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Listen Here: Oliver Leiber Interview

Craig Garber (00:00.29)
Hey everybody, this is Craig Garber. Welcome to Everyone Loves Guitar. Man, I’ve got an incredible guest today with Oliver Leiber, super successful producer, writer, composer, brilliant just guy about music and about the business. And he happens to be an also very, a very cool person. I want to before I get into his background, I just want to thank our mutual friend and total badass Keith Nelson.

Founder Buck Cherry and another badass LA producer for hooking us up Keith. Thanks very much for your support as always All right, Cliff notes on Oliver Leiber successful producers songwriter musician He’s had tremendous success writing and producing top hits for Paula Abdul the cores Aretha Franklin Beth Hart Who was a guest here a while back? Adam Lambert Kesha Gavin deGraw foreigner Dave cause Sheena Easton Brian Ray Jennifer page Quinn Sullivan and Silver Tide

at the time who had Nick Perry as their lead guitarist who was on the show here quite a while back as well and others. He was also a touring and session guitarist for Rod Stewart and Oliver’s dad if his last name sounds familiar. It should because his dad was Jerry Leiber which is who is one half of the famous Brill Building songwriting team of Leiber and Stoller. Dude, I’m so glad to get together with you. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks for coming on.

oliver Leiber (01:18.41)
Yeah, my pleasure.

Craig Garber (01:20.446)
Alrighty, you started off playing drums, but at which you still play drums quite a bit. But at age 11, you switched to guitar. You got a 72 Martin D18, which you later traded for a guild D55, which you still have. And then you got a Walnut SG is your first electric. What prompted you to switch to guitar?

oliver Leiber (01:36.269)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (01:42.99)
Um, well, the messaging from my dad, you know, he kind of, when I was younger and I, you know, we all idolize our dads no matter what they do. Right. And I, you know, or don’t do, um, my dad was a great storyteller and he wasn’t one to ruin a good story for a few detail or truths, you know, and pretty much had painted himself as this like drummer.

Craig Garber (01:57.186)
short or don’t do.

oliver Leiber (02:11.926)
to me when I was a little kid and talked about, I don’t know. So I wanted to be like him. And so I wanted to be a drummer. And so I got my first kid at eight and.

oliver Leiber (02:29.198)
started playing and kind of at a certain point, he was saying, yeah, you know, but you’ll never be able to write songs as a drummer. I’m like 10, 11, you know, I’m just happy to be holding the sticks and sitting on the throne. It was kind of like, you know, it says a lot about the messaging that I got from him, but it was like, you’ll never write songs. So I’m sort of confused and I’m looking at him and he’s like, if you don’t play an instrument, you know, where you can play court, you’ll never write a song.

Craig Garber (02:44.451)
You’ll never be anything.

oliver Leiber (02:59.018)
You know, anyway, so that’s what sort of planted the seed and my brother, my older brother is 15 months older. He actually had a guitar, I think he was going to be the guitar player. And he had it lying around. And I picked it up. And it was one of those things where I think you hear this a lot with brothers who are musicians where one of them is trying to play an instrument trying to play an instrument, the other one sort of picks it up in like a couple days that they’re better.

and it’s like really clear you’re meant to play that. So it kind of happened with the guitar. I mean, my brother’s a great piano player, keyboard player, but I sort of picked up this guitar that was around the house at around 11 and also started playing that. So I never gave up drumming obviously, but I sort of added guitar to my, to the list of instruments that I was playing.

Craig Garber (03:27.689)
Yes.

Craig Garber (03:55.006)
Yeah, I hear that story quite often with the brothers.

oliver Leiber (03:57.278)
Yeah. But it’s funny, man, because I still to this day, it’s weird. Don’t really think of myself as a guitar player. I mean, yeah, it’s weird. In my mind, I’m a drummer, and I play way more guitar and have for years now. But in my mind, I’m like, I’m a drummer that sort of plays guitar on the side. I mean, that’s my mentality. Yeah.

Craig Garber (04:06.835)
Really?

Craig Garber (04:22.507)
Wow.

Is that like if your heart more in line with drumming or?

oliver Leiber (04:33.422)
I don’t know if it’s more in line with drumming.

oliver Leiber (04:40.118)
It feels like something that came more naturally in some ways to me. Maybe because I started, I don’t know, eight to 11, it’s only three years, but somehow I started at a point where it just, I never had to think about it. Like I don’t remember struggling with drums, that learning period, that hump that you have to get over. So for me, it just feels like this thing that was naturally just there. Whereas guitar, I really had to…

Craig Garber (04:59.766)
Sure.

oliver Leiber (05:11.127)
It’s always been like trying to get these fingers to do what I want them to do. Right.

Craig Garber (05:14.894)
Who doesn’t? What guitar player doesn’t? I mean, it’s not an easy instrument, you know? Yeah.

oliver Leiber (05:20.956)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I can’t totally explain it. But um, yeah, I’ve always felt like a drummer who plays guitar.

Craig Garber (05:24.034)
That’s interesting, man.

Craig Garber (05:32.266)
Well, you did learn how to write songs. Touche. Tell me about discovering your superpower at camp.

oliver Leiber (05:34.926)
I did a drummer who writes songs. Yeah.

oliver Leiber (05:46.486)
my super power. I direct that down. Well, so I had a drum set. I had my little Ringo kit. Although I picked, I picked just the wrong colors. I picked the bronze strata Ludwig kit, which in retrospect, if you go look, you know, Ringo had the black, the black strata one, the classic Ringo kit. And anyway, I picked the wrong drum.

Craig Garber (05:47.606)
Hahaha.

Craig Garber (06:02.69)
Ha ha!

Craig Garber (06:15.146)
What a faux pas.

oliver Leiber (06:16.458)
What? Just bad call, bad call. But I had that kid and my brother and I would jam in the apartment, you know, in New York when we were eight, nine, 10. And we got sent away to summer camp and there was a talent show. And I think I was probably nine, nine or 10. And…

you know, we played the talent show and I think, you know, he had a farfisa and a little tiny little amp that was probably just grinding away, just distorted. And we had a few like jams that we would do, you know, just three, four chord jams. And I think we must’ve done it for about 10 minutes, the same three chords or whatever. And we ended and after the talent show, just…

You know, it was a boys camp on one side and the girls camp on one side. And it was just, you know, I was sort of like, the girls came flocking, you know, is that a word? Well, they flocked. Um, they flocked and also the guys and all of a sudden, you know, I just realized like, Oh, this is something that I can do that, you know, somehow. Sets me apart, you know? Um, and.

Craig Garber (07:24.466)
Yeah. Flocking. Yeah, they flock to you.

Craig Garber (07:39.329)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (07:41.598)
Yeah, I sort of got that validation and that rush from that I had never had before. And it’s sort of just light went off in my head, which is like, Oh, yeah, this is what I want to do, you know.

Craig Garber (07:53.268)
Yeah.

Well, also, and we’ll talk about this later, to any extent you’re comfortable, you got attention. And I read your bio, you weren’t necessarily getting that attention at home. So that’s a like, that’s huge. Yeah, at that young of an age, that’s a huge thing.

oliver Leiber (08:03.02)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (08:07.938)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (08:12.212)
That’s very true. Yeah.

oliver Leiber (08:18.234)
Yeah, yeah. Well, in a household, again, you know, where, you know, my dad was a big deal. And, and oftentimes with personalities and guys like that, that are that successful, you know, they can be kind of about themselves, you know, and that sort of was the case with my old man. So very much about him. So it was hard to get his attention.

Craig Garber (08:41.311)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (08:45.45)
I think that’s maybe what you’re referring to. And I think really for both my brother and I, the reasons why we picked up instruments in the first place was, you know, I was eight. It’s like, you were a drummer, dad. Okay, I’ll be a drummer. Maybe that’ll do it, you know? Oh, I can’t write songs with these things. What do you want me to do? Oh, I’ll play guitar. So, you know, I was just sort of kind of tap dancing, trying to get the guys, yeah, approval. Hello. So,

Craig Garber (08:45.65)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (08:58.602)
Yeah, sure. Right, all right.

Craig Garber (09:11.21)
Hello? Yeah.

oliver Leiber (09:13.654)
didn’t really come from him. But yes, like, you know, a lot of attention, positive attention did come from it in other areas. Yeah. And I think I learned that early on. Yeah.

Craig Garber (09:21.982)
Yeah, yeah, so I could totally get that.

So then you start playing in bands in high school, you continued in college, and at 17, I thought this was so cool, you took a drum lesson from Bernard Purdy. How the hell did you get hooked up with Bernard, and what was that like?

oliver Leiber (09:38.986)
Right, right. So.

oliver Leiber (09:44.066)
So the Steely Dan record had come out with Home at Last on it. And it had that classic Purdy Shuffle, that halftime. Swoosh, swoop, pop, the tip, boop, the tip, boop, right?

Craig Garber (09:50.39)
Yeah, yeah.

Craig Garber (09:59.01)
What a great all those records of that era from Steely Dan and especially growing up in New York. It was they were like So awesome, yeah

oliver Leiber (10:02.038)
Oof. Yeah. Oh yeah.

So, yeah, you know, and I was really, again, at that point, even though I played guitar, I’m an acoustic, and I kind of played in my room, it was really a very closet thing. And I was way more identified with being a drummer at that point. And, you know, I was really into, I’d go to McKell’s and watch stuff. And I’d have my face like right up in Steve Gad’s, you know, bass drum there in that club. And, you know, I was living and breathing drumming.

Craig Garber (10:24.138)
Mm-hmm.

Craig Garber (10:34.058)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (10:38.058)
And anyway, so I heard that half time shuffle and drove me crazy. And I was like, how do those triplets keep going? And how do you get that feeling? It was just like magic. And my dad actually, cause I think he had recorded with Purdy probably over the years. I don’t know how it came into being cause he might’ve even said, I ran into Bernard Purdy and I don’t know how it went down. But when I heard that he knew Purdy, I was like,

I have to have a drum lesson with him. I have to learn this one beat that he does, this groove. And somehow he was set up and I literally, the other day I was going through, I save everything, right? I’m just a hoarder and I have a box and I’ve got the ticket stubs from Madison Square Garden from 1973, like Sly Stone and the Zeppelin, you know, like.

Craig Garber (11:12.982)
shuffle yeah

Craig Garber (11:24.786)
I have all my ticket stuffs too. Wow, that’s amazing. Holy shit, that’s nuts.

oliver Leiber (11:31.218)
and 77, crazy. But I have this piece of paper fold up and it literally said, it said Bernard Purdy and his phone number. I was like, holy shit. You know, that was from that period. So I called him up. He’s like, yeah, man, yeah, we can get together. And basically he had a boom box and he put a cassette in and he was like, okay, well, this is how it goes. And he played it.

Craig Garber (11:43.23)
Wow.

oliver Leiber (12:00.102)
And if you’ve ever seen him at NAMM shows or whatever, you know.

He’s just got this way about him, I don’t know. But he just had me watch and then he said, okay, and now you can change your kick pattern and still play the same thing with your hands. And then now you can open the hat on the one or on the hands or you got it. And he basically just kept playing and went through various permutations of that groove with different kick patterns, different high hat opening and closing patterns. And basically that’s like.

clicked off the cassette, handed it to me, because all right, there you go. Like figure it out. But what do you plan? Man, I don’t know. It’s gotta be somewhere. Cause I get an order, and somewhere in a carton, like I have so much stuff, you know, that I’ve never listened to. Somewhere there is a cassette of that lesson. I would love to find it.

Craig Garber (12:39.978)
Wow, do you still have that cassette?

Craig Garber (12:47.53)
That would be cool to revisit. Yeah.

Craig Garber (12:59.69)
That’s awesome. Yeah, that would be amazing. So that’s really cool. So we, I would assume growing up in the household that you did a guy like Purdy or anybody else for that matter, you were not starstruck.

oliver Leiber (13:17.259)
Yes and no. Like, someone like that or someone like Steve Gad, like because of how I viewed them. Oh, I was definitely like I would get that feeling like, Oh, fuck that Steve Gad, you know, I mean, coming out of the bathroom at McKell’s, like I’m going to fuck that Steve Gad coming out of the bathroom. I definitely I felt that, you know.

Craig Garber (13:31.774)
or the drummer thing. Ha ha.

Craig Garber (13:37.894)
Ha ha!

Yeah.

oliver Leiber (13:45.102)
It’s funny, the people that I would get starstruck around are probably not the people that most people would, you know? Yeah, more guys that I respected and musicians. It wasn’t necessarily stars.

Craig Garber (13:50.451)
Right, right.

Craig Garber (13:56.594)
Right, right, I totally get that. I’ve had that on this show here. Yeah.

oliver Leiber (13:58.674)
Especially musicians were my heroes, I think. That’s one of the things. Growing up, because there wasn’t a ton of stars come in. They were here and there coming through my dad’s living room or whatever. And if I went to hang with him at the Brill Building, I met people over the years. There were definitely people I met. But it wasn’t like this just parade of stars that was always happening and coming to the house.

oliver Leiber (14:30.934)
What I loved and growing up, what I witnessed was the record making process. When I’d go visit LeBron Stoller at the studio and I’d watch a rhythm section, and I fell in love with that part of music. It was these amazing players that would come in, sort of be handed a chord chart or whatever, and then…

Craig Garber (14:38.284)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (14:47.468)
Right.

oliver Leiber (14:58.426)
somehow in the course of five to 20 minutes, this thing would happen, it would just, and then you’d hear it, and it was amazing thing. And it were parts players, it wasn’t generally flashy, it was just feel. Guys that knew how to stay out of the way of, you know, the vocals, how to stay out of the way of each other, where to, you know, and I fell in love with that. I fell in love with.

Craig Garber (15:15.475)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (15:26.922)
rhythm sections. So someone like Steve Gad or Bernard Purdy, they were on the Mount Rushmore of

Craig Garber (15:34.526)
Yeah, of session guys. Yeah, for sure. Rhythm section session guys, particularly. Yeah, for sure. Off the top of your head, Oliver, what can you think of, like, besides Purdy and Steve Gad, can you think of, like, a couple of situations where people… Session guys that you saw that you’re like, holy fuck, I cannot believe I’m watching this guy create something out of nothing, or this gal.

oliver Leiber (15:39.422)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (16:00.812)
Um…

oliver Leiber (16:05.454)
Well, it’s got again. I remember being invited to a session. Klaus, is it Ogerman?

Craig Garber (16:14.336)
Ober, Ober minute. Isn’t it? Yeah.

oliver Leiber (16:15.958)
house over there. It was some session. I don’t know how I got invited, but I was like, 17 or 18. I think I don’t know how

Craig Garber (16:23.83)
You’re talking about the bass player, right?

oliver Leiber (16:26.57)
No, he was at Keyboard Club, because what I was gonna say is the rhythm section. So I get invited into some session, midtown Manhattan. I don’t know how I ended up in there. I had seen Gad play at McKell’s, had never met him and I had never seen him in the studio. And he was the drummer and it was like 20 year old Marcus Miller on bass.

Craig Garber (16:51.984)
Holy shit.

oliver Leiber (16:53.41)
who had produced anything, hadn’t made it anyway. And I just remember I just staring in awe at the two of them, work out these parts. And it was this incredibly slow groove too, where the slower the groove, the harder it is to like lock in time. There’s like, you could read a novel in between.

quarter notes is like, how do you get it? Gad was so locked in and they were so locked in and I remember and this probably accounted for my smoking, like continuing with my weed smoking well beyond the time I should have is Gad was just the whole time you like joint after joint after joint a whole time while these recording and

Craig Garber (17:23.746)
Sure.

Craig Garber (17:45.866)
Really?

oliver Leiber (17:49.23)
ashes just like falling on the snare and he was like it was like perfect and every take was a magnet. And of course I got the idea like, you know, I need to smoke more weed here in order to, you know,

Craig Garber (18:01.834)
That is a… Dude, I can’t even like barely hold a fucking conversation if I’m still… Let alone play an instrument at any kind of level. Like…

oliver Leiber (18:07.132)
or here’s

oliver Leiber (18:13.078)
The irony, and it’s funny I brought that up, the other name, one of the other names I found in my little box of things, you know, I was just going through looking for something in particular, Purdy, and then there was Steve Gad and all his numbers that he had written for me. Ironically, I meet him, it’s 10 years later, I’m now like, not quite 10 years later, I’m like 20.

Yeah, maybe 24, living in Minnesota. I had gone there to get sober and I meet him. I go to an AA meeting and in the meeting is, I think he’s pretty outspoken about being sober. If I’m outing him, we can edit it out. But he’s pretty outspoken about it for years and years at this point.

Anyway, in the meeting, I show up and this little hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota, and I walk in and sitting there is Steve Gadd.

Craig Garber (19:25.194)
Holy, that must have blew your mind.

oliver Leiber (19:27.874)
blew my mind and we started talking and he was so nice. And I was like, you have no idea. I mean, I have, you know, he probably gets this every day, all day, all day long, but I did the, you have no idea how big an influence you’ve been on. He was so cool. And he was more impressed with the fact that I had been sober at this point, a year or two, I’m not sure. And he gave me his number and he gave me his information.

Craig Garber (19:38.603)
Yes.

oliver Leiber (19:55.602)
And actually, you know, we stayed in touch. And it kind of blew my mind, because at a certain point when I had success as a producer, I remember him calling me at one point saying, hey man, you know, because he was kind of getting back on his feet. He had really been taken off the rails for a minute. And I remember calling me one time and just saying, hey man, you know, can we work together or anything? I’ll come play, you know. And I just remember like,

hanging up the phone and just, it was just one of those moments where it’s surreal. Trying to take it in, like how much I had idolized him and how.

Craig Garber (20:31.526)
Yeah, I understand that.

oliver Leiber (20:37.442)
this weird full circle of him calling me up and saying, hey, you know, I love these records you’re making. If you ever want a drummer to play on it, it’s just.

Craig Garber (20:48.134)
Yeah, I could totally.

oliver Leiber (20:50.606)
I never, you know, and over the years I’ve thought like, oh, I would love Steve to play on this. I would love Steve to play on this. For one reason or another, it hasn’t happened yet, you know? And I think part of it has also been that he, it’s like, I almost feel like I can’t call Steve Gad, you know? I mean, you know, right? I still feel like, yeah, like, yeah.

Craig Garber (21:11.undefined)
I could understand that. I really can.

Craig Garber (21:16.575)
Like you’re the little kid.

oliver Leiber (21:17.938)
running around in my dad’s pajamas, you know, and yeah, and

Craig Garber (21:20.094)
Yeah, right. It’s hard to get out of the early context at times. It really is.

oliver Leiber (21:27.03)
never with him and we have met and we I’ve come to gigs with him and he’s like, hit me up and we’ve had we’ve run into each other. I was like, dude, call me. But yeah, there’s that hurdle. I’ve never really, you know, let’s just keep it like this. This is good. I don’t know. You might like the tune or I don’t whatever.

