EPISODE 14 - PAUL KILMER

The Counterforce with Aug Stone

Young Southpaw chats to magician and comedian Paul Kilmer, aka Magical Paul aka Jurassic Paul, about songs about cards, being offered large amounts of dairy products while performing, his positive philosophy of comedy, and dinosaurs, of course.

Paul Kilmer: In the early 90s my dad was a construction worker and a mechanic so he exposed us to all those late 70’s/early 80’s “metal” bands, hair bands were very popular, RATT, Whitesnake, other animals, Van Halen, Led Zeppelin, Poison. And my dad was interesting because he did like those but he also exposed us inadvertently to John Denver, and my grandfather exposed me to guys like Buddy Holly and Elvis and Johnny Cash. And Johnny Cash has got albums galore. So yeah, I grew up with Van Halen. I like Jump. I like Panama. Recently RATT has made a comeback cause they had one of their songs in a commercial and I was like ‘I really like Round & Round as a song, I’m glad they made that into a commercial’. I like Van Halen -

Young Southpaw: It’s the Year of the Rat. So hopefully they will make a huge comeback. I wanted to ask you, as a fan of card tricks, do you like songs that mention cards like AC/DC’s The Jack or Stacey Q’s Two Of Hearts? I mean if you were doing a card trick for AC/DC, you would expect their card to be the jack. And for Motorhead, it’d obviously be the Ace of Spades.

PK: Cause there are other songs, like Magic Man...Two Of Hearts, actually a lot of really good magicians do non-talking sets to that song, or Magic Man. They definitely have their place in magic. Cause specifically they reference specific cards. But I wanna say my favourite is Ace Of Spades by Motorhead. Because like I said those are the songs that just kind of pop into your life. I guess my favourite song of all-time would have to be one of those songs that I didn’t know the name of and tried to track down which was Wall Of Voodoo’s Mexican Radio. It always plays between 2:34-2:50 in the morning on some radio station that you’re driving from one location to another, and you’re not paying attention and you miss the name.