The Best of Music Legends | David Letterman

Nice to see you. You know, you look great. You look terrific. You don't look any different than the last time I saw you. You look wonderful. When was the last time I saw you? 1991. Okay. You look fabulous, well-rested, happy, ready to go. Yeah? Yeah. What are you going to do? You look like... Come on! Everybody always wonders, you know, what was it like when you did the Ed Sullivan Show? Yeah. Besides, I was in the back somewhere down there. Yeah. You know, I thought if you were up to it, I could sort of maybe give you a moment's feeling of what it was like. How so? What exactly are you going to do? Well, I thought if we could have the audience, when I count to three and all the very high-pitched voices scream... No, not yet, not yet. But do you think you could do that? Yeah. Yeah, okay. But you have to help me out, Dave. But what do I have to... Well, I got a little something here that'll... Oh, crap. It's going to be good. I want you just to do this because... The last couple of times I saw the show... Yeah? I saw you sort of complaining about your hairstyle. I have interesting hair. Well, I got this for you. And so you don't feel alone. I'll just take this back to the room and... Let's go and stand down there, and I'll give him one, two, three, and they're just going to shriek their brains out. Paul, are they paying me enough to do this? Paul, come down, too. Thank you very much. There you go, Paul. Now, let's pack that camera back, all right? Oh, my God. Come on, Dave, it's sweeps week. We ain't in that bad of shape. Any way you like, Paul. You know, I was listening to the radio last night, and I heard that Princess Diana has granted and has, I guess, done a television interview with the BBC. Unbeknownst to anybody at Buckingham Palace. Do you keep in touch with these people? Are you still friends with everybody there? Well, I see the Royal Family from time to time when I have certain functions. What kind of relationship do you have with them? Is it close? No, it's not close. I mean, they hardly ring me up for a cup of sugar and stuff like that. But they do call you, don't they? Yeah, I mingle with some of them, yeah. They're very nice. Do you ever socialize with them? Uh-huh. How does that go? Well, you know, what can I say, Dave? Two queens together. Congratulations on your recent wedding. Last May. Last May. Was it a big bash? Big deal. Who was there? Oh, gosh. A lot of my buddies were there. Sting was there. Oh, Sting. Sting. Jackson Brown and J.D. Souther and Glenn Frey and Bruce Springsteen was there and Billy Joel and Sheryl Crow. But was there any decent music at the reception? Yes. Tony Bennett. Tony Bennett was at the... Oh, man. Very cool. It's a great thrill to have you here and congratulations on everything. I brought you a present. A present? Yeah. What do you got? If I can get it... Not all of our guests are thoughtful enough to bring me a gift. I brought you a ham, Dave. Oh, man. This is a beauty. Look at that. This was your band. You started the band and wanted to fire Bono. Is that right? I did. It was funny because, you know, in Dublin, 1976, there wasn't a whole lot to do, you know? Join a band or play football. So we started a band. I did try to fire him because in 1976, he wanted to take a lemon to America then. But as you can see, he came back crawling on his hands and knees and here we are. But seriously, how early into this did you think that he wasn't going to be right for the group? I mean, was that true? Is that serious? It wasn't that kind of thing. I think there was an incident in America where we had a little bit of a misunderstanding and he threw a drum kit at me. And I sort of felt at that stage that it was time for him to leave. But as I said, he came crawling back on his hands and knees. This man gave me my first and only job. It turned out pretty well, didn't it? Don't you forget it, pal. I won't forget it. You must know Bob Dylan. I would guess that you guys are friends or have certainly met each other. I've met Bob over the years from time to time. First time I met him, he came to visit me. His daughter, it turns out, was a fan of mine. This was back in the early 80s. He comes over to my apartment. I was living at the Samaritz Hotel. I had this great apartment at Samaritz. And introduces his daughter to me and she's a fan and she's asking me all these questions. And I'm trying to carry on a meaningful conversation with this teenage girl. And in my kitchen is Bob Dylan. And he's leaning against my refrigerator going, hey, it's okay. It's cool. And I