It’s been twenty-two years since Denis Leary’s “Asshole” became an unlikely hit with listening audiences likely comprised of more than a few assholes as well as genuinely nice people or whatever. Unlike other comedy song writers (see: Ray Stevens or Adam Sandler) who’ve gone on to Branson, Missouri, or in the case of Sandler, built an entire film career on screenplays written around the previously untapped comedic treasure trove of dad characters being repeatedly kicked in the nuts, Leary’s own artistic career has been a refreshingly diverse foray into film, television, music, and standup. With the debut of his new show Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll, Leary combines two of those ventures, music and television, into what he hopes will be a properly improper look into the life of a has-been rock star who (literally) doesn’t want to die anonymous and irrelevant. At almost sixty years old and with an inarguably impressive body of work behind him, the timing for such a story seems entirely appropriate given that show business, much like watching a film about a magic remote control, can be viciously unforgiving. I talked to Leary about the nature of the celebrity beast as well as his thoughts on Lady GaGa and other stuff unrelated to his “Asshole”.Noisey: Music isn’t a new venture for you thanks to “Asshole”. Obviously the show is taking a different angle than that song, though. Where did the idea initially come from?
Denis Leary: Well, when I was at Emerson College in Boston where I went to study acting, and I was in this theatre group there called the Emerson Comedy Workshop, and we had original shows, and we had original music. The music students were the band for that group for four years, and when they graduated - and some of them didn’t even graduate because they quit early to join bands - but those guys were and still are really the core of my comedy band. They were the guys that played on the “Asshole” song, and they did my MTV Unplugged with me, but they went on from college to be in bands like the Jim Carroll Band, the Del Fuegos, my drummer played with Ozzy Osbourne for a while, my bass player was in Raging Slab. They’ve rotated through rock and roll for the last thirty or forty years, whatever the hell it is, so I was privy to their experiences in the Boston music scene and in New York back in the late 70s and early 80s, so I got to see and meet a lot of rock and roll people who became famous, but I also got to witness these guys’ experiences in these bands that were supposed to be huge. Some of them were like the Jim Carroll band was pretty big, but they imploded, and they all kind of imploded for the same reason, which was a combination of sex and drugs and rock and roll, and in other cases the lead singer and the lead guitar player hated each other, which is really the key to rock and roll. [Laughs] Our favorite bands like The Beatles, The Who, The Rolling Stones – they’ve all had that constant friction, so I thought it would be really interesting to watch a guy who didn’t make it and what his reaction was, because a lot of guys don’t make it in rock and roll or show business in general because they have some sort of fear of success, or if they did make it they’d probably be dead because they’d kill themselves with drugs or alcohol. So I thought that was a really interesting character to look at – a guy who blames everybody else, but in fact the real fault lies with himself.One of the songs that sticks out to me is “I Don’t Wanna Die Anonymous”. That’s a pretty straightforward assessment of fame especially in the music world. Is that idea of longevity kind of fighting against substance abuse something you wanted to really display with the story here?
I don’t know, man. It’s weird. It’s that fine line in the sand for certain people. Can you write great rock and roll songs without being under the influence of drugs and alcohol? Now, I don’t know about you, but a lot of my favorite bands and my favorite songs were probably written under the influence of those two things, but at the same time you want people you’re a fan of to live longer. I was a huge Clash fan. Not the Clash at the end but the original Clash. Part of me wishes those guys were still alive to get back together again. It probably wouldn’t be great, but I’d love to see them one more time. I saw The Who do Quadrophenia without [John] Entwistle or Keith Moon up in Boston at the Boston Garden, and I have to admit they were fucking great. Pete Townsend was unbelievable and so was [Roger] Daltrey. He hit every note, they were playing the songs in the original key, they were running around on the stage like madmen. Now, it wasn’t The Who, but it was still fun to watch, so I don’t know. Those guys are famous because they were really fucking good, so they’re famous for the right reasons. I’m fifty-seven-years-old, and it’s easy to look back and be right about some of the bands you saw and go, “These bands aren’t gonna fucking last.” I look at music now, and it’s the same way. Some of it’s fucking great like Lady Gaga. I don’t give a fuck what anyone says. That chick is gonna be around for a long, long time. She’s got an amazing voice. The outfits and all that bullshit can definitely go away, but she’s still a fantastic singer. You can pinpoint her, but there’s a lot of other stuff you look at, and you’re like: “Who gives a fuck?” They’re not gonna be around in ten years.Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll is obviously being billed as a comedy, but there’s also a kind of subdued dramatic dynamic to the show as well. You’ve been tapping into that for several years now with your other show Rescue Me. Did you see the emotional context of the two narratives converging at certain points?
