The Soundtrack of the Movie of Your Relationship

A conversation with (LXD)’s Dale Flattum and Lori Eschler

(LXD) promo photo, July 2025

Hi everyone, today’s post centers around this recording by (LXD), a brand-new music collaboration about the relationship between Lori Eschler and Dale Flattum. They both grew up in Montana, and were lured to Seattle’s underground scene in the early 1980s. They eventually lost touch, and Dale became part of San Francisco’s essential sludge-noise band Steel Pole Bath Tub, and Lori moved to Los Angeles and worked as a music editor/composer for Twin Peaks and dozens of other movies and TV shows. After 30+ years, they recently reconnected and created A Cosmic Industrial Love Story—fusing Lori’s manipulated piano and cello loops with textures Dale builds from tape loops, found sounds, guitar and vocals. 

We talk about their new recording, David Lynch, film director John Dahl, Survival Research Laboratories, Spokane WA, The Pugs, Grand Funk Railroad, and how growing up in a small town prepares you (or not) for the rest of the world. In prepping for this conversation, I realized that not only did all three of us grow up in Montana, we all lived in Bozeman during the years 1978-1980. Do we all speak with the same accent? Yup, kinda!

I’ve been listening to your record, and I have so many questions. First of all, how did this record come about? What was the genesis of it?

D - We reconnected in mid-January on the Internet. Because we hadn’t talked in…30 years?

L - 30 Years.

D - I was trying to sell some art, and Lori was interested in buying some art. We started talking and basically haven’t stopped since. And it’s been great. I went to visit her in California, and I brought a couple microphones in my little interface in my laptop, and I was like, we have to make a record. Because she has a piano and a cello.

L - And I hadn’t done any music editing. I barely touched the piano, and I hadn’t touched the cello for years. I was in a really intense situation for a long time, that had ended, and I had this year to recover from it. And then all of a sudden, Dale shows up. 

But you knew each other previously. How did you know each other in Bozeman?

D - Do you remember the band The Pugs? Were you in Bozeman when these film students had this punk band? When I was in high school, they were the only New Wave punk band in Bozeman.

I left in 1980. 

L - So we started in ’79. 

Okay, why did I miss that? Why was I going to the Ozark Mountain Daredevils concert at the rodeo arena? 

D - That was the only other option. The Mission Mountain Wood Band. 

Oh, man. Mission Mountain Wood Band, and the Sweet Pea Festival. 

D - Yep. Exactly. 

L - And John Colter. What was his name? John Colter Band. 

D - They were like a cover band. Bar rock kind of stuff. 

 L - But we’re not dissing those people. 

No no, of course not. One of those guys from the Mission Mountain Wood Band actually ran for Congress. Didn’t win. So The Pugs. That was your band, Lori?

L - No. It was my friend’s band, but a couple of gigs I sang backup, and I had one song that I sang. I was not a singer, but it didn’t really require singing. 

D - I just started seeing flyers for them. They always played at the Universal Slide Company, these places that I couldn’t go to. 

I can’t believe this. I was a DJ at the Universal Slide Company. What a horrible place. 

L - My dad was the first owner, he and his partner built that place. It was just this weird side hustle he was doing. 

Wow. Okay, so by the time I got there, 1979 or 1980, half of the disco floor lights were broken, and the bar was so cheap it recycled its plastic beer cups. Like, they just washed, rinsed them, and sold them again. 

L - Eww. 

So nasty. And that shag carpet that went kind of halfway up the walls, that was all sticky.

D - Right. You need that. The Pugs got a weird gig at my high school for a danceathon. That was amazing. But when I met Lori, they played at the SOB Barn.

L-  It was an all-ages club. It was a barn. All-ages barn.

All-ages barn! 

D - Me and my friends were seniors in high school. We were there, and we were really high, and freaking out because it was like, oh my god. This is a crazy punk band! But then during that, this tall, dark-haired woman, this beautiful woman came up and grabbed me by both hands and started swinging me around in circles, and then let go and danced off. And that was Lori. I didn’t know her. I’d never gone on a date at that point. And then we became friends in Seattle when we both moved to Seattle. 

L - We all started hanging out together, and it was really fun. In our early twenties, just excited about everything. 

D - Yeah. It was a cool time because downtown was really abandoned. Half of the buildings were boarded up, and it was like that movie Streetwise. There was a huge homeless kids population. So they made a documentary about these kids who lived in abandoned buildings. They captured that moment before it all became revitalized and everything. Pike Place Market was sketchy. 

