Here are excerpts from an hour long free ranging conversation
between myself and Stuart Zender. This guy is extremely
cool. He is very warm and engaging and really funny. I hope
to meet him some day over coffee, tea, or whatever.
For those of you unfamiliar with his work, Stuart is the original bass
player for the British pop/funk band Jamiroquai. Formed in/around
1992, the band has sold 21 million records to date with their third
"Travelling Without Moving" selling 11.5 million, and according to
Guinness World Records, the best selling funk record of all time.
"Traveling Without Moving" was SZ's last record with the band. He
played on/co-wrote the first two "Emergency on Planet Earth" and "The
Return of The Space Cowboy". "Traveling Without Moving" was the
first Jamiroquai record to sell well in the U.S., but the band was huge
in the U.K. before that.
A long time Warwick endorser is the proud co-father of the Stuart Zender Signature Bass, which premiered this year.
Upon perusing Stuart's MySpace page, I found a reference to a film
series called "Zeitgeist". These films definitely pass along some
very non-mainstream political information, often relegated to
"conspiracy theorists" and "nut jobs". You can find them on
YouTube. Suffice to say that these films and lots of others like
it, point to some Extremely Scary potential scenarios on planet Earth.
I found it very interesting that a guy from Austin and a dude from
London would see eye to eye on such matters.
Thus starts the conversation...
BH: From seeing your MySpace page, there was a link to a film
there, about the political emergency situation going on, things that
are really scary...
SZ: I mean, it really is scary, and sometimes I think, is it
better not to know these things? When you get to the bottom of
it, it's really sordid, the way that life is, but you realize that it
all stems from yourself, it comes from us, I mean, we allow these
things to be bad...
BH: I know, I've often wished I could not know all this stuff and
go back to sleep, but it seems it's a little too late for that.
SZ: I had a mind altering experience when I was 11 years old, and
I pretty much grew up really quickly. I mean I've always been
turned on to my environment, humanity, and the Earth, and our
connection with it. It pretty much opened my eyes up, and I've
always been searching for the truth, basically since I was a kid.
BH: Is the surveillance thing in England as heavy duty as I've been hearing about?
SZ: It's ridiculous... If you were to go from North to South
London, you would be filmed at least 336 times, you'd be caught on CCTV
(closed circuit television). It all happened from the IRA stuff,
back in the day and, you know, it's just that whole Orwellian "scare
people and they'll give up all their liberties", basically. When
I speak to some people, they just take this stance like it's just a
conspiracy theory and only "mad people" think that way. The thing
is, people DO know the truth inside, and it's just horrific for them,
so they have this wall inside and it's a very safe wall. I
realized at a very early age that life isn't that safe, and, and, this
comfort zone that people put themselves in is to not feel change.
I mean, life IS change, it's changing every micro-second, and people
want to not embrace the change. I mean I'm not so arrogant as to
say that we're the only things in this universe, I mean that's got to
be the most arrogant thing to think in the world. There's
definitely other places, parallel universes, a lot of stuff out there
and I think that our brains, if we were to actually use them to our
full potential, there is so much more we could be doing. We only
use a tiny bit of them, and I believe that the other parts of our
brains are there for amazing things.
BH: Your new thing is called "Running Out of Heroes"... Who are some of your heroes that you can think of?
SZ: (laughs) Goodness... Let's see... Well, the truth is my
hero... It's always been a big hero of mine, love is always been a
big hero of mine, as well. Love and the Truth, I think, are my
big heroes.
BH: Did you ever hear of Bill Hicks?
SZ: Yeah, I love Bill Hicks. He was absolutely amazing,
genius. I try and turn as many people on to him as
possible. It's really a great way of learning things, as well,
through comedy. I think it's a real subtle way of teaching
people. There's that bit of his-"In the news today, the leaders
of the world all took acid and realized that we are all one, that we're
all part of each other, there's a string that connects us all..."
(Laughter from BH and SZ)