Craig Garber (21:42.786)
Ha ha ha.

Craig Garber (21:47.43)
Yeah, yeah, it’s sometimes it’s better to have a with that expression, you know, sometimes be careful when you meet your heroes, sort of. So I. Yeah, I so I can understand that I really can. And also, I have this expression, you can’t connect the dots moving forward. And that’s one of those things where you’re like, all of a sudden, you’re like in a meeting with Steve Gadd and you’re like, how the fuck did this happen?

oliver Leiber (21:56.544)
Yeah, they say trust the art, not the artist. Yeah.

oliver Leiber (22:09.122)
Hmm

oliver Leiber (22:15.214)
I mean, that was just unbelievable. The irony of that was that when I had sort of.

left New York in the way that I left New York, felt like tail between my legs, shameful, like, you know, just my life sort of imploded at 22 without going to lots of details, flying to the Midwest, ending up in St. Paul and rehab and all of that.

Craig Garber (22:28.791)
Mm-hmm.

oliver Leiber (22:47.774)
It really felt like I felt like my life was sort of an all time low, you know, and what ended up happening career wise from Minnesota and that place that I thought was the low point in my life and represented like you cannot get any lower than this, you know, St. Paul in the middle of the winter.

Craig Garber (22:54.964)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (23:17.61)
you know, living near the Schmitz Brewery with like half of the neon sign burnt out. It was just like grim. And that I would meet my heroes, you know, because there were several that, you know, and ultimately have my musical career flourish on a, you know, on a big scale, you know, from there. So the whole thing was very counterintuitive.

Craig Garber (23:39.86)
Yeah.

Yeah.

oliver Leiber (23:50.363)
You cannot plan these things in your life.

Craig Garber (23:52.082)
No, totally. Yeah, I’m a, I agree with you on that. So I always say, you know, you can’t connect the dots moving forward. And, and I love hearing stories like that where, because it always, you know, there’s gotta have hope somehow, even if it’s a little fucking match, you know, if you keep it burning a little bit, something can come out of it, man.

oliver Leiber (23:58.967)
No.

oliver Leiber (24:16.674)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I was continually amazed and surprised by because one would think that, you know, with the father that I had and who he was in the music business, right, and living in Manhattan and New York, that all opportunities and connections and things, you know, would spring from that.

Craig Garber (24:18.155)
That’s cool.

oliver Leiber (24:45.694)
naturally and nothing ever came of that particular, you know, other than a drum lesson with pretty, but it all came from a absolute, what felt like a detour in my life, you know, it’s so just, yeah, very unexpected.

Craig Garber (24:54.823)
Right.

Craig Garber (25:03.881)
Yeah.

I want to talk about that. Um, cause it’s a great story that you have. You hadn’t spoken with your dad in years and you meet with him. And by the way, I cannot stand, I didn’t talk to my parents for 36 years. I cannot stand people who may reframe that. It’s not, I can’t, many people are often call your dad, call your mom. If you’re not, and that’s because like they come from a family where they couldn’t imagine like

oliver Leiber (25:35.798)
Well, and who teaches you that? Your mom and your dad. The programming comes from them.

Craig Garber (25:35.859)
My father had-

Craig Garber (25:40.592)
Right.

Craig Garber (25:45.678)
Right, right. And I remember when my father called me years and years ago and I didn’t take the call, I didn’t wanna talk to him. And my son was like, dad, how can you not talk to your dad? And I was really happy, because I said, okay, I fucking did a good job here. But I was like, Nick, I don’t expect you to understand it. And I’m sorry if it’s causing you stress, but I can’t explain it. But what I was gonna say is,

oliver Leiber (26:04.87)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (26:15.894)
there’s so many people that have these toxic relationships and like justifiably say, you know what, it’s time to split man in any whatever. And then you always get these people, you only have one mother and father. Well, you know, then why were they such assholes? You know, it’s like, you know, I, you know, so I say that. So when people saying when I’m, you know, you hadn’t spoken to your dad in years,

oliver Leiber (26:32.79)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (26:41.398)
There’s a reason why people do it’s not a natural thing to say, I’m going to cut my fucking parents out of my life. It’s, you got to be pushed to levels of like, this is bad, you know,

oliver Leiber (26:46.572)
Yeah!

oliver Leiber (26:51.89)
Yeah, and I also think that there’s way more society and the consciousness because of 12 step programs and because just in general sort of family systems and are just the general knowledge that people have about these things is so much greater now, the kids that have grown up the last, but kind of back when I was,

Craig Garber (27:13.075)
Yes.

oliver Leiber (27:20.49)
you know, going through this and sort of made the decision not to really have any contact with my family for a long time. Um, it was, uh, it was in a popular notion. It was hard for people to understand that these relationships could be really toxic, you know, I mean, you know, the reason why

Craig Garber (27:38.259)
Yeah, I could understand that.

oliver Leiber (27:45.646)
I needed a drink and getting a high to survive my family, you know, just made it out of there, like on the plane out of there, you know, by the you know, by the skin of my teeth, and realizing as I was trying to be sober and get my life together, that there wasn’t a lot of support for that at all coming from my family of origin, you know.

Craig Garber (27:52.217)
I totally get yes.

Craig Garber (28:02.088)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (28:14.294)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (28:15.55)
Because in order for people to acknowledge that, they have to acknowledge their own.

Craig Garber (28:20.842)
their own shit. Yeah. And their own and their own flaws in contributing to potentially that situation. Yeah, that’s a big ask for most people, man. Yeah. I want to get into this, but I love the one story you told you’re flying out of town. And you’re like, I want to get I wanted to get buzzed one time, but I made the mistake of drinking airplane wine.

oliver Leiber (28:21.838)
their own shit. Nobody was ready to do that.

oliver Leiber (28:30.391)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (28:46.499)
Oh, well, it was just it was sadly the last when I left town, when I left New York to go to Hazelden to treatment. All they had on the plane was, and you know, and I had been. Again, you know.

using hard drugs and whatever smoking weed and everything up into the moment, you know that morning that I got on that plane. And yeah, all they had was like the screw off, you know, top the screw up top, Paul Masson.

Craig Garber (29:13.739)
Sure.

Craig Garber (29:26.018)
You’re like 13 again, going into the bodega.

oliver Leiber (29:29.762)
So sadly, the last alcohol I’ve ever had was, yeah, Palmasong wine, a little red bottle of wine in July 20th, 1983.

Craig Garber (29:40.159)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (29:45.938)
Yeah, yeah, that was a funny story. Yeah. Okay, so you hadn’t spoken to your dad in years and I really, this was freaking impressive. So you meet with your dad and he listens to a song that you have, he hooks you up with, oh, over the phone, okay. He hooks you up with Russ Tittleman, the famous producer, and he has Russ listen to this song and Russ wants to work with you and he wants to have.

oliver Leiber (29:47.658)
was death.

oliver Leiber (29:58.87)
No, it was just over the phone.

Yeah.

oliver Leiber (30:07.298)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (30:14.49)
Chaka Khan record the song and when I read this man, I really respected you because this is like shows what people are made of. You turned them down because you wanted, you didn’t want to stand on your dad’s shoulders. And I really get that. And then instead you said, you work with Paula Abdul instead, you produced her and she was a complete unknown.

oliver Leiber (30:16.375)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (30:43.306)
But I’d love if you can share the story. I have some questions, but I want you to tell the story first if you’re okay with it.

oliver Leiber (30:49.134)
Sure. And I wish I could take all the credit for, yes, I did wanna stand on my own. I did get some feedback and some advice and I was left to sort of weigh it out. But the story goes, I wrote this song.

called it’s just the way that you love me. And I sent the demo because I was proud of it, you know, and I sent the demo to my dad, just because I wanted him to hear what I was doing. He hadn’t heard anything. And I’ve been in Minnesota now, maybe three years or so, you know, and so I think I sent him the demo. And

Craig Garber (31:47.298)
So this is you starting like first, I’m starting to cut you off. In the context, you were just first starting to like, for lack of a better, come back to life.

oliver Leiber (31:50.892)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (31:58.578)
Yeah, yeah. Um, I had it took a minute, you know, my first, I don’t want to go off in the weeds, but my first year and a half in Minnesota after treatment and after halfway house, because I went like 30 days treatment, six, seven months in a halfway house. And then they recommend. I just kept following what was being, you know, recommended.

Craig Garber (31:59.647)
Okay.

Craig Garber (32:19.616)
You did the right, you did it right.

oliver Leiber (32:27.446)
It’s like, I’ve never had a concept of a religious God, but I was taught, look, five people, three people that are sober standing in front of you is a power greater than yourself, you know, right? Three sober people telling you what they see and what they suggest you might do is a power greater. So that was as much as I could turn my will in my power, you know, so.

Craig Garber (32:54.262)
Sure. If you don’t grow up with that, it’s a very, very difficult concept to accept. And especially if you didn’t grow up with that and you had so much bullshit to deal with, it’s even that much further removed.

oliver Leiber (33:08.129)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (33:11.614)
Yeah, and particularly what your example of was an ego, huge ego kind of, you know, that reigned supreme. Very hard to imagine an actual power, you know, outside of. But, I don’t know, lose the thread. So, yes, it took me a while. Yeah, and then.

Craig Garber (33:21.951)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (33:25.97)
Right, a higher power, yeah.

Craig Garber (33:37.519)
six or seven months in a halfway house. Yeah.

oliver Leiber (33:41.302)
working kitchen jobs and waiting tables and busing tables, ultimately becoming like a short order chef. But for a year, year and a half till I finally started sitting in a little bit in town and that led to, it was a slow grow. At the time that this thing happened with the song, it was probably now two and a half years into this period where I had.

had gotten a guitar at this point and a drum machine. And I had a little Fostex four track cassette recorder in my room. I was living in a house with five other sober guys and we each had a room and working hourly media labor jobs. And I come home and I was writing in my room there and I had written this song and

I think I sent it to my old man and simultaneously, the guy who, one of the guys who had played on it was Paul Peterson, St. Paul Peterson. He’s a, he had been in the time and then he was in a band that Prince put together called The Family.

and he was the lead singer in the family. And somebody had put us together to meet each other. They thought we would get along, and two funky white dudes, I guess, I don’t know, thought we had musical commonality, you know? And he had played on the demo, and he took it with him to California.

Craig Garber (35:23.167)
Mm-hmm.

oliver Leiber (35:33.262)
because he was making a video. And…

oliver Leiber (35:42.082)
There was a break in the action and making the video and they’re having lunch. And the choreographer for the video was saying how she was gonna make a record. And he was saying, well, what kind of record? She was like, well, like a Janet record. I love the Minneapolis funk. I love Prince, the Janet thing. And Paul said, I have this cassette that I played on from a friend of mine back in Minneapolis.

And it’s kind of that thing. It’s his song, but like, you want to hear it? So the choreographer is Paul Abdul. Did I say that? Yeah. Oh, okay. It was Paul Abdul. And he played her this song and she freaked out. She called, you know, Virgin Records who had signed her, Gemma Corfield. And my phone’s getting blown up. Who are you and what are you doing?

Craig Garber (36:17.062)
Yeah, no, you didn’t. I was I was. Yeah.

oliver Leiber (36:37.778)
simultaneously, my dad had, you know, I think, like met Russ Tidalman at Lane’s one night, you know, which is where, like, yeah, yeah. If I needed to find my dad, basically, from the age of like, six to, like, 17, if I needed to find my dad, I didn’t know where he was. He was at a Lane’s or if I had no money, and I needed money, I could go to a Lane. It was like,

Craig Garber (36:45.798)
lanes. This is like such New York talk.

Craig Garber (37:00.191)
Right.

oliver Leiber (37:07.31)
home away from home, which is the whole other stories related to that. But probably at Elaine’s one night, you know, at the table that was reserved for it, right. You probably ran into Russ and he handed him this cassette. I don’t know entirely cause I was in Minnesota. I remember getting a call from Russ, title man. Now I knew who he was cause I knew the records he had produced and some of my favorite records of all time, you know.

Craig Garber (37:07.314)
Wow. Yeah, that’s funny, man.

Craig Garber (37:32.758)
Mm-hmm.

oliver Leiber (37:37.518)
And Gadd played on a lot of them. So, you know, I was like tracking all that. And he goes, hey, man, this is, mind you, I’m still living in a house with five other sober guys, working at a restaurant called the Day by Day Cafe. Well, the guy who owned it, really like, he knew that the halfway house was like only like half a mile away.

Craig Garber (37:56.598)
What an interesting name for people in recovery to be working there.

oliver Leiber (38:07.018)
And he knew that he could get really cheap labor with all the people at the halfway house that needed jobs. So he kind of, I think he kind of marketed it a little bit. We all ended up working at the day-by-day cafe. There’s a funny story around that too. Well, there’s too many.

Craig Garber (38:14.006)
Yeah. Hahaha.

Craig Garber (38:21.142)
That’s pretty funny, man.

Craig Garber (38:30.314)
If it’s funny and you want to say it, say it man.

oliver Leiber (38:31.574)
What’s not funny is weird, you know, I remember being on my hands and knees, scrubbing the front entryway of the day by day cafe. And door opens. And it’s like a wind chill. It’s like winter in Minnesota. And I just see feet and like I’m white and I just like someone stops and I see these feet. And I hear Oliver, like Oliver Leiber.

and I look up and it’s Maria Dillon, Bob Dillon’s daughter, who I had gone to boarding school with. So I was getting arrested and getting… Yeah, well, he’s from Hibbing, Minnesota. I had gotten sent out of New York when I was 16 or 17. I was getting in trouble, had gotten arrested.

Craig Garber (39:15.01)
And that’s where he’s, they’re from there, weren’t they? Wasn’t he from there? Yeah.

Craig Garber (39:24.939)
random.

oliver Leiber (39:30.134)
Dad didn’t want to deal with it. They sent me to this school in Vermont on 85 milking cows and on a working farm. I literally went from like Manhattan, New York, CBGBs, Max’s Kansas City, playing clubs, this Studio 54, crazy kind of life in the 70s, like whatever, to like cows. And.

Craig Garber (39:58.646)
Wow.

oliver Leiber (39:59.47)
a field and nothing. It was like shock, right? But it was 100 girls and 100 guys on a hill in Vermont. That was my last two years of high school. I knew Maria from then. That was it. And had seen her and she was in that school as well, which is random. It was sort of a mixture of, it’s really weird. I mean, and I know how

Craig Garber (40:16.182)
Wow. So she was in that school as well.

Wow. How the whole thing is random.

oliver Leiber (40:29.05)
nonlinear this whole conversation and interview is and I just like, it’s just okay. It’s like, you know, I always say like my brain and my thoughts, it’s like Jackson Pollock’s autumn really like that’s it. It’s like I’m having to like pull it. It’s not linear. Okay.

Craig Garber (40:36.03)
Hey man, you do you. This is great, as far as I’m concerned.

Craig Garber (40:48.938)
Hey, we’re having fun. This is great. No need.

oliver Leiber (40:54.066)
Okay, one other thing and then you’re gonna have to like just land the plane, only land the plane. But the only other guitar player, right, that ended up and he ended up coming the next year, like musician at this school for with 100 guys and 100 girls in the middle of fucking nowhere in Vermont. The next year, second year that I’m there, this is kid walking around.

Craig Garber (41:00.382)
All right.

oliver Leiber (41:21.462)
with a Les Paul down around his knees, right? And he had plugged into the Les Paul, he had headphones and apparently early version of, I don’t know, like a distorted sound that you could hear. And he’s walking through the woods, like in Vermont with this Les Paul and he’s in his own world and it was like, I was like, who’s this fucking kid, right? And we ended up

Craig Garber (41:24.578)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (41:50.574)
playing a ton of music together with the only two that really kind of played rock and roll. There was like some blue grassy kids and some local Vermont kids. Anyway, his name was Red Beach.

Craig Garber (42:04.05)
Yeah, from Winger. And Whitesnake.

oliver Leiber (42:06.222)
And just the odds, the two of us were like the only two. Yeah, in my, it was a hippie school too. So your diplomas were hand painted by an art student and they’d sort of, it would be like this colored, it was like this watercolor of images of you in the school or something that typified you. So my diploma is me and Red Beach sitting

Craig Garber (42:09.907)
Yeah, that’s very random.

oliver Leiber (42:35.054)
cross-legged, I think by like a river in Vermont with acoustic guitars. Never happened that way, but that’s my memory. So cut to five.

Craig Garber (42:35.402)
Haha

Craig Garber (42:40.359)
Oh my God, that’s so funny. Yeah.

Holy.

So hold on a minute, go back to the day by day. So you’re in there and Maria just comes in and says, Oliver, Oliver Leaver, how?

oliver Leiber (42:54.638)
Well, so yeah, she’s like, right, like, what the fuck? Why are you in Minnesota? Why are you scrubbing the floor of the entryway of the day by day cafe? Like just big? What the fuck? Maria? Anyway, so I had to explain, you know, life had taken some turns. And I was in the halfway house up the road.

Craig Garber (42:58.395)
Yeah!

Craig Garber (43:08.405)
Yeah

Ha ha!

Craig Garber (43:18.636)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (43:23.066)
and this was my job, you know? And maybe a couple of years later, we ended up dating. You know, we’d always been friends.

Craig Garber (43:32.909)
Hmm. Wait a minute, maybe is like, are you unsure?

oliver Leiber (43:36.502)
No, I’m pretty sure.

Craig Garber (43:38.773)
He said, maybe we ended up dating. You’re like trying to be discreet.

oliver Leiber (43:41.186)
I don’t even know why I said it that way.

oliver Leiber (43:46.71)
Yeah, it’s funny because when I go back to Minnesota and I don’t always go to the day by day, but I think like six months ago or maybe even less than that, every so often I’m like, I gotta go. It’s like the pilgrimage to, you know, through the old neighborhood where it all happened before, you know, and I, but I will always like, I’ll take a picture of the menu or something outside and I’ll, I’ll send it to Maria.

Craig Garber (43:50.018)
That was good.

Craig Garber (44:01.106)
Yeah!

Craig Garber (44:06.303)
Yeah!

Craig Garber (44:14.163)
Ah, that’s nice, man. That’s cool. That’s like a little thing you guys have. That’s really cool, man. Very cool.

oliver Leiber (44:15.218)
Yeah, I did it last time. Yeah. But yeah, she’s very much part of the fabric of my memories and those early, early days in Minnesota. So wait, Maria.

Craig Garber (44:32.938)
That’s really cool.

So you’re back out there. You were just talking about what happened, you know, and your journey and what you were doing prior to this thing with getting the phone call from Russ.

oliver Leiber (44:44.842)
Yeah. So I’m still like, yeah, so I’m still working these jobs and I’m living in this, you know, and so it was kind of surreal and he said, hey, man, he goes, your dad handed me this cassette, he said, you know, and play me this song. He goes, this fucking thing’s a hit. He goes, I love it. He goes, I’m, you know, I’m producing the next Shaka record. And it’s like, you know, she had just, yeah, I’m Shaka Khan.