thought he was a good dad. He was being a good dad. I thought that was nice. That's a nice thing for both of you to have done and a great thing for the kid as well. Was there ever anything you got from him that you thought, well, this is insight. This is unusual to our profession. I'm going to hang on to something that he has told you or said to you. I asked him at one time. I met him at a gig, believe it or not, in Milan, Italy. They have these funny venues over there. They don't have hockey arenas and basketball arenas and Madison Square Gardens. They have, like, bicyclone-tron. Like Velodrome. Velodrome, yeah. Velcro things. Very strange gigs. And you go backstage and Bob was backstage in Milan. I go and he goes, hey, Billy, how you doing? What are you doing in Milan? I said, well, I'm here to see you, man. And I always wanted to ask him because I'm now building up a large catalog of songs. And I start worrying if I'm going to forget words. And Bob's written more words than there are. And I said, how do you... Bob, how do you remember all these words? Oh, that's easy. Just go over in the dressing room and take a look on the coffee table. You sound like Bob Dylan if he had a cartoon show. He was in a good mood that night. Yeah. So I look over on the coffee table and there is, like, a store-bought book, Bob Dylan's The Songs of Bob Dylan. He's got them all right there. He's got this big book on the coffee table and I said, well, okay, but how do you read the lyrics on stage? He goes, well, I really can't read them. I just feel good knowing they're there. How's it going? Good. Looking pretty good? Summer doing all right for you? Yeah, it's been good. Now, when you're out, by the way, you know I came very close to being in the E Street Band. That was when we were thinking of letting go of Clarence. I believe saxophone was your... That's it, exactly. That's it, exactly. But when you're out, you know, driving around and stuff, you drive around like other folks, I guess. Do you ever find yourself, like, singing your own songs? You get something on the radio and you're singing along with your own stuff in the car? I mean, are you doing comedy bits when you're driving in from Connecticut? That would seem to be a natural thing to do. You're driving in. Is it funny? Is it not funny? You'd think so, wouldn't you? No, I don't do that. How do you decide, okay, I'm going to put together a collection of music that will go to a disc or an album? Is that an official, do you have, like, an official beginning or is it just a gradual, casual accumulation of material? Sometimes it's luck. You know, you write a bunch of songs that go together. We made this record in about seven and a half weeks. That was really fast. But I've spent a year or two waiting for the right collection of songs and that's not any fun. And how many, it's not fun, you say? No. But you're sitting around. First of all, I like to play, you know. I mean, that's really one of the things I enjoy doing the most, so you're sitting around waiting. The trick with a new song is to have the new song, you've got to have the new idea. Sometimes you don't have them, so you're sitting around waiting, waiting, waiting. You want to go out and play, but you don't have new material. And it just, you know, time marches on. I mean, I don't have any guys writing stuff for me. I don't know if it works like that on this show or not. You look great. Well, thank you. I'm all patriotic. Yeah, it's like you're in Evel Knievel's Will. Well, I didn't think of it. I do sort of look like Evel Knievel. What have you been doing? What's new with you? Oh, I've just been working on this album and doing a lot of wonderful stuff. Watching you on television with that baby. I know you're tired of hearing it by now, but congratulations. Thank you very much. That's very sweet of you. He's a beautiful baby. The picture's great. Yeah, he turned out pretty cute, pretty pleased. Yeah, he did. And I just wanted to let you know, if you need a wet nurse, you call me. Whoa! For the baby. No, seriously, though, Dick. Oh, man. Well, you and I are the same age. And I've, you know, I've always loved, I've never had any children either. And I always wanted to. And, you know, because I always kind of wanted to experience that whole breastfeeding thing. Well, if you had a grand piano, wouldn't you want to play it? Of course, the big story is, coming out of the Kentucky Derby, that the winning horse, the 50 to 1 shot Giacomo, was actually named for your son. It was named after my youngest child. How does that happen? I'm a very good friend