Billy Corgan and the Nelson Brothers: A Conversation on Music and Life |The Magnificent Others

The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan

Billy Corgan sits down with Matthew and Gunnar Nelson, sons of legendary rock star Ricky Nelson and grandsons of TV icons Ozzie and Harriet, to discuss their

Key takeaways

• Creative integrity often clashes with commercial demands, but staying true to one's art is essential for long-term fulfillment.
• The loss of a parent at a young age forced the Nelson brothers into adulthood early, shaping their resilience and commitment to music.

Main topics

• Music industry challenges
• Grief and loss

Notable quotes

"If you try to shift creatively to please the suits. Even if you win, you lose."

"We just don't quit. We just move forward, learn from it. The show must go on."

Conclusion

The Nelson brothers' story is one of enduring brotherhood, resilience through loss, and

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) I just, I love music. I get to play it with my brother, which is awesome. I haven't killed him yet, which is even better. We've always been in the business of connection. And I think music has this way of doing that. We got in the studio and we realized that it was really going to be about songs, the power of songs. It's all about the song. Some songs rise above the moment. That's one of those songs that's just like, to me, that's your dad's song. If you try to shift Speaker 1 (0:29) creatively to please the suits. Even if you win, you lose. We just don't have quit. I think that's what we write in the book. We just don't quit. We just move forward, learn from it. The show must go on. You know, you've got this machine around you and everyone's depending on you and no one stops to think, hey man, how you doing? Are you doing okay? And he said, well, I just wanted to let you know that I'm gonna do everything in my power to kill your record. I'm gonna make sure that it never gets heard and there's gonna be no support. You're gonna get no money. There's gonna be no... Videos know nothing. Just so you're not surprised. Speaker 1 (1:02) Gentlemen, welcome. Nice to see you both. You too. So let's start here because this is always the most exciting part. New music, you got a new record you're preparing. Of course, I always say, I never know where people are going to see the interview. So at the time, the record has not come out, but you're about to release singles and all that stuff. So if you want to talk about that. Well, right now we're in the mixing phase. We're working with a mutual friend, Chris Lord-Alge, right now doing the actual mixing. And Matthew and I are based out of Franklin, Tennessee. So we have a studio out there. But when I think... Speaker 1 (1:30) LA, I think of you. Born and raised. How could you leave? The sun kissed Malibu Beach once. Yeah, we actually went to high school at Palisades High. It's been in the news lately too. It's kind of there. Is it still there? No, mostly gone. All gone. Have you driven over there? I can't bring myself to do it. He did. I tried and they turned me away. It was kind of fresh and what a shame. We had just come back from actually doing a benefit concert for Lahaina, for Maui, and it felt eerily similar. Eerily similar. And kind of the Palisades Village had a little bit of that vibe, which was rare in California. So we miss it a lot. Yeah, we were here actually for some reason. We were just staying in town, my family and I. So it was weird to be kind of not a tourist, but like you're not living here, but you're in the... Speaker 1 (2:17) anxiety of it. Just the anxiety of that time was really high. So you were here during the fire? Yeah. We just happened to be staying in town for work or something. And the kids were freaked out. And one night we had a fire break out across kind of this valley from where we were staying. And there were helicopters coming. My kids are freaking out. I got little kids, you know. But Nelson, we actually were originally from New Jersey. Ozzie and Harriet had a big band back in the day. Speaker 1 (2:45) based out of Richfield Park. I'm old enough to remember you. And they moved out here for the television show, thinking that TV was going to be a fad, and they were going to be able to get back on tour with the band. Yes. It kind of took off. And here we are now in the future with fast channels, and the Ozzy and Harriet show will live in perpetuity. I hope so. We just restored it. I saw that. Our grandfather, Ozzy, filmed on 35mm film. Smart guy. Yeah. Speaker 1 (3:12) He was a great guy. He wrote, produced, edited, directed, starred in all 435 episodes of the show. It's probably where we inherited our insomnia and our drive. Your beautiful work ethic, yeah. He did a great job. And of course, our dad singing on the show didn't hurt either. Going through all that stuff and figuring out, and our dad was our best friend, great guy. But hearing those stories and finding all the documents of things like ABC sending a letter saying, hey, congratulations on... Ricky's success as a singer. We just want you to know, though, if he leaves the show to go sing full time, the show's canceled. And the show ran for another seven years. No pressure on a teenage kid. