Name: Dave Meets the Professor of Rock | David Letterman
Uploaded: 2025-10-22T15:21:50.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Dave Meets the Professor of Rock | David Letterman' from Letterman on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-10-22. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Dave Meets the Professor of Rock | David Letterman' from Letterman on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-10-22. Transcript available.

Dave Meets the Professor of Rock | David Letterman

hi i'm barbara gaines welcome to the barbara gaines show this is phil sheft
writer and drummer and
of course dave letterman hi nice to see you thanks for having me barbara i'm by
the way i'm very
excited yes this is yes very exciting we have a special guest i even have a
little blue card intro
good good our special guest today has his own youtube channel with almost a
million and a half
subscribers whoa how many how many do you have 800 000 wow yeah we're getting
there uh-huh he is a
renowned music historian and a master storyteller please welcome professor of
rock adam reader hi adam
adam thank you very much do you mind if i say a few things no please go i'm i'm
very happy to see you
thank you very much for your time this may be the busiest man on youtube adam
how many
how many new offerings do you put up a week oh i i monday through saturday i
take sundays off
this man works six days a week how often do you work uh twice a month
adam thank you again uh i'll just uh try to keep this to a minimum but i i see
you virtually every
night in my own home and i know quite a lot about you do you mind if i tell
things that i know about
you go ahead your favorite band is van halen yeah well they're my favorite hard
rock band give us
chronologically your you cover you dip back into the 60s and up into the early
2000s is that about right
yeah yep i know casey casem is somebody that's in your head all the time when
you're doing this he was
an influence on what you do now yeah when i grew up i grew up in a small town
in idaho what was the
town it was blackfoot idaho the potato capital of the world yeah come on
everybody let's go home yeah
there wasn't a lot to do so i listened to casey casem religiously i wrote down
the the top 40 every
week and and uh you know memorize that in my head and then i mtv became my
window to the world and so
that's why and then my dad was a huge influence of course he he would uh share
he was a big 50s 60s
guy and bob dylan and ccr and the beatles and that's how i grew up on all that
tell me a little
bit more about that relationship what did your dad do for a living my dad was a
he's a painting
contractor oh painting contractor yes painting contractor and but by the way we
were a letterman
household he loved your show sure yay here's the kicker my dad looked exactly
like jay leto no kidding
people would stop i can kind of see a resemblance in especially your lower face
jaw area yeah but i
think it's it's a good version of what you got there but he looked like jay leto
people would stop him
and ask him for his autograph sometimes because they thought it was leno and
and he and he's he was a
letterman guy you know and so we we grew up i grew up i mean i i remember
watching billy joel as your
first guest in 93 and end august your first show wow at cbs and i was so
excited because billy joel's
my number one really is that right let me ask you a question i put this
question to our friend paul
shaffer uh who's a bigger artist music artist star billy joel or uh elton john
yeah who's the bigger of
the two well i think the critics always loved elton but i was always billy joel
guy i think i think billy
joel uh i mean i love them both but i think billy joel next to only paul mccartney
is the greatest
melodist ever i mean billy joel could write a melody like nobody um to me he's
the greatest
your greatest at writing just a hit song and and by the way paul mccartney says
billy joel the
greatest rock vocalist oh is that right yeah the most versatile yeah well my
dream interview is billy
joel and i was thinking maybe you could pull some strings there dave i'm just
kidding uh i'll do what
i can't i this is let me let me move a few things around yeah uh the other
thing adam when i watch
your show there's so much information and so much research do you do all the
research yeah i mean for
the most part these are things that i've already read and and i i have in my
head but of course got
to go back and make sure that they're accurate so i do have uh some people on
the team that help with
that but you know when i do an interview i do normally 10 to 15 hours of
research to make sure
that i've got it all straight wow uh and who who writes what we see you present
or is that all in
your head that well that's a combination of i have people i have some people
that help me with that but
i i write everything i whatever they send i i write and and take all the ideas
and put them together
because i want it to be in my words i want it to be uh you know my feelings
that kind of thing
i i plan all the shows i plan all the top tens all that kind of stuff and uh
yeah well and and what
led you adam to a youtube for for this uh outlet this presentation actually
what happened is the pandemic
hit we were making documentaries we were going to be working with you know
various organizations out
there like sony and amazon that we were talking to the pandemic hit our
investors said we got killed in the market we got to pull out
so we put up on on youtube and overnight we just people started sharing our
stuff and
and it just word of mouth and it was just amazing how it came together and all
of a sudden you know
we had viewers well it speaks to the universality of uh music and especially
rock and roll music but
again explain to me uh would you uh are you limited to those three or four
decades uh is is rock and roll
uh excuse the expression withering any kid with any talent in their bedroom and
the right digital
equipment can have a billion streams of their music so getting people together
for a band is is that's
going away is that right yeah that's exactly right uh i think that music in the
new age is almost like a
background thing but my kids i've tried to raise them right i've got uh i've
