This is the full (edited & augmented) transcript of the second half of the PSK Podcast e002, in which Graceann Bennett interviews author Gregory Roberts about the details of his True Crime / Prison memoir, Pirate Soldier King. In particular, this segment talks about Music behind Bars, and the myriad ways that music brings light into the dark places of jail and prison.
Music Behind Bars
(continued from e002a : Prison Chess)
Graceann Bennett (29:13)
Allright. So we’re gonna switch gears here for a little bit, and talk about music. So that sound, I mean: I love music, you love music, right? It’s just an interesting education about the ways you can entertain yourself, even behind bars. So tell me a little bit about how music played into your life in prison, or jail, or both.
A Radio Dance Party
Gregory Roberts (29:41)
I will start with the middle, which is about a year and a half-ish, a little over a year in, I got transported out of Reno to come to California. Like I said, I was facing charges in Nevada and California. So I had to be shuttled between those court systems.
and I got put in a private prison called Pahrump, which is just outside Las Vegas. And I guess it’s because it’s a private prison — a CoreCivic facility — but they like, when you get your initial kit, like here’s your blanket, here’s your sheets, here’s your, you know, your terrible crocs that they make you wear. And here’s your shirt and pants. And they’re like, and here’s your radio. I was like, my what? They got your radio.
And here’s the batteries for it. And I was like, my God. Like I hadn’t heard music in like, in a year and a half. And so I got to my cell and I like put in the batteries and had little earbuds with it. like, I mean, my cell was deep in the prison. was still in solitary and I couldn’t get any radio stations. I was like, oh man. But then I got like a little…
know, inkling of a song somewhere. And I was like walking around, like trying to figure out where, because the antenna was the thing and how do we do it. And I like sit on my bunk and on the ceiling of the bunk, there’s like a drawing and it says, if you want to listen to the radio, line up your headphones along this line. And I was like, and I did it and it worked. And I was like, holy shit, awesome.
Graceann Bennett (31:29.773)
Ha ha!
Gregory Roberts (31:33.937)
And there was only one radio station in all Pahrump — some wild off-the-grid station called KNYE 95.1. And it was like some weird — I mean, you remember college stages growing up, right? They played Siouxie and the Banshees and all this wild alternative / experimental stuff. So it was similar to a college station, but it was just crazy hippies or something. And they were playing all these 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s songs, but not anything like a normal radio station playlist. Late at night, they’d play this conspiracy theory show called “Coast to Coast with Art Bell”… And it was just surreal.
Graceann Bennett (31:41.218)
Yeah, I bet that was pretty good though, especially for your first music experience in what… 2 years?
Gregory Roberts (32:01.903)
Yeah, exactly. And I was just having the time of my life. And I just listened to that radio for next 24 hours. And I was dancing and singing in my cell, like a maniac. I was feeling, Music is Life. I was so excited. And I was in ecstasy, actually, just to have the gift of that radio, of that experience. Like a man who was hearing music for the first time again…
Our Own Prison Radio WRPR
Graceann Bennett (32:19.992)
Well, what do you do when you don’t have the radio? Because you told a story about how you didn’t have the radio and then some people were starting to do their own performances, you had your own concert series or something, inmates rapping & singing a capella?
Gregory Roberts (32:32.528)
Yeah, yeah. Well, it actually started when a guy came into our solitary tier. So in solitary, I think there was up to 16 people in each of those tiers. So eight people on the top floor and eight people on the bottom floor. And a guy came in and it was normal to have new people come in there, coming off of meth or heroin, and they’d have tantrums and and they’d mule kick the door. BAM! BAM! BAM! over and over and over again.
So they’d like, you know, and these are steel doors. So they’d be like, and there’s no sound isolation in prisons at all. It’s all, like I said, all metal and cement. So when you’re smashing a door like that with your heel, like it sounds like explosions. And so this guy comes in, it’s like seven at night. We’ve already had dinner and some people are already sleeping.
and boom boom boom I’m like here we go again another freaking meth head you know and but I it it had this rhythm and then it was like boom boom and he was like like like hitting it towards his fist and his knuckles and his elbow and it had this like complex rhythm and then like two or three minutes in he started rapping and he was like really
And he was like his mouth up to the corner so we could all hear. And it was like really, he was speaking really fast. It was really cool lyrics. And I was like, wow, that’s like really. And he kept the rhythm up the whole time while he’s rapping. And so afterwards I was like, fuck yeah, woo! That was awesome. And a couple other people applauded and we were like, what’s your name, bro? And he said this. And he’s like, yeah, I’m trying to make an album. That’s one of my pieces. I was like, you wrote that? He’s like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I got a couple more. We’re like, well, do them, do them. We want to hear them. And so he’s like, I’ll do one more and then we’ll get some more tomorrow or something. I was like, okay. And then tomorrow he did another one. And then someone else was like, hey, I got one too. And it was another rapper guy. then it was like this old hippie on our tier. And he was like, and the lights go down in the city.
