20 | Only The Word Gets Out Alive

0:09Speaker 1:You're listening to a Live Again, a production of Psycopia Pictures and iHeart Podcasts.

0:17Speaker 2:My name is Scott McCoy. I'm a musician and have toured the world with artists like rim M Ward and Robin Hitchcock. I've also started bands as a songwriter and singer, like The Minus Five, The Baseball Project, and The Young Fresh Fellows. On November fifteenth, twenty seventeen, while on tour, I collapsed on a San Francisco sidewalk, paralyzed by a stroke. What followed was one of the most surreal experiences of my life, and the songs I wrote during my recovery feel like messages from a version of myself that I barely recognized.

1:02Speaker 1:Now welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous accounts of human fragility and resilience from people whose lives were forever altered after having almost died. These are first hand accounts of near death experiences and, more broadly, brushes with death. Our mission is simple, find, explore, and share these stories to remind us all of our shared human condition. Please keep in mind these stories are true and maybe triggering for some listener, and discretion is advised.

1:48Speaker 2:My name is Scott McCoy and I played guitar with RAM for many years, and I was playing with them when Bill Barry the drummer, had an aneurysm. When we were on tour in nineteen ninety five in Lauson, Switzerland. It was a regular night, you know, we were having a great time, playing an awesome show. I didn't really notice any indication that there was something wrong with Bill. He was playing fine as far as I could tell. When I first noticed was when he got down off the drums to play bass on Half a World Away.

2:27Speaker 2:He played bass on a few songs in the set and he just he couldn't play, and he kind of like fell back and sat down back against the bassamp as I recall, and everybody's like, what the hell is going on? And then we just kind of lift him up and walked him off stage and he was, you know, apologizing. We went out and did some more songs, giving the fans the rest of a show, and then afterwards we just went and we saw Bill was being taken off into a into an ambulance. Once they realized it was an aneurysm, they had to operate immediately, and we were all sent home. Arim was a hugely popular band at that point. That was probably the peak of their popularity.

3:30Speaker 2:They made two records that sold like ten or fifteen million each. Then they made this big kind of glam rock record called Monster, and I was one of the people they asked to come along and help augment the sound on stage. My first show with Arim was Saturday Night Live, so that was really harrowing, but it was also really fun. Started the tour in Australia and we're playing these arenas and huge shows. My experienced before Arim was playing with the Young Fresh Fellows, which was a band I formed in Seattle with a friend from high school and his cousin. He played in clubs, you know, in front of five people to maybe five hundred people, or maybe a thousand if we were opening for the Red Hot Chili Coppers. Suddenly, with Arim, I was playing in front of fifteen twenty thousand people, maybe one hundred ninety thousand at Rock and Rio in Brazil. But once I started playing, it didn't feel that different. Even though there were tens of thousands of people cheering us on, it still felt like playing a rock show. It was still fun. I was still like playing with buddies on stage, and so it quickly became less daunting to me than

5:04Speaker 2:I thought it was going to be. So yeah, that was how I got into being an RAM and it was basically because Peter Buck, the guitar player, had moved to Seattle and I was his friend there. He'd met me over the years with the young fresh fellows coming to shows and stuff like that. So we just started playing together immediately, just strumming guitars together a lot and kind of hit it off. Before the RAM tour, we were recording a lot of songs together that I had written that turned into the first Minus five record. I grew up in Serto California, which is a small little suburb of San Jose in Santa Clair Valley. I played baseball and football, and then the Beatles happened. My dad worked at Sears and they had a little record department there, and he brought home a copy of I Want to Hold Your Hand and the music was and is absolutely fucking magical. I had an older sister, I had a younger sister too, and all three of us were suddenly standing in front of the giant console stereo in the living room, playing tennis rackets, you know, and pretending we're the Beatles. I mean, there's no other records that sound

6:38Speaker 2:like those records. Still to this day, my dad probably regretted that he ever brought home that forty five. I became totally obsessed with rock and roll when I was in my teens. I get my parents to take my friends and me to San Francisco to catch shows, like almost every weekend. This was the Bay Area, so I saw local bands like Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dad, Quicksilver, Investaders Service, and then bands like The Who, the Kinks, and Neil Young whenever they came to town. The first time I ever heard Suraway to Heaven was the fifth row at Berkeley Community Theater watching led Zeppelin, because they played the song before before the record even came out, you know, And I was just there for when when it was all new. I mean, you never knew what was going to hit you, and it was just like so magical and so insanely innovative, and there were people like that who were just trying to blow your mind and succeeding.

