SPEAKER_02 0:00

I'm Alejandra Roosty, and this is the Roosy Hive: Conversations with People Who Treat their work and life as a creative practice. Today, I sit down with Scott Ason, who treats boredom as the only real failure and taste as a form of courage to talk about how risk stops being a single leap and becomes a way of life, and how Turtle Bay Records emerged from instinct and timing, a modern kind of patronage where the work gets backed, culture gets fed, and comfort never gets the last word. This podcast is presented by Rico Moresca. Thank you for joining me, Scott Ason, and welcome to the Rusi Hive podcast.

SPEAKER_00 0:45

I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 0:46

The day has finally come, and here you are, which uh seems like a small miracle to me, given your extensive criminal record.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

I've only been out for a little while. And who knows when I'm going in anyway.

SPEAKER_02 1:03

I I am honored that you're here. So here is your hive card. Selected maxims from the Scott Asen style guide. One, boredom is the only unforgivable mistake. Everything else can be spun into a story. Two, if it feels just shy of sensible, that's usually where the fun begins. Three, taste is a moral virtue, the core is a polite suggestion. Four, anything worth doing is worth doing slightly out of order, preferably without warning. Five, curiosity beats strategy, improvisation beats both, especially after a few drinks. Six, if everyone approves, something has gone terribly wrong. Seven, a well-timed detour is often the actual point of the trip. Eight, planning is optional, timing is non-negotiable. Nine, if it delights you and alarms at least one friend, proceed. And ten, when in doubt, choose a more interesting problem or invent one if the options feel dull. How's that?

SPEAKER_01 2:28

Is it a quiz?

SPEAKER_02 2:30

Well, this is all about you.

SPEAKER_01 2:31

So all it made me think of is I I once read a book by a great adventurer whose name I can't remember. And his his operating rule of life was that when you get yourself in a situation, and he adventured all over the world. He went crazy places and did crazy things with crazy people. And he said, when you find yourself in a situation that is so complex and so dire that you can't imagine how you're gonna get out of it, that's when the fun starts. That's when the fun starts. So maybe that's number 11. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 3:06

Wonderful.

SPEAKER_01 3:07

I've always thought that's a pretty good way to live.

SPEAKER_02 3:08

Yeah. So I've actually always been fascinated by your life because you truly live on your own terms. And that is something that many admire, but very few accomplish.

SPEAKER_01 3:22

Admiration is questionable, but not not everybody. Not everybody.

SPEAKER_02 3:25

Some might describe you as an investor with an artistic temperament. But I think you actually are an artist with an investor's day job. And the two have seemed to get along surprisingly well.

SPEAKER_01 3:40

It's in the eye of the beholder. Yeah, I'm an investor. That's for most of my adult life, that's been my day job. Uh and how I've managed to support myself and keep now several rooms over my head. But I've done a bunch of other stuff along the way. Uh and the artist definition, I mean, that's a that's a big ten. Who knows? It's it's flat. I take it as flattering. I I admire artists, and then the idea of possibly being one is that's appealing to me. So you be the judge.

SPEAKER_02 4:10

Yeah, well, today I want to focus on Turtle Bay Records, which is the jazz label that you began formulating in 2020, correct?

SPEAKER_01 4:20

Correct. As we as we plunge into COVID. So it's like so much else I've done perfectly fine. Perfectly fine.

SPEAKER_02 4:26

And how Turtle Bay Records embodies your creative life, not only as a kind of uh personal outlet, but as an engine that encourages and supports other people's, many other people's creative work.

SPEAKER_01 4:42

One hopes. Yeah. One hopes.

SPEAKER_02 4:44

So to make sense of this delightful puzzle, I want to begin at the beginning.

SPEAKER_01 4:51

How I got there.

SPEAKER_02 4:53

So you grew up with show business in your bloodstream, your vaudevillian mother and a father who played in jazz bands. How did being raised by performers shape your sense of taste, timing, humor?