You know, I grew up listening to Rufus for the drumming at first, because I think when I was listening to Rufus, it was more like Moon Calhoun. I think it was the drummer. All of that stuff. I grew up listening to all that stuff. Yeah, Ray Parker. And. Yeah, and he said, why don’t you? We’ll take we’ll take your master, whatever you cut with or whatever, we use that as

Craig Garber (45:14.611)
Right.

Right.

Craig Garber (45:24.19)
I don’t know who jumped on that, but all that stuff was really funky and good.

oliver Leiber (45:43.882)
We’ll use that as the…

oliver Leiber (45:49.438)
I totally, I sort of, I got something wrong, which is my original demo for that was on a Fostex four track, right? But when I went to make a better demo, I went to a studio to do it. So it was on 24 and that’s when I met with Paul. That’s why Paul was playing on it. So I went to make a better demo of this. That’s how he had.

Craig Garber (45:58.344)
Okay.

Craig Garber (46:10.7)
Okay.

Craig Garber (46:15.074)
But it’s amazing if you look back at all the sequence, and this is what I think life is magical and this is for me, what allows me to believe in a higher power because I’ve seen this shit in my own life and I’m not that good to be doing all this shit by myself to making shit like that. And when I hear like, what are the sequence of events that had to happen for this to occur? You know, I mean, it’s pretty, pretty powerful. Yeah, yeah, it’s pretty powerful.

oliver Leiber (46:32.291)
Yeah, yeah.

oliver Leiber (46:41.498)
It’s crazy, right? Yeah, it went from me singing all the parts and playing on this little demo to someone saying, you and Paul, St. Paul should get together. You guys, get in a studio somewhere, just see what happens. What happened from that was that I actually ended up writing his first single with him.

That’s what he was flying to LA to make the video of was a song we had written. Because that went so well, a week later, after we wrote that song and recorded it, whatever, I said, man, I got this little song that I did in my bedroom. Can we do, you wanna do it with me? And we went back to the same studio that we had done that song that was gonna be a single, and we recut my song. That’s how he had the cassette.

Craig Garber (47:14.935)
Oh, okay. Okay.

Craig Garber (47:36.746)
Wow.

oliver Leiber (47:38.794)
when he flew to make the video of our son.

Craig Garber (47:43.291)
This is phenomenal.

oliver Leiber (47:45.01)
And I had sent that simultaneously to my old man. So now there are these two dialogues going on. There’s Russ Tidelman, who I admired, Shaka Khan, who was like a huge star, saying, I wanna cut this. He goes, and you can co-produce it with me. And at the same time, Virgin Records and Gemma Corfield saying, who are you? What have you done? We love this song. Are you a legitimate producer?

Craig Garber (48:01.279)
Wow.

oliver Leiber (48:14.654)
You know, we want to fly out with Paula and see what your setup is in Minnesota and see if you’re literally.

Craig Garber (48:20.85)
And you’re, well, I have to ask my roommates to leave that day.

oliver Leiber (48:24.802)
Well, actually, it’s a whole other thing. I literally had to get a studio in Minnesota to allow me to go in the room and have the room for like an hour for this meeting so that I could like put my feet up on the console and kind of invite them in and go, yeah, here’s where I work. It was like all bullshit, but literally like, you know, but it came down to the decision.

Craig Garber (48:37.154)
Wow!

Craig Garber (48:45.238)
That’s awesome though, man.

That’s amazing. That’s so cool.

oliver Leiber (48:54.346)
where I was offered to co-produce with Russ Tidalman and have it be on the Shaka record, or I was offered to be the producer on this unknown female artists record. And the advice I got, or the way it was presented to me was this. If you do the Shaka record with Russ Tidalman, and it’s a hit, and it’ll probably be a hit.

Everyone’s gonna look at the credits and go, Russ Tidalman, Chaka Khan. And I can see like co-produced by, I mean, you know, it’s gonna be a second line credit. And it’s just like, if you produce this song on your own with this unknown artist and it’s a hit, everyone’s gonna go, who did this record? Oliver Leigh-Roo. Who’s that? Well, let’s check it out, right? And it was…

Craig Garber (49:32.947)
That’s a hundred percent.

Craig Garber (49:51.27)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (49:51.998)
It could be career changing. And I made this decision based on that. And it felt like after I made the decision and I turned down the shocker thing and said yes to the Paul thing, I mean, there were months and months and months where I thought like I just shot myself in the foot and ruined my career. It turned out to be a pretty good decision, yeah.

Craig Garber (50:12.192)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (50:16.31)
That would be a great decision. I have a few questions. How did you have the belief in yourself to have the confidence to make that decision? Because here you are, kind of like starting your life literally new, being sober. And when you have childhood trauma like that, self-belief isn’t something that’s very high at all. How did…

oliver Leiber (50:40.738)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (50:44.949)
That’s really amazing.

oliver Leiber (50:45.334)
Yeah. Well, I think there’s a again, I can’t take credit. I would love to take credit for it. I will take credit for listening to the feedback and going, fuck it, I’m jumping off the cliff. So I do that. But there was a guy that I had met that had been through the halfway house before me. And he had come from New York. And he had been driving a cab in New York.

Craig Garber (51:01.556)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (51:14.922)
But the story was is that he was also, he had said he was a lawyer. I’m still not clear whether or not he was ever actually a lawyer in New York because there’s a lot of mystery surrounding him. But he had taken to managing Paul Peterson, who he was the one that put us together. He was the one that said, you two guys need to get in the studio together. So he had this, he was starting to try and manage people in…

Craig Garber (51:36.084)
Okay.

oliver Leiber (51:44.458)
in Minnesota. He was sort of working his way into the music team as a manager. He knew the people at that recording studio. He knew Paul, he put us together. And he sort of just recognized he thought I was talented. And he sort of scooped me up with this group of people that he was starting to manage. He’s the one that said to me, Oliver, if you have this record, and it’s a hit with Shaka.

People are going to say Shaka. And if you have this record and it’s a hit with Paula, people are going to want to know who made this record. Yeah, he’s the one that made that point. And we later had a big falling out and there’s a lot of stuff, but I don’t want to even go there. What I am grateful to him for is, and what turned out to be life-changing advice was saying, if…

Craig Garber (52:22.736)
Who’s Oliver Leiber? Yeah.

Craig Garber (52:33.014)
Sure.

oliver Leiber (52:42.482)
If you don’t go with the superstar and you bet on yourself and you bet on this unknown artist And you win

You win big. And I don’t know what allowed me to, I think there was also a part of me because the thought just came in as I was saying this like.

I want to do this on my own. My dad never helped me before. I had a lot of stuff around him. The fact that he’s trying to help me now, there was a part of it that was like, you know what? Thank you, no thank you. It was a fuck you. There was a fuck you in there. I was scared to do it, but it was like a defining moment too. It was like, you know what? Fuck you, I’m doing this on my own. I’m going over here with these totally unknown people.

Craig Garber (53:17.814)
Fuck you, yeah, right. Yeah. Right.

Craig Garber (53:26.556)
I get that.

oliver Leiber (53:33.93)
and I’m gonna take my chances.

Craig Garber (53:36.234)
That’s awesome, man. That’s so cool. You know, it’s funny when you…

oliver Leiber (53:38.466)
But I did have like a mentor or somebody that was presenting me with it, framing it that way. I didn’t arrive at it on my own, you know, but I listened.

Craig Garber (53:48.234)
Yeah, but you listened and you took a chance. And you know what? And I remember this because certain things I remember and Keith Nelson, at the end of his interview, I said to him, Keith, any final words of wisdom, and he said, always bet on yourself. And that’s what that reminded me of because you bet on yourself, man. And that’s a hard thing to do when you’re in a vulnerable position.

oliver Leiber (54:17.922)
Well, and you hit on something which is like…

Craig Garber (54:18.327)
So I give you a lot of credit.

oliver Leiber (54:23.85)
You know, there’s some people, and I marvel at them, their level of self-confidence, their belief in themselves. Like, and usually it’s like really mediocre motherfuckers too. It’s like somehow, I don’t know why, like, cause even, you know, like Jeff Beck, right, is the, was the most self-deprecating.

Craig Garber (54:36.47)
Hahaha dude that is so…

oliver Leiber (54:47.682)
guy, an insecure guy and like stage fright and I mean, you know, somewhere inside he knew he was a fucking genius. And he also never lost that like self deprecating self doubting thing, right? It’s never those guys like the it’s the anyway, so

Craig Garber (54:59.617)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (55:03.838)
No, it’s so funny. Dude, what you just said is so hilarious because you wind up like, man, I wish I was that confident and…

oliver Leiber (55:10.206)
It’s like that motherfucker had some parents that just like, like gave him a completely unfounded, unrealistic sense of his value. God bless him. I never had. So like I handed in, I remember so the biggest hit that I wrote for her, which was the number one for like four weeks, huge hit, right? It was called Opposites Attract. But I remember literally

Craig Garber (55:14.998)
That, but.

Craig Garber (55:19.562)
That’s exactly what happened. But that’s exactly what happened. Yeah, right. Yeah.

oliver Leiber (55:39.798)
The mixes came from the studio, we had mixed it, and I did a handwritten note that I like, rubber band tied to the mixes, the dat and the, you know, that was an apology to Jemma Corfield. It wasn’t a fucking apology. It was like, I am so sorry, I fucking lost the plot here. I zigged when I should have zagged. I don’t know where it went out of, like, I’m sorry. Like, so.

Craig Garber (55:53.186)
I read that, all right. Ha.

oliver Leiber (56:08.178)
I’ve never been that guy that sort of like dig me. You know.

Craig Garber (56:13.31)
Yeah, here, this will be the best thing you’ve ever heard. Yeah.

oliver Leiber (56:16.478)
No, and I mean, and this day and it’s in some ways never changed where it’s like, you know, man, you know, I wake up and I’m like, it’s as if I’ve

Craig Garber (56:23.841)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (56:32.462)
Like, you know, I think about having to write a song or working with somebody. I feel like I’ve never written a song before. I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how I’m gonna get through the writing set. You know, like I always, or a gig or anything. It’s always feels to me like, I never feel like I’ve arrived, you know? Or like I really know what I’m doing. And, you know, that’s never left me. I can sort of.

Craig Garber (56:51.656)
Yes, I do know.

Craig Garber (56:57.634)
But I think people that have a greater level of self-awareness and maybe who are a little spiritual tend to be like that in general. I think when you realize that you’re not running the show, it’s, you know, I mean, and you tend to be more like aware of things like, I’m, I’m allergic to arrogant people, right? And that, and I, I could sense arrogance pretty quickly. Somebody we talked about earlier,

oliver Leiber (57:04.514)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (57:09.866)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (57:22.715)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (57:27.794)
For example, and I never understood that because I’m like, how does that serve you when your wife is sick or when your kids are something, you know, and I just never got that at all. Because you know,

oliver Leiber (57:42.314)
Yeah. Well, the thing is, is the arrogance tends to be, you know, accompanied with narcissism. And when you’re narcissistic, you don’t ask yourself that question of how does this serve me, you know, with my wife? You’re not even asking the question. You know what I mean? The fact that you have that thought by definition, you’re not a narcissist, but these people, it doesn’t even enter their, you know,

Craig Garber (57:49.394)
Yes.

Craig Garber (57:53.908)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (57:59.506)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (58:05.107)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (58:10.47)
No, it doesn’t. You’re 100% right. Yeah.

oliver Leiber (58:11.554)
their thought reality at all. So, yeah, so I don’t know all that to say that.

I’ve never felt, I always get out of bed feeling like I have to prove something to myself even, you know?

Craig Garber (58:29.23)
Oh, I totally get that. But that’s what makes you a likeable human being too. I think so. I mean, those are the people I like. So

oliver Leiber (58:33.262)
Hmm. Yeah. Thanks.

Craig Garber (58:39.938)
So Paula Abdul’s, yeah, no, this is good. It’s a thousand points. This is great, you kidding? I wouldn’t have it any other way. So Paula Abdul’s album, Forever Your Girl gets released, 88. And at that time it was, it went on to sell 7 million copies, the most successful debut album of all time.

oliver Leiber (58:41.09)
Does this make any sense? Are we making any sense? Thousand points of light, thousand points of light.

oliver Leiber (58:51.264)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (59:04.01)
First time an artist had four US Billboard Hot 100 number one singles from a debut album of which you wrote and solely produced two of them by yourself, Opposites Attract and Forever Your Girl, and you also wrote and produced The Way That You Love Me.

oliver Leiber (59:21.366)
which only got to number two, I think, because, funny, this is gonna sound like a lot, because fucking Milli Vanilli’s Blame It On The Rain, thank you, Dianne Warren, stayed at number one, I think, for like an insane amount of time. And you know, you’re sitting there at number two, you still have momentum, you still have momentum. People are still buying the record, they’re still spinning it. But at a certain point,

Craig Garber (59:26.403)
Only.

Craig Garber (59:35.714)
Ha ha!

oliver Leiber (59:51.038)
You know, it drops and it blame it on the rain stay anyway, would have been three number ones. Who’s counting? Yeah, how dare they? Yeah.

Craig Garber (59:59.158)
How dare they.

Uh, so if you, if you’re not cool talking about this, it’s fine. Um, let me know. So you unknowingly signed away all your publishing royalties for the Paul Abdul record to Virgin and, oh, you did not. Okay. Correct me.

oliver Leiber (01:00:17.902)
Hmm. No, no, no. I sold. I made a publishing deal and but it was a 50 deal. I sold. So it was just percent of my publishing.

Craig Garber (01:00:29.094)
Okay. Then let me scratch that question.

oliver Leiber (01:00:34.091)
Tell me where you were headed and maybe there’s something.

Craig Garber (01:00:36.678)
Well, I just, I’ve had, you know, I had a lot of people on the show, like Mark Farner from Grand Funk. This guy played, I think Woodstock and they toured nonstop for like two years and they come in and it’s like, Hey, well, it’s time to re up your contract. And the record label says, you know, you owe us two, $2 million. And he’s like, he’s like,

oliver Leiber (01:01:01.675)
Right.

Craig Garber (01:01:04.746)
we’ve been making $250 a week, sir. How like, you know, I’m not a math teacher, but that’s fucking, how does that add up? You know? And you know, I’ve heard so many stories of this going on and you know, to me a good deal in business is like a good deal for everybody. When the other person walks away happy and when I walk away, but in the record, yeah, I don’t know how

oliver Leiber (01:01:09.09)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (01:01:27.868)
You are not talking about the music business or the music industry. Yeah.

Craig Garber (01:01:34.886)
like soul, like do these people have no souls when they just go in and like, Hey, here you go. And it’s like, there’s plenty of money to go around.

oliver Leiber (01:01:49.538)
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I look, people did some really funky things. So me, people like lawyers that I had gone to, to represent me and help me like make the publishing deal in the contract that they wrote for me, built themselves and the lawyer

Craig Garber (01:02:11.318)
So there’s a lawyer you hired, independent lawyer to help. Oh my God. That’s disgusting.

oliver Leiber (01:02:14.434)
to help me make the deal, builds himself in 10% of my royalty into perpetuity forever on anything I wrote. This is the guy that was representing me. I only find this out later on, a couple of years later.

Craig Garber (01:02:28.29)
Cheers.

oliver Leiber (01:02:38.354)
when I’m looking for, I think the publishing company at some point a couple years later, I don’t know why we were looking at my contract. They go, you know that your lawyer has himself written in here as getting 10% of all of your songs forever? And I was like, no, I didn’t know that. So I had to go to another lawyer to call him and basically say, you know, this is not even legal.

This is not even, you know, ethical or whatever. And I ended up getting out. So many things like that happened to me. And there are many people that will take advantage of you if they can. And most of us, you know, we’re artists. We just wanna, you know, the artists, you know, yeah, we just wanted more girls from the camp to come say hello, you know. That’s what we’re doing here. We’re just like.

Craig Garber (01:03:28.13)
I just want to make music.

Craig Garber (01:03:32.499)
Yeah yeah yeah.

oliver Leiber (01:03:36.83)
music and the girls and you were not like worrying about I mean, I think people are more savvy now. But in the early days of music, and you hear these stories with all of the great, you know, black musicians and blues musician early rockers. Yeah, but it never really, I mean, it’s never really changed. It’s just that people have tried to get more savvy and you know,

Craig Garber (01:03:43.445)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (01:03:50.735)
Oh, those guys got hammered the worst!

oliver Leiber (01:04:03.03)
Well, even when lawyers get involved, you can’t trust your lawyer, like as the case was. So in an attempt to make a good publishing deal, like you said, the person that was making that deal for me actually ended up being the snake in the grass.

Craig Garber (01:04:06.342)
No, that’s disgusting. I can’t believe that.

Craig Garber (01:04:19.858)
Yeah, how disgusting is that man?

oliver Leiber (01:04:24.935)
And with this person that I got that sage advice from about Paula, they ended up doing some really, really…

oliver Leiber (01:04:39.506)
amoral stuff too, you know? So I was not immune, I was not immune to that. I didn’t make the deal, I didn’t sign all my publishing away, but I found myself in over my head with people that knew how to take advantage of me in an area that I just knew nothing about. Like I knew how to play and write and make records, and I didn’t know anything about the business. And because I didn’t have that relationship with my dad,

You know, I didn’t ask his advice. I didn’t, you know, I just like, so, you know, it didn’t even matter that I came from a place where there probably would have been resources. I didn’t have it at that point in my life. I was told that we didn’t talk for five, six years. So I was kind of an ignorant guy on my own, like, you know, getting taken advantage of in the business as well.

Craig Garber (01:05:13.15)
course.

Craig Garber (01:05:35.138)
But you think people dealing with you would be like, hey, let’s, you know, who your dad, what, like it’s probably not a good idea to screw. I mean, you know, you.

oliver Leiber (01:05:44.802)
You would think, yeah, you know, when I look back and I look at where I was in my life and, you know, and even the way I am now, which is pretty much an open book and, you know, I mean, I won’t edit out much, you know, I mean, I want to say inappropriate stuff, but I’ll really, I think when I went to these people at that point in my life,

you know, like the lawyer or whatever. I think I was like, hey, man, so I don’t have, I don’t talk to my dad. We don’t have a relationship. Cause I think I, you know, the questions might’ve been like, well, can’t your dad help you with this? Or why don’t you? Or who? And I’m like, no, man, it’s not like that. Like we don’t speak, we don’t have a relationship. This I’m on my own. I think like I would have given, you know, like.

Craig Garber (01:06:25.799)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (01:06:37.61)
So you being honest, people took advantage of that basically. They saw an opera, you know, a gap and they just leverage that that’s messed up man.

oliver Leiber (01:06:40.503)
Yeah.

Yeah. And I wasn’t even thinking that way. I wasn’t even thinking that. It’s also when you sober up, newly sober and you learn this program of honesty and yeah, you know, you’re just like open book. So I think I was an open book and probably in areas and with people that wasn’t safe. That wasn’t a safe.