L - Really sketchy. 

And this was before the giant media hype around Seattle grunge, right? 

D - Yeah, It was super fun. 

L - Yeah, ’83.

So Dale, before you moved to Seattle, you formed a band in Bozeman which ended up becoming Steel Pole Bath Tub. Did you have any musical training at all? 

D - I was in a boys’ choir.

L - They sang at the Spokane World’s Fair in 1974. 

D - I was in fourth grade. We toured to Spokane and stopped and sang at churches, and slept in the basements. It was like being on tour. 

L - He was 10. 

D - And then at the Spokane World’s Fair, Lori was there with her family. We obviously didn’t know each other at the time. I saw my first rock concert there. I saw Grand Funk. It was life-altering. They paired us up, a little buddy system. You had to stay with your buddy, and you had two or three hours to run around. We had matching homemade hand-knit sweaters. It was more like a movie theater, but, like, there was a concert. So we went in, and Spokane’s always been pretty rough, but it was the seventies, people were just partying in there. We got there between songs, sat really close to the front, but it was so loud. When we had to leave, we were afraid to walk back through the crowd of people partying back there. So we saw an exit to the right of the stage, and we went okay, let’s go.

The song ended right as we were walking up to the front. And the singer went like, [muffled noises] and pointed at us. And it got this huge laugh out of all the people, and we were just mortified. We ran out, and we were like, what the heck? But it always stuck in my head. We saw Grand Funk. 

As part of a Christian youth choir, with matching sweaters! Okay. So, Lori, let’s talk about your background for a bit. I saw that you played cello. Did you play other instruments? 

L - I actually started on piano when I was a little kid. In high school, the orchestra teacher put out a notice that he needed a pianist, and I’m pretty sure I was the only one that went to audition. He made a deal with me because three of his basses were graduating that next year, and he was gonna have no bass players. So he said, if you take a bass home this summer and learn how to play it, then you can play all the piano parts that we do, and all the tuned percussion as well. Which was really fun. 

Cool. So, you were a band geek? 

I was a band geek. Yeah. For sure. 

Band geeks are always cool. I was in band. I remember going on bus rides with band geeks, and then I also remember going on bus rides with athletes, and the band people were much smarter. 

D - Oh, that seemed way more fun. 

So when you guys got to Seattle, was Steel Pole already playing gigs? 

D - The first band that moved to Seattle was a different band. We lived in Colorado briefly, because me and Mike got this weird job doing New Age music. I had met Dorothy one of the times I was living in Seattle, and I knew that she played drums. We didn’t contact her or anything: “I know a drummer. They’re in Seattle. Let’s move to Seattle!” I ran into her on the street a couple days after we got there, and I was like, “Hey, do you wanna play drums?” We went on an ill-fated tour, and then we ended up in San Francisco. That’s where it really all started.

Steel Pole Bath Tub, Tucson AZ, 1995

And what were you doing during this time, Lori? Were you living in Los Angeles? 

L - I moved to LA in ’86 because a bunch of my MSU friends had gotten into AFI, American Film Institute. And so they talked to me. John Dahl, he’s a director now.

Oh, yeah. Great director. 

He was part of The Pugs as well. John Dahl talked me into moving to LA. I had all these sort of older friends who took me under their wing, and I didn’t have to rent an apartment for two years. Everybody was always on location, so I was always staying at their rent-controlled place at the beach. It was terrific. 

Hold on a minute. When you’re born in Montana, nobody EVER says “Hey, you’re gonna be living at the beach pretty soon, don’t worry about it.”

L - I know! Well, that’s how my whole life has been. “Wow, I can’t believe this is happening.” So people helped me start getting film jobs, and that’s how I ended up getting into music editing. 

So, one more thing I want to ask before I forget. Growing up in Montana, how did that impact you creatively? People don’t really understand what it’s like to grow up in this sort of milieu. So I want you guys to talk about that.

L - I have a good explanation for all of it. My grandparents were homesteaders, and they figured out how to do anything that needed to be done, whenever it needed to be done. So there was that kind of aptitude. Your survival depended on that, and that’s how I was raised—to figure it out. I never had fear about, oh, no, I can’t do that, I can’t learn the bass. Okay, I’ll figure it out. And Dale has the same approach to his entire life too. 

