Best Of: Rob Reiner On 'Spinal Tap II' / Billy Strings

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From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Sam Briger.
Today, Rob Reiner talks about directing the new sequel to Spinal Tap, the mockumentary about a heavy metal band.

He'll also talk about about his remarkable life and career. He directed When Harry Met Sally, A Few Good Men, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, and more, and was a star of the sitcom All in the Family.

Also, Where the Air is Clean

and the Road is Straight.

Singer, songwriter, and guitarist Billy Strings. Strings is one of the rare bluegrass musicians who can fill arenas with tens of thousands of fans.

He's been working to get to where he is for a long time. I mean, I slept with my guitar.
When I was four or five years old, I'd put it right under the blankets with me. I used to kiss it good night.

That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.

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This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Sam Brigger.
Terry has today's first interview. Here she is.

Finally, there's a sequel to the groundbreaking 1984 mockumentary, This is Spinal Tap. And the director and co-star Rob Reiner is here to tell us about that film and his life and career.

This is Spinal Tap was the most influential influential mockumentary that helped pave the way to movie and TV mockumentaries, including The Office and Parks and Recreation.

Spinal Tap satirized heavy metal bands and rock documentaries.

The band is known for its excesses, its loud volume, a bass player who stuffs his pants, incredibly sexist lyrics, as well as on and off-stage mishaps.

In the new sequel, Spinal Tap 2, The End continues, the band members return for a reunion concert.

As in the original film, the band is portrayed by Michael McKean, Christopher Guest, and Harry Shearer. Reiner reprises his role as the director of the documentary about the band.

This time around, Paul McCartney and Nelton John make appearances as themselves. There's also a companion book.
Rob Reiner has had a remarkable life.

The films he directed include Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, A Few Good Men, and Misery. His father, Carl Reiner, created the 60s sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Rob Reiner was a star of the groundbreaking show in the 70s, All in the Family. Let's start with a scene from Spinal Tap 2.
The end continues.

The premise of the film is that the band's former manager has died, and his daughter inherited the band's contract.

She discovers the contract calls for a final concert, which is why the band reunites. She's also found a new road manager.
He's played by Chris Addison. In this scene, he's giving advice to the band.

If this is the final gig that Spinal Tap do, then what we need to do is secure your legacy.

Now, the simplest, most effective way that we could do that is that if during the gig, at least one, but ideally no more than two of you, were to die.

That's what I call the Elvis effect. It really allows for a sort of late flowering of...
If you pretend die.

I think that would complicate matters. It's easier if you just, if, you know, the

exertion expire. Do you mean actually die? Yeah, yeah.
Well, yeah, but I don't want to. I don't want to arrange that.

Well, no, no, no, I appreciate that, but I think in terms of your legacy going forwards, how you'll be remembered, how you'll be talked about, what effect that will have on record sales, I'm thinking documentaries, I'm thinking a huge memorial.

You can do that without actually killing one of us, though, can't you? It's very difficult to do a memorial concert when the person is still alive. That's just a sort of rule of thumb.

Would you settle for a coma? Oh no, that's interesting.

Oh no, now David, that's interesting. That's really expensive.
That's a great bit of thinking outside. Well, the literal box, I suppose.
Yeah, actually.

Rob Reiner, welcome to Fresh Air. Congratulations on the sequel.
I'm very glad that you made it, and I know everyone else will be too.

Thank you.

One of the things that's very interesting about the film, the first, and maybe particularly the sequel, is that you have a band that started off as you know, kind of like young and rebellious, and you know, all that.

And now, like Spinal Tap, they're in their 70s, and it just makes no sense for them to be singing some of the lyrics that they're singing.

And that happens to a lot of bands who end up performing their old material about teenage love, you know, when they're when they're in their 70s.

But these are songs about like their sexual prowess, and

they're incredibly, some of them are just like like incredibly like sexist. So it sounds so inappropriate in so many ways.

Yeah. The beauty of these guys, the members of Spinal Tap, is that in all those years, from their 20s, 30s, now until their 70s, they have grown

neither emotionally or musically. There's no growth.

