walked to the desk and I'm like, I hate to be that guy. And he's like, what? I was like, it's gold. I mean, it's too gold. He's like, you know what that room is? That's the king's room. That is the room made for a king. And he's like, you know what comes with the king's room? The king's robe. Red, with white fur around it. You come home later, you can be the King. I was like, I can't come home to this room.
Parker Brooks: He starts tapping on the keyboard and he’s like, whoa, I got something for you. So we get in the elevator and we go up to the fourth floor. When you come out of the elevator, you hear someone talking. And when you look to the left and you look to the right, there's a screen on either end of the hallway. It's playing the Big Lebowski on a loop 24-7. I'm in a black hallway. Black carpet, black walls, black ceiling. He opens the door. What is before me is a room that's probably in a hotel size six rooms. And inside this room is another room. There's a little house in the middle.
Parker Brooks: It is the most beautifully built Scandinavian house in the middle. Around the house is a table for 10. There's a couch, there's a tub, there's a sauna in the house. And when you crawl into the house, there's probably four or five beds. And there's one rule in this room. He's like, look, just don't destroy the place. Because if you could promise me this, you can have the room.
Josh Caldwell: This next story comes from Aaron Kyle. He's a singer, songwriter, and bandleader. He's fronted bands like Le Switch and Geronimo Getty. I love Aaron's story because it's part cautionary tale of the excesses of the road, and yet it's also part circle of life.
Aaron Kyle: Touring is basically on a weird vacation with no responsibility. But it's also grueling—driving for six hours a day every day is hard work. A friend of mine was managing the Radar Brothers. Their bass player and their drummer left the band and so it was really just Jim Putnam. He asked if I was interested and I was just like, I'll play in anything, I just want to play as much as possible.
Aaron Kyle: Jim was in a way a mentor to me. I felt like I learned a lot about just having fun in life and not taking things too seriously. We were in some town in California and we ended up going out and launching a rocket in the middle of a field. I always thought that was a beautiful memory of that tour.
Aaron Kyle: We ended up going to the UK and it was the first time that I'd left the country. It was such a rock star treatment—somebody picks us up from the airport. But we were also completely broke. Our stipend for the day was like five pounds. I'd use my five pounds on a shitty English breakfast. But we were also drinking so much. From 27 to 30, I was just in this constant party.
Aaron Kyle: On the last Le Switch tour, we got to San Francisco. I go to the hotel and just sleep because I'm so tired. I woke up in the middle of the night and my throat had closed up from being so swollen that I started jumping around the room because I couldn't catch a breath. Finally, my esophagus opens up and I'm like, holy shit, I could have died. I haven't had a cigarette since.
Aaron Kyle: The last tour we went on in 2015, I really enjoyed it. One night we were in Mississippi at this place made up of old sharecropper houses. The guy that ran the place, we ended up hanging out with him drinking and smoking a little weed. We bought all these fireworks on the border of Alabama and Tennessee. We ended up in the middle of this cotton field at two in the morning and we're just lighting off these fireworks and playing Roman candle wars. It was the greatest time. If you can have experiences like that, you really do feel like a kid again. You don't have to worry so much about life. It's pretty sweet.
Josh Caldwell: I want to thank Parker and Aaron for sharing their experiences. Make sure to check out Aaron Kyle's latest release, "Here in the River." And if you want to know more about what Parker's up to, check out Ledger Market. This podcast was created and produced by me, Josh Caldwell. Music by Visual Aid. 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.
