anythingbut.com

‘We’re like the Stones’: Steve Martin and Martin Short talk about life on the road

Over the years, every time Steve Martin and Martin Short have got together it has been nothing but fun times.

So when the comedy greats were asked to interview one another onstage at the 2011 Just for Laughs fest in Chicago, it was an automatic yes.

And as it turns out, it was the beginning of a stage show that has morphed over the years into a touring act — dubbed An Evening You Will Forget for the Rest of Your Life — that finds the duo riffing on showbiz, singing songs, performing stand-up and roasting one another. Their routine, which stops at Toronto’s Sony Centre this Friday and Saturday, was turned into a Netflix special in 2018.

“It went really well,” Short, 63, recalls during a joint interview with Martin. “But more importantly, we had great fun doing it. We went out for dinner the night before and then we had a great dinner afterwards. Then we were asked to do it again and we agreed.”

The SCTV veteran and Saturday Night Live alum liked structure, but wanted to do something more. “So the show has evolved,” the Hamilton-born comic adds.

The friendship goes back nearly 33 years to when they first starred together alongside Chevy Chase in the 1986 comedy ¡Three Amigos! Their cinematic partnership continued in two Father of the Bride films and the 1998 animated feature The Prince of Egypt.

“I find whenever I become friends with someone it’s because they’re really funny or really smart. Marty was… funny,” Martin, 73, jokes.

Calling from New York and Los Angeles respectively, Martin and Short bantered about stardom and life on the road.

The tour, Now You See Them, Soon You Won’t — it’s music, it’s stand-up, it’s you two onstage having conversations — what can people expect when you bring it to Toronto next week?

Martin: Exactly what you said. Marty and I love doing our show and after the Netflix special, which was last March, we really started working on new material in earnest. There’s a lot of growing pains when you’re working out new material, but now we’re just in the swing of things and we love it.

What is life like for you guys on the road?

Martin: It’s pretty easy. We travel first class and stay at nice hotels. We have a little room service before the show, then we laugh for the rest of night. Sometimes we spend the night and sometimes we fly out right afterwards. It’s really, really nice.

Short: And there’s always a nice dinner.

Do you have any guilty pleasures on the road?

Martin: Poached eggs on toast.

Short: You can’t really call them guilty pleasures, but when we get on the plane, sometimes I have a big bag of M&M’s.

Martin: We’re like the [Rolling] Stones except if you take away all the drugs and the women and the youth. Take out the drugs and the women and add Advil.

Short: And a game of cribbage… we play cribbage after the show.

What’s your favourite thing to do in Toronto?

Short: Well, as you know, that’s one of my hometowns and I have a son and daughter-in-law that live there so I hang out with them. Usually before I make my way to Muskoka.

Martin: I’ve always loved Toronto. I went there early on in my life at like age 22 and I always loved walking along Bloor St. or walking up and down Yonge St. By the way, when I went there a lot it was during the hippie days, so Toronto was really alive with a lot of energy and pop.

You first worked together over 30 years ago on ¡Three Amigos! What was your first impression of one another?

Short: I really liked Steve. We immediately hit it off and made each other laugh. I think the thing that you hone in on sooner than you even think is: does this person have a basic decency to them and are they kind? Those things were apparent right away. From there, we kept building as friends.

Martin: It was a fast friendship. I think banter in a marriage might not be a good thing. If you were always cracking jokes or playfully teasing or putting each other down, that might not work. But in friendship, that’s a good thing. We know how to kid and it just seems to work.

What did you think about each other’s comedic chops way back when, before you ever met?

Short: I didn’t meet Steve until 1985 and by that time he was a legend of the stage and stand-up and he was movie star. I was well aware of who he was. I had bought his (comedy) albums and I had read his books, so I knew who he was and it was thrilling to meet Steve.

Martin: I always viewed SCTV, where Marty got his start, as the home of some really incredibly talented people. These were comics who could do a million impressions and voices and they were really, really funny. I viewed myself as a kind of one-note Johnny. I was actually worried that he might not have respect for me and might not like me. Luckily, that was short-lived.

Steve, what’s your favourite thing from Marty, and Marty what’s your favourite thing Steve has done?

Martin: You know, there’s a couple of specials Marty did, one is from the ’90s on HBO and it’s called I, Martin Short, Goes Hollywood. There were some fun, far-out sketches. But I really get a kick of watching him onstage at our show. When he’s onstage and I’m watching from the wings, I just sit and enjoy what he’s doing.

Short: With Steve, I could say The Jerk or Roxanne, but the reality is I kind of agree with what Steve just said. There are very few things that allow a performer to do everything under one umbrella. That’s a lot of what happens in our show. You can’t talk about Steve without the musicianship or the comedy or broadness of Steve. So I’m going to say, the Steve in this show is my favourite Steve.