They basically are in a state of arrested development for like 50 years. And the only growth that there is is maybe skin tabs

from getting older.

They have to be biopsied.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Did you want the second movie to reflect how music documentaries have changed?

Because if I did my math right, like Spinal Tap, like this is Spinal Tap, precedes the MTV and VH1 music documentaries that became so famous and so varied.

There were a lot of music documentaries before we made the first film. I mean, you know,

Led Zeppelin had The Song Remains the Same.

The Who had The Kids Are All Right. And, of course, you know,

The Last Waltz was Scorsese. And the first one was the Bob Dylan documentary by Penny Baker.
You know, don't look back. You know, yeah.
So there were these documentaries.

But so what we were doing was not only satirizing heavy metal, but we were satirizing the documentary form and the way in which documentaries were presented. And I, you know, basically

the reason my character, Marty DeBerge, who's the supposedly the documentarian of the film, is in the film is because in The Last Waltz, I saw, yeah, there's Marty Scorsese. He's in the film.

He's documenting this last concert by the band, but he's also in the film. The first film I shot with a 16 millimeter camera, you know, it was a film camera.

Now we have digital cameras and I shot with two cameras.

And I try to, you know, Marty, let's say the character Marty who's making the film, I have to always filter it through how he would make it, not necessarily how I would make it.

And I try to say, will he be affected by the new modern type of techniques that they use in reality shows and, you know, what you see up on social media and all that. And I think he's...

you know, he may try a little bit, but basically he's stuck in his own inabilities to make it any hipper or cooler than he was. So he hasn't grown all that much either.

You started making Spinal Tap 2 The End Continues in 2024 on your 77th birthday. And everyone in the movie is the same or approximately the same age as the characters they play.

Did making the film make you think more about how you've aged since the first one and all that's happened to you in between?

Oh, sure. You can't ignore it.
I mean, you, you know,

hopefully our minds are still sharp and we're still able to, you know, as Chris Guest calls it, schnadle. We can schnadle with each other back and forth.
But yeah, he says.

Schnadle is his word for improv. Yeah, yeah.
He says, you know, we schnadle with each other, which is true.

I mean, and what's interesting is that after 15 years of not, you know, working together, we came back and started looking at this and seeing if we could come up with an idea.

And we started schnadling right away. It was like falling right back in with friends that you hadn't talked to in a long time.
It's like jazz musicians, you know, you just fall in and do what you do.

You are part of so many comedy-related things, and so are your friends. So I'm going to start with like your father was Karl Reiner.
Yes.

And he created the Dick Van Dyke show, and before that, wrote for and acted in Sid Caesar shows back in the 1950s.

Albert Brooks, your good friend from high school, you made a movie about him. You did an act with Joey Bishop's son before you made movies.
You co-founded an improv group and did a lot of improv.

In the 70s, you were on one of the most popular and groundbreaking sitcoms, All on the Family. You wrote with Steve Martin for the Smothers Brothers Summer Replacement Show early in your career.

You were the third host of Saturday Night Live. I mean, I could go on.
You have three movies in the National Film Registry, When Harry Met Sally, The Princess Bride, and This is Spinal Tap.

Yikes, that's like so much comedy history. I'm tired, Terry.
I'm tired when you read that.

When you make a friend or meet somebody, is being funny one of the first traits you look for in someone? Well, you know, it's interesting.

Yes, of course, you want to connect with somebody that you can connect with on the same level. When I was young, you know, you mentioned my dad and Sid Caesar.
You know, he also

did, to me, the greatest comedy albums ever done with Mel Brooks called, you know, the 2,000-year-old man.

And to me, they're the hippest, funniest comedy albums ever. And when I was a kid and teenager and I come home from school, I would put on one of the albums.
I did it almost every day for a long time.

And I listened to it because I thought, God, this is so brilliant. And that was improvised, too.

I thought, you know, when I met somebody, if they dug the 2,000-year-old man and they could quote lines from it, I knew it was somebody I could connect with because they were on the same wavelength as I.