7:53Speaker 2:Of course, then I wanted to start a band. All my early bands were all just my group of friends, and that's what we like to do, is make music or listen to music together. We never even cared if we were really good or not. We play a party with six drunk people there, you know whatever. If I ever could even play a song in front of anyone, it was a huge thing. It still is now. It still is. There really wasn't a music scene in Seattle. I realized that the way to do things in music is to just do what you want to do and do it yourself. If you're planning and getting a deal on a major label or something, it's just dumb, you know.

8:52Speaker 2:I mean it worked for some people, but I never had any dream of that happening. You know. I never had a dream that I could make an indie record either by myself. But we discovered people were doing it, and we just figured out how to do it. So I was probably twenty seven when I first held a piece of vinyl that that I'd worked on, and it was just the culmination of all the fun that I'd had with my friends growing up, just listening to music and playing music together. The Young Frashpille's first record came out in nineteen eighty four, A few years after that, a record labo called Subpop started putting out great local bands like Mud Honey, Nirvana, Sound Garden. Some of those bands became really really huge. The Seattle sound back then became known as the grunge thing. We didn't really fit into that because Young Fishfellows were a pop band that those sub pop bands were always really good about giving us credit for being one of the first bands from the Pacific Northwest that actually got national coverage and went on national tours, and wherever we played, ten or fifty people remembered us because we were really really good. It

10:30Speaker 2:was a celevision of Ricky's Mouth Disease. We were really really fun to see, if it's a wedding or a high school dance, well dance the power most act, you know. Right with the Fellows we scraped by, you know, we make our tours so that they would make enough money or we wouldn't lose money or whatever. But suddenly with Rim, I was actually getting paid and it was like, Wow, this is this is amazing. So I guess that's how it became a career. I don't think it ever would have if it hadn't been for Rim. The Minus five was just It wasn't supposed to be a band. It was just supposed to be a recording project. Psychedelic folk sort of thing was what Peter and I were calling it.

11:42Speaker 2:Then somehow it became a band, you know, and we started playing rock and roll songs because because when you're played live, it's more fun to play rock and roll than to play down er slo songs. We also started playing with Alejandra Escovedo. Alejandra was one of the bright shining lights of Americana music. He does records in Spanish sometimes, but deep down he's a rocker. We did a record with him I made in twenty seventeen called Burned Something Beautiful, which we're very proud of. We were having so much fun on that tour. I mean, the Seattle show was just completely off the hook, and Portland what show was too.

12:35Speaker 2:And then we came to the Phoenix Hotel in San Francisco, which is a classic old dive in the heart of the Tenderloin. It's become like a place for bands to stay. We got there at three o'clock when we could check in. I went in, threw my stuff in the room, and I booked. I just turned around and headed for Cafe Trist to get a coffee. Cafe Trist is an authentic little Italian coffee shop in the heart of North Beach in San Francisco. It's where Francis port Cuppola wrote the screenplay for The Godfather, and you know, it was a major hangout for writers like Jack Kerouac and the beat Nick poets. I just really liked the vibe of that place.

13:23Speaker 2:Just a cappuccino that were so beautiful. The people there were just artists, and I would always go there to sit and write, you know, and just spend an afternoon there, you know, whenever I had time. And it was a beautiful day, I was heading to Cafe Trist, but I didn't make it. I was walking down Kearnie and suddenly I just felt like I was slowing down and I couldn't control my movements. I couldn't put my foot in front of in front of the other one. It didn't hurt, it was no pain. So it's like, I don't I was mystified. I don't know what's happening here. There was some scaffolding on the street, and I grabbed onto the scaffolding and I said, I'm just gonna hang on here for a second. I'm sure i'll feel better in a minute.

14:28Speaker 2:Something could have passed, you know. And it was like it was like thirty feet from the corner, and I thought, I'll wait for a few minutes. Then if I can walk to the corner, everything will be fine. But I just gradually couldn't even hold myself up anymore, and I just kind of slid down the scaffolding and just kind of crumpled spread out, half on the curb and half in the street. I wasn't really afraid. I don't know why I should have been. I should have been terrified, but I wasn't. I think I just remember going, well, this is happening. I don't know what it is, but I'm just gonna going to roll with it. You know.