SPEAKER_01 5:09

Well, I mean, I think uh I mean everybody would argue that that your upbringing is hugely important in the context of your upbringing and and what your parents were like and what you were exposed to as a kid. I grew up in in a uh in the deep country in in Northwest Connecticut, which sounds like a suburb of New York, but it's it's really wild country. It's amazing how it still remains that way. And uh it was very isolated. And I was raised by my mother and my and her mother, who was a great stage mother, um, and my father, who at that point worked in New York and showed up on weekends. So I was I was raised really by two women all the time, tons of dogs and cats, beautiful countryside, and a father who a charismatic father who showed up on weekends. There, and you're quite right, they had both been in show business. My mom was in vaudeville, my dad was a was a clarinet and saxophone player in bands of every possible kind. And their life, their professional lives doing that had actually ended by the time I came along. So I I only grew up with the stories. But that part of their lives was was so much part of them uh and their tastes and what they liked and what they got fun out of and so forth. That was such a strong influence on me that yes, it it really did help form me. Something I I remembered recently, the the uh my dad would usually show up on Friday night from from the city, and he would almost always bring a new record or two that he'd found during the week. And the music was just fabulous. It was it was people, some some of the names are known now, some not, people like Benny Goodman or Peggy Lee or less known names like Bob Scobie and Clancy Hayes and Ralph Sutton, just in their time, just giants, and still to me giants. And I literally never saw the two of them, my parents, as happy as they were when they we finally sit down, they put the record on the turntable, and we'd start listening to the new music they'd brought. And the just that that kind of pleasure, just body pleasure almost, is is is so infectious. And as the only child who was sitting in the middle of the that was, you know, the only the only light shining on me, uh it was hugely influential, hugely. And because their taste was pretty good, and because in my view, the music is remains so strong. It was sort of easy to have that that stay a strong influence in my life all the way along. And it's it's it's bubbled up in various ways along the way, but it's always been there.

SPEAKER_02 7:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:47

Always been there.

SPEAKER_02 7:48

Aaron Powell So Groton, the very elite boarding school that you attended, has a long history of producing people, expected to lead, govern, or at least run something.

SPEAKER_01 8:00

In more in those days, but yes, that's that's that's always been the dream.

SPEAKER_02 8:04

And many of them go to Harvard to learn how uh you followed that path, despite coming from a completely different universe. What w was it arriving at both places with your particular background?

SPEAKER_01 8:18

What was it like?

SPEAKER_02 8:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:20

It was hell. It was terrible. It's terrible. I mean, first of all, the having grown up in such an isolated circumstance, um, just being away from home for the first time, I mean, it was a big decision to send me to boarding school. And it all came about in a in a completely crazy way, which we don't need to belabor. But Groton was not the sort of obvious next step for me growing up in Canaanite, Connecticut. But it I I landed up there. And I mean, thank God for it. It was, it turned out to be a sort of miraculously wonderful, but also very brave and a very painful decision. Uh, my first year there, I mean, it was just it was just simple homesickness. I was miserable, just simply miserable. I hated being away from my parents. I couldn't stand them. They they were similarly miserable. It's amazing we didn't all give in and just converge back in Caden, Connecticut, and and give up. But I stayed, thank God. So, what was it like arriving there? Uh apart from the homesickness, uh it was it was it was very tough and very dislocating. I mean, I uh Groton uh then was a very homogeneous school. It's not the case today, but it was sort of famously the the uh a school for very sort of upper class, mostly northeastern wasp kids, um from from old established families and so forth. And uh and as I say, a pretty homogeneous group. And that that really did characterize the population pretty pretty strongly. So here arrives this kid. My dad was Jewish, they both my parents were in show business, also Groton put a great emphasis on athletics. I was tiny, I had terrible eyesight, I was uh I was the least athletic kid you can ever imagine. I didn't naturally fit into the scene there, I just didn't. You tried telling a fourth-generation Boston wasp that your parents were in vaudeville and you get a kind of a funny look. So I was it we I was just different. I was I mean it was a classic outsider. I mean, every kid feels like they're an outsider, but boy, I really I had good reason. I really did. It sort of began a pattern. I mean, I've in in some way, I mean, I guess everybody everybody starts feeling like an outsider. Some people, not everybody, but but uh uh some people become more comfortable with themselves and their surroundings as time goes on. But it happens in various ways. And because of the way I've lived my life, I've always been something of an outsider, not not necessarily uncomfortable, but but an outsider. And I and I in some ways still am still am.

SPEAKER_02 10:55

So your CV reads like three different people. Um, a Wall Street beginning, a stretch playing piano in a Cambridge bar, uh dabbling in journalism, and then venture capital and private investing. Right. What thread ties it all together?