It was like a good test to see if this is somebody I could connect with. Was the 2,000-year-old man album and subsequent versions of it one of the reasons why you wanted to do improv?

Well, no, not really. I mean, that's something I always, you know, I was drawn to.
I mean,

I loved Second City. I loved the committee.
I used to go visit the committee

when they were up in San Francisco. And we got the idea when I was at UCLA.
I guess I was about 18 or 19 at the time.

to start our own improvisation group. And I wanted to do what my dad did.
I, you know, when I was a little boy,

my parents said, I came up to them and I said, you know, I want to change my name. And I was about eight years old, I I guess.
I said, I want to change my name.

And they said, they were, oh my God, this poor kid, he's worried about being in the shadow of a famous guy and living up to and all this. And they said, well, what do you want to change your name to?

And I said, Carl.

And they said,

I said, I loved him so much, I just wanted to be like him, you know, and I wanted to do what he did. And I just looked up to him so much.
So,

yeah, I was surrounded by all of this. And I look at,

there's a picture in my office of all the writers who wrote for Sid Caesar and the show of shows over the nine years, I guess, that they were on.

And when you look at that picture, you're basically looking at everything you ever laughed at in the first half of the 20th century.

I mean, there's Mel Brooks, there's my dad, there's Neil Simon, there's Woody Allen, there's Larry Gelbart, I mean, Joe Joe Stein, who wrote Fiddler on the Roof, Aaron Rubin, who created the Andy Griffith Show.

Everybody, anything you ever laughed at, is represented by those people. So these are the people

I look up to, and these are the people that were around me, you know, as a kid growing up. We're listening to Terry's interview with Rob Reiner.

He directed, co-wrote, and co-stars in the new sequel to This is Spinal Tap, which is called Spinal Tap 2, The End Continues. We'll hear more of their conversation after a short break.

I'm Sam Brigger, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.

Julie Kavner, with Albert Brooks, and Woody Harrelson. See Ella McKay only in theaters December 12th.
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You decided to give your mother what turned out to be the most famous, most quoted line from When Harry Met Sally.

This takes place in the deli, a very famous deli in Manhattan, Katz's deli, when Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal, their characters are having lunch together. They're friends.

And Billy Crystal's kind of like going on about, you know, his dating life, how good it is, and how satisfied, you know, sexually satisfied the women he's dating

are. And Meg Ryan is a little skeptical.

And she says, like, how do you know that it's real? I mean, how how can you judge if what they're expressing is real or not? And he goes, Oh, I know. And she goes, Oh, really?

And then she starts faking the noises as if she's having an orgasm. And everyone in the deli stops eating.
Everyone's staring at her.

Billy Crystal's watching people stare at him and Meg Ryan, and she's going on and on. And then your mother has this famous line that when Meg Ryan is done, that your mother says to the waiter.

So let's play a short excerpt of that.

Oh!

Oh!

Oh, God.

Oh.

I'll have what she's

I'll have what she's having. How did you decide, oh, that's the line I'm giving my mother? Well, first of all, Billy Kristol came up with that line.
We had the scene.

We knew we were going to do a scene where Meg was going to fake an orgasm in an incongruous place like a deli.

And

Billy came up with the line, I'll have what she's having. And when he did, and he came up with it, you know, before we went to New York, he came up with it in rehearsal.

I said, we need to find somebody, an older older Jewish woman, who could deliver that line, which would seem incongruous.

And I thought of my mother because my mother had done a couple of little things. She did a thing in a movie that Anne Bancroft directed called Fatso, and she did a couple of other little things.

And so I thought, oh, well, she'd be perfect for it. And so I asked her if she wanted to do it.
And she said, sure. And I said, now, listen, mom, you know, we don't know.

Hopefully that'll be the topper of the scene.

It'll get the big laugh and if it doesn't you know I may have to cut it out because I know the scene is funny with Meg doing that and she said that's fine you know I just want to spend the day with you I'll go to Katz's I'll get a hot dog you know whatever it is she was fine with it you know she was okay and then when we did the scene

the first couple of times through Meg was kind of tepid about it she didn't you know, give it her all. She didn't go full out.
And so I said, let's try it again. And she was nervous.