15:16Speaker 2:I was conscious people were stepping over me and stuff, because you know, there there's another drunk guy on the street in San Francisco or whatever, you know, so they were stepping over me. I couldn't really get angry at them, but but I couldn't really signaled to anybody. I couldn't move or anything. I couldn't talk. I discovered that pretty quickly. Eventually, somebody stopped and looked at me, and they called nine on one or whatever, and pretty soon some medics came and took me away in an ambulance. I actually remember being in the back of the ambulance and we were driving up a really steep hill. I could look out the back window and just saw a beautiful, beautiful San Francisco panorama, and I was just living every thinking, God's so so beautiful out you know, It's like it's true.

16:22Speaker 2:It was just like it was like so lovely. I guess I was accepting what was happening somehow. Once I got the hospital, everything went south, like I lost in and out of consciousness and it was a total wreck for the next twenty four hours. I definitely panicked a lot of the time. I didn't know what was happening, So there's only very brief moments of where I can remember anything happening in that period. They couldn't figure out how to get in touch with anybody. Eventually, they called the last number that I dialed on my phone, and that was Linda Pittman, who's the drummer in the Minus five in Alejandro's band. She had this funny name that I called her Miss georgiet Polycarp is how her name appears in my phone, and uh so she thought it was a prank call by me because somebody called it is this miss Georgiett Polycarp And she was like, oh, yeah, what's happening here. The ms McCoy's pulling a fast one.

17:50Speaker 2:But yeah, they got the word to her that I was in the hospital, and so she got Peter Buck and they came down and from then on, I like, I really was out of touch. I didn't really know what was happening. After I've been there for twenty four hours. They finally got the doctor to give me a MRI because he wouldn't give me one because he said it's not a stroke. He said, he's a drunk. So you need an MRI to determine if you had a stroke and if so, where the blood clot is so it could be treated. The quicker the better because if you've had a stroke, each moment you delay creates the potential for more damage and more bit of your brain dying. Finally, Peter and my wife Mary, who had down from Portland at that point, said you got to give this guy m he's had a stroke. But this doctor just wouldn't believe it. I think they assumed I was a burnout drug addict because of it being San Francisco and being of the area was even though I wasn't actually in the tenderloin at that point. I just walked right through it, and you know I was. I was very very close, very very close, so I wouldn't have been shocked to

19:34Speaker 2:see somebody lying on the sidewalk in a puddle of piss on Kearney Street.

19:39Speaker 3:You know.

19:41Speaker 2:I wasn't in a puddle of piss. By the way, he must have had so many people come in that he was just so blase and so burned out on it or something like that. But I don't think that's an excuse for him. I mean, I didn't look terrible. I was wearing my rock and roll clothes. I was wearing a talk It from the Crypt bowling shirt and black jeans. I was carrying my little notebook with my lyrics song lyrics I was writing in and that was it. When Peter showed up, my wife told me that he said, look, whatever this costs, I've got it. Don't worry. There wasn't any reason for them to not do an MRI I don't know why that mattered, or why he wouldn't have just immediately regardless of who I was, or who my friends were, or what kind of condition I was in.

20:39Speaker 2:I don't know why he wouldn't have said, this guy's had a stroke and let's let's take care of him. It was really important to have my wife Mary there, and Peter and Linda, our drummer, were all They're really staying close and making sure that things were going the way they should go. It was probably hard for Peter because you'd been through it before with Bill Barry having an aneurysm, and it was the same thing with me. And aneurism is where you get a blockage in your blood vessel. The stroke comes from elsewhere, a clot is formed somewhere in your body and it goes up to your brain and it blocks the blood flow to your brain.

21:32Speaker 2:So at some point they transferred me to a stroke center at a better hospital across town. And weirdly, I also remember looking out the window of that ambulance too, and by then I was a total rack. I was paralyzed on the right side totally, and yeah, and so they put me in the I see you for ten days or something, and they had to raise my blood pressure to one ninety for a while to try to flush the rest of the clots out in my brain. I remember some really bad times in that hospital. I didn't know what was happening, and I was trying to move and stuff like that but not being able to.