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So. Speaker 1 (3:54) Talk a little bit about the music you're doing. Oh, great, great. It's a melodic rock record. It's for anybody who liked our first record, After the Rain. It's kind of a modern continuation, similar theme, but it's all about the songs for us. Yeah. So we kind of waited a bunch of years until we had 10 bangers that we feel anyways and put them down. I feel, I mean, you tell me, you live it, but it seems like... Speaker 1 (4:21) time has been kind to what you guys originally were after, which was this kind of melodic rock. It seems to have aged very well. Well, we were different from a lot of the bands that came out before. I mean, Matthew kind of pointed out that Geffen back in the day kind of marketed us as a heavy metal boy band, which wasn't our choosing. But I'm trying to remember. I mean, I certainly remember when you guys suddenly were on MTV every five seconds. It was like, there you were. We looked like hot Swedish chicks. Speaker 1 (4:46) I wasn't thinking that. I was more focused on the songs. Well, the songs also, we weren't blues-based, mostly. Yeah, you guys weren't heavy on the pentatonics. Right, not really. We weren't. And it was more of like a heavy version of the Hollies that we were going for meets the Eberleys. Oh, interesting. And so it seemed to work that way. And everybody was kind of doing the black and white thing and the videos, and we went full color. I guess the idea was that... Speaker 1 (5:11) People were going to get a snippet of time in which to make a, find an attraction to what we were doing or just pay attention, really. There were no guarantees. And so that's kind of where the look came from, too. We've done some writing with some people in Europe where they really emphasize that that was super important is the image and getting that together. And we had the, I don't know, ironic, I think, looking back on it, situation of everybody thinking that it was. Speaker 1 (5:40) And music was just a hobby for us. So we kind of picked up and wanted, oh, here's some rich kids that want to do something. And our upbringing really wasn't Ozzy and Harry. It was the opposite of that. And music for us was our way out of our kind of our prison. And we had each other and we started doing it young and it just kind of developed. We started playing clubs really young. We were like 12, 13 before we rolled. Like Madam Wong's was a place that we used to play. And that was pretty much eight to 10 years before all that hairband stuff that came out that we were kind of lumped in with. Speaker 1 (6:09) Oh, I see. So from your perspective, when this all kind of starts to kick in, this is what we do. Like you're not riding some way. You're just. This is an extension of where we are. And I think one thing that was a real kicker for us was losing our dad the way that we did and just kind of being thrust into, hey, figure it out, guys. Yeah. That really, it caused us to either sink or swim and made a decision. It was really like, I remember we were dealing with a lot of grief and pain. putting it into stuff. And it was one person at the right time that said, hey, you know, you guys don't need to do this, right? You don't have to do this. You know anything you want to do. The world's wide open. And when we looked at each other and went, no, but we want to do this. Everything kind of like went from there. It's like we're on a mission. Yeah, it strikes me. I mean, I've been friends with. Speaker 1 (6:55) other children of celebrity patronage or parentage. And when you have loss in the family, it's not just the private part. There's always this kind of personal thing that comes in where you have people constantly coming up and giving you their reflections. You almost become this kind of constant wake line. A bit. A bit. We've had that a lot and we've actually embraced it. We think that it's actually, it's kind of lovely most of the time. The people especially that have a meeting with our dad or our grandparents or things. And now on our mom's side, Mark Harmon is our uncle. And so it's kind of, people have been seeing us for a long time that way. And they feel like they're kin to us. They feel like they're related to us a little bit. Yeah. There is that in America. I think it's partially because we don't have a royal family. So celebrity almost becomes a version of royalty. Speaker 1 (7:48) I think you're right, but I think, yeah. Like I used to tell you, I was friends with Lisa Marie Presley. I used to say, you know, it's your rock royalty. It's like, there's no escaping it. You're Elvis's daughter. There's no escaping it. That was true with her. And I remember the last time we saw her was with James Burton, our dad's guitar player. I went to go see a show that she was playing and we waited for the very, it was at the Opry and we waited for the very last people. And