She's in front of the crew and there's extras and people. She did it a few times.
And then it was never exactly what eventually wound up in the film.

And at one point, I get in there and I said, Meg, let me show you what I'm.

And I sat opposite Billy and I'm acting it out. And I'm going pounding the table.
And I'm going, yes, yes, yes, I'm pounding the table. And

then I turned to Billy. I said, Billy, it's embarrassing here.
I see, what? He says, I just had an orgasm in front of my mother.

But then Meg came in and she did it obviously way better than I could do it.

So I have to ask you, I feel obligated to ask you about All in the Family, which was such a popular show in the 1970s and kind of controversial for its depiction of the generation gap between the parents and the daughter who is married to you.

You're the son-in-law in it.

And you're very liberal, and the father's really conservative, and that's a constant uh battle between the two of you that's one of the main themes throughout the series but you know norman lear was very liberal he founded uh you know uh people for the american way

what was that experience like for you like how old were you when you first started performing in that the series started in 71 right i was 23

and This is, to me, what's interesting about all this. And it was groundbreaking at the time.
Nobody had done a show like this.

CBS, when they put it on, they had a big disclaimer at the beginning saying, you know, the views that are represented in the show don't represent the views of CBS.

Basically, it was a disclaimer saying, I don't know how this show got on here, but you want to watch it, you watch it at your own risk. You know, we don't.
Don't sue us. Yeah, don't, don't, don't.

Yeah, I don't know. Somebody put it on anyway.

But here's what was interesting about this.

We were a country at that time of about 200 million people. And we were number one in America for five years straight, every single week.
And every week, 40 to 45 million people watched that show.

And they had to watch it when it was on because there was no TiVo, there was no DVR, no video cassettes, nothing. Now we're a country of, you know, upwards of 340 million people.

And if you can get 5 to 10 million people watching a show show on a given night, that's a huge hit. And they're not all watching it at the same time.

Well, there's politics itself that has become

like everybody talks about that.

But pop culture is no longer the glue that it once was because there are so many options that everybody is doing their own thing and not watching or listening at the same time.

So I know exactly what you're saying. What was it like for you to be famous at that age? You were already from a famous father and had that helped.
That helped.

You went to school with the children of very famous people and other people you went to school with were becoming famous too. But what was it like personally to have people recognize you?

Did that make you feel good? Was it feeling intrusive?

I got to tell you,

it was bizarre, you know, to be on a show of that power and that reach.

It was like being in the Beatles. I mean, you'd go into a restaurant or you'd go into, I remember one time that Gene Stapleton and myself, Sally Stradley, walked into

an airport restaurant and the entire restaurant stood up and cheered and started applauding. It was that kind of response that you don't see so much now, you know, with people in television.

So it was,

that was strange, but you have to take it with a grain of salt because you want to entertain them and you hope that you do, but it doesn't matter what they think.

You have to do something you like to do, and hopefully, other people will like it too. Rob Reiner, thank you so much.

It has really been a pleasure to talk with you, and thank you for the Spinal Tap movies. Well, thank you so much for having me.

Rob Reiner speaking with Terry Gross. His new movie is Spinal Tap 2.
The end continues.

Little girl, it's a great big world, but there's only one of me.

You can't touch cause I cost too much. But tonight I'm gonna rock it.
Tonight, I'm gonna rock it. You tonight, I'm gonna rock it.

If you ever find yourself at an arena concert where tens of thousands of fans of all ages are stomping about to the Billman Row tune Roanoke or the classic bluegrass song Old Slewfoot, chances are you're at a Billy Strings show.

A singer, songwriter, and guitarist, Billy Strings is one of the younger generation of musicians carrying the torch for traditional acoustic bluegrass, even while his music incorporates excursions into exploratory improvisational jams and the occasional heavy metal guitar riff.

And he's been celebrated by both audiences and the music industry.

He's won two Grammys and Highway Prayers, released in 2024, is the first bluegrass album in over 20 years to reach number one on Billboard's all-genre top 100 albums sales chart.