22:24Speaker 2:And I couldn't understand what anybody was saying because their words were garbled to me, and everything I said was a real words didn't make any sense. So I was living in this weird world where I just didn't know what was happening. At one point, they started writing stuff out. They said, this is what you just said, and I was like, no, that's not what I said, because I was I was speaking into another language or whatever, you know, because the speech part of my brain was the part that had gotten killed, you know, it had had died. Basically.

23:07Speaker 2:It probably was only a couple of days before I started being able to understand what people were saying to me a little bit and where I started being able to say words that made a little bit of sense. But but it was it was really scary at that point. It wasn't fun. I didn't start realizing probably till you know, after a week or two that that I had really lost the ability two recall words. I didn't realize that was going to be a permanent thing, and you know, to to a to a degree, it hasn't been. It hasn't been permanent, but it kind of has. I mean, obviously I can talk now and I couldn't at first, but I can't really remember words to songs anymore or anything like that. I mean that it's come back in some ways, but it's still it's always a constant, a constant battle. When i'd been in there, I see you for a couple of days, and I was kind of starting to be a little bit more functional. Peter handed me a guitar because he wanted to see if I would remember anything about how to play a guitar, and I immediately put my fingers on the net in the shape of an a minor chord, and we both realized,

24:55Speaker 2:I can remember that. I haven't lost that, I haven't lost the to remember how to play guitar. I'm not saying I could play it, but I remembered. It was like the first real glimmer of hope for me, because I was like, well, I'm not going to have to completely learn guitar from scratch again. Really quickly. I started writing in my notebook, writing songs or lyrics or whatever was in my head, and those are those are really strange, and those are the lyrics I ended up using when I made the five album called Stroke Manner the Wall Wap Sponsor Root Talk Back on Top, because I just wanted to pay tribute to that moment, that weird state of mind, because I was I was just really I was proud that I was trying. I was trying to to to do something, to write when I couldn't really.

26:20Speaker 4:Sansu Kicks one Sellman, fucking wild Chi.

26:26Speaker 2:Some of the words are aren't even real. Like the one of the songs was called placent folk, and I don't know where that word came from. I think maybe it was like a weird blending of plangent and nascent.

26:43Speaker 5:To choose the time.

26:50Speaker 1:Can shoot in common.

26:56Speaker 6:Sentius.

27:04Speaker 2:So I really don't know what I was trying to say. White it sparkles ingratuitous. The Wizard of Oz came on the TV and it was like a really shitty little TV, like you know, classic hospital, upperly high and far away and had commercials and everything like that. But I remember with Peter watching Wizard of Oz that I was just kind of freaking out, like I'd never seen it before, and it was like it was like a total acid trip for sure. Peter just said I just kept saying, it's so weird, it's so weird. And one of the songs I obviously wrote about to watch it, it's called scarcrow and and it's it's all images that I think was me trying to to describe what was happening in the movie.

28:09Speaker 7:The dog clown was real, and.

28:22Speaker 2:I was writing these songs in the ICU, writing in my little notebook. I didn't really remember writing them.

28:32Speaker 4:Wasn't play.

28:35Speaker 2:At the first hospital when I came out of being unconscious, I remember asking somebody about my notebook, and one of the guys who came and picked me up and throw me in the ambulance said, yeah, here's your notebook. I've got it. And I remember him saying, I really liked that song he wrote about Facebook, so he had not only grabbed it, but he was he was reading it. And there was a song I wrote about how much I hate Facebook in this in there, and he really liked that. So I never never really put that into a into a song yet. But but I do remember that I loved him. I loved him because he had the book and I thought it was really cool that he that he read a song and liked it in there.

29:40Speaker 2:So after the stroke, I started looking at the lyrics I'd written in the notebook there, and I started de signing to try to make songs out of them. Then I started trying to record them to see if I could do it. And I discovered really quickly that I could still play. And I was coming up with weird things that I might not have beforehand, and I was singing in weird voices that I didn't do before, and that became the album Stroke Manner. When I got out of the hospital a month later, I had to drive back to Portland because I couldn't fly. Pressure would be weird to my brain or something like that. It would be dangerous, so I had to drive back. So the first thing when we left the hospital after a month there, we drove straight to Cafe trist and I got a cappuccino there. The first thing, Mary, I said, you're going to Cafe Triss. You're gonna make it. It just took a month one of the first things I said when I could actually communicate in the hospital is I said to Mary, don't don't don't do any benefit concerts or GoFundMe or anything like that, because I just I don't like that kind of attention. But you know, she said,

31:09Speaker 2:it's already too late. They ended up having these two big concerts in Portland in early January. It was like only six weeks after the stroke or something, and you know, they raised a lot of money, which was really really nice and just above and beyond everybody came and just we're just giving, you know. I did actually play a couple of songs. I played bass on a couple of songs with filthy friends, just to see if I could do it. But it was really hard because everything seemed really loud to me, and and I was I wasn't in really good shape. But but it was it was amazing.