we spent about an hour with her. And it was kind of neat to be able to talk to her about things as you, you know, Elvis was our dad's pal. Speaker 1 (8:17) Kind of almost treated our dad like a little brother. Yeah. He played like these famous football games together. I heard about that, yeah. So it was neat in the sense that, yeah, of course, we had something we could relate to that way. And there's the same situation with people that are related to other people that spin out in the curves. And we always say we could have wound up that way just as easily as the other. Sure. Speaker 1 (8:42) 9-29-1990. Remember that date? Yep. Well, that September 29th, it was actually, I think it was the 20th, was our 22nd birthday. Yes, I have that here, too. You skipped ahead on me. Sorry. No, it's fine. I said not bad for your 23rd birthday present. Right, not so bad at all. I think that's when we got the phone call that love and affection had gotten number one. That's right. Which was... Speaker 1 (9:05) an amazing day. That's an interesting call to get, right? It was. And you know, we wrote about this in the book, or at least I didn't in my chapter on this. We've been working towards it our whole lives doing that. We started playing when we were six. So you always think, hey, you're going to prove all those naysayers wrong. When you say six, what does that look like when you're six? Pots and pans in the kitchen, making a lot of racket. I was a drummer first. Yeah. And I loved it. My first memory was seeing my dad at Knott's Berry Farm. Speaker 1 (9:33) off the side of the stage and i kind of made this connection wow it's pop and yeah he's happy and but the drums and i just thought it was great so the title of that chapter is i just want to hit something yeah yeah and gunner was actually a savant drummer he just had this thing where and we grew up as a rhythm section okay that's kind of the heartbeat of what we do even though it's really now more write songs acoustic guitar yeah you know so you don't you're not hiding and uh he was a great drummer to the point of where when we started playing in clubs Speaker 1 (10:02) all the grownups were coming to see him play the drums, kind of like, look at this freak show kid that's playing the drums. And it really worked out well. And it was when we turned 18 and our dad passed away suddenly, and we had already booked Saturday Night Live as a musical guest. Funny story there too. But on the way home, Gunnar just turned to me and he said, and I thought he'd lost his marbles. I really, because it was a lot for us. We found out. Speaker 1 (10:26) Our dad was dead. I found out on the car radio. Gunner was watching television. That's the most horrific thought. And we were supposed to be on the plane with him. So it was just too much. I have to call it like a football game even all this time later. I miss him every day. But on the way home, Gunner just turned to me and he said, you know, I got to come up with you. I got to come up front with you. I just played my last gig as a drummer. And I said, what are you talking about? He goes, are you happy? I said, no, I'm miserable. I said, me too. Speaker 1 (10:53) And we decided we had to get ourselves together. But he said, I promise you, I'm going to learn how to play guitar, which he didn't know how to play at all. And he was a lefty. We're mirror twins. So I was born, I'm right-handed, he's left-handed. And he convinced me, because I figured there was no way I was going to talk him out of this, that he was going to learn how to play guitar. For one year, he's going to have a guitar in his hand every day, all day long. And like all those people we grew up with saying, I've been playing guitar for 10 years. He said, I'm going to make my hands bleed. I'm going to learn from people. Speaker 1 (11:21) We were friends with Dweezil Zappa, who was a savant, great guitar player. And Dweezil kind of became his first guitar teacher, wrote out a chart where Dweezil's mind works. That was how the fretboard was. It's the Zappa mind. It's unbelievable. And Gunnar, to his credit, never stopped playing guitar for a year. And we kind of got our heads together. Was the thinking, though, that if we're going to make it, am I jumping ahead? I just had this vision of kind of like a modern Everly Brothers thing. Speaker 1 (11:50) Yeah. Being the two guys up there doing that. Well, it certainly works. Yeah, yeah, it does. It did, but the weirdest thing, too, was that I had been the lead singer most of the time. And we got in the studio, and we realized that it was really going to be about songs, the power of songs. Yeah. It's all about the song. And we decided to, even though we'd played a lot of clubs, start fresh, meet some people, learn the craft, really start over again. If he was starting over again on guitar and coming up fun. I had a similar experience. Yeah, and it was really. Where you just go. Speaker 1 (12:19) If I'm really going to do this, I got to go this way. It was that simple. Everything that's happened has been fine, but now I got to. Yeah. I totally