SPEAKER_01 11:14

Not much. The I mean it it it is a lunatic story. I I went to these incredibly fancy schools, growing up in Harvard, were, you know, in in most people's eyes, about as good as they could get. Uh I was a terrible student. I mean, uh how I survived in both I I should have if there's justice in the world, I should have been thrown out of both places. Um I wasn't, and that's a whole story in itself. But I I did survive. I graduated, but my I never worked hard. I didn't learn a whole lot. What you absorb from the environment, I couldn't help but absorb, and that ended up being very consequential for me in ways that I'm I'm really only now kind of beginning to be able to articulate to myself. But the those environments were very important to me. But I graduated barely from Harvard. And unlike a lot of my peers in school, whose because of family situations and so forth, the the path was pretty well laid out for them. It just wasn't the case for me at all. I mean, my dad has had started as a clarinet player, he'd he'd subsequently gone into business and had a a really kind of interesting career, which had, among other things, made him prosperous enough for at exactly the right point in time so he could afford to send me to these fancy schools. And then ultimately that sort of started going downhill and he ended up, he died broke, my dad. It was a crazy sort of a sine wave of a of a career that he had. But there there was no obvious path for me. I mean, I sort of had the idea that that business, the investing business would be interesting. Took me a year to find my first job. And it was in in sort of time-honored uh way. It was the it was the father of a classmate of mine from Groton who worked for some fancy little Wall Street firm and took pity on me and hired me. That's why I got my first job a year after getting out of Harvard. And then I had had two really kind of lackadaisical Wall Street jobs, that being the first of them in my 20s. And it's kind of hard to describe how lacking in energy and certainly ambition I was. I was just, I was having a good, I always had a good time, but I really just kind of drifted and got consequently nowhere. When I turned 30, I was working for the second of these two companies. And very small, not successful investment firm run by a crazy man. I just I found myself bored. And not with any particular new direction in mind, but just bored. There was a guy who I'd met a few times, as sort of a friend, who had run a bar in near in Harvard Square in Cambridge, um, where I'd hung out when I was in college, and had lots of friends who went there and so forth. And he'd heard me play piano at parties a few times over the years. He knew nothing about music. And he'd sort of idly said, Hey, if you ever want to stop this Wall Street nonsense, why don't you give me a call? I'll give you a job playing piano in the bar. I think really he thought I could attract some of my sort of fancy school friends to come to the bar and so forth. He couldn't have thought the music was any good. And so I'm sitting in my office at the age of 30 one day, and I was bored. And there'd been a couple of people sort of angling other job opportunities in front of me that I was not interested in. And so I just picked up the telephone and I called the guy who ran the bar in Cambridge, wonderful Lebanese guy called Saria Buljabain. And I said, Hey, sorry, you know, I'm actually I'm thinking about calling your bluff about about the job in the bar. And he said, Cool, when do you want to start? And I said, What about two weeks from Tuesday? And he said, fine. So I went in and quit and told my poor parents that their their Harvard graduate son, who ought to be succeeding in Wall Street by now, was chucking it all and going back to Cambridge to play piano in a bar. They also knew how good a piano player I was. So they they that made it look even more a scant, I think.

SPEAKER_02 15:16

How did you learn to play the piano?

SPEAKER_01 15:18

I arguably I never did. Oh, you just kind of picked it up. I I took lessons, the classics from schoolboy lessons for a little bit in my early teenage years. Got good enough to read music and and just started playing. And um I'm I'm a half-ass piano player. I'm just not good. I'm really not good. I mean, I get fun out of it. And if it's late enough at night, then people who had enough to drink, they can be kind of amused. But the idea of anybody paying money to go here ain't happening, which didn't daunt me a bit. And I and so I moved up to quit my job, moved up to Cambridge, got a a rented room and a house near Harvard Square, and just bravely went in and started playing. I mean, it was it was a crazy act. Absolutely crazy. Because I wasn't any good because I was 30 years old. I mean, what what could possibly have led me to play was to like and I and I didn't, I I had absolutely no sense of direction. It just seemed like a fun thing to do. It was it was really not a well not a not a studied decision at all.

SPEAKER_02 16:19

So how long did that last?

SPEAKER_01 16:21

Getting out of three years, I think. Three years.

SPEAKER_02 16:24

I presumably you were playing at night.