of Jerry Moss, who owns the horse. Jerry Moss was the head of the record company for the last 30 years. And so he phoned us up and said, would you mind if I call my new horse Giacomo? We said, no problem. I didn't think he would win the Kentucky Derby. Well, nobody did. 50 to 1, for God's sake. Luckily, Trudy bet on him. 500 bucks. Is that right? She made a lot of money. That's amazing. Because, just kind of trying to do the quick math in my head here, if you bet that horse a 50 to 1 shot, $500, that's a billion dollars. That's a billion dollars. Congratulations. Thank you. I'm retiring. Yeah, you don't need to go on the road ever again. I don't. You're one of the people, obviously, that we've tried to get on the program as a guest about every week. Maybe every other day. We would call and find out, can he be on the show, can he be on the show? And after the first 15 years, we started to get our feelings hurt. And now it's been close to 25, 30 years. And I just need to know, going forward, any problems that we don't know about? I don't like the show. We'll make a note of that. We'll put that in your file. When we were 22, I thought we were, like, older than I feel now. Because, you know, we were smoking Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes. And we thought we were, like, really grown up. We were only 22. But I had to stand somewhere here. And there was a curtain. And the audience was out there. And we were kind of very new to America, loving it, but a little bit scared. And I had to do, yesterday, my song on my own. And I'd never done this. I'd always had the band with me. But suddenly they said, you're doing yesterday. So I said, okay. So I'm standing there. Come on, get it together. It's okay. And the floor manager, the guy on the curtain, came up to me and said, are you nervous? I said, no. He said, you should be. There's 73 million people watching. Oh, wow. Wow. Well, sadly, you won't have that problem tonight. Take me through your name, the origin of the name, and where it started, and to what it is today. Well, my mother named me Sean because when I was born, I was her right. So, S-H-A-U-N? S-E-A-N? S-H-A-W-N. Oh, sure, I would get the wrong one. Well, Sean, that's a nice name. Yeah. And then what happened? Yeah. People started calling me it. I see. Right. Same thing happened with me, but I was Dave. Your name Dave or David? It's David. Dave, really. Just Dave? Well, Dave, yeah. Not just Dave. Actually, it's Dave Z. If you want to know something. Honest to God, I thought you would stop smoking. Where did you get that idea? I thought you would stop because I remember 10 years ago, you were on this show, and you'd had a little health deal, and the doctor said, well, it's probably the cigarettes. And you said, yeah, but can I keep smoking? And he said, yes. No, I had a test once, and this is not what the doctor said. After he looked at my lungs and looked at my heart, he didn't say this, but this is what I heard. Keep smoking. That's what I heard. That's what you heard, yeah. Now, we were talking to Ray, where you don't take care of yourself for yourself, you take care of yourself for your family. Do you get any pressure from your family? My family didn't like me all that much. Oh, I see. That's too bad. I'm never home anyway. They wouldn't care less, really. But what about the kids? Don't they worry about their dad smoking a cigarette? I think they're annoyed with their dad smoking. I think it's more about them worrying about having to smell the secondhand smoke than it is that. Dave, let's face it. About a year or so ago, a guy that worked for me counted up how many cigarettes I've smoked. Over 650,000 cigarettes. So, I'm toast. Do you remember the first time you heard Elvis Presley on the radio? Yeah, I heard Heartbreak Hotel, and I heard the sound of his voice and the echo and this kind of exotic calling. So, when I was in the bathtub one night, it didn't take long, I pulled the plug out and I sat there until all the water went away and I sang into the overflow. And I got this amazing sound. I went, wait a minute. That's me. And the sound kind of came up through and just under my legs. And that's how I invented echoes. Forget about Les Paul. He was not important at all. And your paths must have eventually crossed with Elvis Presley. What was that like? Well, spectacular for us. Absolutely amazing. He was involved with the same agents that we had at the time in the 70s. He wanted to know who this bunch of guys were who were selling tickets quicker than him. And we wanted to know who we were too. So, he played