I just finished listening to Marc Maron’s interview with Barack Obama on WTF. If you haven’t heard it yet, you can stream it here. When I found out last Friday that it was going down I got so excited! Not excited like my favorite TV show is coming on. I mean excited like my friend is getting to do this really cool thing and I’m happy for him.
I don’t know Marc Maron at all outside of his work. But as a guy that wears his heart on his sleeve, I feel like you get to know a lot about Marc that way. And when you get to know a person, you get excited for them. Honestly, I was just as excited for him when he spoke with Keith Richards and Mick Jagger recently.
I don’t think it was a great interview. It was a really good, really interesting interview. Especially once Marc got passed the excited puppy stage. Can you blame him? We’d all be like that. My favorite interviews on WTF are the ones with Marc talking to someone he both respects and feels somewhat on an equal level with. Those go deep and are really enjoyable.
But I think he did a great job with the president. He did the best he could keeping to his style of interview. And the questions “How are you crazy?” and “What is it when Michelle tells you ‘Please stop that.'” were perfect Marc Maron questions. I was so glad to hear those.
Really though… It didn’t matter to me who the presidential guest was. Politics is one of the worst forms of anything we have in the world and it doesn’t interest me. I keep up with issues and I have opinions, but I don’t care much for the people involved in it or fascinated by it. And I would have been just as happy for Marc if this were an interview with George Bush, Bill Clinton, or Richard Nixon (that would be a tough get!)
….Because it’s just this: Marc is an performer who stuck to his artistic guns for a long long time with only limited success. The podcast was an act of desperation that uncovered a hidden skill in his repertoire. And he’s accomplished so much with the sheer force of quality that the biggest man in the land wanted to visit his garage and be a part of it.
To me, as an artist the entertainment industry isn’t running to support and has been told to change my own artistic guns many times, this is an inspiring story. To be able to maintain control of your vision and see it through should give hope to everyone out there with an idea they’ve been told won’t work and have struggled to find support for.
It’s being able to forge something great and create a life for yourself from nothing but an idea and hard work. And that, my friends, is the American Dream.