SPEAKER_01 16:26

Yeah. I was playing upstairs in this in this funky Harvard Square Bar. I mean, it was college kids for the most part, who had themselves no taste in music and certainly no interest in the kind of music. Because I was the music I've always been attracted to was my parents' music. It was older, older popular music. And it was older in those days, too. We're talking about now the 1960s. And so the the the kids who came there, it wasn't their kind of music at all. I mean, and they just they nobody liked it. I mean, it was it was just it was just it was it's it's kind of it's kind of it's kind of a problem. I mean, I I can remember, you know, every once in a while somebody would be sitting at a table across the room and just trying to you suck and just just scream at me. Um and just keep going. Just keep going. Just keep going. Yeah. This none of this speaks well for me, by the way. I I I I'm under no illusion that this speaks well for me. Something I vividly remember. Um since I played piano till one or two o'clock in the morning, then I'd go out and party with my friends, so I'd go to bed very late and I'd get up by noon. And I'd go down to Harvard Square, and I always always loved big breakfasts. And there were a couple of cafeterias there where I'd get all my newspapers and I'd go, and it would be 12:30 or 1 o'clock, and I'd spread my papers out and big breakfast, and just in heaven. And one of the cafeterias was on a street called Holyoke Street, and right across from the cafeteria was a newly built office building that had a commercial space in the ground floor. It was a brokerage house called Tucker Anthony. And I remember looking out the window of the cafeteria and seeing people my own age or younger in suits and yellow ties and carrying briefcases and striding up and down the street and going in and out of Tucker Anthony. And I remember thinking, you know, Scott, if you had a brain in your head, you would be just terrified about where your life is not right now. And characteristic of much of my life, I just couldn't muster the anxiety. I just couldn't, I just couldn't get myself upset about it. I'd just go back to my wonderful breakfast and enjoy myself. I I've never had ambition in a conventional sense. For for the I don't know, I mean, I had I was very, very low energy. Not anymore. For decades. No, something, something changed. I mean, I I've I frequently say it's a good thing I've lived so damn long because I, you know, before I was 70 or so, I didn't start doing nothing really kicked in. No.

SPEAKER_02 19:00

I doubt that. Um so you started Turtle Bay Records, as we mentioned in 2020, 2021, when the world was more or less at a standstill. Uh you've said that most people fear failure, but you fear boredom. Was Turtle Bay the antidote at that moment?

SPEAKER_01 19:18

I've run from boredom my whole life. Okay, that was, and probably Turtle Bay is another another chapter in that story. But yeah, I mean, I th I think a very important uh uh issue in in my life, and I think most people's lives, is is how they define risk. Um and something I vividly remember is is back in my mid-20s when I was working these half-assed Wall Street jobs, um talking to contemporary friends, and hearing them say things like that, you know, they didn't like their job, they were bored it wasn't going anywhere. Well, my now that was mine, but I didn't care about that. But but they they felt they were going nowhere, and they were complaining about it. And I'll say, Well, you're 25 years old, why don't you change? You know? And I remember getting answers like, well, I'm on a very good track and it can really go someplace. And besides, I'm getting married next year and we're gonna have a family. So they were stuck. And it seemed at at that young age completely lunatic to me. Because I th for them, the risk was a career risk, not not being on a track that would lead to making 15% more money next year and on and on to the future, and you know, a bigger job at the bank. And for me, the the what risk meant was the risk of just being being painfully bored in whatever I was doing. Somehow that came from my background, and I can't I can't speak to that, but it it it really is definitionally, it's a fundamentally different thing. And and just people have their different ways of looking at it. And I'm a bit unique, I think, in that way. Most people and convention has always been my enemy, really has.

SPEAKER_02 21:03

So at the very beginning of Turtle Bay Records, did you imagine this becoming a label, or were you simply following the impulse to record a few great sessions?

SPEAKER_01 21:13

That's about right. Um in my investing life, which is which is the one professional common thread through most of my long adult life. I I've been an investor in a variety of different kinds of businesses and and different ways, but I've always been an outside investor, investing money in businesses. And I really uh uh that's fun for me. It's turned out to be fun, and I've turned out to be okay good at it. It's a complex development of sort of pattern recognition like so many other things in life. And I think I've I think I've gotten pretty good and better at picking investments and dealing with people who run companies and so forth. So all that period I have said over and over again I should never be allowed to run anything. I should never be the person in the chair running the business, which is a very different set of skills than investing in the business. And for all sorts of reasons, we don't even be belabor. I I'm I I'm not a hard worker in a conventional sense. I don't get to the office early in the morning. I didn't have the attention span of a mouse. I just I just can't I I'm not a manager. I'm not a manager. So of course at the age of 75, I start a business where by default I'm running the damn thing. So, you know, another just just careless adventure. The idea very simply was that I accumulated more and more musician friends over the years. I continue to love the music, and and it's it's all older jazz. There are all these sort of niches that people name differently. The semantics are tough, but it's it's all older jazz up to the 20s, 30s, 40s, maybe into the 50s a bit. That that kind of that period. And I had more and more musician friends who who played that kind of music. It was everybody's perception that there was a very small audience for the music. And so consequently the music was almost not getting recorded at all. And when it was, it would oftentimes be the musicians themselves who, God bless them, wouldn't take every penny they had, go into a studio, record something, and then would just sit there because they had no money to promote it and push it out in the world. And so I thought, God, this, you know, this is interesting. There's this generation of of really kids coming along, because a lot of my friends are in their 20s and 30s and so forth, and who play this music. And some of them are, I swear, as good as the originators. This this intergeneration, intergenerational phenomenon of young people playing this music from often if it's a hundred years ago and playing it wonderfully well, I thought it was just a fascinating sort of intergenerational phenomenon. And the fact that it wasn't getting recorded and sort of documented at all was uh I thought, god damn it, why why not try to do that? Why not try to do that? Uh whether it would ever be a business. I absolutely no, no idea. And the answer is it it may or may not, but more likely not. If I ever make money doing this, it'll be a it'll be a miracle. But I've now got to the point where I think I'm I'm really we are creating a catalog of music that's that's that's really of of of some it's certainly of some size and some significance in in the development of this music and the history of what we're going through musically right now. I'm very proud of it.