That album showcases his songwriting and his terrific band. Since then, he's released a live album with another Ace Bluegrass guitarist, Brian Sutton, called Live at the Legion.

The duo performed in a more intimate setting than the arena strings usually play in these days, the American Legion Post 82 in East Nashville, playing a lot of music associated with Doc Watson.

Let's hear the lead-off track from Live at the Legion, Nashville Blues, originally by the Delmore Brothers.

I've got the blues,

those Nashville blues,

I've got the blues, those Nashville blues.

Ain't got no hat,

ain't got no shoes. These people here,

they treat me fine, these people here,

they treat me fine.

Well, they feed me beer,

and they feed me wine.

And I've got the blues,

those Nashville blues,

I've got the blues those Nashville blues I ain't got no hat I ain't got no shoes

that's Billy Strings and Brian Sutton on the new album live at the Legion Billy Strings welcome to fresh air

hey thank you so much Good to be here a lot of this material comes from Doc Watson like some of these songs are songs that are part of his repertoire.

And you said that most everything you do comes from Doc Watson. Can you talk about his influence on you?

Yeah, he's like the ground upon which I stand.

My dad played his music all around the house growing up. And by the time I could play guitar, you know, five, six years old, I was learning those tunes too.

I might have been able to play some of them before I knew how to tie my shoes or something.

It was like I was learning how to speak and talk and walk, and I was learning all these Doc Watson tunes at the same time, and it was just like a religion in my house.

His music is just

the best. I mean, that's what I was listening to on the way over here, the Sonic Journals,

the Owsley thing that he recorded.

It's just these beautiful recordings.

Gosh, it was so good. Everything they were playing was just churning.

I can hear some of his guitar playing and you're playing, but what about his singing? Was that also influential? Like, he didn't have a big range, but he was expressive and he is singing.

I always think of it as very crisp.

I mean, I think his range was really kind of something to behold when you think about it. He had this great low baritone, and he could also yodel and get up into that really high falsetto.

You know, but with Doc, it was always just spoken. It was always

the information of the song came through and the conversation of it. You know, people like him, people like Willie Nelson, people like Dolly Parton,

these

really great storytellers, when they're singing,

you know, if you if you see Dolly Parton on TV singing and you press mute, it just looks like she's talking to you

because she is. She's telling the story.
You know, that's one big thing that

one of my vocal coaches that I've been working with, one of the the big things that I took from some of those lessons was just give me the information.

I get on stage and I sing and I'm so worried about the pitch.

Am I singing good? Is the tone good? Am I singing right? How's my timing? This and that.

It's like taking the kids to the park and you're scared to let them go down the slide because you don't want them to get hurt. It's like, geez, let them play.

And so

if you focus on the story and telling the words,

it's just like, I know where the pitch is. I just need to tell the story.
So you're doing that more? Trying to.

It's easier said than done, all this stuff. You know, all the music, kind of Zen, kind of mindful stuff that I've been getting into.
It's kind of the

inner game stuff.

You know, I mean,

I'm high strong.

I got a lot of anxiety and stress.

I'm moving around a lot. I've been really busy the last several years.
And

I got a lot of my own personal stuff that just haunts me on a daily basis and I try to

I try to do everything I can to just be cool and get my nervous system to chill but it just seems like I don't know what I can do to to calm it.

I do the best I can and I'm doing okay but

it's a daily kind of struggle to just stay on the ground.

Does playing guitar help or is playing guitar out caught up in all of that stuff because that's what you do for a living?

It depends on what kind of playing guitar. If I'm on stage,

that's where the joy is.

That's where

the fun is.

I kind of ride myself pretty hard about practice off stage.

Well, Billy, if you wouldn't mind

doing another song for us that's one of your favorites. I could do...

I told you on the way over here, I was listening to that Bears Sonic Journals, Doc and Merle, T. Michael.

And man, they were sounding good. And they were doing this number here.
It's called the Browns Fairy Blues.

Hard luck, Bob coming on a lane, Mama getting back his walking cane. Oh Lord, I got them Browns Fairy Blues.