Craig Garber (01:07:04.018)
Yeah, but it’s a shame, you know that anyway, so how did that record change your life both, you know, career wise, financially, opportunity wise? How did the how forever your girl change your life?

oliver Leiber (01:07:08.939)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (01:07:13.952)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (01:07:17.438)
Yeah. Well.

oliver Leiber (01:07:22.746)
enormous. It was like, you know,

seismic shift. You know, I went from, well, so then.

Yeah, well, I went from living in that house with the five other sober guys to buying a house out in the suburbs near Prince. You know, he was building Paisley Park and I wanted to be, you know, I’d wanted to be, I don’t know, in my mind, it was sort of like, look, everything musically revolved around Prince then. And…

Craig Garber (01:08:01.922)
There, I’m sure, yeah.

oliver Leiber (01:08:02.922)
Yeah, and so it was like, well, I want where’s Prince live? I want to live near there, you know, I bought this house and

oliver Leiber (01:08:14.818)
Virgin made a publishing deal with me, that deal which blew my mind at the time. And I really thought this is before, before the record sold all those copies. And when I was turning my mixes in with apology notes, they’re like, let me take you, Jemma Corfield, let me take you up the street to Virgin Music. Cause do you have a publishing deal?

Craig Garber (01:08:35.658)
So funny.

oliver Leiber (01:08:44.81)
no, what’s that? Come with me, right? So before that record came out, she took me to Version Music and they made me an offer. And the offer was 50-50 publishing. And what at the time was, I mean, I don’t know what that, you know, look, I had been working odd jobs. I had been playing in

Craig Garber (01:09:11.598)
You’re scrubbing the floor in the day to day. Good Lord.

oliver Leiber (01:09:14.618)
And my gigs were like bowling alleys, the Burnsville Bowl, like, you know, bars. And they said, we will give you an advance. And I was like, oh, great. Well, like, you know, how much? And it was like $350,000. And

Craig Garber (01:09:18.272)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (01:09:33.718)
And your mind is like.

oliver Leiber (01:09:36.798)
Well, first of all, I felt like, again, I almost felt like saying you guys look, I don’t want to sucker punch you guys or anything, but like, you’re so like, like gonna lose money here. Like, you don’t even know what you’re doing. I was convinced that they were didn’t know what they were doing. And I felt badly, I felt like I was getting over on them. But that was the deal that I made. So

Craig Garber (01:09:45.334)
Hahaha

Craig Garber (01:09:50.91)
Yeah

oliver Leiber (01:10:05.758)
I got $350,000 upfront. So this is how it changed my life. I bought a house. I moved out of the house where I had been for several years with these guys. I bought this little house in Eden Prairie, Minnesota next to Chanhassen, which is where Paisley Park was. I bought a 24 track real to real Sony MCI.

I bought a recording console from Jesse Johnson from the time who I had worked for. I had been in a band for him, but I bought his recording console, not straight from him from the place where he was having them sell it for him. And I sort of put together a little studio in my living room there. And so now I had the means to record and my phone started ringing.

Craig Garber (01:10:37.794)
That’s awesome.

oliver Leiber (01:11:02.45)
and it started ringing from every major record label saying, you know, we have this artist, do you wanna write and produce for so-and-so? Do you wanna write and produce for so-and-so? You know? And I think that year when Billboard, you know, they come out with all the charts and things like that, they had the top 10 producers in the country. And so the year or the year after that record came out, I was listed as number seven.

Craig Garber (01:11:12.906)
Wow.

oliver Leiber (01:11:32.074)
record producer in the country. So I think, well, long time ago, but I went from, again, right, playing locally, scrubbing floors, like just, you know, being a local musician to being a recognized record producer, you know, and songwriter, nationally and internationally. So all of a sudden I’m getting calls to work.

Craig Garber (01:11:34.346)
Congrats. That’s awesome.

oliver Leiber (01:12:02.106)
and to produce records. And that sort of started that whole career for me.

Craig Garber (01:12:07.946)
Well, and equally monumental needs to be said. You got 350 grand newly sober and you didn’t go back to using that. I mean, to me, right. That’s the fucking a crowning accomplishment of all of this.

oliver Leiber (01:12:18.466)
So in my 20s, Bill, in my 20s, and it wasn’t.

oliver Leiber (01:12:27.81)
Yeah, thanks for saying that man, because that’s a it’s like an interesting, I wouldn’t have thought of that. But it occurred to me, it occurred to me. And I remember saying it at the time, sort of sitting in that new house and with I still went to meetings and had sober friends thinking, Oh, my God, can you imagine if I had this kind of money? When I was putting needles in my arm? I’d elasted

Craig Garber (01:12:32.906)
Ugh.

Craig Garber (01:12:45.236)
Right.

Craig Garber (01:12:55.028)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (01:12:57.294)
Two days, two days, like, and I couldn’t believe it. And I was, and I had the sense of, man, everything happens for a reason and in its time, because this would have been a death sentence to me, you know, if I had received this kind of money before I was sober, absolutely.

Craig Garber (01:12:59.046)
Right.

Craig Garber (01:13:19.986)
Yeah, man, honestly, that’s like, really like Pat on the back welders. That’s amazing, man. And in the in your 20s. That’s like

oliver Leiber (01:13:29.606)
Yeah, well, that was yeah late, probably late 20s, right? Late 20s.

Craig Garber (01:13:34.274)
It’s pretty, pretty phenomenal. I mean, you know, look, I don’t need to tell you the rates of sobriety are pretty low to begin with, unfortunately. But you add 350 grand to the mix, it’s probably like zero. I mean, honestly, that’s really.

oliver Leiber (01:13:49.932)
There were a lot of tests along the way. I mean, I’ll tell you, we can jump back. I mean, you know.

oliver Leiber (01:13:59.618)
Sometimes I don’t know how it is that I’ve been able to stay sober and all these other people along the way haven’t. And people that in some ways were more, like went to more meetings than me and they could quote the big book chapter and verse and they were more, I don’t know, they seem like they actually had direct phone line to God and all this stuff that I never felt. But.

when I look back at what my path was, it’s like, you know, something that connected to this.

oliver Leiber (01:14:36.51)
I remember when I got on that plane, when I had the palmassan, you know, what I had been doing the few weeks before that was I was playing drums in a band that I put together. I was an MD. I dropped out of college for that semester because I couldn’t hang with college work. And I put together a band for one of the village people. Yes.

Craig Garber (01:14:51.839)
Mm-hmm.

Craig Garber (01:15:03.339)
Okay.

oliver Leiber (01:15:05.462)
construction worker, David Hodo, through an old high school friend that was singing backgrounds with him. I got a call and can you put a band together? And so like, I put this band together, I was the MD. And just before I like hit bottom and got on a plane to go to Minnesota, we had, we went to a studio because there were auditions for this show at the time.

called Star Search, which was like the American idol of the time, right? And they’d come to town and I guess they had cattle calls where they’d be set up with cameras and one after another, your band would come in and play for them and they’d record you and then some executive somewhere in LA would go, okay, let’s try that band and that band, that band, right? And you had to go in the studio and make an actual recording because none of it was live on TV.

Craig Garber (01:15:38.228)
Okay.

Sure, Ed McMahon.

oliver Leiber (01:16:06.442)
So we went in, we recorded four songs in the studio. And this is me at the height of my, like, I don’t even, I still have the recording, by the way. I have the cassette, but four songs and then.

Craig Garber (01:16:06.53)
All right.

oliver Leiber (01:16:24.622)
do a faking playing the song on camera, and then you wait to hear, I don’t know if you got in or you didn’t get it, right? So I forget about all of that. I go to 28 days of treatment. They’re like, dude, you need to go to halfway house. I’m like, fine, go to halfway house. I’m doing all this work and with counselors who are also saying, you know, the only way you’re gonna stay sober if you’re willing to put your sobriety above.

everything else. That means like, are you willing to give up music if that means you can’t stay sober? You know? And I went through some really heavy times of I mean, bawling my eyes out grieving like, it may mean that I can’t live my dream of being this, you know, rock star session musician, you know, like I may not be able to do it and stay alive.

And I really did hit a point where I, at least I said the words, yeah, I’m willing to give it all up to stay sober. I don’t know if I was a hundred percent at that time, but like there was that having to come face to face with it. Like I had to ask those questions. A month or two or three into, no, I’ll tell you exactly what it was. I went in July, August, September, October, November, December.

So now it’s snowy and it’s winter in St. Paul. I’d been there five months. It’s a dead of winter. I get a phone call from my brother who I had put in the band. That’s what he was playing keys in the band. And David Hodo band, yep. So I had picked a couple guys, a buddy of mine, George Weiss from college to play bass, put my brother on keys.

Craig Garber (01:18:03.663)
Now, we have a commitment to the David Hodo band. Okay. Right.

oliver Leiber (01:18:17.254)
I was playing drums through some recommendation, some guy, you know, sax player named Steve Elson. I heard about it. I was like, yeah, I’m going to. He was unheard of. He ended up playing for, if you look him up for David Bowie, he’s like the sax player on the iconic sax. Yeah, no, later. It’d be more the Nile Rodgers era of Bowie with Stevie Ray and that year, that record.

Craig Garber (01:18:35.422)
Young Americans?

Craig Garber (01:18:43.559)
Okay.

oliver Leiber (01:18:46.89)
But anyway, he was a sax player and

oliver Leiber (01:18:52.058)
and a guitar player’s name, I can’t remember. And he said, dude, we’re on Star Search. We’re like flying to LA in a week. You gotta be there. I’m like, fuck, okay. Well, let me go talk to them. I’ll sort it out and I’ll let you know. So I’m calling out the phone and I meet with my counselor. I’m like, I’m on Star Search. So I need to go to LA and then I’ll come back right after.

And he’s like, it doesn’t work that way. I’m like, what do you mean? He goes, if you go, you can’t come back.

Craig Garber (01:19:32.162)
Wow.

oliver Leiber (01:19:34.346)
Now I’m realizing as I’m saying it’s like, of course I could come back, you know, but he was, it wasn’t presented to me like that. And in some ways maybe they could refuse me, but he was like, you need to make a decision. What’s the most important thing in your life? Is it your sobriety or is it other stuff? Is it your career? And I was like.

Okay, okay. Okay, mother. Okay. So so well, I end up watching on this black and white TV, okay, in the common room of the halfway house in the dead of winter in St. Paul literally again through the window, the Schmitz brewery like blown out neon like

Craig Garber (01:19:57.158)
Wow, how did you have? Okay, so what was, go ahead. Sorry, I gotta ask you a follow-up, go ahead.

oliver Leiber (01:20:23.694)
half-working sign going, these people that are, it wasn’t a handsome lot, it wasn’t a handsome lot. And it was like watching this band that I had put together, and they used the recordings that I had done, I was playing drums on it, but they had like Rex Smith drummer, and some fucking random dude with great hair, like playing my part, watching Star Search, crying my eyes out.

Craig Garber (01:20:31.25)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (01:20:44.93)
Ha!

oliver Leiber (01:20:53.206)
like crying, you know, like, and everybody kind of knew the story. So they all, you know, the guys I was in groups with there are watching with me and I’m crying my eyes out going, that was my chance. That was my break and I fucking blew it. And here I am in this shit hole, you know, halfway house in God fucking knows where, you know, Minnesota. And I, my life.

Craig Garber (01:20:53.759)
Wow.

Craig Garber (01:21:07.283)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (01:21:22.902)
is fucking over. I literally hit that. My point being, because you had said something about the money and I, there are these moments in my life where I made these decisions that came from what felt like it’s not what I wanted. It’s not what I wanted to do. It felt like it came from a deeper place. It came from some kind of knowing. And at the end of the day, if nothing else, it came from the part of me that wanted to fucking live.

and I made some of these decisions. And what I realized is these decisions, making them and then life later on giving me something.

the success with Paul. It’s sort of like, oh wow, I thought I had hit my bottom when that, but look what happened after. And I didn’t have the 33,000 foot view and look what happened after that. And I thought that was the end of my, you know, and I just, what am I trying to say? What I think I did is I made some really hard decisions that put

Craig Garber (01:22:09.57)
It’s almost like karma.

oliver Leiber (01:22:38.526)
sobriety in front of everything. And as painful as they were, I think they set a precedent for me in my life about.

oliver Leiber (01:22:56.234)
just a commitment to wanting to live and knowing that.

I put drugs in me again, if I go down, you know what? I don’t know what will happen. You know what? I can’t tell you. But if it’s, you know, if it’s what people have, you know, said to me and, you know, things that I’ve like observed, you know, you don’t get to go back, you know, you stay sober 10, 20, 30 years and you use again, it’s not like it hits reset. You get to go back to the beginning. It’s like you get right back on where you jumped off the train.

You know, and where I jumped off the train was a dark, scary, dangerous place. And I just, I don’t know. I scared myself enough that I didn’t want to risk it. And.

oliver Leiber (01:23:47.222)
guess what was my point? I guess, you know, I don’t know. I made some tough decisions along the way that weren’t the easy decisions. They weren’t the easy decisions that I don’t know that everybody would have made. And I don’t think that I’m special because of it. And I don’t entirely understand how or why I made those decisions. I believe it came from some place deep in me or that’s not even me, that was just like, choose life.

Choose life. You don’t even need to understand why you’re doing this. Yeah, this feels like shit. And, you know, but choose it anyway. Choose it anyway.

Craig Garber (01:24:26.998)
Dude, honestly, man, I’m so, I’m of course, so happy for you, but that’s such a, I mean, that speaks volumes to your, your commitment to yourself and to your discipline. I mean, that’s almost unheard of. I don’t need to tell you that you were in the music business. You’ve heard hundreds of guys with stories that didn’t make that decision already. So, um, honestly, man, that’s really fucking hats off to you, man.

oliver Leiber (01:24:50.866)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (01:24:55.298)
Thanks. I think I scared myself. Without going into detail like what it looked like at the end. I scared myself. I knew I didn’t.

I couldn’t keep going that way very much long.

Craig Garber (01:25:10.892)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (01:25:16.202)
Let’s talk. Thank you for sharing all that, by the way. I appreciate it. It was really kind of you. I want to talk about some of your artists you work with. Tell me how you got the gig and like maybe a cool or interesting story. You worked, you toured with Rod Stewart. How did you get the gig? Interesting story. And also talk about playing the solo to Maggie Mae on Jay Leno, because I can’t imagine, I cannot imagine that how good you felt doing that.

oliver Leiber (01:25:18.446)
Sure.

oliver Leiber (01:25:39.211)
Mmm. Oh. Yeah.

Craig Garber (01:25:46.15)
I mean, that’s unimaginable.

oliver Leiber (01:25:48.43)
Yeah. Yeah, that’s one of those moments where we have sort of, I don’t know if it’s bucket list, cause it wasn’t on my bucket list specifically, but there are those moments where you kind of go, oh dude, take a mental snapshot, right? Like take a mental, like be here now. This is fucking happening, right? That was one of those. But so when I moved to LA,

Craig Garber (01:26:05.455)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (01:26:20.414)
I was playing some gigs with Jeff Lorber. Yeah, yeah. And we had met in the process of doing, motherfucker keyboard player. And again, somebody that I had listened to as a young, in my teens and 20s, because of the drummer, Dennis Bradford was a bad man. And that was a, Jeff Lorber, Fusion was a three piece. And it was just Jeff on keys.

Craig Garber (01:26:24.69)
Oh, the keyboard player. Yeah. Jazz, great keyboard player.

Craig Garber (01:26:33.302)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (01:26:48.898)
bass and drums and hit rhythm section was treacherous. And I loved his playing. So I listened to Jeff Lorber fusion records. And when I came to LA working on the Paula record, I needed to overdub a few things. And Gemma Corfield at Virgin said, oh, well, Jeff Lorber does a bunch of overdubs. I was like, Jeff Lorber? The Jeff Lorber? He goes, yeah, he plays overdub. So I went up to Jeff Lorber’s studio.

Craig Garber (01:27:09.484)
version.

Craig Garber (01:27:14.582)
Hahaha

oliver Leiber (01:27:18.982)
And it’s so funny, man, because he texted me last night of watching the Laker game. He says, what’s happening? It was so weird. We haven’t been in touch at all. But we met, he did some overdubs on the Paula stuff for me. And he was another one, like he was an idol for me. He was like, I mean, Jeff Lorber, those records were, you know, Toad’s Place and…

Craig Garber (01:27:25.802)
That’s funny. That’s really random.

oliver Leiber (01:27:45.006)
Tune 88, all that shit. That was untouchable stuff for me as a drummer. That was like, and he loved Minneapolis stuff. He loved the Prince stuff. He loved what I had done. And I play this Minneapolis style rhythm guitar, which is a thing, you know? And I learned it from Prince, and I learned it from Jesse Johnson, and I learned it from being there eight years. It’s like, it’s a thing. And I just happened to do it pretty well.

And he loved that. He’s like, man, will you play on this? So I started to play on things. He’d be making records, Dave Kaws, and some of the things you read off. A lot of these more jazzy, fusiony things that you wouldn’t expect to see my name on. It was Lorber going, man, will you come and play? He just wanted me to scratch Minneapolis style. And so we had a relationship. And he said, man, you wanna come, will you play live with me, right?

Craig Garber (01:28:34.922)
That’s cool.

oliver Leiber (01:28:41.57)
So I did some small tours just playing live with him because it was fun. I was like, it was just, you know, it was one of those things. I, yeah. So I can’t believe I’m playing, it was different players at the time.

Craig Garber (01:28:47.391)
Like with his trio.

oliver Leiber (01:28:57.122)
gave me the itch to be playing alive again. And what I ended up doing was I ended up, um, it was early night, it was 90. And I was missing I was here. It was maybe 92. Now I’ve been here a couple of years. I’ve been here, I missed Minneapolis funk and Minneapolis music, I missed everything I had been around, you know, in Minnesota. And I thought, Fuck it, I want to put just a band together that can play that stuff and just play somewhere in town. And

So.

I knew some of the musicians. I was like, killer drummer, Sergio Gonzalez, that I had played with Lorber, you know, that played with Lorber. I was like, okay, he’s playing drums. Oh yeah, Nate Phillips. Also, I met, he was from the band called Pleasure, who played like iconic track. I forget what it’s called. That, you know, for anyone that was like slapping bass or whatever, like one of the tracks that Nate played on is like iconic, right? Like you had to learn that. I forget the group, but.

It’s a great rhythm section. And I just started to put this band together. Other guitar player I had met in a music store here in town was Randy Jacobs, whose killer guitar player grew up in Detroit, plays with his thumbs. Another guy, no pick, thumb guy was in, was not was, he was the guitar player, was not was, now for the last.

