Hello?

Hey, Nate, it's Joe Plummer.

Joe, hello, my friend.

How you doing?

All right.

All good.

Nothing.

I'm sorry I've been bothering you so much.

I was hoping to get a tour story from you, if that's still cool.

You mentioned that you were interested.

Yeah, I don't know, man.

I knew this call was gonna come.

A tour story?

That's gonna be a bit of a tall order over here.

I'm not, you know.

Do you know, Dave, what his day, his book was called?

Do you remember that?

The Storyteller.

Like, I'm.

I'm sort of kind of whatever the opposite of that is, so it might not go over so well.

Yeah.

Are you sure?

Yeah, dude.

I don't know.

Might not be the kind of thing for me.

All right, well, are you sure?

Annoyed with me or anything, are you?

Well, I mean, I think we did talk about this before, and it was pretty okay.

It would be pretty hard to construe what I had said as a yes or any interest in it at all.

But I appreciate your tenacity.

I respect it.

But, yeah, I think we're done.

We should probably stop talking about it.

Okay.

I guess I'm get your drift.

Sorry if I bugged you at all.

It's okay.

But we're clear.

We're good, right?

Yeah, we're fine.

Nate Mendel is the bass player for the Foo Fighters, a good friend of mine and has a long history steeped in punk rock.

In this episode, Nate shares four experiences that have one thing in common.

Nudity.

Including a demonstration of the power of positivity by the great Taylor Hawkins from Ruinous Media.

This is Stories.

Hi, my name is Nate Mendel.

I'm a bass player.

I've been playing in bands for a really long time, primarily with the Foo Fighters, for the last couple of decades.

And I thought I would.

Rather than telling one story, I would tell a compendium of stories on a theme.

And that theme is nudity.

So let's start way back in probably 1990, with a punk rock band I was in called Christ on a Crutch.

Politics were a big part of being in a punk rock band at that time.

I guess it still is.

So you go on tour and you'd be playing squats and there's like.

Politics is kind of infused in everything that was happening.

So we did a tour down the west coast with a band called Subvert from Tacoma.

We were living in Seattle at the time, and I guess it's sort of like a field trip with all the Guys in our band and I think Subvert.

We went to an anarchist festival.

We were staying at a squat.

And I think the people in the squat were participating in this.

And so it was maybe not mandatory, but it was the thing to do on that afternoon.

So we go to the anarchist festival and, you know, prepare to learn about what anarchy is and how we can participate in this movement.

And it's basically an open room full of various stalls where people are giving out pamphlets and things like that.

So you're just kind of wandering around this room, you know, there's probably falafel being sold here and there.

And at some point in time, it's very sort of staid affair.

There's not a lot of anarchistic activity happening, put it that way.

It's sober.

And it's like a Sunday afternoon in the middle of San Francisco.

And suddenly this guy kind of looks like a hippie, although you couldn't really tell.

The indicator that he was a hippie, I guess, is his long hair, because he wasn't wearing any clothes.

Nude guy, naked guy just walks in the room.

And immediately some of the really sincere organizers of the anarchy festival start to escort him out of the room because this is inappropriate behavior.

And the thing that was so charming about it is he gets pissed and he starts yelling, you guys are fake anarchists.

You're fake anarchists.

As he's.

As he's being.

His naked ass is being dragged out of the event.

Another nudity story with the same band.

We had a guitar player named Jerry.

He was hilarious and still one of the funniest people I know and one of the funniest people I've ever met.

And we were playing at the party hall in Seattle around the same time period.

And Jerry got into his.

I don't even know where it came from, but he got into his head that he was gonna play naked at the beginning of the show.

And we'd play for, like, I don't know, 45 minutes or something like that.

And it was a spot.

You could tell it was a spontaneous decision.

He's like, I'm gonna have fun.

I'm just gonna take my clothes off and rock.

You know, play my guitar nude.

And you could tell within, like, 20 seconds, he.

He just.

Just miserably regretted his decision.

But Game Leap, like, played the entire set naked.

So good on him for that.

We all have awkward moments.

We've got to find our way through them.

More recently.

And this is a Foo Fighter story.

Probably had to have been here, but we were in Germany it was me and our singer Dave and our tour manager, Gus.

And it's like an early morning and we're on a flight, I think to go do some promo somewhere out of a city in Germany.

And everyone's just tired.

We're in this van and I was driving down the road.

All of a sudden Gus just started yelling, naked guy, naked guy, naked guy.

And sure enough, on the side of the road, there's just standing up, there's just this nude German guy on the side of the freeway.

That alone's not interesting.

But I, I just loved Gus's response.

That's how he's going to learn.

Naked guy, naked.

Like he was in the military and it was like some sort of threat.

I love my bandmate, Taylor Hawkins.

He's dedicated to his craft in so many ways and very loyal.

And we were having a.

Well, we looked like we were about to have a rough show playing a big festival over in Europe.

And Dave's voice was pretty scratchy.

So it was gonna be, you know, we needed to find some sort of inspiration for making it a good show because it was gonna be a long, probably a long three hours.

It was gonna be really tough on Dave and Tato was going to have to be backing him up as much as he could.

So he sacrificed his body for the show.

He goes, hey, what do you guys give me if I streak across the stage like thousand dollars, thinking of course he's not going to do it.

Pants off, bam, runs out.

Doesn't run across the stage, just goes to the front of the stage, bare ass naked, throws his hands up, does a little looking around and then runs back, puts his pants on and we do the show.

And sure enough, totally worked.

It was genius on his part.

It kind of gave everybody a boost.

We were laughing and having fun and it made what would have been a tricky show a lot less tricky.

Alright, that's a brief history of my.

Experiences with nudity in my rock and roll career.

Thanks to Nate for the stories and thanks to you for listening.

And don't forget about our companion podcast, the check in all@ ruinousmedia.com.

Tour stories.

The place that you want to go It's a little far right now.

You dig your heels in right now.

Things are gonna get real slow Slow down.

Like a house Everything will be all right if you take a little breath out we're not alone all night is the throne there's no guarant we Weeks in life.

Weeks in life and reductions in defenses Starting up spending.

So take a little walk in your head down the road that you prescrib.

It opens up to a home where all who couldn't follow has stop and now they want your head Perhaps everything will be all right if you take a little bath out we know no one die taste to grow no guarantee.

Perhaps everything will be all right if you have a little faith that we're not alone not your artist.

There's no guarantee when this goodness of will Let you speak the self more than the sel Speak the self more than the.

New land sel can see the.

But cow.