The Craziness of Miami with Billy Corben

And one of the things that I wanted to talk to, because I haven't talked to you since the pandemic started, last time I talked to you was Screwball, right? Like how long ago was that? Oh yeah, what, 2019? Yeah, it was right before the shit hit the fan. That was the last time we talked, and we were talking about that documentary. And then when all this happened, and so much of the wackiness and the, you know, the controversy is coming out of Florida. Like you embrace the chaos of Florida. Yeah, Florida fuckery is our genre. And it's also our top export, I think, as well. It's really what we provide the rest of the COVID. And you, I mean, look about how much your work is about Florida. The cocaine cowboy series, you know, all the stuff on A-Rod, like all the, there's so much of your work. The petrifying, I'm a Florida native, you know, and a lifelong Miami. And I think the petrifying thing that I've learned through the years, and it's not my theory, TD Allman called Miami the city of the future. And effectively, the Florida of today is the America of tomorrow. And more importantly, the Miami of today, more specifically, the Miami of today is the America of tomorrow. So if you want to know what challenges we'll face or calamities will befall us as a nation in the years or even decades to come, you only look at the canary in the coal mine, which is South Florida. Do you think that's because of it's very vulnerable to climate change, first of all, right? Like there's, there's estimates about how long Miami can last. Yeah, not good. Yeah, they don't, they think you got about two decades, right? Isn't that the current thought? I'm a renter. Let me put you that way. I've lived there my whole life. I don't own any property in Miami. It's probably a good move. I'm not bullish. It does. It seems like it's going to go underwater, right? Yeah, it'll definitely be underwater. Just a question of when. Just a question. It's all like the ground itself is very porous. Is that correct? Yeah. I mean, you know, we had reclaimed wetlands. That's Miami Beach. That's where Champlain Towers is. Reclaim wetlands. What does that mean? It was fucking mangroves. Swamps. Yeah, swamp. And that we reclaimed, which means we filled it in and there's still porous limestone underneath that. Champlain Towers only had water coming at it from the front, the back, above and below. But other than that, it was totally dry. This is the tower that collapsed. Collapsed, yeah. We're getting battered. They were on that porous limestone. Yeah. Yeah, built on reclaimed wetlands. And so I'll tell you right now, as we speak, this is the King Tides. You know what the King Tides are? No. They happen every September, October and November. Not the entire time, but there's like a week here, a weekend there for those three months. It is what we call sunny day flooding. So it has to do with the tides. It has to do with the distance between the sun and the moon and the earth. And it floods in the sunlight. We can get as much as 12 inches above the highest high tide of the year. So it's not from rain? It's not. Now, here's the problem. We're still in hurricane season, which means rain exacerbates it. Inclamant weather can... We're totally fucked when it rains on top of the King Tides. But this is just like a day, like you just... If you are in a low lying area or waterfront or oceanfront, bayfront, that's just what... Sunny day. It's perfectly... It could be perfectly beautiful and you could have as much as 12 inches above the highest high tide. So it's just an unusual level of the ocean? Yeah. It's just a quirk of the tides. It happens every year off and on for three months. Yeah. That's in the... We call it sunny day flooding. That's a thing that we have there. I mean, you know in Miami we make it rain, but we have sunny day flooding is a thing. There's nothing they can do like New Orleans, like put up some sort of a wall or dam. The Army Corps of Engineers proposed a kind of futuristic post-apocalyptic, after the flood, well pre-flood kind of a wall. And Miami said, no gracias, no thank you. We don't want that. We'll fend for ourselves. Did they say no because it was too expensive or did they say no because... The Army Corps of Engineers, I think, was going to be federally funded. They just didn't want this unsightly, unseemly kind of a wall in our beautiful town. But what they did want is they wanted a signature bridge. We're building like this $800 million bridge that we don't need. But it's super pretty as we say in Miami. It's super pretty. And somebody probably got a good deal. Oh yeah. You better believe the contractors. That's the thing. That's why the Miami of today is the America of tomorrow. It's really the corruption, dysfunction and nonstop construction. That's really what it is. It's this anything goes wild west kind of mentality. Because I said this before on the show, LA is where you go when you want to be somebody. New York is where you go when you are somebody. And Miami is where you go when you want to be somebody else. It's always been a sunny place for shady people. The Florida man phenomenon. It's just like... If you have... It's not