got four kids two
that are out of the house but two boys that are in the house i've got a a son
that's autistic that's 14
and a son of 17. my son is 17 is playing the guitar he's learning the guitar
and uh you know he wants
to be great and i said well you know the guys i've interviewed like neil sean
from journey the guitarist
course of journey he he practiced eight to ten hours a day since he was a you
know just you know a little
kid so that's that's what it takes to be great and i i think that there's so
many different
distractions you know that happen with kids that they're not they're not
picking up the instrument
they're not learning as much but i still have faith in the process i mean you've
got great
youtubers out there like rick beato that uh you know is teaching guitar and and
and you know interviewing
people and that's what i'm trying to do try to keep the music alive so that
that you know i mean
it's like dave grohl said right you got just got to get into a garage and suck
for months and then
all of a sudden you're nirvana and i i believe that that's still alive you know
i i i have faith in
that that that music will always the cream will always rise to the top so uh we
need another moment
like nirvana i think there's the greatest opportunity in the history of music
right now i think anybody can
go in can plug in a guitar play have fans that kind of thing and create music
and i think it's incredible
though i worry about ai and the things coming in that could could try to
replace it but i think
people uh are getting tired of that i think people want real they want
sincerity they want passion
and i think that rock and roll has always been about those things i've been
following the threat to
your youtube channel can you explain to me the threat and then do we have a
threat to this channel other
than no one watching is the only thing we have we wish we wish but it has to do
with music rights is
that correct adam yeah a lot of people are facing this it's uh you know what we
what i do and what most
of us do is fair use you know we're talking about the the part of the song that
we're talking about we
play that part of the song now what i'm sorry to interrupt you but when we were
on a tv show
we got to use i think occasionally what was referred to as like a needle drop
where you get
like three to five seconds of a song is that the same as fair use yeah yeah i
mean that's all we use
is five to six seconds though you can use more than that to explain your point
but you know you're
getting copyright claims you're getting uh claims from from labels right for
the master you get claims
from people don't even own the master you know it's frustrating because you
would think the labels
would embrace what what myself and what other youtubers are doing because we're
trying to keep
the music alive we're trying to educate we're trying to continue uh you know
classic rock classic pop and
these interviews and and capture this history and you know sometimes labels
will reach out to me and say
hey will you do the the 40th anniversary of the b52s do this interview and push
this album
and then put a link at the bottom and i'll do that i'll get a claim and i'm
like i'm helping you guys
out why am i getting a claim no sense so is the basis of the claim that somehow
somebody is not getting
paid is that what it is i i think they just had with ai and with everything
going on they just go out
and they go out and they see oh they're playing the melody of this song they
match it up and they claim it
and i don't think the right hand is talking to the left hand you play music and
if you're not getting
any money for it can you can you then is it okay no they'll they'll come after
you no matter what
there's a guy that got that they came after playing for playing i think beethoven's
fifth is that's part of
that's part of the public domain and they're coming after him it's it's craziness
it's the wild west
i wanted to ask you this dave i know it's it's it's you guys a show but boy is
it
but i i loved when you had future islands on oh wow i watched that i'm not
kidding you i
watched that clip at least twice a month
the passion of that samuel guy and i love your reaction to it dave oh man i'll
take all of that
you guys yeah that was wonderful it was tremendous and i've heard that comment
endless number of times
and i keep thinking really i just i don't really remember that other than there
they are and wow that
was cool so i remember watching that and watching the guy and thinking this is
like if marlon brando
was a front man yeah it's the same yeah yeah and then we had him back at the
end yeah we had him
back right i saw the comment that said it's like if the gym teacher got up and
did this at a talent
show and you're like oh my gosh you know and i but i love your your passion for
music i've always loved
that dave rem you know when they were on in 1983 you were always pushing warren
zivon you're always
pushing these artists uh that you know we're a little bit outside of the norm
outside of radio friendly
and i've always appreciated that about you so i just wanted to say that because
that's the kind of
passion that we need out there his passion and your your reaction to it was
tremendous well i you know
the the the the kind of music and the the endless stream of music that we had
was because of the
people that produced it for us uh sheila and and paul sheila rogers and paul shaffer
and i just
benefited from that endlessly and to to this day since i got fired i i think my
appreciation for music has
only grown and that's one of the reasons that i enjoy your uh program so much
it's and as you point out
um you know music takes care of quite a lot of things maybe not permanently but
certainly
temporarily they can change things for you you remember just this is my
curiosity and what your
first album you bought was the first records that i bought with my own money i
bought bruce
springsteen born in the usa billy joel and innocent man and michael jackson
thriller were the first three
that i bought my pretty good yeah so i i started out in my house it was the
classical music uh and then
when my older sister listened to music it was like the kingston trio 