Red throwed it away and he went to town to see a little woman, and now he's down. Oh Lord, I got them brown stairs.

Hard up up, you're getting too tight, and you don't get drinking in your highest current, oh Lord, I got them brown stairs.

Drink a block and tackle kind, you can walk a block and tackle a lion, Lord Lord, I got them brown fairy blue.

Well, I walked up to my girl's old man and asked him for my true love's hand. Lord, Lord, I got them browns very blue.

Said, you love little colloquial. Said a hurt hand and got his foot.
Lord, Lord, I got them browns very blue.

Hard luck cars standing in the rain. The world was corn, you couldn't buy a grain.
Lord, Lord, I got them brown's fairy blue.

Walk around and sit in the clothes. You can smell his feet, wherever he goes.
Lord, Lord, I got them browns fairy blue.

That's Billy Strings playing Doc Watson. He'll be back after a short break.
This is Fresh Air Weekend.

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Well, Billy, if some of your songs deal with some pretty heavy subjects that you've dealt with in your life, including, you know, losing friends to suicide,

family and friends who are dealing with addiction, you know, feeling neglect when you were a kid. When you write songs about that stuff, is it helping you process those experiences?

Is it easy to sing about that stuff once you've written the songs?

Sometimes it's hard, sometimes it is definitely a.

That's how I felt when I sang on stage the night my mom died. It was cathartic.

I've had songs that I've written

about something totally different

that I didn't realize I wrote for myself until months later.

I write these words thinking that I'm giving some information to some people that could hear it. Really, I'm the one that needs to hear it.
And I wrote that for myself so that I could heal.

And now I go sing it on stage.

there's also been songs,

Stratosphere Blues, and I Believe in You. You know, the other night I was singing that on stage.
And,

you know, like I said, I wrote that before my mom had died. And now singing it after is just different.

It's like I knew something or something, you know.

I'm sorry about your mom passing away. She died this last June.

Would you mind singing a verse of that?

I could try.

Let's see.

Couldn't help but wonder why you threw yourself away.

Come on out from under and just take it day by day.

It's true.

I believe in you.

Took a walk to wander, and I wandered on a thought.

It's kind of hard to get through all the things we ain't been taught. It's true,

but I believe in you.

After all the years of medication

Feels good to get your life on track

Long as you live, I'm sorry to tell you

You never get that monkey off your back

Yeah, something like that anyways, you know Yeah, that's a beautiful song. Thank you for playing that

Billy, when your mom died, I think you heard in the morning, and you had a gig that night. You decided to play it.
You got on stage, and you made

obviously an emotional announcement about it, and you said that your mom would have wanted you to go on. She wouldn't have wanted you to cancel the show.
Why is that?

The only reason she died is so she could, you know, space travel and be there. She was at all the shows, you know, she was always in the mix, right up front.

She'd show up in New Orleans or Seattle or somewhere and I wouldn't even know she was coming. She freaking hitchhiked there, you know.
I was like, what? She walks in my green room. What the hell?

You didn't even tell me you're coming, you know.

She was just a wild one, and she was really living her best life in this last little bit.

She had become quite involved with a lot of my friends and fans, you know, that go to every show and go out and in the lot and stuff. And she became really close to a lot of these people.

And I was um always had mixed feelings about that. Um.

What do you mean?

Well, I wanted her to g go have fun and and be doing, you know, whatever she wanted to be doing, but um I worried about her running into the wrong people or, you know, she's been an addict my whole life and um

had short stints where she was doing pretty good, you know. And

I loved to see her out there hanging with all the fans, but at the same time I was leery of them.

You know, I would go over to visit my parents' house, and there would be, like, the fans there that I see in the front row of my concerts all the time.

People you knew or just knew as fans?

Mostly I just recognize them from the crowd, you know, and then I get to know them because they're hanging out with my parents or something. But,

you know, and who what am I supposed to say? Like,

don't do that. I don't know.
They're grown people, but I don't know. She was getting older and I kind of just had this vision of her in my head that I wanted, which is stupid.

It's not realistic to try to come up with somebody else's life in your brain. But, like, I just wanted her to have a garden.
And my dad, 70 years old, she was 64.