get what you're saying. Yeah. And it really worked for us. We really started getting into what it was like to not just write. Everybody can write songs. You got to write good songs. What was it about your father's passing, though, that sort of shifted that for you? Well, we had to hit bottom. You know, we did. We spent a year. Speaker 1 (12:42) after our dad died, being those guys we never wanted to be. Being those Hollywood kids that you read about in the tabloids and stuff. And we got to the end of that year broken every way you can be broke. Did I hear right? I think I saw somewhere he was, your dad was $4 million in debt when he passed away. He was. Yeah, he owed a lot of money. That's a lot of money. Well, here was a problem as well. Bankruptcy for him was never on the table because he just thought that it was dishonorable. Speaker 1 (13:07) And we inherited a bit of that as well. But there's also another situation. If you declare bankruptcy, everything goes in the pot. That's every song, all the publishing, the Ozzie and Harriet show, all of it. Name it like this, right? Everything. Everything goes. So our situation was a little different that way. Wow. You know, I know a lot of people that use it almost as a financial strategy. I'm just going to, you know, walk away from it. Yeah. We really couldn't. Or we could. Actually, you have a choice. Well, thank God you didn't. I agree. And all these years later, and that was another thing we're kind of. Speaker 1 (13:36) finding our feet as people, as artists, but also as, you know, we never felt like we were entitled to anything, but we felt like we had a duty. It was like an honor thing, which we accepted because we loved our dad. We loved our grandparents. They were great. They were really funny and really good people. I never saw our dad have one of those celebrity moments ever. And he was arguably, with Elvis, the most famous person in the world, and he never acted like it. Speaker 1 (14:04) He was impossibly good looking because he really was a handsome guy. But it was almost, he was shy about that. I mean, we saw women fall apart when he was around. And I'm talking not people that knew who he was. He just had that Elvis charisma thing, you know. But he was also what we identify with too. He was a teen idol when there wasn't such a thing. They coined the term for him, but he was a real deal. I mean, they would record on a Friday and it was on the air on Monday. There was just. Yeah, I think it's hard for the modern world to understand that level of fame. Speaker 1 (14:33) Because we assume because of the reach of the internet, we assume that fame these days is different because people can show these massive numbers. But I think what people get lost in that is the compression. Like when your father walked through life as a 20-year-old man, the entire country knew who he was. Oh, sure. Not just people who were into that type of music. The entire country knew who he was. In his situation, it's like the country grew up. Speaker 1 (14:56) with the adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and watched him grow up in a very real way from the time he was six. And there were 435 episodes, a lot of them. And it was part of the lexicon, still is. And coming out of World War II, I mean, at that time, there were basically three national channels and a local for everybody. Television was brand new. So you didn't have a million channels like you mentioned. And when they tuned into Ozzie and Harriet, the whole country did. And so it was just a different time. Speaker 1 (15:25) He always surrounded himself with the best musicians. Matt mentioned James Burton. We love Elvis, too, that Elvis connection. Elvis tried to steal James from our dad for years. And our grandfather, Ozzy, nobody knew that he was a lawyer. He had a law degree from Rutgers. So he knew what he was doing when he was negotiating contracts. The family wound up owning the show because he paid a little extra money. And he had complete control of it. And as a musician, you know what that's like. And ironically, there's a great clip of him, I think it was on Mike Douglas or something, where he was asked about what it was like running the show. And he said, well, having autonomy, I think, is really crucial because I just don't believe in art by committee. I don't think it works. And now people, you see the song credits for any number of pop songs. How about one or two people, not 500? Speaker 1 (16:20) Times are changing. I covered Wrecking Ball by Miley Cyrus once, and I think there were 12 writers on the song. Well, there you go. Yeah. Crazy. Art by committee. Yeah. I'm always fascinated because I think that you understand this vibe because I get it too. You know, people want to talk about a peak moment in your life, and then they sort of, it's like after that you sort of fade into some sort of shadow in their mind. You know, they remember that time, they remember that song, they remember that album. Speaker 1 (16:48) So I'm always fascinated by what was your experience because being number one, huge, you