New England. It's not what's your name, who's your daddy. Everyone's nouveau riche in Miami. So no one cares where your money came from. As long as the booze is flowing and everybody's dancing, the music's going, nobody gives a shit. And it's always been that place. It's always been that party place. You were telling me before about how during... Was it the 70s, the 80s, these recording artists would go down to Miami? Yeah. Listen, Miami is just... It's America's Casablanca. And so some of the biggest records of all time. Back when that was the business, you could sell tens of millions of albums. Everybody went to Miami. Eric Clapton was one of the first. Jimmy Buffett, the Bee Gees, the Eagles, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the Allman Brothers, Fleetwood Mac. And they were doing all those records that we all still know today from the 70s. They recorded, mixed or mastered, at least in part. Glenn Fry and Don Henley wrote the lyrics to Hotel California in a rented mansion on Miami Beach. That had been the love nest of Howard Hughes and Eva Gardner. Winston Churchill used it as a winter home. And the Watergate burglars and Howard Hunt used it as well. And then Stephen Stills used it. He was hanging out there with Shel Silverstein. It was a weird scene. And then eventually the Eagles came down to do Hotel California and wrote the lyrics. They locked themselves, these two guys, in a fucking room. And the housekeeper left sandwiches and drinks at the door because the door was closed. And they came down in bathrobes one day with legal pads, yellow legal pads, and said, we have it. We have the lyrics. And so everybody, and it was a communal scene too. It's kind of like your place with the, you know, everybody just sort of stops by. People stop by. It was like that because you had all these artists in every room. Like, so there was pickup basketball games outside. You drive up and there'd be the Bee Gees playing the Allman Brothers, playing Eric Clapton in a pickup basketball game. And they, to this day, Criteria Studios, they have a wooden upright piano. And the rumor has it, one day there was an artist, I won't mention the name, was playing and had a baggie of cocaine on the top of the piano. And he was playing. And the baggie fell open, fell, boom, puff of smoke on the keys of the piano appropriately. And he grabbed the bag and salvaged what he could. And then for the next several months, the people at the studio who worked at the, would stick a straw between the keys on the piano and try to, mostly dust, they were probably snorting, but like, would just try to salvage whatever they could from there. So the joke was that they had a line item on the bills. Because that's the thing. They were away from the watchful eyes and ears of the labels, which were all based in New York and LA. So they would go to Miami and no one knew what the fuck was going. I didn't have publicists or executives, rather, from the recording studio. So they would send them bills to pay for the studio time. There'd be a line item for cocaine, but you couldn't say cocaine. And I think, by the way, cocaine at that time was probably part of the appeal of bringing the artists to Miami, to be fair. Probably, right? But it was under the category of piano tuning, was the cocaine. So you get someone that accounts at a record label to call up and say, hey, I have a question about this invoice. There's $5,000 here for piano tuning, but there's only one ballot on the album. So what's with all this fucking piano tuning? There was an act. I'm not going to say it, but there was a band who came down in the 80s to record a criteria. And then they came down again in the 90s. And the guy who runs the studio, Trevor, his mom was the manager before him. So he was a little kid running around this scene. If you can imagine a little kid in Miami in the 70s running around this scene. This is an incredible place. Aretha Franklin did the respect record at Criteria. James Brown did I Feel Good recorded that song at Criteria. It's a really historic place. And so this band comes in and he says to the lead singer, he says, hey, listen, I don't know if you remember, you were down here 15 years ago, whatever, back in the late 70s, early 80s doing this record. And the singer says, I have no memory of that whatsoever, except for one thing. He said one night, apparently we were done recording here and someone took us into the neighborhood. It's like in a residential kind of area into the neighborhood to this woman's house. And she brought out a brick of cocaine, an entire kilo of cocaine. He said, I'd never seen that before. She put it down on the coffee table. We're sitting on the couch. She put it down on like this, a big band. She put it down on the coffee table. She cut it open. And all I remember from my entire experience in Miami is the smell of that entire kilo of cocaine. Like just what it feels like when an entire kilo of cocaine is opened up before you and it hits and it hits you. Have you ever done Coke? Never. Me neither. Never. But hearing that, I want to sniff. That is the takeaway for that. I want to know what that's like. Watch the entire episode for free only on Spotify.