I was like, Man, you guys should, like, be settling down, you know, don't you think? Instead of rearing and tearing and going and eating all these shrooms and going to all these concerts.

And then she did get wrapped up in the wrong stuff, and that's why she's not here anymore.

I'm sorry, this might be too personal, but are you did she overdose? Is that

yeah?

Oh, I'm sorry.

Yeah.

And it's, you know, it's, um

it's it's messed with me my whole life and now it's gonna mess with me for the rest of it.

You know, I have complex post-traumatic stress and I have anxiety and depression and I have for for years tried to deal with this stuff just that happened to me when I was a kid.

You know, it wasn't just being neglected and there not being food in the house and, you know, uh my parents being strung out and

I I miss them even though they're sitting right in front of me and like while they were partying and you know stuff like that I was around the corner being molested you know before I was ten years old and

all that stuff you know and it's it's a really hard thing because they're s such beautiful people and they taught me so much about music but yeah their addiction has been really hard on me for my whole life and and it still is and um

really triggering to lose her in this manner you know

Well, I'm sorry. I hope talking about it is not triggering any hard feelings for you right now.
I got to talk about it because it's like

my whole life I've had to keep a secret in order to try to not make them look bad, you know. Like even when I was in high school,

I spoke to a counselor one time. I mean, I was

in 10th grade, but I was couch surfing. I didn't live with them, you know.
I moved out when I was like 13 because the house was no longer a home.

They were strung out, and it's it's a wonder I was even going to school and one time I got pulled into a counselor instead of the principal's office you know and

and they said what's going on you know and I finally just they they told me anything I say is between them and it won't leave the room and I said yeah my parents are on meth and I don't even live there and my house got raided right after that you know that same day five state cops came up raided the house.

I almost sent my mom to prison because I opened my mouth and from then on I never said s to anybody about anything.

I've just

it hurts me, but what hurts me is I've always just been worried about them, you know, and I've always wanted them to be good. And

when I say be good, I mean to be well and happy and to have some sunshine in their life. You know, a few years ago, I was able to buy them a home, my parents, and

stuff was good for a while, but

it just, yeah, it really breaks my heart that it went back to this, and now she's gone. And

so I think my duty here is to continue doing what I'm doing for one thing.

Use all that beautiful energy that I get from her, that crazy wild streak. I got to use that and, you know, honor her in that way.
And

I feel a great...

Kind of duty as far as just writing down these words, making these songs for people to heal from.

And also, you know, who knows, maybe someday I'll actually be able to help kids that are in the situation that I was in.

Maybe I'll be able to help their parents, you know, like open a rehab or something or something like that to just to help combat this because it's it's really hard, you know.

Yeah.

Are you taking some time for yourself right now? Like, are you are you able to take some time off the road? And you have a young family now. That's also, that's at home.

Yeah, they're with me on the road. Oh, they go with you on the road.
Heck yeah, man. So, so yeah, I got the whole the whole gang, and and we're out there traveling, and it's it's really cool

earlier. We talked about uh Doc Watson, and I wanted to ask if you'd play a tune that maybe was one of the earlier songs that you learned as a kid.

Yeah, um,

when I was a kid, I mostly just played rhythm, so I'll give an example of that. My dad, he would play this.

You know, that's the fiddle tune Beaumont rag for yeah, and so I would play.

You know, and so that's how I started and that's kind of what I did for the first few years of playing.

I was my dad's rhythm player, and that gave me a chance to just listen to how the songs worked, to just kind of stay there in the bass kind of notes and um

and listen to the melodies and listen to the the harmonies, how the vocals work together. And that kind of bluegrass harmony just seeped into my ears, I guess.
And

later on, I got an electric guitar, a little mini squire strat and a pig nose amp for Christmas one year. I think I was probably nine or ten or so.

And that was my first time really trying to play solos and stuff like that. But it was more, I was getting into Hendrix and I was playing more,

you know,

guitar center stuff. When I got into middle school, I wanted to play with people that were my age.