I wanted to have kind of the reverse formula. I wanted people to be laughing their asses off most of the time in Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll, and then occasionally kind of twist the knife in. I want that family and that group to play as real as they can. Yeah, you’re laughing your ass off, but every once in a while it’s gonna hit you between the eyes. Johnny’s a mess, and he may be wrong, but he’s ultimately right about one thing, and I see this now with my two kids who are in their twenties, but fame on a lot of fronts doesn’t mean shit. My kids thought Paul Newman was a chef. My kids don’t know who John Wayne is. They have no idea who Johnny Carson was. The only old film stars they’re aware of are people that carried over into their generation, which is very few. The Godfather carried over so Marlon Brando and Al Pacino carried over, and Robert DeNiro carried over because he was in some films with Ben Stiller. [Laughs] It’s interesting. The only thing that my kids are aware of without me prodding them at all is Frank Sinatra, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Louis Armstrong. You know, great songs last forever which is really strange. When I sat down to start the script and started thinking about it, it made me realize how Johnny was kind of aware of that. Somewhere in his head I think he thought: “If I can just write one or two great fucking songs and play my cards right, I would last forever,” but he fucked it up. But a great song can exist forever, and in the fame world that’s all you really get. If you can do that, it’s a legacy. It’s interesting watching Dave Letterman go off the air and my buddy Jon Stewart’s going off the air soon, but that form, the talk show, is probably the most disposable form of fame that we have because every night whatever you did was fantastic, but the next night it goes away, and you have to do it all over again. Generation to generation, that doesn’t really carry, but my kids are walking around singing Frank Sinatra songs, and that’s just because the music hit them in their ears at some place when they were listening to the radio or walking around in a record store or whatever.Did you see your own role as a parent playing a significant role in how you approached writing and playing the main character Johnny?
Yeah, because I think now – and I’ve been saying this for almost twenty-five years now, so I have some perspective on it – but my oldest kid, my son, is twenty-five and my daughter is twenty-two. I’ve watched them, especially in the last ten years of their lives, acclimate to this new world, and what fame means to them is that everybody’s famous because they’re all on Instagram, and they’re all on social media, but it’s really interesting. You worry as a father, which you’ll do soon if you’re not doing it already, but you wonder if they appreciate it or if they’re getting eaten alive by the speed of it all. Do they understand, for example, the Kardashians and that kind of fame versus the longer lasting fame of a group like U2. My kids have been to see U2, and they were highly aware of U2 because I didn’t have to force it into their brain, and they loved it. But they are aware of how reality shows and whatever else like that relates to being famous and what it means. I have hope for the current generation. Years ago when I was a teenager coming into my early twenties, I really thought new wave and punk was gonna change the world. Well, it didn’t but we got some great bands out of it, and we got some great songs. We got U2, we got Elvis Costello, we got the Clash, we got certain things like the Ramones that, to me, were very worthwhile. It really is that simple in rock and roll. You can hear two or three minutes of a song, and it changes your life. Maybe it doesn’t change the world, but it changes your life. It’s what I love about rock and roll.The Keith Richards influence is on point with Johnny Rock, but were there other frontmen as well you were trying to sort of channel through the character as well?