Marty, do you break out any of your old SCTV characters for this show?

Short: There’s a new variation on a character I’ve done, but not Ed Grimley or Jackie Rogers Jr. or any of those guys.

What do you like best about one another?

Martin: We just have fun together. But our friendship onstage is kind of fake. Our friendship offstage is real, but onstage we kid around and say things we might not in real life.

Short: It’s like any friendship, except we’re more public. Anybody who has a close friend will understand.

Steve, you haven’t been in a movie since 2011’s The Big Year. Are we going to see you on the big screen anytime soon?

Martin: I’m retired from movies. …. I’m not actively pursuing movies and they don’t actively pursue me.

So you’re saying people aren’t coming to you with scripts anymore?

Martin: Well, I do have a life. Things are going on (laughs). I actually kind of shut down conversations about it pretty early on … I still get requests every once in awhile, but I’m not pursing it and I tell my agents not to pursue it.

So just to be clear, we’re not getting a Father of the Bride 3 then?

Martin: Alright fine, we’ll do it.

Short: Wow, that was a short retirement (laughs).

You’ve both been in show business for over four decades. Do you have a motto?

Short: My father always used to say, ‘At the end of the day, Martin, you do the decent thing.’ I think that’s a nice sentiment.

Martin: I’m curious Marty, with that motto, why you don’t?

Short: Because I never really trusted my father.

What’s the best advice you ever got?

Martin: You’ll think I’m joking, but I’m not. When I first started in show business and I was doing my act onstage, I didn’t know how to dress. I didn’t know what to wear. So I asked this guy, his name was Fats Johnson, and he did have a pretty funny folk music act. He always wore a puffy white shirt, a nice jacket and had diamond rings on his fingers. I said, ‘Fats, what’s your advice for how I should look onstage?’ And he told me: ‘Always look better than they do.’

Short: I guess, just from watching other people on television, the best advice I ever got was: More is more.

What is an ideal Sunday for both of you?

Martin: Marty, do you go to the earliest mass or the later one? I wake up and I go to the gym. Then I have a nice lunch out and then my wife, my child and I go to a really nice restaurant and we have dinner. Just the three of us. I love Sundays.

Short: I wake up and I … you know, we’re in show business. We don’t really work. Every day is like Sunday to me.

Dick Dale, pioneer of the surf guitar, dies at 81

Nearly 60 years ago, surfers flocked to the waves along Newport Beach to try mastering the new craze. When the sun set, they needed someplace to dance and Dick Dale delivered it at Rendezvous Ballroom on the Balboa Peninsula. Nearly every week for two years, Dale and his band packed over 3,000 people into the ballroom.

“The energy between the Del-Tones and all those surfers stomping on the hardwood floor in their sandals was extremely intense. The tone of Dale’s guitar was bigger than any I had ever heard,” recalled Del-Tones bandmate Paul Johnson.

Dale, whose death was confirmed Sunday, manifested a quintessentially Southern California story, forged in surf, sand and rock ’n’ roll. They called him the Pied Piper of Balboa Beach, but his musical instrument of choice was defiantly not a flute. Rather, the electric-guitar playing son of a Lebanese father melded elements of the music of his ancestral homeland with roaring instrumental rock sounds emerging in the late-1950s, and helped pioneer an iconic American genre known as surf music.

“When I got that feeling from surfing,’” he told the writer Barney Hoskyns, “‘the whitewater coming over my head was the high notes going dikidikidiki, and then the dungundungun on the bottom was the waves, and I started double-picking faster and faster, like a locomotive, to feel the power of the waves.”

Those rushing guitar lines energized generations across the Southland and reverberated around the world.

Dale, who was 81, died Saturday after a long bout with rectal cancer, longtime friend and former bassist Steve Soest said Sunday.

That guitar tone arrived via a blindingly fast picking technique, one of the centerpiece elements of his breakthrough hits “Let’s Go Trippin’” in 1961 and “Misirlou” the following year, that caused guitar picks to melt in his hand. A few decades later, director Quentin Tarantino tapped “Misirlou” to serve as the theme to “Pulp Fiction.”

The sound featured a liberal use of electronic reverb with his signature Fender Stratocaster guitar, cranked to wall-rattling volume through juiced up Fender amplifiers. Other rock instrumentalists charted wordless hits before Dale came to the fore in the early days of the electric guitar, among them Link Wray’s “Rumble” and Duane Eddy’s “Rebel Rouser,” but Dale helped push surf music into the mainstream through those high-energy performances, supplying a sound that paired perfectly with that growing surf craze.