32:15Speaker 2:Some of the music that was played was just so incredible and and it was It really meant a lot to me. I mean, like I said, I didn't want it to happen, but but when it did, I was very very thankful.

32:38Speaker 1:The future.

32:58Speaker 2:And that's my whole life is is just based on music. And other people who I love, who love music. But you know, the whole thing is the benefits shouldn't have had to happen because it should be taken care of. Your health care should be taken care of. And with my situation, and this is an important point I should make, it could have been prevented because I knew there was something going on with me. I mean, I'd gone to see a doctor like a year before to have him look at my heart, and a said, well, we're not finding anything now, but I should have you wear a monitor for a month and we'll see how your heart's doing.

33:47Speaker 2:I realized I was getting out of breath really easily. It wasn't pausing me die or worry. But I never went back. And what I found out later is that's why I had a stroke, because my heart runs really irregular, and so that's why I got clots. I'm niloquist now. Yeah, it's a blood dinner. It seems to be help. I'll be on it for the rest of my life. Probably, I would just say I had a stroke, and all the things that are bad for you, they'll they raise your they raise your your chance of having a stroke.

34:30Speaker 2:And the other thing is I say, once you have a stroke, you're probably gonna have another one, you know. So so that's not that's not a comforting thought. But I feel so lucky that I function as well as I can right now. I think what it has done for me is it's made me just more desperate to to keep creating art and keep putting things out there. When you're creating art or making a record, you are committing something to eternity. I don't know who we're committing it for or how long it's actually gonna last, but it's important to me to get those things out and get them into the existence. For some reason. I know I only write songs for myself, really, but there's a reason that I must feel like I have to record them and release them. You know, I'm seventy years old now, and that's just shocking to me. It's shocking to me, and I feel like I don't have that much time left.

35:49Speaker 2:What's important for me now is my little family, my wife and my dog Gladys, spending time with them and with all my friends that I make music with. But the biggest driving force in me is to keep making music. There's a whole new manusfib record out called War on Penelope. I don't even know what makes it different from the rest of the records I've done, but to me it feels like a really positive record. You know, some of my records are real downers, and this just feels really positive.

36:27Speaker 2:Like the lyrics to Words and Birds, which is the first single, Let me see if I can remember them. Sometimes words can be a challenge after after a stroke. Look at that. Try what's the first part? Time Time is time hangs, time hangs hard on our hands. A bird makes no demands, try to survive. Only the word gets out alive. That's all right. I did it.

37:04Speaker 1:I did it.

37:08Speaker 2:You'd think that would be ingrained in my mind after writing it, singing it a hundred times, listening to it a million times, working on the song, but it's just it. Stuff just goes away in my brain so quickly. The weirdest thing is the songs I can remember the best are songs that were like the first Young Fresh Fellows album.

37:30Speaker 4:I went and told him I was new downtown and I did not know the propers pass it, hang around.

37:36Speaker 2:Songs are harder for me to remember, the newer they are, so I keep a music stand nearby with the lyrics on them. When I'm playing shows nowadays, it's a fine line between to be in the moment and singing the song without still having to worry about looking at the words printed in front of me to remember the So it's it's not. It's not my favorite thing. I look back at the old days and think how I could just spellt off three hundred songs without even thinking about him.

38:12Speaker 2:But now it's like every song, no matter how many times I've sang it, I still worry that it's gonna go blank. It's gonna go away. They can't fly.

38:36Speaker 4:It's true, that's not all they couldn't do. We tried to under the fat, quantify the sky um tup buck kicks, but the high one suck. It's all too beautiful, man, too beautiful to them.

39:03Speaker 2:So names.

39:07Speaker 4:Now try.

39:12Speaker 2:Gets out a lot, try to.