D - My dad grew up in Greycliff, which is right by Big Timber, between Billings and Bozeman. Everything in the town is on one side of the street. The general store, a post office, and a bar that used to have a hotel. That was it. And then there was a school. That’s where he grew up. My grandparents never understood because he moved to the big city, to Bozeman. They could never understand why I wanted to leave because they’re like, “There’s everything here.”

We were really into skateboarding. We would steal wood and build ramps, and you kinda had to make it happen if you wanted it to happen. In Bozeman, because there was a college, popular culture all seemed like it came from the trunk of some kid’s car. My parents’ house was surrounded by college rental housing, so whenever the students would move out, they just dumped this stuff. We rode our bikes up and down the alleys and found stacks of Creem magazines, and records that were in the wrong sleeve. You just couldn’t find out about things. It’s that era, there’s that weird scarcity. You’d go see some country rock band, because that’s the only live band you could see. 

You’re talking about that adaptability and always finding solutions to problems. All the men and women in my family were like that. So then to move out of that environment, where you’re not around people like that, is a big adjustment.

L - Right. You can’t even explain it. I’ve tried. 

D - Yeah. Yeah. Your mom would just be like, go outside. Just get out of here. Go figure out how to entertain yourself. I got stuff to do.

L - And that was probably the greatest gift she could give you.

Right. It’s kind of the opposite of helicopter parenting. It’s like, I don’t know where Dale is. He’s running around, digging in a trash bin full of something. Who knows? 

D - We were talking about this. I had a neighbor whose mom would blow a whistle. My mom had, for awhile, a cowbell that she would just go out the back and just like, dink-a-dink-a-dink. 

L - My mom had a whistle. 

D - And you knew, like, oh, okay, you had to come in. 

Oh man. I lived across the street from the Dunning family, and the Dunnings had 10 children. And their mom would call them for dinner, and it was every kid’s name, every night. “Duke, Leonard, Tory, Teeny,” blah blah blah. It was like this weird blast echoing across the neighborhood. 

L - God. That’s so funny. That is so funny.

D - I had the older brother who was about three, four years older. When I was in junior high, it was like Dazed and Confused. They drove beat-up muscle cars and listened to AC/DC and Ted Nugent. I wasn’t allowed in my brother’s room, but he would go out with his friends, and I would sneak in and borrow his records, and then just be kind of terrified by them. Those early AC/DC records, they’d look like all the hoodlums who smoked across the street from high school. 

I know exactly what you mean. The kids who had primered cars. Maybe just one part of it was primered. Or maybe it didn’t have a hood. 

D - Exactly. Yeah, yeah. 

They were the Sabbath kids when I was in high school. 

L - That was me.

D - The burnouts.

Some of my Bozeman musical education happened at KGLT, the campus radio station. You guys remember that?

L - Oh, of course. 

For some reason, I had no business, but I DJ’d a jazz fusion radio show. 

D - Oh, right on.

Now nobody cares about that genre. But I thought jazz fusion was the future, man. I listened to a lot of that stuff, and it was just so weird, so far removed from daily life in Montana. Do you know the pianist George Winston? 

D - Oh, he would always play with the Windham Hill records, those people.

Right. There was an album, a picture of dead trees, and it would just say “December” on the cover. So he went to my grade school. 

D - Oh, really? I’ve seen George Winston more than once. It’d be like, oh, there’s a classical guitar player who’s gonna play at the Emerson Auditorium. You’d go, because it was something. 

You’re right, there wasn’t much. I remember seeing Jefferson Starship in the rodeo arena. 

D - Ha ha! George Thorogood played in the cafeteria at the student union. 

That would be cool. So before we run out of time, Lori, I’ve read interviews with you on these Twin Peaks blogs. Super detailed, super granular information about David Lynch and the show. A monumental moment in American television. The fan base is still enormous. You are attached to that for the rest of your life. So in working with David Lynch, what was your biggest takeaway in working with him?

L - My biggest takeaway is that the destination is not the goal. The journey is the destination. We enjoyed working so much, and getting to work, and then, alright, what are we doing today? All of this experimenting with the music. It was really, really fun. It was a beautiful golden moment in his life where everything was coming together really well for him. He was having so much fun. Everything we did was experimental. I didn’t know anything about what I was doing. I was just like, okay. I’ll figure it out. I knew how to splice film and audio. I could cut music by itself. No problem. So I started making loops and then layering them with other loops. And it all had to be transferred, you know, because it was mag.

D - Right. Magnetic tape.

So in the David Lynch workplace, the day to day, moment to moment process—is the reason you do it.