In Johnny’s head, I think he name-checks enough people in the series to make certain influences clear like Keith Richards and David Bowie. He mentions The Replacements at one point, and I remember the first time I saw The Replacements, and at that point I’d had a lot of experience with messy bands, but I thought they were fucking great. At the same time, I think the second time I saw them they only did three songs before they got into a fistfight, which I fucking love. [Laughs] I thought it was the coolest thing ever, but now if I paid $175 for a ticket to see The Replacements, I don’t wanna see a fistfight until after you’ve played for like two or three hours. I need to get my money’s worth. [Laughs] But, to me, it’s like the first time I saw Iggy Pop perform, and it’s still emblazoned onto my brain, that’s what rock and roll is all about – being rebels and rock and roll heroes and living their lifestyle. I mean, what’s Iggy now? Seventy? Still in great shape and still doing great shows and will never die from sex or drugs or rock and roll. The difference in Johnny’s case is he just made the wrong choices. I mean, if you make that choice that that’s how you’re gonna live your life and you’re famous and you continue to live it and you’re Keith Richards and you’re really good at what you do and you have great genetics? Hey, more power to you. But if you don’t? You’re fucked.The idea of celebrity is fascinating especially now within the social media spectrum, too, where that idea of fame and longevity has become somewhat distorted. Is that something you see as well in relation to how the show’s narrative takes on how nebulous the idea of celebrity really is?
I think it’s kind of prostituted music to a certain extent because of things like American Idol and all those shows. I don’t really watch them, but my kids used to watch them when they were younger. But it’s a weird thing. You can’t fault it because it’s huge, and a big chunk of America loves it, but it’s all about vocal tricks. They’re all doing Whitney Houston vocal tricks. There’s no heart and soul to it. It’s all flash, which is fine. But it kind of worries me, because I look at those kids have records going up on iTunes on Tuesdays, and they’re selling a ton, so you just kinda go, “Well, it’s just cotton candy to me. I don’t think it’s gonna last probably,” and then you have to dig a little bit further to get to the good stuff. It was kinda the same way in the late 70s. I lived in the same room with my brother for our entire lives until we were like eighteen years old. My brother took a dangerous turn in the mid-70s where he went from listening to The Who, the Stones, the Kinks, and we shared the same room so we were listening to the same music, but he took a left turn – and I’ll never forget this – but he started listening to Yes and then Rick Wakeman released this double live record solo album, and my brother bought it. I was like, “Dude. You are fuckin’ losin’ it,” and it was right after that the New York Dolls and the Ramones showed up, and I was just like: “Let’s go back to three-minute songs, okay? Let’s get away from the seventeen-minute Rick Wakeman keyboard solos.” [Laughs] I always have this faith that if you put a great three-minute rock and roll song in front of anybody, it’ll either make you cry if it’s supposed to or it’ll make you fucking dance if it’s supposed to, because that’s always the shit that really lasts.Jonathan K. Dick is on Twitter.
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Denis Leary: Well, when I was at Emerson College in Boston where I went to study acting, and I was in this theatre group there called the Emerson Comedy Workshop, and we had original shows, and we had original music. The music students were the band for that group for four years, and when they graduated - and some of them didn’t even graduate because they quit early to join bands - but those guys were and still are really the core of my comedy band. They were the guys that played on the “Asshole” song, and they did my MTV Unplugged with me, but they went on from college to be in bands like the Jim Carroll Band, the Del Fuegos, my drummer played with Ozzy Osbourne for a while, my bass player was in Raging Slab. They’ve rotated through rock and roll for the last thirty or forty years, whatever the hell it is, so I was privy to their experiences in the Boston music scene and in New York back in the late 70s and early 80s, so I got to see and meet a lot of rock and roll people who became famous, but I also got to witness these guys’ experiences in these bands that were supposed to be huge. Some of them were like the Jim Carroll band was pretty big, but they imploded, and they all kind of imploded for the same reason, which was a combination of sex and drugs and rock and roll, and in other cases the lead singer and the lead guitar player hated each other, which is really the key to rock and roll. [Laughs] Our favorite bands like The Beatles, The Who, The Rolling Stones – they’ve all had that constant friction, so I thought it would be really interesting to watch a guy who didn’t make it and what his reaction was, because a lot of guys don’t make it in rock and roll or show business in general because they have some sort of fear of success, or if they did make it they’d probably be dead because they’d kill themselves with drugs or alcohol. So I thought that was a really interesting character to look at – a guy who blames everybody else, but in fact the real fault lies with himself.