SPEAKER_02 24:31

So turtle-based tagline is the best jazz players of today, playing the best tunes of yesterday, as you mentioned. Yeah. How do you balance preserving something and reinventing it? Or is that not a question?

SPEAKER_01 24:44

Much too sophisticated for me. I would say that different of the players that I work with, in some cases, they're well, let me say they're more about preservation. Um, sort of re- restating the the old music, often oftentimes slavishly to the arrangements and the notes as originally written. That that's one end of the spectrum. And it goes all the way from there to taking that old music and just simply improvising it into a whole new suit of clothes right now.

SPEAKER_02 25:14

Yes. So much of jazz culture and Turtle Bay in particular revolves around the hang.

SPEAKER_01 25:19

Hang, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:21

Um what does community mean to you in this project?

SPEAKER_01 25:26

A lot. Um I I it sounds so stupid. But people make the world. People make the world. I love people. Not all of them, but I but I but I but I love people. Um and uh and communities of people who sort of function well together and particularly make stuff and have fun doing it. That's really energizing to me. That's really fun. That's that's hot. One of the real pleasures to me, and and I feel tremendously lucky about having this having come along at this stage of my life, given what else is going on in the world right now, which we don't need to belabor. But the world is is so tough and so scary and so ugly right now. And damn it, musicians, artists in general, but musicians particularly, they just live their life for for, in my view, good reasons. They want to they want to entertain, they want to make work that lifts people up. They're for the most part pretty nice, they care about other people. I mean, all the things that I that I was sort of brought up believing are the good values in life, they tend to be honest, they tend to be empathetic, they tend to be fun, they tend to be funny and talented.

SPEAKER_03 26:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:49

That's a that's a big bundle of joy, really.

SPEAKER_02 26:52

A wonderful community to be in. Yes. So what does the process of making an album look like from your side? Okay. Like the choices, the steps, the parts that you're most hands-on with.

SPEAKER_01 27:05

In every case, I uh I will pick the the lead artists that we're working with. And oftentimes, I mean, we we now have people coming to us, but my my community of people that I know and work with is expanding all the time. And so and they're just there's there are always people that I I just have the idea I want to do something with. Um so it's it's typically the lead artist that comes first. And then uh I really I'm I'm I'm very hands-off in terms of all the artistic stuff. I want them to pick the people they play with, I want them to pick the the tunes they'll play. We'll talk about it because it's my business. I have the right to say no. And occasionally I will say no to a choice about something, but not much. I mean, my my view is of if I think somebody is good enough to to have have made them the focus of an album, so give them their head, let them run. Um so then they and we pick the studio to go into. We have one particular engineer that we work with, who we've had great luck with, and we just like a lot, and we work with him a lot. But we've we record mostly in New York, but we've recorded in Nashville, we've recorded in Austin, Texas. Um it's kind of where the musicians are and where they want to a lot of this is just again giving them their head and letting them do what they want, where they want to do it. So then you record it. And then there's a whole long process, which I barely understand, called mixing and mastering, where you take the raw recording and and turn it into really listable form and get rid of as many, as many sort of rough spots and flaws as you possibly can. And then you pick the the order of the tunes. You oftentimes you'll have more than will fit in an album, and then you have to pick the order of tunes that you put in the album. And we make vinyl of everything so far, and but in every case, vinyl and cds. A CD will take more music than a than a vinyl, so often as we'll have more tunes on a CD. So all those kinds of decisions. Then you have the package to worry about. You have to create cover art. You have to be, you know, hopefully a very engaging you I I care about about visual aesthetics a lot. My associate Elvira, who who has a design background, she's responsible for most of the design of the albums. And uh I we now have 21 albums out, and I'm really if you look down that the screen of 21 images of what we've done, I think some of them are I think they're all good, and I think some are really just beautiful, just beautiful. So the cover is important, but then the whole package is complex. You have to do the back of the album, and oftentimes we'll have elaborate liner notes that will go somewhere on the package, maybe in a booklet that goes inside, and those have to get re you have to try to hire somebody to write the liner notes. Now we have a distribution deal with an Arm Sony called The Orchard, which we're very proud of. And they're highly highly automated, and they have an elaborate workstation that you have to get all the all the what's called the metadata into having to do with the album. So that's very technical stuff that I don't begin to understand. Elvira does most of that. So there are multiple steps um to actually getting the album. Then you create a schedule for release of the album, and uh you'll frequently we normally will release two or three singles from the album in advance the album release to sort of build some some hopefully momentum for it. Then you release, then you hire a PR person to promote the album. Sometimes you hire a different radio promoter to promote it on radio. So there are all these steps. Maybe you have a launch party. So it's it's it's it's logistically a complex operation.