39:33Speaker 1:Welcome back. This is a Live Again joining me for a conversation about today's story or my other alive again story. Producers Lauren Vogelbaum, Nicholas Dakowski, and Brent Die And I'm your host, Dan Bush. Brent, how did you find this story?

39:47Speaker 7:A good friend of mine had a stroke in January and a young guy soccer player, and it just kind of came up on him. So I was doing research to try to figure out how to help my friend who had just had a stroke. We all were, and I came across this story, and I thought there was a lot to it, you know, in terms of the failings of our healthcare system, in terms of how does a stroke effect somebody whose career is related so much in words and language, which are affect everybody who has a stroke. Usually that's one of the first things that it really hits them. And yeah, I mean, and I loved his music. I was familiar with The Baseball Project minus five ram, so I just was like, Wow, this is just a really interesting Can I just say that.

40:34Speaker 1:The moment when he's in the hospital room watching The Wizard of Oz but the scarcrow is that what he called it, scarcrow. But here's a man who's lost his grip on reality. He's watching one of the most archetypal stories about alternate reality ever made on a fuzzy hospital TV. And he kept saying, you know, it's so weird, it's so weird. And here he is, having had a trying to make sense of what he's looking at. I mean, for me, that moment was like just chef's kiss of like what how absurd life can be?

41:11Speaker 7:Particularly when this is something that we've all seen a million times, right, seeing it with new.

41:16Speaker 3:Eyes, Yeah, because if you hadn't grown up with that movie, right, I was thinking, like, if I had not grown up seeing that movie you know, once a week, Yeah, what would you think of that? As an adult? Just dropped into our.

41:30Speaker 7:All sorts of brain saving medication.

41:33Speaker 1:But it's it's like, I found that really poetic that this this broken brain is trying to rebuild itself while watching Dorothy try to Go Home. Isn't that just like the most poetic thing in the world.

41:46Speaker 7:And he writes a song about a character who said, if I only had a brain.

41:50Speaker 1:I mean, he wasn't horrified. He was sort of oddly passive during this experience. He wasn't freaking out inside of his own brain. And you know, if you're paralyzed, you can't talk, you can't really control your muscles, and all you can all he could do was sort of slide down the scaffolding and collapse onto the sidewalk there in San Francisco. That one that's hard to imagine being sort of in prison in your own body. But secondly, he wasn't scared. He just sort of like, oh, okay, this is happening. Yeah, and then people are stepping over him, thinking, oh, he's probably just a burnout, just a drunk, right.

42:20Speaker 3:That callousness, that learned callousness of living in a city.

42:23Speaker 7:Yeah, I wish you would have spent more time on that, because just the idea of being trapped in your body has always kind of been a fascinating thing to me. Yeah, he's lying on the street and you can't even get angry at these people that are stepping over him. And I just, I guess because I'm claustrophobic, I think I would be losing my mind for an artist who's entire existence is about self expression, and suddenly your tongue is clapped and you can't speak, and you can't you can make sense of what people are saying to you, But when you try to express yourself, back, jarbled garbage comes out. Yeah, things that you're very familiar with the Wizard of Oz Beatles' songs.

43:03Speaker 7:When you tried to express what you've just experienced, it comes out as gibberish would be frightening.

43:09Speaker 3:I think that in the moment of having the stroke, Scott was very calm, but he described the developing terror of realizing that this was real, that this was ongoing, that it was not a thing that was about to stop, and that furthermore, he wasn't being believed by the healthcare workers who were ostensibly supposed to be there to save his life.

43:34Speaker 1:Yeah, everything that he was having to go through was sort of deepened by this weird neglect and this doctor who refuses to give him an MRI because he assumes that Scott's a drunk and a burnout. He doesn't. So the doctor didn't see a human being. He saw a type, you know. And it's this question of like who decides who's worthy of medical attention?

43:56Speaker 7:Right, And like when my friend had his stroke, they said that the thing that doctor told him was like every second we do not get an MRI on you, and we don't figure out what is happening to you. Your brain is getting killed. Parts of your brain are drying and not to come back necessarily. So to be in this dier of a situation and be denied care just because they assume he's a drunk and like Scott said, you know, maybe they have drunk homeless people come in in all the time and they give them in our eyes and they're just drunk. Maybe maybe that's the case, but certainly we can do better.

44:32Speaker 6:That's the understatement.