It began as a regional phenomenon in Southern California and soon spread around the world influencing the likes of the Beatles and Rolling Stones in England, and a high-school aged Canadian named Neil Young long before he found fame. According to Hoskyns’ “Waiting for the Sun,” a young Jimi Hendrix was said to have seen Dale and his band play. Echoes of Dale’s fiery guitar runs and showmanship can be heard in Hendrix’s style.

Dale was born Richard Anthony Monsour May 4, 1937, in Boston to a father who had emigrated from Lebanon and a mother who was Polish Belarusian. Growing up in a Lebanese neighborhood in Quincy, Mass., outside of Boston, exposed him to the sounds of Arabic music, which became a signature of his musical amalgam.

His musical training started with his childhood interest in piano. Early on, he studied trumpet and also acquired a ukulele before eventually picking up a guitar and trying his best to emulate one of his heroes, country music titan Hank Williams. A friend suggested he call himself “Dick Dale,” rather than Richard Monsour, because it sounded more fitting for a would-be country singer.

The Monsour family moved to Southern California in 1954, when his father landed a job at Hughes Aircraft Co. in El Segundo, near the beach. Dale became a regular at the weekly live country music television show “Town Hall Party.”

“I wanted to be a cowboy singer, so I went on ‘Town Hall Party’ and entered their talent contest every week,” he told the Glendale News-Press in 2015. “And I did, every week.”

The confluence of Dale’s ethnic heritage and newfound geographic proximity to the beach and to the flourishing factory in Fullerton, Calif., where electric guitar innovator Leo Fender worked, all blended into the music Dale would soon bring to listeners.

“Misirlou” represented a cross-cultural blend, coupling minor key motifs and Middle Eastern musical scale with pounding drums and throbbing bass, all fueling Dale’s stinging “wet” electric guitar pyrotechnics. A section of the song featuring trumpet also brought in an element of the mariachi music that was prevalent around Southern California.

In interviews he would often overstate his role in the development of Fender products, but he was an important early adopter of instruments and amplifiers that would change the sound and content of popular music beginning in the 1950s. Dale liked to consider himself one of Fender’s favorite guinea pigs, and he did push guitars and amplifiers to the limits in his live performances.

“Playing guitar was only a window in my life,” he said in 2015. “I never practiced the guitar and when I’m done playing I just put it down. Music is like building a house. It’s like going out deep into the desert to see what nature is doing. It’s like painting, like Salvador Dali. I try to do that with my music, make it like a Salvador Dali painting.”

A freak accident, when hot oil exploded while he was cooking popcorn in 1983 left second-degree burns over much of his body, put him out of commission as a musician for months.

“With every problem comes a gift in hand,” he told The Times in 1985. “For instance, when I do shows to raise money for burn victims, now I can talk to them and know what they are going through. And I can tell their family and friends that when the doctor says the recovery has begun, that’s really the time they need your concern and love.”

As a celebrity, he capitalized on quirky passions. At one point he kept live tigers at his Balboa Peninsula mansion, which had previously belonged to Gillette shaving company magnate King Gillette, and titled an early-‘80s live album “The Tigers Loose.” That was his first album in 18 years after surf music fell out of favor in the mid-1960s with the rise of the Beatles, the British Invasion, psychedelic music and other genres.

A decade ago Dale battled back from cancer, even playing a show in south Orange County shortly after being released from a nine-day stay at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles for treatment of an infection.

“I thought, ‘I cannot cause this [club owner] to lose thousands of dollars,’” he said at the time.

That’s when he started trying to promote a new moniker to substitute for the “King of the Surf Guitar” label often applied to him: he wanted to be referred to as “Dick Dale-Cancer Warrior.”

With characteristic bravado, he told The Times, he would soon return to the hospital because “everything is messed up, and if it continues that way, I will die. But I’m not ready to leave my son, not ready to leave [his wife] Lana, I’m not ready to leave all the Dick Dale music lovers. They’ve been my medicine.”

Although he has not been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he was elected to the Musicians Hall of Fame in Nashville a decade ago. He experienced recurring brushes with widespread popularity, notably in 1994 when Tarantino used “Misirlou” in “Pulp Fiction.”

In 2010, a career retrospective album “Guitar Legend: The Very Best of Dick Dale” also helped introduce his music to a new generation.

Through his life Dale practiced martial arts and explored eastern philosophy, which he often quoted in interviews.

“There are four sentences [taken from Eastern philosophy] in my life that I go by: ‘To experience is to know. To know is to understand. To understand is to tolerate. To tolerate is to have peace’,” he told The Times in 1985. “It took me 17 years and [training with] masters of the martial arts to make me understand what that means. But I understand it and that’s how I can put up with all the stuff that goes on.

“That’s one of the reasons I like working with tigers and lions. If you can understand animals like that, then you can really put up with the reasons why people are the way they are and love them.”

Dale’s survivors include his wife, Lana, and his musician son, Jimmy. Information on services was not immediately available.