Craig Garber (01:30:22.355)
Okay.

oliver Leiber (01:30:25.71)
20 years, I mean, he’s like, first call smooth jazz out there playing with everybody. But killer R&B blues rhythm guitar player. And we just clicked. We were in there. I don’t know. I was trying to guitar and he was trying to guitar. I think I’m probably playing like a shocker kind of like Ray Parker’s You Got the Love or something like that. They and he started playing and he has a different

He plays his real gloves down, is muted and mine’s real tacky with a pick and everything just slotted. We kind of looked at each other. I’m like, you wanna do some gigs? You know, I don’t know. So he was the other guitar. So I just put this band together and I think I was Lorber if he would come sit in a bunch which he did. And I picked material that I loved. And it was all 70s funk.

It was all over the map, actually. It was just everything I loved. A lot of 70s funk, some Minneapolis funk, some Motown stuff, right? And there was a club in town called The Mint and called the band Hollywood Swingin’. And Hollywood Swingin’, of course, we had to play, cool in the gang shit. Horn players started to show up, singers started to show up. I met…

Craig Garber (01:31:18.975)
Thank you.

Craig Garber (01:31:35.187)
That’s awesome. Hollywood swinging. That’s very cool.

oliver Leiber (01:31:45.698)
so many people and everyone would sit in. I mean, like Joe Walsh, it was like all these people would sit in and it started to get a reputation as, a fucking ass wiping band and a great sit in, people come sit in. And so it became this thing Monday nights at the Mint, which is this famous old dive in LA, became lines outside the fucking door, the small club. And it was just,

a thing. So what started out. Yeah. And so I ended up meeting so many people and you had mentioned, you know, like, we had talked a little earlier, but what a lot of people a lot of people came through that later on for years, people will go, man, I used to come see you at the minute, like, you know, guys who I knew as players that I didn’t even know were there, you know, but um, so

Craig Garber (01:32:17.584)
This is all for Hollywood swinging.

oliver Leiber (01:32:46.326)
You asked me how I got the Rod gig. I get a phone call one day from a guy named Carmine Rojas. OK. I didn’t know you love Carmine. And he said, hey, man, he goes, he was one of these guys I met because he would come and want to sit in.

Craig Garber (01:32:55.806)
Man, I had him on here. Lovely, love, fucking salt of the earth.

oliver Leiber (01:33:15.434)
I knew I wasn’t even sure I don’t know if I knew if he was who he was playing with or whatever. I think someone’s I used to play with Bowie or whatever. And he loved I knew the songs he liked to sit in on whatever and he’s one of these guys. It’s like he chopped every week. I’m like, Come on, come on up, you know, and come I would come and I don’t know what the tunes he would do some of the Motown stuff. He was a great player. But it was like that. So he called me up. He said, man, he goes, will you make a list for me? Because

Craig Garber (01:33:23.445)
Right.

Craig Garber (01:33:31.521)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (01:33:45.106)
Rod’s auditioning guitar players. And, and I know you know, all the cats in town, because they all come and sit in on Monday nights, can you make a list for me of guitar players that would be a good audition for Rod? I’m like, Sure. So I make a list, you know, I ever and I give them the numbers and whatever, right? So go for it. This guy is great. This guy is great. This guy’s great. And he goes, thank you. And he calls me back like a week later, he goes,

I got another favor for you to ask of you. So what he goes, will you come and be the guitar player that knows all the parts so that when we’re auditioning somebody and then Rod goes, okay, now you play the lead and you play the rhythm, right? That I know, cause he goes, cause I know you can cover all this shit cause I’ve watched you cover all this shit, you know, Monday nights, like you know, you know, I’m like, sure, that sounds like fun. So I’m not auditioning for Rod. I’m like,

the auditioning guitar player that goes on the house band playing with Carmine and Dave Palmer, the drummer, so that they can find a guitar player.

Craig Garber (01:34:43.862)
You’re the house band.

Craig Garber (01:34:53.95)
Now this was like, was this after Jim Cregan played for Rod? Okay. Yeah.

oliver Leiber (01:34:58.602)
Yeah, that was after Jim Cregan played for Rod. In fact, it was

oliver Leiber (01:35:09.262)
Jeff Gollib was still playing, but somebody, the other guitar player had just left or something and they were trying to fill his shoes. Can’t remember. And so what ended up happening is he never told Rod that who I was or what I was doing, you know? I didn’t wanna say, this is the guy that recommended all the guitar. It was like, he didn’t tell Rod. So Rod thought I was just another guy auditioning.

So like the first day I remember there was like 30 people and then the next day there was like 15 and the next day there was like seven. And it was like, I was just the guy playing with, you know, and I kept coming back and it got to a point where one day there was like three guys and I get a call from Carmine going,

He goes, I got a question for you. He goes, you ready to go on tour? I went, what do you mean? He goes, I mean, Rod’s got you on his short list. Like, there’s three of you left. I’m like, what are you talking about? Doesn’t he need, he’s like, no, he didn’t, you know, it’s like you, Jimmy Crespo, motherfucker, right? Killer, killer guitar player. And one other dude, I can’t remember who it was.

Craig Garber (01:36:29.886)
Yeah, from Aros. Yeah.

oliver Leiber (01:36:38.37)
like, he’s serious because I just need to know because I need to know how to present it to him. But like, if you, you know, are you, I’m like, and at that point I had so much going on. I was producing The Chores, I was producing Beth Hart, it was like 1997, 98. It made no sense on any level, business-wise, career-wise. But like, the 11-year-old kid in me…

Craig Garber (01:37:02.182)
Yeah, who the hell doesn’t want to go on tour with Rod Stewart?

oliver Leiber (01:37:04.546)
that felt like, oh, I might play Madison Square Garden. That’s where I saw Sly, Zeppelin, Stones, like that was it as a New York kid. I’m like, fuck yeah. Right? Now it’s the only day I’m nervous when I show up because now there was like, pressure was off me all the time. I was so relaxed and loose. It was like, yeah, you know, I don’t need to be good. I just need to be okay.

Craig Garber (01:37:09.066)
Yes!

Craig Garber (01:37:24.578)
Ha!

Craig Garber (01:37:32.991)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (01:37:33.814)
The last day they called me in and it’s like the three of us. And now I’m like, you know, I’m nervous.

Craig Garber (01:37:39.52)
Of course.

oliver Leiber (01:37:41.75)
guy who got the gig was the guy who should have gotten the gig. And I knew it. It was like Jimmy Creswell, right? So he got the gig. Fine. The guy was like, just amazing. And he does the tour. Some point after the tour, that tour, whatever, it’s a year later or something. I don’t know. I get a call from Carmine going, Jeff Golub.

oliver Leiber (01:38:13.742)
can’t make it in and we got to play the Tonight Show in two days or three days or you know what it could be five days it was a short amount of time can you learn um can you learn Rod’s new single which was written and produced by Terry and Jimmy Minneapolis you know right I think he figured I also stylistically it was more R&B had nothing to do with classic rock Rod I think he

Craig Garber (01:38:34.85)
Okay, right.

oliver Leiber (01:38:44.25)
and the couple other classic Rodsons. Can you get this together in the next? I’m like, sure, why not? So I learn it, I do the show. And yeah, so the moment was, you know, we play the single, right? And you always play two songs, I think, with the night show, it’s like, or if you’re Rod or it’s big act, you play one and then you play two. We played that.

Craig Garber (01:38:44.351)
problem.

Craig Garber (01:39:10.209)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (01:39:11.774)
And after we played that towards the end of the song, they’re like, you know, bring Rod Stewart back on again. And it’s Maggie May. And I just remember getting to the solo and, you know, I had never performed live with him. I had done, you know, the auditions of the house, studio and low key. And, you know, and then it just went that to national television, Maggie May. And there was this moment where, you know,

Craig Garber (01:39:29.922)
The studio, yeah, the studio thing, yeah.

oliver Leiber (01:39:43.525)
I had pretended to be sick in sixth grade, 1971.

10 years old.

Craig Garber (01:39:51.83)
Dude, you have a good memory.

oliver Leiber (01:39:53.802)
Well, because I know how old I was. I remember the year that record came out. I remember it. And I pretended to be sick. And I stayed in my room with little Victrola record player, learning the solo to Maggie Mae. And one of the reasons I learned it and why I thought I could is because there was something, it was still in that box, that pentatonic box. Bluedip, bluedu, bluedip. It was accessible.

Craig Garber (01:40:06.922)
Yeah, sure.

Craig Garber (01:40:18.566)
Yes, dude, it’s great solo. Who played the original solo? Was that okay? I was going to. Yeah.

oliver Leiber (01:40:24.054)
Oh, that’s Ronnie, Ronnie Wood. And he played the bass on it. And he played like, that was a lot of Ronnie Wood on that. It’s like when Ronnie was, Ronnie was on another level. And I stayed home learning the solo as best I could at that time to Maggie Mae. I think I got through the first four bars, but I got the blue-dip-de-do-de-do, right? And I’m on now on national TV and Rod comes over, it’s the solo.

Craig Garber (01:40:32.182)
Yeah.

Yeah.

oliver Leiber (01:40:53.366)
and he does the classic arm around my shoulder and I’m playing the solo. And I have this moment where you can dissociate, like you kind of leave your body and you’re looking at yourself and there’s a voice going, Oliver, fucking get back in your body or you’re gonna stop being able to play what you’re doing. But I had that moment of holy shit. I’m on stage thinking, do you remember when you were 10 and you stayed home?

Craig Garber (01:41:07.455)
Uh huh.

Ha ha Oliver fucking get back in your body

Craig Garber (01:41:22.454)
Sure.

oliver Leiber (01:41:23.278)
pretended to be sick and learned this on your coo. I didn’t have an electric guitar on your acoustic guitar. And here you are and fuck me.

Craig Garber (01:41:33.61)
That had to feel amazing.

oliver Leiber (01:41:36.182)
That was amazing. And I just did that again, Carmine, thank you, Carmine, right? And it was just to cover that night. And I get a call the next day saying, Rod loves you, man, and he wants to know if you wanna join his band. And I was like, oh yeah, why not? Soon after that, Rod learns. And then at that point, I think maybe Carmine said a little bit more about me.

because I honestly, through the whole auditioning period a year before, I was just another guitar player. And even when I came and did the show, I was that guitar player. You might remember him from almost getting the gig a year ago, whatever. But I think after he decided he wanted me in the band, I think Carmine might’ve said something like, you know he’s a producer, you know, but more about, you know, his old man was, and.

Craig Garber (01:42:19.74)
Right, right.

oliver Leiber (01:42:32.17)
Rod started to take more of an interest and he wanted to see, he knew I had a studio. He wanted to see my studio, which I built up at the house, which is now Joe B’s, which Keith Nelson bought for me, but I built the studio there. And that’s where we made his next record, was with the Maggie Mae.

Craig Garber (01:42:44.066)
That’s a studio. Oh, okay, interesting. Okay, I didn’t realize that, okay.

Craig Garber (01:42:57.654)
That’s such an amazing story.

oliver Leiber (01:43:01.966)
12 string that Ronnie played on the original record under my bed for the whole year. Rob was like, yeah, keep it, take it, play it, you know. So like, I would sometimes at night just take that guitar, you know, and just play it like play the opening, you know, riff to it just like, fuck, that’s the sound. That’s the guitar. That’s how it all happened. It really happened because I was in a glorified funk cover band that I put together.

Craig Garber (01:43:11.83)
That’s fucking amazing.

Craig Garber (01:43:22.966)
That’s amazing.

Craig Garber (01:43:31.042)
Hollywood swinging.

oliver Leiber (01:43:32.406)
Hollywood swinging and it kind of became a thing and Carmine, who was one of the guys that would sit in all the time, thought I’d be a good guy to help out for the auditions.

Craig Garber (01:43:44.022)
That’s awesome, man. I’m so glad to hear that. Carmine, I really enjoyed, he’s a very sweet.

oliver Leiber (01:43:45.463)
Yeah.

And Keller, musical, musical bass player, king of the substitutions. Like you could be playing the most known simple, like how, you know, just done chord progression that we’ve all done and he will start substituting. He just has a bass notes that turn it into a complex chord that are so just like, I don’t know, he does it effortlessly. He’s really musical, great player and a better human being, yeah.

Craig Garber (01:43:51.541)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (01:44:14.114)
Yeah, great player, great guy. Yeah, really good human being. Brooklyn guy, Brooklyn guy. That’s right, that’s right. He had a good story. Tell me about 1982. So Prisoners of Rock, and when I saw Dennis Elsis, I was like, holy shit, I haven’t heard that name, because I grew up listening to N.E.W. and P.L.J., right? And it said, first time you’re on the radio, Jason Flom. And I gotta tell you,

oliver Leiber (01:44:19.318)
Yeah, yeah, Puerto Rican, New Yorker Rican.

Craig Garber (01:44:43.934)
I’ve never met Jason. I’d love to, but I have heard nothing, but I’ve heard, I’ve had 20 guests on this show who’ve had nothing but incredible praise to say to about this guy that in a world of corporate assholes, he is not one of them, you know? So I was eager to hear all of this.

oliver Leiber (01:45:01.774)
That is so true. Yeah. Okay, here’s the story. First of all, I went to elementary school with Jason Flom, right? And no, that was before I moved to the village. That was, it was called Ethical Culture, the school. And it was on 64th Street and Central Park West. We known each other since.

Craig Garber (01:45:13.462)
That’s crazy. Where was that in the village or?

Craig Garber (01:45:26.546)
Oh my god. That’s

oliver Leiber (01:45:30.586)
I was a lifer. I went in like kindergarten, but I think he came in like third, fourth grade. I don’t know. And I remember him back from when and he didn’t take up guitar. I mean, I’d been playing since I was there. He wasn’t a musician at the beginning, but somewhere like 13 or 14 or 15, he started to play guitar. I remember he had a car made up that said Jason Flom, ass kicking guitarist.

Craig Garber (01:45:58.722)
That’s classic.

oliver Leiber (01:46:00.294)
very day. But Jason, well, there’s some I don’t know how deep to go into this. Jason got a job actually setting up window displays for like Sam Goody or like records or like for you know, he got a job at Atlantic in the mailroom, then setting up displays like in record stores for Atlantic, whatever, and he worked him his way up.

oliver Leiber (01:46:32.989)
to who he is and to the incredibly successful executive that he is. Back in 1982,

Craig Garber (01:46:34.23)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (01:46:45.378)
So he had connections, right? I mean, he was working in the record. And somehow he had a record connection with, I mean, a connection with Dennis Elsos or that radio station, maybe through Atlantic at that point. I think he was still, he wasn’t an executive, but he was working there. And he said, let’s write, you know, let’s do an original song and let’s record it. And I’ll submit it for this thing called Prisoners of Rock.

which was this thing that Dennis Elsis did back in the day, which is they would pick once a week, I think, one unsigned New York band to air, right? So we did this recording, I played drums on it, it was called War Jam, and really it was an excuse for me, like it started with a very hyped up, faster version of 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.

Craig Garber (01:47:27.839)
That’s pretty cool.

oliver Leiber (01:47:42.966)
which is because I was a huge Gav thing. Yeah, that’s a Gav thing, but it started with that, right? And it got really rocked out, but that’s why it became called War Jam, because it was very military. It had that sort of, but it was protest-y, but that’s how it started. So it started with me sort of doing this hyped up Steve Gadd sort of military drum thing, and then it went into this big rock jam and whatever. Somehow he managed to submit it to…

Craig Garber (01:47:43.206)
Wow, that’s the standard. That’s a gad. Yeah.

oliver Leiber (01:48:11.778)
the radio station and he calls me one day and he’s like, dude, we’re gonna be on the radio like tomorrow at seven p.m. whatever. And I have somewhere else is a boombox recording somewhere of it like you know, Dennis Elfman.

Craig Garber (01:48:19.255)
Ha ha!

Craig Garber (01:48:25.519)
A view on any W that’s so crazy, man.

oliver Leiber (01:48:27.946)
Yeah, so I think I was in 1982, first year of college. So I was a freshman at college. And I remember just, that was the first time I was like nervous, shaking, boombox, waiting to hear myself play. It was the first time I ever, yeah, heard myself on the radio. That was number one, that was with Jason. I have so many other tie-ins with Jason, but I don’t know.

how far a wormhole we want to go down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So.

Craig Garber (01:49:00.638)
Yeah, we got a lot of other stuff to cover about you. Yeah, that’s a cool story though, man. You know, that was, wasn’t that pretty, you know, hearing PLJ and any W at that time was pretty revolutionary. It was like, to hear all those deep tracks suddenly being played on the radio, it was like, wow, this was, you know, mind blowing. I remember that.

oliver Leiber (01:49:20.17)
Yeah, yeah, that’s when radio was, you know, radio.

Craig Garber (01:49:26.462)
was radio was awesome. That’s when it made a difference in like artists lives and in music business. The cores, how did you get with them? And did you happen to bump into a guitar player that played with him called Anto Drennan? Any chance?

oliver Leiber (01:49:43.126)
Yeah, so perfect segue. The answer to that is.

I’m so bad with short answers. Here’s the connection, ready? Okay.

Craig Garber (01:49:54.395)
You’re great. This is good.

oliver Leiber (01:49:59.662)
Jason Flom calls me when I’m in Minnesota still, living in that little house with the five other guys with my Fos-Tex tape machine. And he tells me this story about meeting a singer in Utah when he was on vacation that was kind of a lounge act singer and sort of, he said like, I kinda handed her my business card and said, come to New York ever and I’ll…

you know, I’ll get you a record. He sort of, you know, he did that thing. And he sort of he called me on and he goes, like, she showed up. She’s in New York, dude. Here. Like, what the fuck he said? I you know, he said, Can you write me something? He knew I was in Minnesota. He literally asked me, like, could I come up with something? Because he said, we’re putting out 12 inch dance records. And and I could just do one dance record and I’ll be like, you know, we’ll be good. Can you write something?

I wrote It’s Just the Way That You Love Me, the song that Chaka wanted and the song that ultimately opened the door. I wrote that for Jason, for this artist that had showed up at his door and he needed. And that’s why I wrote the song. There’s another layer to that song, which is I had to say, Jason, you’re going to hate me. And I will make this up for you.

Craig Garber (01:51:03.524)
Wow, yeah.

Craig Garber (01:51:19.818)
That’s great.

oliver Leiber (01:51:27.834)
one day because he heard it and he was like, great. And

she’s the one that sang the demo. When I went to make a better demo, okay, it’s all coming together. Okay, I did the four track demo, I sent it to Jason, like just me doing the part, he’s like, great, when can I send her out there to do the, you know, do the, right? And so I got to make a recording of it, I got to put it together. That’s why I went to make a better version. That’s when Paul, I called up Paul Peterson saying,

Craig Garber (01:51:59.778)
whole.

oliver Leiber (01:52:01.75)
Hey, I gotta do this other song. Can we use the same studio we just recorded in for your thing and we’ll knock it together to get, you know, we’ll do it together. We’d knock the truck out together. That’s why he was playing on it. She flies out. I record her vocals. I do a rough mix. No money has exchanged hands at this point. I send the song to my old man, just cause I was proud of it, thinking it was gonna come out.

as a 12 inch single one off for Jason Flom, right? Paul inadvertently without telling me, takes the recording and flies to LA with it, where it ends up being played for Paul. But it was really now, I’m just sort of remembering this shit now, made because I was good. Jason asked me, would I do something? Nobody ever asked me to write a song. I was like, fuck yeah. I had to call him up and I had to say, dude, don’t hate me.