44:33Speaker 7:Yeah, I mean, why isn't it just part of our system? You know, when somebody's bought into an emergency room, if I breathalyzer, give them what they need.

44:42Speaker 1:Yeah, because that's what I thought.

44:44Speaker 7:The juxtaposition of here's a guy that ofsentstantly nobody knows, they think he's a drunk lane on the street, and then Peter Buck walks in a lot of people know who that is, and it's like, what difference does it make?

44:55Speaker 3:It shouldn't take a literal rock star walking into your room to get something done.

45:00Speaker 6:That's very rare, very expensive insurance. I've got a Buck policy.

45:07Speaker 7:But yeah, I think it highlights the whole whole gap in our health system. You know, if you're a recognized figure, here's the door, come on in. But if you're just average.

45:19Speaker 6:Joe, I feel like a running theme in this show is that the healthcare system is fucked beyond belief and just getting.

45:28Speaker 1:Worse driven by profit.

45:31Speaker 2:Yeah.

45:31Speaker 3:Yeah, and it's not even that one doctor's fault. I mean, it is his fault.

45:37Speaker 6:Screwed that guy, and it is both the faults of the system and the top.

45:41Speaker 3:But we're right, and at the same time, you know, like you have to, you have to empathize a little bit with this, with this dude who you know, it's probably working twelves, you know, he's probably working twelve hours a day. He's seeing humanity when they are not at their best. People walk into an er, are not having a good day, they're not treating you well. It's difficult to remain to remain empathetic for humanity when that is what you are seeing day in and day out.

46:06Speaker 7:He's probably dealing with a certain amount of resource management as well.

46:09Speaker 1:Oh of course, yeah, that's that's all true. But there is still this underlying arrogance that goes with the white coat that is just overwhelming at times. I mean, it's it's sort of built into In other words, that's sure, he had all these obstacles, but he wasn't able to see correctly because he was stuck in his own arrogance, which was something that I think was probably it's a learned behavior.

46:31Speaker 6:Honestly, I also frequently think that that also depends on the doctor's background, like jeep background, like where did they come from?

46:39Speaker 2:I think, I think true.

46:41Speaker 1:But I think that arrogance is also systemic in medical school. I think you're taught to have that sort of and it maybe has to do with the policebo effect, like you put somebody puts on a white coat and it's like, oh, we believe him. We we we lose our autonomy as over our own bodies because we trust this guy who just walked in the door. And I think there's something about that that is trained. I think that arrogance has trained mostly I think an arrogance.

47:03Speaker 2:Yeah.

47:04Speaker 7:I will say it's remarkable what he's done since the stroke. I mean, like he's put out I don't know if the Baseball Project has put out another album, but he just put out an album with Minus five and they're on two. He's on a crazy tour this summer. It's a great album. But to be able to do it, you know, to be able to get out there and keep doing it. And one thing about these stories, so many of them are about redirecting. You have this near death experience and it redirects your life. A light bulb goes on on you. You see the path you should have been on. And I think what's remarkable about Scott's story is he was on that path already, like from a young age. He discovered his love of music and the community that that has built for him. And all he got out of this experience was I don't have much more time left to do this thing that I love to do, and to create this thing I'm compelled to create and to throw it out there in the universe.

47:55Speaker 7:God knows why. I'm being told almost that I have to create. So many of us feel that impulse, and he's lucky enough to be in a position where he can act on it. Yeah, and he's not going to give it up, you know. I think that's that's a really cool part of his story.

48:08Speaker 1:I love to.

48:08Speaker 7:When he's dying in the ambulance and he just looks out and sees the beautiful panorama.

48:15Speaker 2:Of San Francisco.

48:16Speaker 3:It's like, oh, what a nice day.

48:18Speaker 2:Yeah.

48:19Speaker 7:It's funny how many of these stories people are like, oh, this would this would be a good moment.

48:23Speaker 5:Yeah.

48:24Speaker 3:I think I cried a little bit when the nurse or hospital attendant or whoever it was, gave him back the notebook because yeah, I've lost notebooks before, and it's I mean, you know, stroke bigger issue losing a notebook crushing, completely crushing.

48:43Speaker 6:Losing a notebook is it makes me very upset.

48:46Speaker 1:I like that he didn't just give the notebook back. He had some commentation, right.