the Forum in L.A. And I'd seen him a couple of times. I was really so in awe of him as a singer. And he was so aware of all the impersonators and stuff. And you can imagine how I feel. Through the 70s, everybody took their shirt off, but they just didn't have the right chest. I never did. And now, you see where it's ended me up? Did you ever mention to him how you incorporated your music in your career and your young time on stage? Yeah, well, he said, well, what are you guys, what's your music roots? And we'd all got the same roots, you know. The sort of blues out of Memphis and Mississippi and stuff. And he said, well, you know, do you do a lot of rehearsals? And of course, Led Zeppelin didn't really show up until the gig was almost over before we actually arrived in those days. And so, we didn't do many sound checks. But when we did, I used to like to sing in those big arenas his songs, because they sounded even bigger. So, he said, well, which song do you like? And I said, well, I like loads of them, but I do sing this song, Love Me. You treat me like a fool. So, we talked and talked, and then we said goodbye, shook hands, and said we'd all meet again. I went out in the corridor and was heading for the elevator, and suddenly he swings around the door, and he says, hey, Robert, and he started singing to me, and then I started singing to him, and then we were all crying. Your meat dress was turned into beef jerky to be preserved forever. Is that true? Yes. That's not true. That is true. That's not true. Why would you ask? Then don't ask me about the rumor. It's a rumor. That is a true rumor. You don't know how to make jerky. Do you know how to make jerky? I didn't make it myself. Who made the jerky? A friend. There's several things you don't want to leave up to your friends. Making jerky is one of them. I think it was just salted. Isn't that what jerky is? Last year, you bought $11,000 in lingerie at one store. That's very inappropriate of you to ask me. That's true. Held a seance on tour to get rid of a spirit who haunts you. That's not true. Whatever you say. That's not true. You relax by fly fishing. No. Once ate a Barbie doll's head during a concert. Yes. All the time. No, that's not true. That is true. That's polypropylene. Why are you asking me this? That would poison you. That's polypropylene. Once on a talk show, tore up host's notes. I'm just so fed up with all of it. Once? How about this one? What did you... Oh, no, no, no. No, no, no. That's not what you think. No, no, it's not. It's chemically treated. You're going to be sick for a week. You won't be out of the egg for a month. Did you have a happy childhood yourself? Yeah, it was pretty good. I was sent to the school that my father and his father were sent to. Private school? Private school. So that was a little like Tom Brown's school days at the time. What does that mean? Is it difficult? It was a disciplinary stir? Yeah, ruled by fear. You know, I got there on the first night and I was used to rooms with curtains. There were no curtains and you'd see the headlights sweeping across the ceiling and it was just the sound of sobbing and masturbating. And I think one of the courses was sobbing and masturbating simultaneously. Reminds me of my honeymoon. My eight-year-old loves music. All of my kids have that thing that you need to sing and play and do the whole thing. But sometimes their musical taste is a little questionable. But I'm not one to judge. I was lucky. My parents never told me not to listen to any kind of music. Well, you can't. You can't. Let us explore and find out. When Violet was young, when she was about two or three years old, she used to listen to music on my wife's iPod. And she was really into the Amy Winehouse record, right? Which is an amazing record. It's kind of weird to hear a three-year-old sing the Rehab song. I thought it was cute. So I come home from the road once, and I'm getting in the car and we're driving, and all of a sudden I hear my daughter listening to this gangster rap song. And I turn to my wife and I'm like, what is that? She goes, oh, I was trying to download the song Rehab, but I messed up and I got this rapper named Rehab. And it wasn't like graphic or bad, but it just was not a good, I didn't think it was good music, it was a good song. So I turn to her and I say, hey, Violet, what's that? And she says, oh, it's my new song. It's her new song. And I said, I don't really think it's such a good song. And she goes, well, I like it. And I said, well, I don't. And she said, well, I do. And she listened to it eight times in a