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I don’t know, man. It’s weird. It’s that fine line in the sand for certain people. Can you write great rock and roll songs without being under the influence of drugs and alcohol? Now, I don’t know about you, but a lot of my favorite bands and my favorite songs were probably written under the influence of those two things, but at the same time you want people you’re a fan of to live longer. I was a huge Clash fan. Not the Clash at the end but the original Clash. Part of me wishes those guys were still alive to get back together again. It probably wouldn’t be great, but I’d love to see them one more time. I saw The Who do Quadrophenia without [John] Entwistle or Keith Moon up in Boston at the Boston Garden, and I have to admit they were fucking great. Pete Townsend was unbelievable and so was [Roger] Daltrey. He hit every note, they were playing the songs in the original key, they were running around on the stage like madmen. Now, it wasn’t The Who, but it was still fun to watch, so I don’t know. Those guys are famous because they were really fucking good, so they’re famous for the right reasons. I’m fifty-seven-years-old, and it’s easy to look back and be right about some of the bands you saw and go, “These bands aren’t gonna fucking last.” I look at music now, and it’s the same way. Some of it’s fucking great like Lady Gaga. I don’t give a fuck what anyone says. That chick is gonna be around for a long, long time. She’s got an amazing voice. The outfits and all that bullshit can definitely go away, but she’s still a fantastic singer. You can pinpoint her, but there’s a lot of other stuff you look at, and you’re like: “Who gives a fuck?” They’re not gonna be around in ten years.
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I wanted to have kind of the reverse formula. I wanted people to be laughing their asses off most of the time in Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll, and then occasionally kind of twist the knife in. I want that family and that group to play as real as they can. Yeah, you’re laughing your ass off, but every once in a while it’s gonna hit you between the eyes. Johnny’s a mess, and he may be wrong, but he’s ultimately right about one thing, and I see this now with my two kids who are in their twenties, but fame on a lot of fronts doesn’t mean shit. My kids thought Paul Newman was a chef. My kids don’t know who John Wayne is. They have no idea who Johnny Carson was. The only old film stars they’re aware of are people that carried over into their generation, which is very few. The Godfather carried over so Marlon Brando and Al Pacino carried over, and Robert DeNiro carried over because he was in some films with Ben Stiller. [Laughs] It’s interesting. The only thing that my kids are aware of without me prodding them at all is Frank Sinatra, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Louis Armstrong. You know, great songs last forever which is really strange. When I sat down to start the script and started thinking about it, it made me realize how Johnny was kind of aware of that. Somewhere in his head I think he thought: “If I can just write one or two great fucking songs and play my cards right, I would last forever,” but he fucked it up. But a great song can exist forever, and in the fame world that’s all you really get. If you can do that, it’s a legacy. It’s interesting watching Dave Letterman go off the air and my buddy Jon Stewart’s going off the air soon, but that form, the talk show, is probably the most disposable form of fame that we have because every night whatever you did was fantastic, but the next night it goes away, and you have to do it all over again. Generation to generation, that doesn’t really carry, but my kids are walking around singing Frank Sinatra songs, and that’s just because the music hit them in their ears at some place when they were listening to the radio or walking around in a record store or whatever.