48:49Speaker 3:Yeah, he was like, well, I've added some notes. No, it's like spell tracked but so sweet and I and I also do want to put in here that his philosophy of like, don't if you're an artist, do it to art. Don't do it because you want to get signed on a big label. Don't do it because you want to go big, because that's not why you art. And it's I know it's easy to say that from a position of being a world touring artist, but at the same time, yeah, like you can't believe me. I say this as a human who works for her day job in podcasting. You cannot make something go viral, that's not what happens. But you can make beautiful, weird art yea.

49:34Speaker 1:And chances of it going viral have nothing to do with you wanting that result have everything to do with you actually being authentic.

49:40Speaker 3:Yeah, well, or well placed marketing and advertising.

49:44Speaker 7:But well, I think kind of back to what you were saying. You know, his authenticity is what created that opportunity to play with Ram. You know, like the Young First Fellows. I knew them from when I was in high school. They would play them on the progressive station and I love their music and they we're coming up at the same time as like the Replacements and Who's Screwed two and Ram And what the indie music scene represented to me at the time was people doing what you're talking about, just make an art, to make art, not trying to follow a trend. And the community that he built through that. I mean, Scott not only is in Minus five, he's in the Baseball Project, he plays for Alejandro Escovito, he plays for m Ward, he plays for all these different artists because he's going to support them.

50:31Speaker 7:He's going to become part of the team and play at his ideas and play the music that he wants to play. And out of that came this whole benefit concert. As he said, you shouldn't have to depend on a go fundme or a benefit concert to have your healthcare addressed. In this country, healthcare should be all right. If you've had a stroke and you're lying in the street and people are stepping over your body, then you need to be taken into a hospital and taken care of immediately. Well, doing the story it's been I mean, I was not extremely familiar with The Baseball Project. I kind of just got to give them a plug because it's this band.

51:08Speaker 7:I'm not a baseball fan, but it's this band that tells all these stories. All the songs are stories that have really happened in baseball, and it's been such a bleak period in this period of that we're living through right now in baseball history.

51:23Speaker 1:In baseball, I have a doll.

51:26Speaker 7:I haven't followed baseball since the strikes of the early nineties, but it has been such a dark time, like world history wise. And then researching the story, going to the gym, listening to his music to just kind of get a background on it. It's been a delight to listen to these records by The Baseball Project. So if you're in a dark space and you want some good music, may I recommend the album's three in Grand Salami Time by The Baseball Project. They are a lot of fun.

52:06Speaker 1:Next week, on a Live Again, we meet Matthew Fortune, who lived twenty five years on the street before a fentanyl overdose stopped his heart. Your feet had been wet for three days.

52:16Speaker 5:You're in wet clothes when it's freezing cold, and you don't have a blanket.

52:20Speaker 2:You're in a T shirt.

52:22Speaker 5:If somebody hanging you a pipe and you can hit it once and feel better, if you're gonna hit it once and feel better, My heart started beating and then stopped, and then started, and so they kept going, and so they did it for about forty five minutes. It's a miracle I was brought back because if you know anything about CPR, they do not typically.

52:40Speaker 1:Go that long. He shares a brutal and honest account of addiction, homelessness, and what it takes to rebuild a life when there's nowhere left to fall. A heartfelt thank you to Scott McCoy for generously sharing his story and his music. This episode features songs from Scott's incredible body of work, including tracks from The Young Fresh Fellows, The Baseball Project, The Minus Five, and Alejandro Escaveto. For a full list of songs featured in this episode, please visit our show notes, where you can check out our website Alive Again Project dot com. Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent Die, Nicholas Dakowski, and Lauren Vogelbaum. Music by Ben Lovet, additional music by Alexander Rodriguez. Our executive producers are Matthew Frederick and Trevor Young. Special thanks to Alexander Williams for additional production support. Our studio engineers are Rima el Kali and Noames Griffin. Our editors are Dan Bush, Gerhartslovitch, Got, Brent Die and Alexander Rodriguez. Mixing by Ben Lovett and Alexander Rodriguez. I'm your host of Dan bushli n is a production of I Art Radio and Psychopia Pictures. If

54:03Speaker 1:you have a transformative near death experience to share, we'd.

54:06Speaker 2:Love to hear your story.

54:08Speaker 1:Please email us at a Live Again Project at gmail dot com. That's a l I v E A g A I N P R O j E c T at gmail dot com.

54:27Speaker 2:Lee one