know, had a big MTV moment. You guys were certainly everywhere there for more than a hot minute. Not so much how did it feel because we all know it's very intoxicating, but it's more the idea of like, did you think, okay, now that we're here, we can do this or this opens up this other lane or like, what was your inner perception of? Really cool. Interesting. It was, it was overwhelming. It really was. On a Friday, we went to the Valley over here. We're filming this in Los Angeles. And we went to the Sherman Oaks Galleria when that was a big deal. It was kind of our childhood mall. And we got some supplies to go to New York to do some MTV VJ. We were sitting in for Daisy Fuentes when she went on vacation for the week. Speaker 1 (17:36) And we hadn't released our record yet or anything like that. They said, don't bring guitars with you. We brought guitars. Right. So we showed up there and we were cutting on each other and playing in and out of commercial breaks and doing the whole thing. And by the end of the week of announcing all the videos, they had a show, what was it called? Dial M TV? Like a countdown, top 10 countdown. Right. At the end of the week, we got to announce, they surprised us with it. Love and Affection was the number one most requested video. So we thought, hey man, that's really cool. We get on the plane, we go home. Speaker 1 (18:03) And two days later, we had a radio event at the Licorice Pizza at the Sherman Oaks Galleria. And we were met by the police when we got there. Their eyes were this big, and they said, we don't know if we can do this. What are you talking about? And they opened up the elevators. It was one in the back, so we didn't see what was going on. And we never experienced anything like that. It sounded like a jet engine. It was insane. And, I mean, thousands of kids had showed up. Speaker 1 (18:30) At that. Mostly female and three layers of parents and kids. They closed it. They closed it down when they realized there was no way they were going to get to meet us there. So you can't really, even though we had a famous dad, we saw how people reacted to him at certain times. And we thought we were ready, but nobody can be ready for that. You know, where, you know, one day you're playing for the sound guy or you're in the studio. Yeah. You know, and I had mentioned. And the only difference really was TV, which was. Speaker 1 (18:58) I found fascinating. We were the same guys making the same music, having the same dream and all that stuff. And the only thing that was out of place was some TV work. But did you, did it change the way you saw what you were going to do musically? I think we were on that path at that time. We were just being, we were just being professionals, just being Nelsons, putting your head down and getting the job done. And I think, I think when that spotlight's focused on you in those moments, because our dad always said a career, just like life is a series of comebacks. Speaker 1 (19:27) There were so many people that wanted our energy. They wanted our time. And we didn't really have any time to ourselves anymore. That's something I didn't really embrace. I had no perspective. All of a sudden, we're in it. And you're living in a world where you have to visit four different radio stations in the same day in three different states to promote your record. And everybody wants you to do the favors for their daughters at the bar mitzvah, at the privates, because he's a radio guy. But that was two and a half years of that. Speaker 1 (19:54) Yeah. And at the at the end of that, it was kind of like a matter of survival. It was tough for the two of us because our image was so strong when we were on the road. We couldn't even spend days off together in public at all. We had to split up and do that. And he was he's my best friend. That was hard. Oh, I see. And I had a more difficult time on on the road or with fame or success than Matt did, you know, actually putting everything together. I always felt that I was the driver and I was tough and all that. But we got about halfway through that tour. It was 13 months, six shows a week in arenas. And my voice. And we're a singing band. Yeah, my voice, no tapes or anything. My voice started giving me trouble. And if you have one cold or one bad day, then you're playing catch up, as you know. Speaker 1 (20:41) People don't understand what that kind of pressure is. The anxiety is the thing that gets me. Well, it's the audience, your bandmates, the crew, they're all relying on this, right? And you wake up on a show day. And if you have one of those days of total laryngitis, it messes with your mind. So I started writing things down on a pad during the day just to preserve my voice. I started having to do every interview because that was one thing is he's got spare parts. So then I took that on as well. It's weird how we... Speaker 1 (21:10) Yeah, I see. But I got to say, I snapped. I lost my mind about halfway through. There was a moment where Matt had to grab me. The intro music was going on out of the arena. We were like, that