Craig Garber (01:52:35.802)
Right.

Craig Garber (01:52:54.883)
Wow.

oliver Leiber (01:53:01.774)
Please don’t hate me, but this song that I wrote, you know, I’ve been offered a chance to do, right? I said like, I swear to God, I swear to God, I will make this up to you one day, right?

can’t remember the exact but he was he was cool. I mean, there was never a lawsuit. There was never like, how could nothing it was like, okay, I mean, I’m sure he wasn’t happy about it. But he was like, Alright, dude. So

Craig Garber (01:53:29.898)
So you didn’t even write it, you wrote it in response to his request. This gets more and more mind, the outside events that it just boggles my mind.

oliver Leiber (01:53:33.771)
Yeah.

Yeah.

oliver Leiber (01:53:40.49)
I never, I’m not the guy that wakes up ever and never been saying, ooh, I must create, I must write a song, this has to come out of me. If it doesn’t, I won’t be able to sleep. I mean, sometimes I’m exaggerating, but for me, it’s always, you know, started with more of like someone said, hey, can you do something like this or this or we’re like, you know, it’s like, I kind of need to know that it’s going somewhere.

Craig Garber (01:53:49.68)
Yeah, yeah.

oliver Leiber (01:54:08.042)
And maybe it goes back to that early need for validation. Like somebody wants this. And when I do it and if I do a good enough job, there’s gonna be some feedback, right? And…

Craig Garber (01:54:18.098)
Yeah. Well, could this be the way you create too? Cause that’s a, I think that’s a, I’ve never had this conversation, but I think that’s gotta be different for different people.

oliver Leiber (01:54:29.218)
Totally. I mean, there is a quote that I think my dad told me that someone asked Sammy Kahn or George M. Cohen, one of the biggest early, early songwriters, how does a song start? And he said, it starts with a phone call. Like it was, that’s how I write. It’s like, if we need you to write something that sounds like Yankee Doodle, and he writes Yankee Doodle. Like, so that was kind of more, more. So, so.

Craig Garber (01:54:45.69)
Wow. Yeah.

Craig Garber (01:54:54.132)
Wow.

oliver Leiber (01:55:00.118)
Jason, so he realizes that this song goes to Paula Abdul, Jason does, he sees it become the record that it is. And sometime in the wake of that X amount of years later, he starts saying, will you do that? So he came to me asking me to do Beth Hart. I made that record for him. I made good, I made… Yeah, and the record I did for it…

Craig Garber (01:55:22.946)
She talked very highly about him.

oliver Leiber (01:55:29.542)
for her the single, probably her only top 10 single that she’s ever had. And that was the first thing I did for him after. So I made up for it. And then he asked me to do, would I meet with the chorus? And I said, of course. And again, like Jason was somebody that I would never ever and A, based on just our childhood, but also based on

Craig Garber (01:55:37.654)
So you made up for it in spades.

oliver Leiber (01:55:58.402)
who he is and how he responded to that situation. It’s like, I will say yes, always.

Craig Garber (01:56:04.098)
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, of course. I totally get that.

oliver Leiber (01:56:06.638)
And he was in, I mean, the truth is, is that, you know, like, he was championing me too. Like, thank you, Jason. You know, we all need a champion. And, you know, he was, uh, he, he was asking. So, so I get a call from him and, um, it was something like I’d never heard of the course and, um, I was in the.

Craig Garber (01:56:12.286)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, of course.

oliver Leiber (01:56:32.354)
There was a lot going on that year, so I don’t know. There was Rod, there was Beth, some other records I was making in the course. So I don’t know where I was at, but I met with them and ended up handing them a track that I had done, just a track with another childhood friend of mine, John Shanks.

Craig Garber (01:57:01.61)
I had him on this show here a long time ago. If I remember him, wasn’t his dad like the EVP of Merv Griffin’s show or something like that? Yeah, that’s really, that’s crazy.

oliver Leiber (01:57:03.102)
Okay, so we grew up in the same building. Yeah, we were

oliver Leiber (01:57:12.778)
Yeah, and Merv lived in the building. So, yeah, so we grew up in the building in between the San Remo and the Dakota, which are two iconic New York buildings, you know? They’re in every shot of New York, every skyline shot ever of New York, from Central Arc or whatever, you see these three buildings. And it was like the Dakota, the building I grew up in, it’s the only one that has 10, and the San Remo. So John and I grew up

Craig Garber (01:57:33.035)
Yes.

oliver Leiber (01:57:43.682)
knew each other from zero to 10 in that building. Merv Griffin lived in that building. Later on, Jagger moved into that building. It has a whole history. I think Jimmy Crespo from, no, different. Maybe Crespo even moved into that building for a short period when he was like recording for Aerosmith. But yeah. Okay, now help me land the plane. How do… Oh.

Craig Garber (01:58:09.588)
John Shanks, you had hooked up with John Shanks for this Jason thing.

oliver Leiber (01:58:11.63)
Yeah, we grew up together. Then he moved to LA. And through a bunch of different circumstances, we were reconnected later in life around sobriety. And I won’t go too much into that story. But at that time, John was, I was calling him in on everything I was working on.

co-write, great guitar player, talented writer and childhood friend, like Flom. So we would do tracks sometimes. We would just fucking do tracks. I had the studio and we’d be like, I don’t know, let’s do that, right? So we had this track and anyway, ended up handing it to the core sisters, not the lead singer, Andrea.

Craig Garber (01:58:48.086)
Sure. What more credentials do you need? Yeah, right.

oliver Leiber (01:59:11.446)
but the two sisters that were also in the group. And thinking like, we had tried to write with them all day long and we were doing sort of what we thought they want, we thought that what they wanted, which was more like sort of, I don’t know, lots of six, eight sort of, you know, things that we thought were Irish sounding. I don’t fucking know what we were doing, but it wasn’t really what they were looking for. And at the end of this day of just nothing really going anywhere.

I don’t know who brought up, but we ended up saying, well, we got this track, right? And we played them this track and they were like, fuck, that’s great, can we take that track? And they ended up giving it to their younger sister, Andrea, who really at that point was really writing most of the lyrics and the top line stuff. And few days later, I get a call saying that, you know, Andrea wants to come to the studio and sing the song to us and see what we got. So she had written lyrics to that track.

And that’s how that started. You know, and I ended up doing about half that record, writing and writing several. And that was another one for Jason. And that’s another one where it wasn’t big in, I just did an interview cause it’s like the 25th or 30th anniversary of that record. But the guy who did the interview told me that it was the largest selling record of that decade in Europe.

Craig Garber (02:00:15.114)
Producing and writing. Yeah, that’s, that’s really cool.

Craig Garber (02:00:40.31)
That’s amazing.

oliver Leiber (02:00:40.338)
in its genre. It’s amazing. I mean, it’s sold like, I mean, Paul ended up selling 30 million worldwide, and this one ended up doing about 30 million worldwide, which is crazy.

Craig Garber (02:00:52.348)
So you don’t fuck around.

oliver Leiber (02:00:54.774)
Well, I do fuck around, um, a lot. And that’s all of the stuff you will never hear. I’ve never heard of. It’s going to sit on old hard drives.

Craig Garber (02:00:56.312)
hahahaha

Craig Garber (02:01:01.78)
That’s the B-roll that’s on the tape cut on the floor.

oliver Leiber (02:01:05.922)
Dude, you know, the stuff that makes it through in my case has been just like, just… Yeah.

Craig Garber (02:01:10.81)
It’s everybody. It’s not just you. It’s everybody. I had a couple of songwriters on here one time. They were saying like, you know, like one out of every 20 or 30 or 50 songs that they write, they’ll even consider putting it on a record. Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:01:23.806)
Oh, yeah, yeah. And honestly, like my best stuff, the songs that I think, you know, I just have never even been recorded, you know?

Craig Garber (02:01:34.719)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:01:38.15)
I generally won’t tell people about like, I have a weird, because they’re so kind of poppy in some ways and just the genre, like I will not talk about the Paula stuff like a lot of the time, you know? It’s not like, I don’t know, what am I trying to say?

Mmm.

Craig Garber (02:01:56.938)
Yeah, what are you trying to say?

oliver Leiber (02:02:00.487)
It was stuff I wrote as a kid at a certain period of time.

Craig Garber (02:02:07.094)
Doesn’t take away from the, you know, the quality of it. You know, I know, I know what you mean though, because when you’re at it, I really know what you mean because I have things that I’m like not proud of. Not because they were probably bad, but because of I’m uncomfortable with who I was at that particular point in time in my life, and I’m probably a far worse critic about those items than anybody else might be, but

oliver Leiber (02:02:08.762)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:02:29.055)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (02:02:36.582)
If you don’t like who you are at a time and you’re not comfortable or it’s hard to like, and especially if you’ve changed and you’ve worked hard at changing, it’s, you almost like disassociate anything that happened out of that. It couldn’t be good because I was an asshole then or whatever, you know? So I kind of understand that if that’s what you’re talking about.

oliver Leiber (02:02:39.414)
Yeah.

Well, okay.

oliver Leiber (02:02:46.712)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:02:52.567)
Yeah.

Well, here’s the truth, and I’ve never said this. And again, like, yeah, never said this, but here’s the truth. Those could have been harder records, particularly the way that you love me and opposites, could have been harder records if they were done by an artist that was harder. Like, their intent and the way they were written and the way they sounded to me when I, you know what I mean, were just…

I don’t know what I’m trying to say. I guess I wanted to have been making harder, harder records than those. And so not to take away from them, I think I get a little uncomfortable. Here, here’s the insight.

Craig Garber (02:03:31.435)
Right.

Craig Garber (02:03:35.894)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (02:03:39.714)
But you do realize you could say that about any song that’s ever been a hit in any genre.

oliver Leiber (02:03:44.513)
Yeah?

Craig Garber (02:03:45.906)
Yeah, I mean, if you gave the killing of Georgie by Rod Stewart to Metallica, or to Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, it would have been a different record. And a good record’s a good record.

oliver Leiber (02:03:47.542)
Harder, harder to hit, you know. Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:03:58.783)
Right. Yeah, they so yeah, I guess.

oliver Leiber (02:04:06.614)
So I’ve always been embarrassed. I’ve been embarrassed by how poppy they were. And it’s funny because I love pop. I love pop records. I fucking think Sugar is one of the greatest records of all time, you know? Like, and so, I mean, it’s just weird. I have this kind of weird bifurcation, which is like, I love.

Craig Garber (02:04:23.03)
That’s so funny. Honey, honey. Ha ha ha.

oliver Leiber (02:04:37.762)
deep funk and blues and R&B, right? At the same time, I love, you know, and I guess it’s how I grew up, you know? I appreciate and love pop songwriting, well-crafted, you know, like stuff that, and even if there’s glockenspiel and bells, you know, like covering the melody, you know, even if it, so, but somehow on my own stuff,

Craig Garber (02:04:49.471)
Yeah!

oliver Leiber (02:05:05.598)
I’m uncomfortable that I’ve made some records like that. And that those are the most popular records that I’ve made. You know what I mean? Because they don’t express fully, I guess, like where I live musically. I don’t know if that makes sense. You know?

Craig Garber (02:05:09.544)
Interesting.

Craig Garber (02:05:21.834)
But let me give you a frame of reference, if it makes you feel any better. And this is over speaking to 920 something artists and musicians, the best songwriters, the number one thing they’ve all told me that I’ve walked away with is the value of having your foot in every kind of genre possible. And I don’t think you could be a songwriter at the level at which you are.

oliver Leiber (02:05:28.77)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:05:43.17)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (02:05:50.194)
If you hadn’t, if all you listen to is funk, you know, so

oliver Leiber (02:05:54.338)
Yeah, you might be able to do that. I mean, you might have that one lane, you know? But pop by definition, and has always been ever evolving, is sort of taking like what’s been done and go, oh, let’s put a little bit, let’s do it in this balance. No, let’s pop more fun, a little bit of, you know, it’s always pop is an amalgamation of things. So I guess the more shit you’re drawing from,

Craig Garber (02:06:00.366)
Right.

oliver Leiber (02:06:22.722)
the more informed, you know, that informs your, is that kind of what you mean? I mean.

Craig Garber (02:06:24.737)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, totally. But I can, you know, as you’re talking, I’m thinking, you know what, I do understand how you feel that because you’re also a New York dude who grew up in the 70s. You have an edge. And I mean that in the most loving way possible. I mean, I’m I like people like that. So, you know, and I think I’m having an edge like that. So I there’s like a male, not you know, there’s like a rough

a rough aspect of your character that you’re happy with, you know, so I get it. But man, let me tell you.

oliver Leiber (02:06:56.786)
Yeah. And more identified with. And this goes to my so this goes to my cutting you off or this. This goes to my dad thing and my and my dad thing. We know I have a dad. It was others. But so he grew up very street, you know.

Craig Garber (02:07:04.838)
No, no, man, go ahead, go ahead.

Craig Garber (02:07:11.308)
The dad thing.

oliver Leiber (02:07:23.202)
Black Jewish ghetto, Baltimore separated by train tracks. And his life, you know, he came from that. He was very much associated with that. And the only music he cared about and what he came up writing, if you listen to early stuff, was all black music, you know? It was all blues and it was all in the stuff that he wrote when he was a kid, Kansas City and Hound Dog.

And all that stuff was he was not writing, trying to write white pop. It was all, right? And he had that edge to him. And that’s what he loved. And in the house, there was no white rock. There was no, there was none of that shit. His record collection was all blues and R&B and great. Not even as much soul. There was some soul, but it was really blues. It was very like a.

Craig Garber (02:08:16.758)
Alright.

oliver Leiber (02:08:23.002)
And that’s what I grew up with. That’s what I knew he loved. He, you know, it was a very specific thing. And that is in me so deeply. Those first records that I put on were, it was all blues records and early R&B. And somewhere inside me, that’s the real stuff. That’s the, you know, that’s really the real stuff.

I remember playing him and it’s the last time I ever played him anything. I had just cut.

oliver Leiber (02:09:05.852)
I think it was Forever Your Girl. I didn’t play. Oh, so he had heard the way that you love me and he dug that, right? That was a funky track. I had played him Forever Your Girl, which is super poppy, you know, R&B pop, a la Borderline, Madonna, that kind of whatever, you know, that. And, um, I think it was Forever Your Girl. I didn’t play. Oh, so he had heard the way that you love me and he dug that, right? That was a funky track. I had played him Forever Your Girl, which is super poppy, you know, R&B pop,

Craig Garber (02:09:19.233)
Yes.

oliver Leiber (02:09:26.242)
He was always like, hey man, play me something man. What you got? Play me something. He didn’t want to talk about anything else other than business. He was just that old school, it’s all about music business and the charts and give me something we can talk about. And he’s like, play me something man. And I knew better. Cause with him my whole life, it was like Lucy and Charlie Brown in the football. You know? It’s like, no, I swear to God, I’m holding the ball, I’m holding the ball, not playing from you. And every fucking time go to kick the balls. And I would say to myself, remember that.

Craig Garber (02:09:43.746)
Ha ha!

Craig Garber (02:09:53.971)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:09:55.73)
Remember that, you know, like, you’re never gonna get it from him. You’re always gonna feel like shit, no matter what. Anyway, last time I did it, he’s like, oh, you got anything, you know, you like what you working on out there? And I went, oh, fuck. I thought the track sounded pretty good, right? So I play him. It’s not mixed, but it’s the rough. I think I might’ve even had her vocal. I don’t know if I had her vocal on it or not, but I play him the track or the song, forever your girl, right?

Craig Garber (02:10:02.082)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:10:25.39)
play it and um just kind of silence at the end to silence. I’m like waiting and he goes yeah that **** sounds Mickey Mouse, man.

Craig Garber (02:10:38.952)
Oh my god.

Craig Garber (02:10:43.83)
Lucy in the football.

oliver Leiber (02:10:45.262)
because that shit’s Mickey Mouse.

Craig Garber (02:10:48.722)
Yeah, man, I’m sorry that you had to deal with that.

oliver Leiber (02:10:49.166)
All right. And no, it’s okay. It’s part of, you know, we all, you know, like we all, we all get our stuff, I think. It’s like we get born and someone knows, this is gonna be your stuff to unpack over the course of your life. And this is gonna be your work. It’s gonna be what makes you who you are in all of the great ways, you know? And it’s also gonna be your…

Craig Garber (02:10:54.963)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (02:11:07.454)
Right, right. Right.

Craig Garber (02:11:13.938)
Yes. Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:11:18.558)
you know, you’re crossed over, you know, and this is it. So here’s your stuff. And so I long ago, I mean, I daily continue to work with it knowing this is what I’ve been given. And if this didn’t happen, which is painful and it was hard, probably wouldn’t be able to dig as deep in some ways or write or have the sensitivity, you know, like you just, you’re not gonna be who you are unless you have, it’s your.

Craig Garber (02:11:20.17)
In all the bat, in all the cross, yeah, right. Across the bear, yeah.

Craig Garber (02:11:31.53)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:11:48.278)
You know what I’m trying to say. It all makes sense. There is no free lunch. And you wanna like, you wanna dig that deep? You wanna play that way? You wanna, okay, well, here’s the price you gotta pay.

Craig Garber (02:11:49.174)
There’s no free lunch. We all pay tuition. Yeah.

Craig Garber (02:12:00.13)
All right, yeah. But you know, I will tell you that like my brother, all he wanted from my father was an attaboy, never got it, and he wound up killing himself. So I mean, and whereas I wasn’t looking for that, for whatever reason, I wanted to just get the fuck out of there. And, but when you’re wanting those attaboys and you don’t get them, they’re painful, man. It’s…

oliver Leiber (02:12:12.568)
You know?

oliver Leiber (02:12:31.086)
I mean, I still relate to what you said. And, you know, again, like never got the attaboy, always wanted it. My brother and I were pretty good musicians at a very young age and great band. And like, you know, had a lot of whatever, you know, I was starting on the varsity baseball team as a freshman. Was a good baseball player, great player. Never came to a game like the attaboy.

Craig Garber (02:12:53.247)
Wow.

Craig Garber (02:12:57.762)
Where’d you get a high school? This was at, not in Vermont.

oliver Leiber (02:13:00.834)
before I got sent away. So when I, I got sent away for junior, senior year. No, the baseball team in Vermont, there were girls doing cartwheels in center field. And like weaving daisy chain, like I was like, fucking get me out of here. I am in hell. Cause I had actually come from a really good, competitive sports school in the Bronx called Field.

Craig Garber (02:13:05.962)
Where’d you go freshmen?

Craig Garber (02:13:10.678)
Hahaha!