SPEAKER_02 30:47

It's a lot.

SPEAKER_01 30:48

It's not a good thing.

SPEAKER_02 30:48

So when you think about Turtle Bay as like a meta project, what's the larger vision guiding the catalog that you're building?

SPEAKER_01 30:57

Completely idiosyncratic. It's it's where my taste leads me. We have done, uh, as I said, I mean, the the the whole original definition was older jazz, as sloppy as that sounds, but but older jazz. And that's what we'll certainly stick to. Uh having said that, uh, we're gonna take a uh walk on the completely wild side next year and record an album by an English girls' singing group called The Medieval Babes. Um whose style is sort of Elizabethan choral music with a sort of new age twist to it. Uh it's a wonderful long story. But when I when I heard them a few years ago, I I was as different as it is from my music, I was very taken by them and met them and thought they were great. And I said, you know, there's something listening to music that that rings to me about Beatles music. Have you ever thought about doing an album of Beatles Covers? And Kate, the woman who the the head babe, um, said no. And she she initially hated the idea and and sort of sat with it for a little bit and came back and said, Yeah, damn it, I think that really is an interesting idea. Let's let's do it. So we've agreed to do that now. And that we'll probably record that late 26 or early 27 and release in 27. And we we plan to record some of all of it at um Abbey Road.

SPEAKER_02 32:21

Oh, amazing.

SPEAKER_01 32:22

Which is which is just a cool idea. That's very cool. Yeah. And maybe the cover will be uh and the the the it's it's uh a bunch of very beautiful women singers um who dress in in long flowing gowns and so forth. It's quite aesthetically quite beautiful. And so we fiddle maybe we'll have them crossing the street with the stripes that was the famous Beatles cover. Who knows? But and and the the album title, which is mine, which I'm very proud of, is Medieval Beatles.

SPEAKER_02 32:51

I love it. Can't wait.

SPEAKER_01 32:53

It's good.

SPEAKER_02 32:54

So your townhouse here in Manhattan is a home, a social world, a performance venue, and even a music video set. Uh with all that happening under one roof. How do you make sense of the way your life and your creative projects imitate each other and where, if anywhere, the boundaries are?

SPEAKER_01 33:17

I've never been very good at boundaries. Do they imitate each other? I don't know. It all seems pretty seamless to me. The the house I just learned very recently, is the people who come to the house, and the I I have fairly frequent music parties there. The the some of the kids are calling it the Jazz Mansion. That's apparently the name by which it's known around town now. Yeah. It's yeah, like so much else in my life, it's it's just it's a been a wonderful sort of unfolding piece of luck. Um, this is a building that I moved into the fall after I graduated from college as an illegal rent control subletter on the fourth floor. And uh, over a crazy decades-long New York real estate story, it's come to be my building. And then I moved out for a while and completely gutted and turned it into a house just for me. Kind of a silly amount of space for one guy. My girlfriend lives in California, so she we're not there together very much. So it's I'm the I'm there alone more often than not. And it uh it's turned out to be an amazing place to have parties mostly associated with the music business and have video shoots. And uh I have a wonderful piano there, which pianos are are central instruments in the whole music world, and and they're they're great pianos, they're terrible pianos. And I'm lucky enough to have what's turned out to be a really wonderful piano that terrific players love to play. So that's that ends up being weirdly being kind of a magnet. And so we have there's a lot of music there. We've we've actually made a couple of albums in my living room. So the the the houses end up being it's a lot of times I'm there alone, but a lot of times it's just packed with people and there's wonderful music playing and so forth. So and it it it it feeds the whole well, feeds me, first of all, which is a thrill. Uh but it it but it feeds this business, this music enterprise that I'm trying to build, and and people like coming there. And it just, it just the whole sort of ecosystem of Turtle Bay is is uh is fed by this. It's great.