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Yeah, because I think now – and I’ve been saying this for almost twenty-five years now, so I have some perspective on it – but my oldest kid, my son, is twenty-five and my daughter is twenty-two. I’ve watched them, especially in the last ten years of their lives, acclimate to this new world, and what fame means to them is that everybody’s famous because they’re all on Instagram, and they’re all on social media, but it’s really interesting. You worry as a father, which you’ll do soon if you’re not doing it already, but you wonder if they appreciate it or if they’re getting eaten alive by the speed of it all. Do they understand, for example, the Kardashians and that kind of fame versus the longer lasting fame of a group like U2. My kids have been to see U2, and they were highly aware of U2 because I didn’t have to force it into their brain, and they loved it. But they are aware of how reality shows and whatever else like that relates to being famous and what it means. I have hope for the current generation. Years ago when I was a teenager coming into my early twenties, I really thought new wave and punk was gonna change the world. Well, it didn’t but we got some great bands out of it, and we got some great songs. We got U2, we got Elvis Costello, we got the Clash, we got certain things like the Ramones that, to me, were very worthwhile. It really is that simple in rock and roll. You can hear two or three minutes of a song, and it changes your life. Maybe it doesn’t change the world, but it changes your life. It’s what I love about rock and roll.The Keith Richards influence is on point with Johnny Rock, but were there other frontmen as well you were trying to sort of channel through the character as well?
In Johnny’s head, I think he name-checks enough people in the series to make certain influences clear like Keith Richards and David Bowie. He mentions The Replacements at one point, and I remember the first time I saw The Replacements, and at that point I’d had a lot of experience with messy bands, but I thought they were fucking great. At the same time, I think the second time I saw them they only did three songs before they got into a fistfight, which I fucking love. [Laughs] I thought it was the coolest thing ever, but now if I paid $175 for a ticket to see The Replacements, I don’t wanna see a fistfight until after you’ve played for like two or three hours. I need to get my money’s worth. [Laughs] But, to me, it’s like the first time I saw Iggy Pop perform, and it’s still emblazoned onto my brain, that’s what rock and roll is all about – being rebels and rock and roll heroes and living their lifestyle. I mean, what’s Iggy now? Seventy? Still in great shape and still doing great shows and will never die from sex or drugs or rock and roll. The difference in Johnny’s case is he just made the wrong choices. I mean, if you make that choice that that’s how you’re gonna live your life and you’re famous and you continue to live it and you’re Keith Richards and you’re really good at what you do and you have great genetics? Hey, more power to you. But if you don’t? You’re fucked.The idea of celebrity is fascinating especially now within the social media spectrum, too, where that idea of fame and longevity has become somewhat distorted. Is that something you see as well in relation to how the show’s narrative takes on how nebulous the idea of celebrity really is?
I think it’s kind of prostituted music to a certain extent because of things like American Idol and all those shows. I don’t really watch them, but my kids used to watch them when they were younger. But it’s a weird thing. You can’t fault it because it’s huge, and a big chunk of America loves it, but it’s all about vocal tricks. They’re all doing Whitney Houston vocal tricks. There’s no heart and soul to it. It’s all flash, which is fine. But it kind of worries me, because I look at those kids have records going up on iTunes on Tuesdays, and they’re selling a ton, so you just kinda go, “Well, it’s just cotton candy to me. I don’t think it’s gonna last probably,” and then you have to dig a little bit further to get to the good stuff. It was kinda the same way in the late 70s. I lived in the same room with my brother for our entire lives until we were like eighteen years old. My brother took a dangerous turn in the mid-70s where he went from listening to The Who, the Stones, the Kinks, and we shared the same room so we were listening to the same music, but he took a left turn – and I’ll never forget this – but he started listening to Yes and then Rick Wakeman released this double live record solo album, and my brother bought it. I was like, “Dude. You are fuckin’ losin’ it,” and it was right after that the New York Dolls and the Ramones showed up, and I was just like: “Let’s go back to three-minute songs, okay? Let’s get away from the seventeen-minute Rick Wakeman keyboard solos.” [Laughs] I always have this faith that if you put a great three-minute rock and roll song in front of anybody, it’ll either make you cry if it’s supposed to or it’ll make you fucking dance if it’s supposed to, because that’s always the shit that really lasts.Jonathan K. Dick is on Twitter.