Craig Garber (02:13:15.97)
Ah… Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah

Craig Garber (02:13:27.254)
Where’d you get a, oh yeah, that’s in Riverdale. Yeah, right. Oh, okay, interesting, I didn’t know that. All right, interesting.

oliver Leiber (02:13:30.454)
Yeah, that’s the upper school to ethical culture, which was on 64th.

Yeah, so senior year I’m playing, I’m starting, yeah, starting varsity. Batting number one, playing better field. Yeah.

Craig Garber (02:13:44.626)
As a freshman, that’s pretty awesome. That’s yeah, that’s so you’re paying. You’re playing the power position. On top of that. Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:13:51.382)
Dude, yeah, I was a good athlete. And it was just at that point before music and perhaps smoking weed, sort of like kind of, kind of like, come this way, this way Oliver. I was still able to pull off the athlete thing too. But what was the, how do we get off in that? Oh.

Craig Garber (02:13:55.563)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (02:14:05.462)
Hahaha

Craig Garber (02:14:11.64)
Yeah, that’s pretty cool.

Craig Garber (02:14:17.482)
You would talk, we were talking, we were just talking about, yeah, with your dad. That sounds kind of Mickey Mouse.

oliver Leiber (02:14:20.466)
Mickey Mouse thing and the, you know.

oliver Leiber (02:14:25.99)
Yeah, and so I have that guy internalized in my head. He’s always here. He’s always there, you know, and to the degree that I can turn the volume maybe down to if I can get them down to two or three to a low roar, and turn up the volume of this sort of like, positive and current, you know, it to the degree that I can like, be creative.

and finish and write songs, right? But that part of me that said, that expressed that thing about the Paula songs is really, and I caught myself, which is why I sort of shared the story with you. It’s the part of me that goes, that shit’s Mickey Mouse.

Craig Garber (02:15:04.284)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (02:15:11.874)
Yeah, man, let me tell you interesting. I listened to this story, man. So I hadn’t spoken to my parents in 36 years grew up in a highly, highly abusive environment. I had for I’ve done a lot. I did it, you know, ACA, I don’t know if I told you this adult children of alcoholics and just I did that program. It’s and it I’ve read books, therapy. My whole I mean, I can’t, you know, every day I give thanks for that, you know, and

oliver Leiber (02:15:13.294)
Do you know what I’m saying?

oliver Leiber (02:15:27.699)
Oh yeah. Yeah.

Craig Garber (02:15:41.734)
I had forgiven my parents, didn’t talk with them, but I had, you know, for myself. So they contacted me and I knew he had, I could listen to him. He was going, he had dementia and he was not doing well. And I said, and they wanted to see me and I said, okay, you know, um, so I saw them and they gave me the grip, not intentionally. They gave me the greatest gift ever. When you grow up in that environment, no matter how much work you do and, and how

how sort of aware you might be. There’s a part of you for me that always feels that abuse you got was your fault. That there’s something with you that you were in some way and when I met them as adults, this is just last year, they both passed right after that too. So this is again, I think a higher power thing.

I in seeing them and seeing how I don’t know how to say this any other way, how unintelligent, I mean they were very not intelligent. I mean very dumb people emotionally, intellectually. Somehow I realized for the first time in my life, none of that was my fault. And it was like a million pound weight lifted off me and it changed my whole identity of how I look at myself.

And it was the greatest gift I ever, one of the great gifts besides my wife and a couple of other things that I’ve ever received.

oliver Leiber (02:17:10.102)
And that 335, 345? Behind you?

Craig Garber (02:17:12.898)
335, yeah, that’s another great one. But I mean, so I understand that little Oliver in there yelling at you sometime. And so I really do get it. I really do get it, man.

oliver Leiber (02:17:16.289)
Um.

oliver Leiber (02:17:23.254)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:17:28.546)
Yeah, I wish it wasn’t part of my story, but it’s just part of my story. It’s part of just, yeah, where I come from and who he was and what it was like. I can add to it that it has been the case where it’s so many low points in my life, like in the middle, like a…

Drake up in a restaurant and the girl walks off and I’m sitting there or something else without fail, Stand By Me always comes on. It’s like on top of it all, he’s like, doom, dood, dood. This is the irony of the sort of like the message of Stand By Me when this shit’s blowing up in my face in my life and he never particularly did, but the song comes on and it’s just like, all right, God, yeah, sense of humor, right?

Craig Garber (02:18:23.937)
Wow, yeah, yeah. Yeah, totally. Wow. You mentioned your dad, did you spend time with your mom after your folks split or was she not in the picture that much?

oliver Leiber (02:18:25.518)
You need to get a sense of humor. Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:18:35.818)
No, so yeah, another perceptive thing. So my dad left when I was 10. And I’m.

First of all, I was super identified with him. Again, you know, like, I… My mom, my mom, you know, she was a German Jew, left, escaped, you know, escaped the war. She went from Frankfurt to Amsterdam, literally was friends with Anne Frank, same age.

Craig Garber (02:19:04.016)
Oh, she, wow.

oliver Leiber (02:19:17.89)
got out of Amsterdam, came back. All this to say that she had a lot of trauma, wasn’t particularly very functional and definitely not functional as a mom. So that she really never, like there was never really a bonding with her because she really wasn’t physically or mentally there a lot. She was just this kind of

Craig Garber (02:19:25.409)
Oh, I-

Craig Garber (02:19:33.814)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (02:19:45.302)
Totally get it.

oliver Leiber (02:19:48.07)
shadowy figure. And she was also kind of had a super codependent relationship with my dad. It was all about him. And so she was just kind of so when he left, there was this part of me that was like, Oh, there is nobody steering this ship here with my mom. And even though my dad was scary, and, you know,

Craig Garber (02:20:08.483)
Yeah, of course.

oliver Leiber (02:20:17.302)
He was a drinker and he could be really scary and he could, I don’t wanna go too much into it, but like there’s a lot of trauma there around him and how he was, but even that felt more like a parent. Do you know what I’m saying? Like.

Craig Garber (02:20:30.273)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (02:20:38.998)
Dude, we have very similar dynamics. Yes, I do. I know exactly it.

oliver Leiber (02:20:43.246)
So as scared, right. So I made this choice to, and it took a couple of years actually, because he moved down to the village and he had a new wife and all this, but at a certain point, you know, the place was ready, right, there was a place in the middle. And I chose to live with him because I literally felt like, at least like getting yelled at feels like somebody at least cares.

Craig Garber (02:21:03.624)
Okay.

oliver Leiber (02:21:12.138)
or there’s someone on board, whereas my mom was just in the weeds. My brother ended up living with my mom. He stayed with her, and I ended up living with my dad until I got sent away to that boarding school when I was 16 or 17. So she not really, was never really a part of my life in a lot of ways, you know?

Craig Garber (02:21:15.954)
Yeah, I totally understand that.

Craig Garber (02:21:38.774)
Yeah. I, yes, I totally understand that. Is she wow. Oh my God. Good genetics. Hopefully, you know, you know, you get your health genetics from your mom. So you’re probably in it.

oliver Leiber (02:21:42.574)
She’s still alive, 96 or 7. And her dude.

oliver Leiber (02:21:54.542)
know if I want to be around that. I mean, all the enjoy the ship gone at that point. Anyway, so, so that was your question, right? Just sort of like, where’s your mom? Sure. You know what, she had been an actress on Broadway. She was in this one famous cult film, film noir film called Kiss Me Deadly. That’s like a very well known culty film, nor them. She was an actress and

Craig Garber (02:22:06.035)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:22:24.15)
The minute she met my dad and I think found someone that would take care of her, she was a thank God, you know, and she, um, yeah, I mean, you know, I come from, I’ve come from alcoholism on both sides. And, and, and unfortunately that’s part, you know, that’s part of the story. Is, uh, nobody was really on duty. Most, but my dad’s version of it where.

Craig Garber (02:22:28.19)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (02:22:37.556)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (02:22:43.136)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (02:22:48.255)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:22:52.126)
he’d be gone, be gone, be gone, wouldn’t see me, I could do it. And then all of a sudden, like he’d rage on me because I was riding a skateboard. That at least felt like that’s like that was parenting to me. I was like, OK, well, he’s angry because I’m riding a skateboard, skateboard. So that was more than I got from, you know. That makes sense.

Craig Garber (02:23:02.667)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (02:23:09.982)
No, I totally get it. I had a similar thing. Do you ever, do you ever, you know who Gabor Mate is by any chance?

oliver Leiber (02:23:18.48)
Not Gabor who did the jewelry, no.

Craig Garber (02:23:21.39)
No, Gabor Mate is a guy who’s a trauma expert, right? And he has really good stuff to say, but he grew up in, his parents were in a concentration camp. And he wound up doing these studies because he noticed that the kids who grew up as children of parents of survivors, they were all fucked up because the parents had no bandwidth because, I mean, what an unnatural thing to like,

you know, having kids is rough enough. How do you have a frame of reference of how do I get out of a fucking concentration camp? I mean, that’s like, but the so he’s Yeah. So it’s, it’s very common. In that situation, very calm.

oliver Leiber (02:23:59.87)
It. Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:24:06.09)
Yeah, look, like I said, you know, I mean, I feel like, and you know, there are people that have way harder, bigger crosses to bear, you know, but I always feel like I kind of got the fiesta platter, though, I mean, you know, it’s like, you know, like just a bunch of things to work through, you know? But on my mom’s side was the trauma from Nazi Germany.

Craig Garber (02:24:19.838)
Yeah, yeah. No, I get it.

Craig Garber (02:24:28.183)
Yeah, I do.

Craig Garber (02:24:34.625)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:24:35.318)
She was traumatized, it was never talked about, but you feel that second generation trauma survivor, it’s real, you know, it’s real. So yeah, so put that on the plate next to the rice and beans and you know, all the other shit, yeah.

Craig Garber (02:24:41.503)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (02:24:50.114)
Honestly, man, all the more, again, I’ve said this because I know how tough it is to beat addiction, man. Fucking feather in your cap, honestly, man. You’re welcome.

oliver Leiber (02:25:00.27)
Thanks.

And that accounts for, you know, going back to that thing you were saying about people not understanding like, that’s your father, it’s your mother, how can you not talk to them? At a certain point, you may realize, you realize what you need to do in order to survive and recover from where you came from. You’re not blaming them, but you realize that a lot of the damage and the trauma and the problem comes from this

Craig Garber (02:25:22.643)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:25:32.706)
family and system that you were born into. And that unless you can extricate yourself from it, 1000%, you know, for however long, and some people it’s the rest of their lives, whatever, you’re not gonna heal, you know? And I knew that I needed some years between me and my family to just begin to unpack, you know, what it was like.

Craig Garber (02:25:35.936)
Right.

Craig Garber (02:25:48.875)
Yeah, cause…

Craig Garber (02:26:01.536)
Yeah!

oliver Leiber (02:26:02.434)
growing up and surviving it. Like I made it out to that plane, to the Palm Assam one, like not a minute too fucking soon.

Craig Garber (02:26:10.374)
Yeah, yeah. And they didn’t do any work. So, you know, and I have a program friend is always saying, Hey, nothing changes if nothing changes. So like, what are you going to do hanging around them? Like, more of the same? Like, they’re not going to be, hey, I’m really proud of you. They haven’t done they don’t have the awareness. It’s, they just fucking can’t get out of their own way. Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:26:22.262)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:26:28.806)
No, and they’re actually so deep in their denial that they can’t even acknowledge that, you know, I mean, you know, that you’re really a drug. You’re not, you didn’t, you just, you know, it’s like they can’t even support what you’re trying to do in your life. So sometimes, and the thing about getting on that plane and going physically, you know, away is important because it affords you the physical distance, affords you eventually

Craig Garber (02:26:45.322)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:26:58.734)
the emotional distance that you need, you know?

Craig Garber (02:27:00.274)
Yeah, definitely man. Awesome.

oliver Leiber (02:27:03.723)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (02:32:14.322)
Okay, question. You’ve been sober 40 years and over or over four years now, if what’s the most important thing, Oliver, you might be able to pass along to someone listening to this who’s either struggling or who’s afraid to ask for help.

oliver Leiber (02:32:40.138)
You don’t have to ever feel this way again and live this way again. And you’re not alone. As alone as you may be feeling and as desperate and…

hopeless as you may be feeling. You’re not alone and there are people that have been there just where you’re at, you know, and reach out. You know, I mean, the people in AA saved my life, you know. AA saved my life for sure. It’s a hard first step to make, you know.

But there is help available and it’s free. And there’s people just like us, you know, waiting for us.

Craig Garber (02:33:39.938)
Thank you, man, because I have a lot of people sending me messages that are struggling from time to time. Thank you. Hey, which of your personality traits do you think contributed most to your success? And I don’t just mean success in music. I mean success in music and in life.

oliver Leiber (02:33:44.631)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:33:54.96)
Hmm.

oliver Leiber (02:34:07.978)
Was it? It’s not the answer I would have thought that I would have come up with. I’m gonna say sensitivity.

because, and it’s, there’s a sensitivity required in being a musician, you know, with your ears and your choices and your, what are you tuned into? And, and, you know, how you play and what you play and what you choose not to play and your choice is all about, you know, it has to do with sensitivity and.

And just with who I am with people and in my relationships, I don’t know, I feel like I have, if nothing else,

oliver Leiber (02:35:01.39)
pretty sensitive to people’s feelings and…

oliver Leiber (02:35:09.182)
I don’t know. I don’t know. I think it makes me a good listener and…

oliver Leiber (02:35:18.094)
I don’t know, I don’t have a pat answer to that. It just feels to me like sensitivity, it’s a component in music, in writing, in creating, in general. I think that’s the key to any creative person, it’s the sensitivity that you have. That not everybody, people walking around with different skills and different gifts, but not necessarily that. You know, and.

Craig Garber (02:35:42.24)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:35:47.186)
I don’t know. That’s what’s hitting me now. Yeah.

Craig Garber (02:35:49.974)
Good, then that’s the right answer. What’s your favorite song you wrote?

If you have one.

oliver Leiber (02:35:58.284)
Umm… Fuck.

oliver Leiber (02:36:03.062)
That’s a really tough question for me.

oliver Leiber (02:36:10.262)
It’s not even one that’s ever come out. Yeah, there’s a song I wrote called Time Machine that was about my divorce. And, or not necessarily about my divorce, but I wrote maybe five, six years after my divorce. And it’s sort of about that and wrestling with that and regret and…

Craig Garber (02:36:13.524)
I wouldn’t. Yeah, that’s fine.

oliver Leiber (02:36:40.504)
I think that…

oliver Leiber (02:36:45.87)
I think that’s my favorite song that I’ve written. It’s not covered yet, but yeah. Maybe I’ll throw the demo up on Facebook. Right? Yeah. All right.

Craig Garber (02:36:55.658)
Can I say, yeah, that would be very cool. I’d love to hear it. Tell me your top three desert island discs just for this moment, because this changes every day.

oliver Leiber (02:37:07.142)
Oh my God. All right, well, Sly, there’s a riot going on. You’re saying like albums, right? Oh, Sly.

Craig Garber (02:37:18.625)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:37:28.778)
Oh god, um…

oliver Leiber (02:37:34.255)
Sgt. Pepper.

oliver Leiber (02:37:45.698)
That’s a great one. Is it Blues at Sunrise, Albert? Yeah.

Craig Garber (02:37:49.442)
by Albert King.

oliver Leiber (02:37:52.686)
I’m trying to think of the album though. Okay, yeah. The greatest blues guitar tone of all time.

Craig Garber (02:37:55.262)
It’s, it’s blues at sunrise, isn’t it? I think it is called blues at sunrise.

Craig Garber (02:38:04.178)
I like Freddie better.

oliver Leiber (02:38:06.462)
No, the three kings. Yeah, I all day long, all day long. Freddie, Albert. You know who else I love though, that like I just he doesn’t seem like in the conversation enough to me, you know, I mean, fucking Albert Collins.

Craig Garber (02:38:07.942)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (02:38:24.726)
He’s not in the conversation and I don’t know why.

oliver Leiber (02:38:27.13)
And that dude and how melodic he is also, it’s because he tunes differently and he’s playing with the capo. But just like it’s sophisticated and melodic and burning. And I mean, I don’t know. I don’t understand how somehow he’s not, you know, I mean, he’s not in my Mount Rushmore of guitar players for sure.

Craig Garber (02:38:52.798)
Yeah, he’s funny. You mentioned I went through a catalog deep dive of his like maybe six months ago and I was like, why don’t I listen to this more? I mean, it was pretty phenomenal.

oliver Leiber (02:39:02.594)
Yeah, I mean, and there’s a lot of time. I mean, there’s some footage, I can’t remember what is where he’s up there. He’s on stage with all these great guitar players, and he’s just killing them. Like, you know, I mean, it’s just like his intensity and his, and his tone, it just, you know, I don’t know. Can’t make that shit up. Yeah. Hard for me to read this. Yeah.

Craig Garber (02:39:18.41)
Great stage presence too, how he’d walk around and really affable guy.

Most important, y’all, it’s the, I said this several times, people sending comments like I love.

oliver Leiber (02:39:33.214)
I’m going to think of three things I rather wish I had said, but whatever.

Craig Garber (02:39:37.967)
I know people sending comments like I love how people will talk about you know All this tragedy in their life, but when you ask them give me your three best cds. It’s like oh my god The monkeys uh Most important lessons you’ve learned from getting older

oliver Leiber (02:39:47.242)
The Partridge family.

oliver Leiber (02:39:56.817)
Um…

oliver Leiber (02:40:08.782)
I can’t take any of this with you and it’s about love. Period. It’s the beginning, the middle, and the end is about love.

Craig Garber (02:40:14.251)
Yeah, man.

Craig Garber (02:40:20.898)
Great answer, man.

Craig Garber (02:40:25.034)
Here’s a tough one. What do you like most about yourself?

oliver Leiber (02:40:29.077)
Um.

Craig Garber (02:40:34.314)
And it could be several things.

oliver Leiber (02:40:35.693)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:40:39.631)
I think I got a good heart.

oliver Leiber (02:40:45.902)
I think I’m a pretty loving guy, you know?

oliver Leiber (02:40:53.77)
Yeah, I don’t know, you know, I guess so. I mean, I think I’m a decent human. I’m flawed, but I do believe that like, I’m genuinely coming from a good place with people.

Craig Garber (02:41:10.472)
What’s your best childhood memory?

oliver Leiber (02:41:17.246)
Wow. Well, uh, best childhood memory.

oliver Leiber (02:41:31.95)
Childhood is like, we’re talking like pre 12 years old, like childhood, childhood.

Craig Garber (02:41:36.61)
No, I was, you know, whatever you like, man. You can, it’s your question. You could, whatever you’d like.

oliver Leiber (02:41:40.087)
Man.

oliver Leiber (02:41:48.386)
Oh, the only thing I can think of is like when like Zippy the chimp came to my 10th birthday party.