SPEAKER_02 35:21

I remember going to one of your parties for the first time, maybe like a couple of months after we met, and it felt almost Gatsby-esque. Um, part salon, part jazz said it was all incredibly chic and smart, and I remember thinking. Wow, I've stepped into some fantastical portal into a hidden world that in some ways is a lost one, in my opinion. You've always struck me as someone who is a bridge to a certain kind of vanishing New York, a world of taste, style, friendship, intelligence that feels increasingly rare. How conscious are you of carrying that world forward?

SPEAKER_01 36:01

Listen, having grown up when I did and having had the kind of taste that came from my parents and so forth, there's there's a lot of old New York and in my in my life and and and my experience and my and my taste, no question about it. New York has changed over and over again, sometimes wonderfully, sometimes not so wonderfully during my life, but there have been some amazing periods. Um and yes, I guess my house and the parties that I give there are there's something about something of old New York about it. People don't give parties that much anymore. They just don't. I'm told. I mean, I don't get invited to it. I don't get invited out very much at all, but uh I don't I don't think people have parties.

SPEAKER_02 36:45

No.

SPEAKER_01 36:45

Um and certainly not parties with wonderful bands playing and and no no last call.

SPEAKER_03 36:52

Right.

SPEAKER_01 36:52

Um, and uh it's kind of a different world.

SPEAKER_02 36:55

Yes, it is.

SPEAKER_01 36:56

It's a world that that that has always seemed like you know the one you ought to be living.

SPEAKER_02 37:00

So if you had to pick one day from the 70s, one from the 80s, and one from the 90s that captures who you were in each of those decades, what would those three days look like?

SPEAKER_01 37:16

It's a day from the early 80s.

SPEAKER_02 37:18

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 37:19

Um my my then girlfriend was Keith Herring's studio assistant. She kind of ran his studio for him. And during the the brief, tragically brief spell of of Keith's life when he just became this wild artistic success. A lot of our life was spent with Keith and with Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. We were just together all the time. It was a pretty exciting time. And I just remember one night, you asked me for one day. I remember one night in that period when there was I think Andy and Keith both had openings in Soho at different galleries. And it was summer night, and my girlfriend Julie and I were going down to both these shows, and I just want these magical summer nights in New York, and Soho, which was the art center of the universe in those days, was just teeming with the streets were full of people. And I think we were on our way from Keith's opening to Andy's opening, and people were talking about something, just you could overhear people in the streets talking about something extraordinary that just happened. And at the beginning of Andy's opening, somebody had gone up and snatched his wig off his head. Terrible, terrible thing to do, right? Um, because Andy his his appearance was a very important thing to him, and the wig was a was a uh a mask on top of his head. Not a big deal in the greater scheme of things, but but boy, it was big news that night. And everybody, everybody, we knew about him long before we got to his opening.

SPEAKER_00 38:51

Everyone was a very good thing.

SPEAKER_01 38:53

And and just being, you know, strangers who were talking about you hear about Andy and so forth. And I mean, that was really that was a New York moment in the early 80s that that that really characterized so much of what was going on in the city.

SPEAKER_02 39:04

I love that.

SPEAKER_01 39:05

There was a moment.

SPEAKER_02 39:06

All right, switching gears a little bit. What is it like to still own the house that you grew up in in Connecticut? Does it feel like a time capsule or like continuity?

SPEAKER_01 39:20

Um feels like continuity. My kitchen window looks out at a gargantuan, really old apple tree, which is I'm gonna lose pretty soon tragically. But that is a tree where and it's it's got a huge trunk and it splits not very far off the ground. And I spent a lot of my childhood sitting in the crotch of that tree. I'd climb up there with a book and sit, and I look at it every day, I'll be up there on Thursday and I'll I'll look out of that tree, and and and it's been 80 years of looking at that tree. And that that kind of thing means a lot to me.

SPEAKER_03 39:54

Right.

SPEAKER_01 39:54

A lot.

SPEAKER_03 39:55

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 39:55

And the sound's the same, and the you know, the the the uh the wind in the trees is the same. And it just it it that that's a wonderful thing to me. It's just wonderful.