You know, I'd always played with my dad and his friends, and some of them were much older, and I just wanted to play music with people that were into the same stuff as I was, like skateboarding and video games, whatever, you know.

And so the only thing that was really going on in my middle school at the time was heavy metal. And I went to a couple shows and I just, I hated it at first.
It was like, this is not music.

You know, I don't know what this is, but it ain't music. But

I fell into that friend group, and then next thing you know, I started, I acquired a taste for this music, and then I fell in love with it.

But after my bands kept breaking up and falling apart, I kind of got back into Doc Watson at this time, and just bluegrass in general.

This would have been around the time that stuff was really rough around the house. I remember specifically stealing my mom's old Chevelle one day.

How old were you?

14, 15. You know, because I'd go over to my parents' house and hang out with them and stay there and party and it's not like I just totally left and disowned them.

I just, once I realized stuff wasn't going to change, I mean, I didn't end up really moving back there, but I'd go there for a weekend and hung out there a bunch, but I didn't, it wasn't like my home.

And so, yeah, I stole my mom's car one day when I was just sitting around getting drunk by myself. And that's how bored I was, and that's how kind of there was nothing to do in this town.

I mean it was there's 600 people that live here. There's nothing to do.

So I was just getting drunk during the day and I stole mom's car and I went down Hayes Road, this old country road with cornfields on either side and man I put the pedal to the floor and I just I was going and that corn was just a blur on either side and there was a tape sticking halfway out of the deck.

And I pushed it in and I was like, I wonder what my mom's listening to, right?

And then

this is what came on.

I was in those heavy metal bands and all this stuff and I hadn't really been listening to bluegrass very much but I was kind of heartbroken at the way my life was at the time and when I heard

I wandered

you know ranked stranger came on, that's what my mom had in her tape deck.

And I just started slowing that old car down.

And until I came to a complete stop and I just pulled over on the side of the road and I started crying. And I was drunk, you know.
But this song hit me right in my heart.

In that moment, I was like, what am I even doing in these heavy metal bands? Bluegrass is where my heart is. This is the music I should be playing.

And at that time, I just, I started hunting for an acoustic guitar, you know, and my friend Zach had one. And one of the first tunes I learned how to actually pick,

how to play the lead on and stuff, it was a thing called Nothing To It. It goes like this.

Is that one of those licks that you're now tired of, or do you still like it?

Oh, I love it. I mean,

yeah, it's still the best. I mean, any of that Doc Watson stuff.

Your dad taught you how to play guitar. Have you picked out a guitar for your son yet? Do you plan to teach him the way your dad taught you? Well, he's already got one that he just bangs on the floor.

I gave him this Martin Dreadnought Jr.

used to be my guitar.

I just practice on the bus and stuff and I took tape and I covered up all the pokey parts on the where the strings are on top and I wrapped him real good so he can't poke himself on that. Yeah.

So when are you going to start teaching him how to play the strings? Oh man, like I said he's already gone. He's 10 months and

he's he's just banging on it.

But I sing for him all the time. It's always the best.
I remember that first night when we got home, the night of my 32nd birthday,

the first time I was able to be at home with my son. And

I held him and I sang this little song. I'll sing a bit of it for you.

He went to sleep in my arms when I was singing this to him. And

it's probably the best moment of my entire life, besides maybe just the moment he was born.

But there's this little lullaby.

Sleep,

pretty baby, sweet woman,

close

them pretty by love.

Christmas

while your daddies

to you

and I sang that to him and he fell asleep. That was like like the best.

Well, Billy Strings, I want to thank you so much for coming on Fresh Air today.

Thank you for having me.

Billy Strings' latest album is called Live at the Legion.

Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.
Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.

For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Sam Brigger.

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Support for NPR and the following message come from HomeServe. Owning a home is full of surprises, and when something breaks, it can feel like the whole day unravels.

HomeServe is ready to help, bringing peace of mind to 4.5 million homeowners nationwide. Plans start at just $4.99 a month.
Sign up today at homeeserve.com. Not available everywhere.

Most plans range between $4.99 to $11.99 a month your first year. Terms apply on covered repairs.