Craig Garber (02:41:56.066)
Was that like Mr. Jigs or something like that?

oliver Leiber (02:41:58.35)
Well, literally, if you go back, you could probably find him. He was like in the, I mean, they probably replaced zippies. The zippy might’ve died and another zippy came in, but it wasn’t zippy the chip and I think somebody brought him in to the Brill building, you know, to my dad’s office one day to like.

Craig Garber (02:42:02.582)
Bye!

Craig Garber (02:42:06.658)
Ha ha ha!

Oh my god.

Craig Garber (02:42:15.586)
Hilarious.

oliver Leiber (02:42:19.198)
as a stunt for somebody else. And it was like, you know, he roller skated or whatever. He was like on the Ed Sullivan shows. Anyway, my dad got the idea was probably like around my birthday, that he was gonna have Zippy the Chimp come to my birthday party. So I even have a picture of it like somewhere. Me eating birthday cake and Zippy the Chimp. That was pretty much the greatest thing ever. It’s fucking champ in the apartment and roller skating and

Craig Garber (02:42:34.85)
of you and Zippy.

Craig Garber (02:42:42.102)
So funny.

oliver Leiber (02:42:47.95)
painting and sitting next to me for my birthday. I mean, that was like the bomb. That was the best. Yeah. Fuck, yeah. So if he was OG. The OG champ.

Craig Garber (02:42:54.058)
Awesome. Bubbles had nothing on Zippy.

Craig Garber (02:43:00.438)
Do you have any hobbies outside of music and sports?

oliver Leiber (02:43:06.014)
No, no. Yeah, well, the closest thing I would say would be scuba diving, which I don’t know if yes, it’s a hobby. I mean, I don’t do it nearly as much as I would like. But I’ve been an avid diver since I think I got certified in like 1986. So I’ve been certified that long and got my advanced.

Craig Garber (02:43:13.898)
Oh, cool.

Craig Garber (02:43:30.022)
Oh, wow. This is a long time.

oliver Leiber (02:43:35.474)
certification and I’ve done a lot of live aboard to 10 day two week kind of dive trip to some really cool locations. went diving in the Galapagos. All over I did Red Sea about a year a year and a half ago in Egypt. I love diving. And yeah, yeah.

Craig Garber (02:43:44.286)
That’s real.

Craig Garber (02:43:51.856)
Oh wow.

Craig Garber (02:44:00.83)
Yeah, that’s pretty big commitment going to all over the world. That’s awesome.

oliver Leiber (02:44:03.966)
and it’s exciting and it’s sort of, yeah, it’s just, I love it, so diving. But really it’s like music, it’s what I do and it’s what I love and it’s my hobby and it’s sort of like, it feels like more like of a way of being in the world and everything. Yeah, like I’m not someone that’s like, God, I can’t wait for my job to be over so I can go play guitar, you know.

Craig Garber (02:44:22.386)
Yeah, it’s a way, yeah, right, it’s your lifestyle. Yeah.

Craig Garber (02:44:31.398)
Yeah, yeah. I saw on some video you work out regularly, you had a trainer or something like that there too? What?

oliver Leiber (02:44:38.95)
No, you must really funny. First of all, I don’t and I stopped and I probably haven’t worked out since that interview, which was like, like a year ago, maybe I have my first workout in a year at 230 today, like literally, I have planned which of course I’ve had nothing to eat. I just ate a bar but I’ve been talking

Craig Garber (02:44:55.751)
Oh my god.

Craig Garber (02:45:01.782)
God, and after everything we’ve just talked about, you’ll be exhausted. You’re gonna go in there like, look man, can we do this tomorrow?

oliver Leiber (02:45:08.056)
and it’s kind of more of a, it’s sort of boxing. Anyway, I am not in good shape at this point, but for a lot of my life, I’ve sort of been, you know, decent shape.

Craig Garber (02:45:11.41)
Oh, okay. Still.

Alright.

Craig Garber (02:45:21.534)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, you seem like you’re in great shape, to be honest with you. What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given, and who gave it to you?

oliver Leiber (02:45:45.486)
kind of comes back to the same thing I said before. I think it was my grandfather who came over from Germany and he would say, anything you can buy with money is cheap.

Craig Garber (02:45:57.572)
Oh, fuck, that’s pretty heavy actually.

Yeah, that’s a great one.

Craig Garber (02:46:09.774)
That’s a good one, man. Two more questions and I cannot thank you enough. I’m so happy that I got to talk with you, man, and I hope we get to have a meal together sometime.

oliver Leiber (02:46:13.646)
Sure, man.

oliver Leiber (02:46:19.75)
I would love that, yeah. No shortage of things to, we can go into any number of, dig deep right there, you know, really, yeah.

Craig Garber (02:46:25.714)
Yeah, I’ll just shut up and just keep listening. We kind of talked about this, but this is a little more specific. If you don’t have an answer for it, it’s cool. So my question was how have you managed to reconcile the negative voices you may have heard earlier in life regarding your personal success or comparing yourself with your dad? And if you have been able to, what have been the most helpful ways you’ve been able to reconcile

oliver Leiber (02:46:36.205)
Okay.

oliver Leiber (02:46:55.914)
I mean, that is such a good question, such a deep question, and such a relevant question. And I don’t know, I mean, we could do a whole.

Craig Garber (02:47:11.132)
Maybe we should, you should be like, yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:47:12.11)
Three hours, series on it.

Um, it has been a multi-pronged attack or, you know, to try and deal with and manage and wrestle to the ground or somehow integrate those negative voices that were so ingrained in me so early on and so loud that it will be.

Craig Garber (02:47:24.374)
Fair enough.

oliver Leiber (02:47:46.53)
a lifelong process, which is something that I’m coming to terms with. And that’s part of realizing like, this may not go away. It’s.

oliver Leiber (02:48:03.002)
Here’s the shift, here’s the little bit of judo, which is the voices are never gonna go away. The thing I am continually trying to do and remind myself of is not to identify as the voices, to literally say, those voices, there’s that story, there’s that narrative, but that’s not me.

Craig Garber (02:48:18.914)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:48:29.41)
That’s an old story. Those are old voices and ideas born out of early childhood experiences, born out of trauma, born out of the pain in some ways that we’ve talked about, about coming from families, right? And that is not the truth and that’s not who I am. So for me,

Craig Garber (02:48:49.121)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:48:59.01)
Getting sober was the very first step. You can’t even begin to address that stuff unless, if you’re checking out and numbing out and just searching for oblivion, then you can’t even entertain those questions, right? Your answer is to check out. So getting sober was one. Man, I’ve had to do so many different kinds of therapies, to be honest with you. I’ve done…

Craig Garber (02:49:01.697)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (02:49:15.926)
Of course.

oliver Leiber (02:49:28.366)
therapy around trauma. You know, we didn’t get into it, all of it, physical, all kinds of emotional, but physical, like, you know, you had it too coming, it sounds like coming from where you came from. So I’ve had to do EMDR therapy, which is, you know, people can look into that if they want. I continue to do somatic therapy. When you have trauma, basically, you know, Elvis leaves the building.

Craig Garber (02:49:42.063)
100%.

oliver Leiber (02:49:56.926)
It’s like when you’re a little kid and you’re frightened out of your fucking mind by your alcoholic father, this monster, literally the way you protect yourself is, is you dissociate and you leave. You leave the building, right? So like I’ve had to and continue have to learn how to check in with my body and even know what’s going on with it. I still start, so that’s like somatic work. Cause apparently that’s where all the traumas.

Craig Garber (02:50:09.845)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:50:26.638)
stored is in your body. That’s a whole other the book, The Body Keeps the Score. So there’s all of that. So for me, it’s like, I mean, it’s like I said, a multipronging, it’s like sober, doing trauma work, whether it’s EMDR somatic work, talk therapy. I’ve been a meditator for 18 years, I do TM, Transcendental Meditation.

Craig Garber (02:50:28.051)
in your body.

Craig Garber (02:50:32.662)
Body keeps the score, yeah, sure.

oliver Leiber (02:50:56.847)
Um…

oliver Leiber (02:51:00.086)
And I read and listen to a lot of, I guess what you would call spiritual sort of material and things that I am just continually trying to put in my head and in my mind, things that feel like the antidote and the counter to the nonstop motion and momentum of the story that I’ve been living.

You know? And it literally is daily, man. It’s daily. I mean, you know, the times in my life when I presented much differently than I have, I think in this discussion with you, where I like, I kinda had a persona and I could hide, you know, and I would hide behind it. And, you know.

Craig Garber (02:51:30.547)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (02:51:50.198)
Well, it was scary to let people in. It’s fucking, that never ends well, you know?

oliver Leiber (02:51:52.586)
Yeah, you know, I’m most Yeah, that doesn’t end well. So, you know, yeah, I mean, there were times when I was rolling around 20 pounds heavier yoked on my bike mad dogging you like, because that’s how fucking scared I was, you know, and that didn’t work. And you get to a certain point in your life when you’re like, Well, I’m either gonna go out this way. And this doesn’t feel comfortable.

Craig Garber (02:52:01.538)
So you gotta work.

oliver Leiber (02:52:22.87)
Or, you’ll see alternative, like let me try and heal. And for me, it’s like, fucking takes a village. It takes all of that. And, you know, so I think I answered the question, but there’s no one thing. It’s, but the thing that’s key is to realize that

Craig Garber (02:52:33.886)
What does?

Craig Garber (02:52:38.611)
Yeah, man.

Craig Garber (02:52:42.56)
No.

oliver Leiber (02:52:52.382)
you are not your ego. Your ego is this personality that has been formed. It’s the voice you’re always hearing in your head, but it’s been formed by all the things that happen in your life. And it’s always trying to keep you safe. That’s its job. Ego’s job is to keep you safe, right? And if you haven’t had the experience of having had a very safe upbringing, it’s gonna be telling you.

Oh, that motherfucker’s not safe. Oh, don’t do that. No, stay, keep it to yourself. Everything’s the enemy. And if you listen to your ego, ultimately, you end up in the fetal position in your room, in the dark. That’s what it’s telling you is the only place for it to stay. So, you know, you need to…

Craig Garber (02:53:30.914)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (02:53:34.538)
The only place that’s safe, yes. I do.

oliver Leiber (02:53:40.578)
Um, identify with another part of yourself, which is your, the bigger self, you know, and, um, yeah, I feel like I’m going, we’re, I’m, I’m floating off into areas that maybe we don’t have time to go.

Craig Garber (02:53:52.638)
No, you’re good, man, that’s good. No, it was awesome, thank you. I actually started talking to little Craig. That I found incredibly helpful because he’s the guy that’s wounded most of the time, not me, yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:54:08.342)
You know what I say? Look, when I’m really in it and I can catch myself. See, as an adult, like you might think like something’s happening in your adult life and you wanna fucking kick this dude’s ass or you just, and what you don’t realize until you get to this point is like, that’s really like a very young, young reaction that goes, you know, but what I find myself saying to myself a lot and catching myself, when it’s fear or something, I literally, I’m like, I got you little guy.

Craig Garber (02:54:38.655)
Yeah, right.

oliver Leiber (02:54:39.978)
I got you. And that’s the part of me that’s like a father, you know, and been a father and been a functioning adult and kicking ass in areas of my life and working hard. Like that voice, that guy, that’s the adult that can stop it, interrupt it immediately and go, I got you, like you said. Really, it’s a phrase, cause it takes me right to that place where I’m no longer.

Craig Garber (02:55:02.228)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:55:07.754)
in that panic or fear, because I realized that’s a very old reaction by a very frightened kid.

Craig Garber (02:55:14.11)
Yeah, but it’s so important to know that because it allows you to mitigate all that shit instead of like, you know, you’re up in bed and you never fucking sleeping. You know, if you have that a little bit of awareness, you could sort of like cut it off at the pass and then, you know, spend 10 minutes and like, I got, you know, and then we can move on the rest of our day or night or whatever.

oliver Leiber (02:55:33.462)
Well, it took me years though, years to even quiet the voices in my head that would say, oh, you fucking pussy, you’re going to heal your inner child now? Is that what you’re going to do? But, you know, just like brutal, like that was somehow. So to get to a place in my life where it was like, yeah, you know what? I actually am. And you need to like go lie by the pool, motherfucker.

Craig Garber (02:55:51.839)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (02:55:58.953)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:56:03.338)
you know, you’ve had enough air time. Yeah.

Craig Garber (02:56:04.215)
Good for you.

That was a great answer. Thank you. And the last question is Oliver, what’s been the biggest change in your personality, would you say over the last 10 years and how much of that change is intentional and versus just being a part of natural part of aging?

oliver Leiber (02:56:26.102)
Well, softening, and it’s all tied into everything we’re saying. Like I said, I wouldn’t admit 90% of what I’ve shared with you in this interview or say these things, 10, 15 years ago, and I’ll tell you is having daughters, 15 year old and 17 year old, having kids, and realizing that I can’t be the father.

that I wanna be to these.

children to these girls, unless I soften, I can’t be present, I can’t be available, I can’t be the man that I want them to be the first man that they fall in love with. So that’s what they choose, right? Because they’re going to go looking for, you know, like unless I start peeling these fucking layers off and start healing and softening.

Craig Garber (02:57:17.505)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:57:29.386)
and I hate the words on this, softening. It’s like, you know, this is a part of me as I say it today, when I say softening, it’s like, I wanna fucking.

Craig Garber (02:57:39.587)
Yeah, I get it.

oliver Leiber (02:57:39.822)
that word, right? But that’s the work and that’s the work.

Craig Garber (02:57:44.13)
But that’s the word though. I mean, being softer with yourself, being softer with others, yourself first of all, most important, with your daughters, everything.

oliver Leiber (02:57:53.559)
Yeah. But how you treat people and how you love people, it’s, it’s coming from yourself, you know? So if you don’t have it for yourself, and you talk to yourself this way, I would hear things coming out going, holy sh- you know, like-

Craig Garber (02:58:02.751)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:58:12.811)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:58:16.502)
My desire to be a better father and a more loving father has forced me to soften. And that’s the most succinct way I can.

Craig Garber (02:58:22.978)
for you man.

Craig Garber (02:58:28.514)
play this for your daughters in 10 years and they’ll appreciate it. They won’t appreciate it before that. My son came to me when he was like 25 and he goes, you know what? I fucking hated it when I was younger because you always were right. I really hated you. He goes, now I’m just realized that it was a good thing, dad. I’m like, okay, thank you. But they don’t come around until he’s 25, 27. You know, being a dad is a painful job, man.

oliver Leiber (02:58:32.898)
Fuck no. Not even close. Fuck no.

oliver Leiber (02:58:50.498)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:58:55.392)
Yeah.

oliver Leiber (02:58:58.758)
It’s a thankless job, man. And thankless job.

Craig Garber (02:59:05.938)
It is until you get. Yeah. Right.

oliver Leiber (02:59:05.974)
The river of love flows in one direction at this point, I think, is and you can’t have an expectation of it. And one of the things that you learn is like, yeah, you can’t come to your kids with that needy kid inside of you wanting to like, you know, be loved and reflected back in the way that you know what I mean? It’s like you that’s out the window.

Craig Garber (02:59:31.578)
Especially your kids that age. You’re in a rough period now, especially with girls. I’ve been there. It’s very rough, man. Hey, listen. Oh, go ahead.

oliver Leiber (02:59:35.174)
Yeah. No, I’m good.

Craig Garber (02:59:43.466)
I just wanted to first of all, thank you again. I really enjoyed talking to you. I really hope we get to meet me, you and Keith Nelson, go have some good pizza, not that shit you’re eating out in LA. Um, um, uh, let me tell people where to find you. Um, so, so Oliver, he’s, if you are interested in work with Oliver in a production capacity or in a song collaboration capacity,

oliver Leiber (02:59:52.498)
Yeah, I know. I was going to say we can’t stay in California.

Craig Garber (03:00:09.726)
What you do is go to his Instagram and you just look up Oliver Leiber L E I B E R and message him on Instagram or Facebook, send him like some tracks, send him your, what you’re doing so he could have a frame of reference to look at it and say, you know, yeah, this, you know, let’s explore, let’s have a phone call and discuss it or not. If you can’t just say, Hey, I’d like you to produce me. And then like you send nothing. It’s that’s not a valid.

uh, request for anybody. So just be considerate and just send him the information that you’d want if you’re in his situation, uh, for production or writing. Uh, if you’re interested in hiring Oliver to work with you as a session player on guitar or drums, same thing, just DM him on Instagram or message him on Facebook. Uh, also there is, he’s part of a really cool band called

with Brian Ray from Paul McCartney’s band. And I’m sorry, what’s your singer’s name?

oliver Leiber (03:01:14.45)
Hello, Lucretia Sans Lopez from Argentina. Yeah.

Craig Garber (03:01:17.542)
Yes. And she, they have a, they, they have been profiled on little Stevens, uh, under little the Steven from little from spring scenes band on, uh, his underground garage. He’s got a very popular, it’s on serious, I think, right? Yeah. So they have won the coolest song in the world several times. And now there’s a vote going on for who’s the coolest song of all the coolest songs. So this is

oliver Leiber (03:01:31.69)
Yeah, yeah, serious.

oliver Leiber (03:01:45.346)
For the year, right? It’s like, yeah, for the, yeah, yeah.

Craig Garber (03:01:46.902)
for the year. Yeah. So my personal request is if you would all support Oliver, that would be awesome. So just look up Little Stevens Garage and how to vote for the coolest song in the world or coolest song for the year and vote for the bayonets and the name of the track is, excuse me, Argentina. He is, Oliver’s also in a sort of a mini app that’s called the Minneapolis Funk All Stars. It’s kind of like all the members.

of the time and Prince’s bands over the years, various people go in and out and they play. And so look up Minneapolis funk all stars and you can see the touring schedule. Go check them out when he’s in your area. And I’m pretty sure you’re going to have a great time listening to him in the band. Um, is there anything else? How, how can I pimp you some more? I mean, not anything.

oliver Leiber (03:02:36.566)
man, you know, I’m good. I’m good. I don’t need to be pimped. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you a lot, man. Yeah, I mean, I didn’t know really what to expect and it was really a pleasure. It was a pleasure. Yeah. Thanks for asking me to do this.

Craig Garber (03:02:40.342)
Yeah.

Craig Garber (03:02:45.163)
Oh, thank you, man. Same here. Feeling very mutual.

Craig Garber (03:02:52.438)
Thank you, man. Same here very much. Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for coming on. Hang on one second. I’m going to wrap up here and then you and I’ll chat. I want to say everybody thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this, please share it on your socials with your friends. I want to thank a huge, huge debt of gratitude to Oliver Leiber. And thanks again to Keith Nelson for connecting us. You don’t get to have it’s a privilege and an honor for someone to have a conversation with me like this.

opens up and I learned so much and I hope I know a lot of people listening feel the same way. So thanks, Oliver. And most important man, remember that happiness is a choice. So choose wisely. Be nice, go play guitar and have fun till next time. Peace and love everybody. I am out Oliver brother. Thank you for everything that

oliver Leiber (03:03:41.486)
Thank you.