row. That's right. And it was right then that I realized I am a parent now. Parent now. And I have to just allow her to do her thing. Buckle in and get ready. But then I immediately bought her a Beatles record. I'm like, no, no, no, wait. You've got to get here first. Isn't that the thing about music? Music is music. Some people love it. Other people might not love it as much. I think what happens is the reason why different people have different musical tastes is because you find yourself in someone else's song. So as you're going through life searching for your own identity, you hear a song that you connect with and then that becomes part of you. And so that's how she felt about rehab. You have a daughter who is a gangster. Already, too. You look back on the time and the culture that you came to be and lived through with drugs and really abusing yourselves. Are you grateful and surprised that you're still alive? Well, that's a two-part question. And yes, we are grateful and surprised that we are here. I mean, we had no idea that we would be together this long. But you have to remember that our wild, crazy kid partying days only were about seven years of our career. And then you take seven from 40. So what do you get from that? So all that. So you've got to figure that the rest of the time we were relatively sober and having a career. But as we know, and the landscape is littered with fallen soldiers, fallen fellows, fallen souls that didn't even party for seven years, maybe tried it a week and it was adios. Well, it just shows what kind of troopers we are. And I don't want to be insulting about this, but I'm fascinated by this. Like the Grateful Dead, they said, you know, good luck keeping up with these guys. That's what they said about you. Well, it was in the 70s, you know. Is that true? Were you guys like the big major league, here we go? You know, we were an army marching on. Look, if you could put a button here and humans could orgasm, how many people out in the audience wouldn't be hitting that button all day long? So, Janice, can you answer that? I have no more questions, Your Honor. I'm going to give you some names. You tell me if they were friends, peers, acquaintances, people you knew, people you didn't know. Okay. Janice Joplin. Did you know Janice Joplin? Loved her? Not really. Knew about her? You know what we had in common? We were like the first women to have tattoos. Really? Yeah, bad girls tattoos. Now everybody's, I mean, you know, babies come out with tattoos. Yes, it's genetic. Right. But what was her tattoo? What was your tattoo? Well, I don't know. We were that friendly. I don't know what her tattoo was. Do you know what yours was? Mine was, what was mine? This is bad. You don't know what your tattoo was. No, no, because I have a few. But I think my first one was on my butt. On my butt. On your butt. And it said... Hi, sailor. Oh, yeah. Right. Hi, sailor. That was on one cheek. Right, no. On one cheek it said, hi, sailor. And on the other cheek it said, new in town. You were a kid then. You were like 18, 19 years old when you had them? No, no, I wasn't. I was 27. 27? Yeah, I had to leave Sonny to do it. And we'll get back to these other people. But you're having them taken off now, aren't you? Well, yeah. But I don't like them, and everyone has them. And mine are old-fashioned. I mean, the artwork got so much nicer. And I mean, look, I'm going to be, you know... My ass is still in a nice place. But, you know, at 87 or 90, I'm going to have, like, this lower-ass tattoo hanging there in the wind. That's... That is some wind. Isn't that great? That comes under the heading of too much information. Well, I don't know. But that's the thing. I mean, that's the way life is. You make decisions that sometimes stay with you your entire life. And a tattoo is certainly symbolic of that choice. When you were 26, 27, and you got the come on in, or whatever it is. I don't know. You got the welcome mat out. No, you're misquoting. Yeah. Do you date? Do you go out and see... Are you dating boys now? No, not yet. No. Now, I remember last time you were here, you were with a Justin Bieber. I was with a Justin Bieber? Yeah, you were with a Justin Bieber. And that's not going on now? No, I'm single. You're fine. I'm so good. Good, yeah. I think you're fine. Be the crowd. Now, the last time he was on, he and I got into a conversation, and he said something, and I said something, and he said something, and I said something, and I made him cry. Well, then that makes two of us. Wow. Hey, that's good, buddy. That's pretty good. Pretty strong.