L - Right. And so when we finished, it was just like, oh. We’re not gonna be here tomorrow. 

[laughter]

I heard that when you met David Lynch for the first time, he asked you how much milk a cow would produce? What was that story? 

I got the job from a friend who convinced David to hire me, because I knew how much milk a cow put out each day. Because my friend Jon and I were at an espresso bar, and he said, god, they have so much business, they need their own cow. And I said, well, I don’t think one cow would be able to cover this place, something like that. David knew I was from Montana. So that was sort of our first bonding experience—talking about how deep a specific lake was, and how scary it was to think about that. I think it was Swan Lake. They used to have a train track in the wintertime, and a locomotive cracked through the ice and went to the bottom. 

Western Montana always had more dynamics. The mountains, trees, lakes. In Eastern Montana, we didn’t have any of that. We had General Custer. 

L - I know! I’m from Billings.

Everything where I grew up is named after Custer, but nobody talked about him. Custer County, Custer High School, Custer this, Custer that. And there’s no statues. There’s nothing. It’s just sort of like, yeah. We don’t talk about it anymore. 

D - Then there was the occasional “Custer had it coming” bumper sticker. 

Custer had it coming! This is a fun thing I wanna ask. When you were growing up, were you aware of any people from Montana who went onto some notable achievement?

D - Evel Knievel. 

Evel Knievel! Right. 

L - Charlie Pride.

Myrna Loy. 

D - Yeah, Myrna Loy will come up. Jan Stenerud, the placekicker for the Kansas City Chiefs, went to MSU. He kicked soccer style. And he missed the field goal that would have won the Chiefs the Super Bowl. It goes wide and they would always show it. One of those horrible things. But Evel Knievel was the only thing that came from Montana. Charlie Pride, I didn’t know that, that’s so cool.

So, Dale, in San Francisco, I knew of Steel Pole, and knew people who knew you. And then, of course, we interviewed you for our punk book. You guys had your rehearsal space near SRL, Survival Research, the art-machine performance group. 

Oh, yeah. We were friends with people who helped them. We knew Matt Heckert more than Mark Pauline. That doesn’t get talked about enough. I don’t think people know, they set the tone for that city for awhile. This was what you could be doing. My friend Kim worked there. She was just like, “Bands are stupid.” I was like, “We got a show.” And she’s like, “Whatever. We set freeways on fire.” 

They had the best posters. When I moved to SF in the ’80s, their flyers were everywhere. 

Yeah. They would just be, “Taste the Bitter Message of Hopeless Grief.” 

Right! That would be the name of the show. “Illusions of Shameless Abundance,” another one I remember. You’d see that string of words and you were like, okay. What the hell is this? But it was smart, and it was new.

D - How they got permits to do this, I don’t know. One time it was in this parking lot underneath the freeway. They had this huge stack of pianos that one of the machines had set on fire. So it’s burning, and my friend Kim was working this thing called the “shock wave cannon.” It was this huge long tube that shot a ball of air, and it hit the pianos, and it just went WOOSH! You’d be putting out sparks on people in the audience. At one point I looked up, and the flames were going over the top of the freeway. People driving by must have just been like, what is happening? 

Yeah. It was an aggressive art-for-art’s-sake mindset that the city had at the time. That era was an interesting pocket, just before the tech. 

D - It was such a golden time to be there. You could work at a coffee shop or work at the art supply store, and pay your rent. And then play in a band. It was cheap to live in the Mission. It was a wonderful, wonderful time. 

Just thinking of SRL, do you remember their offshoot group called the Seemen? 

Oh, yeah. I just saw Kal. Mike still sees him all the time. Yeah, they were great.

I saw Seemen at a nightclub on Divisadero, these guys had machines inside the club, shooting fire and cooking raw meat. And there were pools of gasoline on the dance floor, and Soundgarden is blasting through the sound system, and you’re like, how the fuck is this allowed? 

D - Oh, god, yeah.

But I’m glad I saw it. It was really fun, reckless art to witness in person. 

D - That was this whole thing. All these people had warehouses, on Shotwell Street or in different areas that would last for a certain period of time. You’d see things, you’d just be like, damn. No real club would ever allow it. 

Like you say, the city wasn’t as expensive back then.

It just embraced the weirdness. Not like people trying to be weird, but people who were just genuinely like, I’m into this. And people were like, yeah! There was an audience for it. And it was stuff that wasn’t ever gonna get out of the city or translate into any sort of monetary reward. You’d see bands, and you’d see performances and stuff, and you’re just like, right on! It’s like they were doing it, to do it. There’s no album at the end of it. You were constantly kind of challenged in a way. Like, do I like this? Am I comfortable here? Is this safe? 