Sun goes down on the bay and he starts singing like Eagles and Journey and I was like, okay and I just started it to like I was like, alright I’ll be the DJ and I was like and here we are in WCRJ Reno Prison Radio Next up we have cell 7 And so people lined up and like we’d have like an hour each night where people would like we’d give a concert for ourselves. And yeah, it was pretty cool. Yeah.
Graceann Bennett (35:29.086)
that’s so fun. That’s pretty cool. So did anybody get out and actually do anything with their rap… like anybody famous?
Gregory Roberts (35:39.805)
I didn’t, you know, other than a very small handful of people, I have not followed up on the people I met on the inside. It’s still a little bit of a raw, I don’t know, it’s like, like when I was in there, I was like, oh yeah, yeah, I wanna like get together and stuff, and I’m like, I’m back out here, I’m like, you know what? I’ve got other things to do. I don’t need to go visit Compton tomorrow.
Graceann Bennett (36:09)
Maybe not such good idea.
Gregory Roberts
So, regarding famous rappers, musicians or artists who did time in prison… I’m sure there was, and there’s certainly, especially in rap, long history of people who were in prison and write stuff in there.
Graceann Bennett (36:33)
Well, we could check out your playlist. That was another thing the readers will probably enjoy, you’ve added the playlist as an appendix in the book. So, what kind of playlist can we go through in your book and what’s inspiration for the different playlists that you’re sharing with us?
[Ed Note: here’s the link to my Spotify Prison Music playlist]
Gregory Roberts (36:48)
Well, lets get into individual songs first. I will tell you the one song that broke my heart was — because I would ask my good friends at some point or people I respected or people who made me curious. I’d say, “Yo, give me your top 5 songs that I’ve never heard of…” and I’d discover all this wild new music, music related to cultures so foreign to the culture and music I grew up listening to.
The Sandisk MP3 player // TruLincs
So.. backing that up a second: once we got to the real prison, we actually were allowed to have MP3 players. I mean, we didn’t just get them — we had to buy them at Store… at Commissary. We had to actually bribe the commissary workers in order to buy them — you know, throw them a flat or two of stamps, and write a note on the order form, call in a favor — but we could actually buy them. And they were basically, circa 1999 MP3 players. They didn’t even have a working shuffle function! But you could save up to 5 custom playlists, which we meticulously crafted…
Graceann Bennett (37:17.966)
And the year was 2018-19? At the actual prison?
Gregory Roberts (37:22.045)
Yeah, yeah, these are like pre-iPod. But you know what? They worked, they played music just fine, they had rechargeable batteries, and we could buy songs for $1.50 each and — hahaha, you’re laughing. Yes, like iTunes. We bought individual songs. It was like old, old, old school mp3, long before Spotify. But, like a lot of people, I spent a fortune on songs. I think I bought like more than 1,300 songs across the years. So close to $2,000. Why? Well, because it’s like you feel this flex, this freedom this agency: When you’re buying songs, you can imagine that you’re just like a normal dude in the Free World, fucking around with iTunes, picking and choosing your soundtrack. Its weirdly empowering. In fact, it’s like your only power in there. You know, it’s like…
Graceann Bennett (37:32.59)
We’re gonna buy these songs. Boom.
Gregory Roberts (37:50.909)
Exactly: I have power. I have technology. I can buy music. Any music I want. Whenever I want. And then you’d listen to that song like, like, you know, a bunch, like 10 times, 30 times. And then you’d be like, oh, I love that song… I want the whole album. And you just don’t know. Perhaps it was… I started to think I’m just an addict of buying, of consumption. As in, I don’t need $2,000 worth of music, but at the time I felt, you know what? I mean, it makes me happy. It’s one of the only areas of which I have true agency in this place. So yeah, I’m going to buy the fucking songs. All of them. Thank god, actually: the system limited you to a maximum of 15 songs s day. You couldn’t buy more than 15 songs in a 24 hour period. So there was that. A forced limiter on hyperconsumption.