SPEAKER_02 40:05

That's beautiful. Um and I know you're renovating another house nearby, right?

unknown 40:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:12

And thinking of possibly starting a residency program. What are you advancing?

SPEAKER_01 40:16

Not in a formal way. I I've um in the completely unplanned way that everything in my life happens. I I carelessly bought another house uh a few years ago. The land is adjacent to my existing land. You have to drive on the road to get into the driveway, but it's it's effectively next door. And it's an act of complete lunacy. It's a much bigger house than the house I grew up in. Uh it's kind of a fancy house. I'll never move in there. Never, never consider moving in there. I bought it because I think it's really beautiful. The the sort of sense of all land going together made sense to me. But then, of course, the question is what the hell you can do with it. And I have all these musicians and other artists' friends, and I frequently hear people talking about God, if we only had a place to go for a little block of time and work on a new album or work on a book or something. Uh so it seems to me that I I that's I have something that I can offer to artists' friends. It's, it's, it's coming, it's taking on a bit of a life of its own that way. I've had a few bands go up there and spend four or five days just closing themselves and working. And and it it seems to work great. They love it. And I mean, I I think it's a it's a wonderful thing to be able to offer. It's so damn beautiful up there, and it's completely quiet. And of course, to me, it has the echo of uh I mean, that's where my love for music got born. And to be able to sort of keep that going somehow there, it's just that feels really really, really nice to me.

SPEAKER_02 41:42

That's amazing. So it's not going to be a formal residency program. It's just gonna be a word of mouth.

SPEAKER_01 41:48

I'm not a very formal guy. No. And and neither am I a very organized guy. So so no, it won't it won't there'll be nothing formal about it. Nothing. I just hope it gets used a lot. Houses need to be lived in.

SPEAKER_03 42:00

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 42:00

And this will it feels good. And and I'm also making it, I think, more beautiful. Because I don't have enough space now for no.

SPEAKER_02 42:09

Okay, so final stretch here. With a small handful of questions to tie the bow. Or untie the bow. Whatever. So you've never seemed drawn to the safer, more predictable life that you could have easily had. What do you think kept pulling you toward the more colorful, riskier alternative, time and time again?

SPEAKER_01 42:32

Well, I'd I I would say again, fear and boredom. Um the curiosity for new stuff, new friends, um, new experience. The fact this is risk expanding this conversation, the fact that I never got married is not inconsequential in everything we're talking about.

SPEAKER_03 42:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:54

Not inconsequential at all. Um I am I really believe, and I think I'm right, that the if if I look at the sort of important crossroads moments in my life, which everybody has, which you realize after the fact usually, if I look at those in my life and the way they've gone, I can say that that almost without exception, had I been in any sort of conventional relationship, including marriage, I would have decided differently. With with a with a different and probably from my point of view, less happy outcome. I'd I'd just rather not be bored than than sink into convention.

SPEAKER_02 43:35

Well, that makes perfect sense. If you could send one short message to your 30-year-old self, what would it be?

SPEAKER_01 43:49

A 30-year-old self who who had just moved to Cambridge to to to to to to starve to death playing piano in a bar. Um keep at it. Keep at it. I certainly wouldn't say hurry back to New York and get another job in the investment business quickly. Um that's ultimately what happened, but that was purely by chance. I mean, I I've certainly never never taken advice very well, so I don't think I ought to give it. Uh I don't take instruction very much too much.

SPEAKER_02 44:18

A message from future Scott reaches younger Scott and has zero.

SPEAKER_01 44:23

This is one of the many blessings in my not having kids. I don't have to worry about giving the younger Scott any advice because I'd I'd screw it up if I did.

SPEAKER_02 44:33

So what's the most unreasonable thing you've done recently that brought you joy?

SPEAKER_01 44:37

I won't ask that. That's my answer. Can I find a more rational answer than that?

SPEAKER_02 44:50

Amazing, Scott. Thank you again again for joining me. This was fun.

SPEAKER_01 44:55

It was really fun. Thank you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 44:57

Not so painful, right?

SPEAKER_00 44:58

Happy to be here. No pain.

SPEAKER_02 44:59

No. Great.

SPEAKER_00 45:00

It was great. Great. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 45:04

If this conversation resonated with you, follow the show wherever you listen and find me on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Substack at RucyHive. If someone came to mind for the hive, send guest suggestions to guests at ruseyhub.com. And if you just want to say hi, it's hello at roosyhab.com. Original music and sonic identity for the Roosy Hive by Ant Food. Until next time, let your life be a creative act.