That’s a great way to put it. It wasn't really an industry town, before the tech people. There were no big movie studios, record companies, publishers, on a large national scale. Jim Harrison always referred to certain cities in the U.S. as hubs of ambition. 

D - Ha ha!

And I always thought San Francisco was like a hub of expression. 

L -  Mmm-hmm. 

Because you would be able to move there from Bozeman or wherever. You’d meet people from all over the United States, and they have a Mohawk, and they’re doing some weird-ass thing, and they’ve renamed themselves.

D - Right. 

They’re getting to do what they wanna do. But there’s not like a huge capitalism stream attached to any of that. 

D - No. I mean, The Residents are established. But they’re the weirdest. We kinda looked at them as these grandfathers of this whole weird scene that was happening. 

So before we go down a complete rabbit hole, let’s talk about your record. Your description on Bandcamp says it was “recorded in dining rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms, and sunrooms.” I like that. Sunrooms. You were collaborating in person and online, in Palm Springs and in Minneapolis. So if someone were to ask you, how would you describe this recording, what would you say?

D - We make soundtrack music that doesn’t have a film yet. We think of it cinematically. It’s all very organic. Nothing is preplanned. It just came out. A sound or something will be like, let’s record that. I’ll give a sound to Lori, and then I’ll turn around, and it’s suddenly like, how did you do that? That’s suddenly now six minutes long and sounds like birds dying. 

[laughter]

I don’t even know how she does a lot of this stuff. It just kinda builds on that, and then I react to that.  

L - Back and forth. 

D - We’d kinda mixed it all together. We’d all listen, and Lori’s really excellent at carving out spaces for, like, oh, we’ll EQ this, so now this stands out. It seemed very much like when she talks about Twin Peaks, and the times they had to mix the sound effects and the sounds and the music and the dialogue. so that it all balances in, and it’s not drowning out the voices. So there’s a lot of playing around, bringing certain things to the front and then other things to the back. We’re always amazed because we’re like, how long was that? And we’re like, oh god. 

L - Eight minutes.

D - Eight minutes! We’ve got all these songs, and we realized, oh, this is way too long to be on a record. so we had to leave some songs off.

L -  I wanted to add to the how would you describe the album question. I would add that it’s an emotional narrative of our lives together, and apart. All the happy music was when we got together in January. It’s just an emotional narrative of the trials and tribulations and wonderful joys of things that have happened during that long 35 years that we didn’t see each other. Because we were catching up, telling each other stories about what we were doing this year. And when did you go to Europe? How many times were you in Japan?

D - Yeah. if you listen to the songs in order of when we started it, they’re very tentative in a way. They’re kinda like, hmm, you’re gonna do that? Well, I’m gonna do this. As we got closer and closer and more comfortable, then it started to really bloom in all these different ways. But especially this record itself is very much about us coming back together. 

Right. Some of the titles of the pieces, like the Spokane Fair, which you both attended in 1974, and I assume something happened with trains in San Antonio. Not to put words in your mouth, but in a way this is the soundtrack of the movie of your relationship.

D - I think that’d be very true. 

And did you know that was that case as you’re assembling this? 

L - It sort of evolved as we were working, because we were still catching up and telling stories.

D - There were things that were, like, god, this is sad. And the music, there’s a lot of heavy stuff that happened in 30 years. Early on, in early texts, Lori read me a text where I’m like, “We should start an art band. We gotta make a record.” I have a tendency to wanna make anything. There has to be an art project with it. 

L - One of the things he texted was, “We can drive around and record music in motel rooms.”

D - When I went to see her, of course, I was like, oh, we’re gonna record. That became a way to reconnect, too. I’m really glad we did. Now we just start playing and it’s like, oh, yeah, it all works. At least we have this document. We didn’t really plan on making it. 

L - No. We had no intention. 

D - It was just like, oh, this will be fun. 

L - I haven’t played for years. And when he set up the recording and set up the mics on my piano, I was like, you’re gonna be here when I play? I can’t do that. 

[laughter]

Wow. It reminds me in some ways of people whose relationship is growing, and they’re sending email back and forth, or letters or postcards. But in some ways, you guys did that through music, pieces of music or loops or whatever. 

L - Yeah. It was always so exciting because he’d say, I wrote something last night, and I’m just waiting. And sometimes I would say, are you gonna send it? 

