Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!
WWDTM: Eric Idle, Bridget Everett + Jeff Hiller, and more!
Sat, 29 Mar 2025
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How did Monty Python become so popular?
No. I wanted to play with James Brown. Really? That was your thing? Yes. Which I'm very happy to say I eventually did, but I grew up as an R&B kid.
And you actually got to play. You played with a lot of people, but you actually got to play with James Brown. I got to play with Mr. Brown, yes. And what about, what's it like meeting your heroes in the case of Mr. Brown?
It's complicated. It's complicated.
Yeah. That's what everybody says.
We heard that he used to levy fines on his band members if he screwed up. But that was standard practice for a lot of band leaders in the 40s and 50s. You know, Ray Charles did that. Lionel Hampton did that. Benny Goodman did that. That was part of the gig, you know, like if you screwed up. $10 coming out of your pay at the end of the night.
Now, of course, James Brown kept that practice going long after everybody stopped doing it.
Significant part of his income, I'm sure, by the end. So when did you get into jazz?
When I first started playing the double bass when I got to middle school, because I'd been playing the electric bass for a couple of years, my great uncle Howard, who's the other bass player in the family, he was so excited. He said, come over to my house, I got something for you. And now that he found out that I was playing the double bass, he said, hey, I'm going to turn you on to the cats.
So he spent the whole day playing nothing but jazz albums for me. And my great uncle had this very cool way of, you know, he would put a record on and he had a chair similar to this. He would sit down, he would sit way down like this. He'd light up a cigarette, have a glass of wine, and he would start playing air bass along with the record.
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