D - I’ll just send an mp3 or something, and then she’ll be like, “Oh, I’m playing the piano to it.” 

L - It’s way better than a postcard or a letter. 

D - And they were written for you. It wasn't like, here’s a rock song I wrote. I would just be thinking about Lori and making some weird thing, going, oh, I wonder what Lori will think of it. It immediately became part of our relationship. 

So the music is very much a sonic texture. It’s instruments, voice, effects. It’s a lot of things. But is it something you could perform live? 

D - Yeah. I think there’s ways to do it. 

L - You can do arrangements of it.

D - Technology’s gotten a lot easier. I grew up with making noisy four-track recordings that most people just can’t bear to listen to because there’s so much tape hissing. But now you can get a really nice clean recording. None of these recordings would have happened if we’d had to pay to go somewhere and record. You wouldn’t have ever felt comfortable enough to sit there and try things.

L - Plus, we had just the privilege of working whenever we felt like it. It happened really fast. We finished in May and started mixing in May. 

So what does Steel Pole think about this project? 

Mike, I think, is out of the country right now. But Dorothy really likes it. I have my other recording project, NovEX, with Dorothy, and she lives in Tacoma. So she was very excited about it. 

L - And it’s fun because I knew those guys as well. I knew Dorothy and Mike, in Seattle. 

D - They’re all very supportive. I went through a pretty rough period of time. When Steel Pole got back together a couple years ago, it kind of saved me. It lifted me out of a really bad place. I didn’t even realize how bad it was until I went out there and went, oh, yeah. People live in houses.

People live in houses!

You know? Music saved me in Montana, and music saved me a few years ago. And now this. I never would have dreamed I would be where I am now with Lori, and making this stuff. It’s so exciting because we don’t know what’s gonna happen. It’s very organic, and it's not like we gotta get a record deal. That’d be cool. Maybe we’ll meet someone who wants to do that. That’s how Steel Pole worked. We weren’t very ambitious. Like, ambitious bands tended to be kinda gross. 

[laughter]

That whole gross killer instinct. I remember if somebody lived in your small town, and they were tacky and gross, and maybe they drove a big car and had a big house with decorations on Halloween that kinda went overboard, and maybe they flashed their money around or grabbed women or whatever, you would just think, what a dick. 

D - Yeah. It was like, who do they think they are? Growing up in these towns in Montana, it kinda humbled you in a way. There were certain negative qualities about it, but there was a certain, like, you’re from Montana. You’ll always be from Montana, and all that culture and music and art and movies—that happens other places. There’s a certain sort of humility. The Midwest is kinda like that too. No one’s gonna let you get too full of yourself.

We’re almost out of time, but I want to make sure that we include this—I love the news articles about Lori in the Billings Gazette. 

L - Yeah, I know!

It was so hilarious. It was just, like, “Area woman….”

D - “Area woman.” Yeah. My mom cut out the article from the Billings Gazette and mailed it to me when I was in San Francisco. 

L - The one about me? 

D - Yeah. 

L - Oh my god. 

There was an “Area man” article about me once in the Miles City Star. I’d been an actor in a Rainier beer commercial, that aired in that part of the country. And my dad was the only reporting source. Every single fact was, he said this, and he said this, and it was so cornball. I asked him, why on earth would they even write about this? And he goes, “Oh, I bumped into the editor on Main Street.” 

[laughter] 

D - Excellent.

L - My dad said, no, you need to become a teacher. You need a degree to fall back on. You can’t go into music and film and show business. 

From what I remember, the only people who really were thought of as successes, went to Minneapolis or Denver or Seattle, and they always worked in engineering, or gas and petroleum.

D - Right. Get a job with Boeing or something. 

Boeing. Yes. Maybe you have a company pickup and you drive it around. That was sort of the bragging rights of parents.

D - My mom was always very supportive. My dad was very, I think a lot of it was worry. As a parent now, I’m just like, god. They let me move to Seattle when I was 18 years old. Just failed out of college, and, “I wanna be in a band.” And they’re just like, “Okay, go for it.” There was an article about our band before we moved to Seattle, in the Bozeman Chronicle. And I remember the first line of it was, “filled with the optimism of youth.” 

[laughter]

That is so great. 

D - That just seems like the amount of encouragement you could get, to leave the state.

Well, good luck with all of it. It’s a very cool project. Thank you so much. 

L - Thanks, Jack.

D - Okay, bye.