Graceann Bennett (38:14.51)
Huh. So were there any songs that were like a personal anthem, the Phoenix or the Roberts theme song, as it were? Any anthems that you played over and over again that… that helped you mentally, or just helped you get through it?
Gregory Roberts (38:28.119)
Yes, there was. There’s a song called Speakerboxx by… I want to say Bassnectar.
I’ll have to look it up, but yeah: a song called SpeakerBoxx, which was just a hard driving beast of a track. I listened to that when I played chess, I listened to it when I worked out. It’s a fairly extreme song.
Prison Slang & Prison Rap
Then there was an absolutely great song that was introduced to when I first landed in Beaumont, called First Day Out by Tee Grizzly. And this is where I started to realize how layered rap music is… because it’s all about a guy getting out of federal prison, his “first day out.” and the journey that got him there, actually how he got into prison, the court cases, and then how he went through and survived on the yard and then actually getting out of federal prison.
But I wouldn’t have, if I had you played that song for me back on the streets, before my bid, I wouldn’t have known any of that. Like everything was street slang, prison slang. And, and there’s basically, there’s a whole ‘nother vocabulary in prison. Like I feel like even when I was writing the book, I’m like, I want to say what people actually say in there. But if I write a real sentence, as it was stated on the yard, you’re going be like, what the hell does that mean?
Graceann Bennett (39:08.523)
wow.
Gregory Roberts (39:33.969)
You know, what? What happens is, I write the sentence, and then I have to explain every word. So, for instance:
“He’s down for his second bid, but he checked in, went all PC, and he’s in the shoe now turning state and he’ll be out in the free again yesterday already”,
You know, just all these things are so obfuscated. Its a completely foreign language. And like any language, at first you understand none of it, you’re in total confusion, you don’t understand whats being said around you, much less directly to you… but you’re in total immersion, and before you know it you’re understanding everything, you’re speaking it fluently, and you’re not even thinking about it… its just second nature, the programming is complete. Here’s another:
“Yo, it’s count time. But once they pop the doors for chow, Jimmy’s going to hit the yard coming out of EB. He’s got a green light on him. Its gonna be a 5-on-1. So watch your 6.”
Getting the Greenlight
Graceann Bennett (39:54.968)
Green light…?
Hahaha. No, you don’t want the green light. Never.
Graceann Bennett (39:54.968)
No? The green light isn’t good?
Gregory Roberts (40:04.093)
When someone comes into prison, one of the first things that happens is they check in with their race or their gang and their paperwork is checked. And the paperwork is checked to see if they ratted on anyone, if they’re a child molester or a rapist. If they’re either of those three things, then they’re immediately green-lighted, which means, like, if you see them, green means go… go kill them. Okay, maybe not kill — but if you see them, beat the holy living crap out of them. And here’s the kicker: if you know someone is greenlighted, and you see them, and you don’t jump their shit and do your best to kick their ass, then…
Graceann Bennett (40:37.39)
Then you get greenlit?
Gregory Roberts (40:43.256)
Exactly.
Graceann Bennett (40:37.39)
And so, I get it now. You don’t want to be green lighted. Wait: were you ever?!?
Gregory Roberts (40:43.256)
No, no!! I never had a green light on me. Never had a cause to. Thank God.
Gregory Roberts (40:50.309)
Like Green means Go, as in, go! Go jump his ass. Yeah. So it’s like, you’d hear it on the yard, from your speaker, or your celly or your buddy: “Yeah, Tommy in unit three just got greenlit! The shits about to go down, as soon as the doors pop!” And so we’d like be looking out the window when yard opens, because that stuff happens fast. Like they pop the doors and it’s just like, BOOM! People just sprint straight to Tommy’s cell and just, well it’s usually in the first 15 seconds after the doors pop. In certain jails, the doors are all like remote, magnetic solenoids. So, POP! And the whole tier is open. All at once.
But actually, in Beaumont… the guards in our prison actually, they unlock the doors one at a time, with these big massive iron keys, but you’re not allowed to push your door wide open till the guards call it. So they’d unlock the doors, but we had to keep them closed. And then the guards yell “All right, CLEAR!” And then, in that instant, 64 doors fly open with a bang, and a small group of people just run toward Tommy’s cell, full tilt, and proceed to kick the shit out of him.
Graceann Bennett (41:42.742)
And so that’s, but that was some of the lyrics in the song. Did you feel yourself, as you evolved as a human throughout your prison journey, did it change the kind of music you listened to?
Gregory Roberts (41:55.747)
Oh, absolutely. For sure.
Graceann Bennett (41:58.744)
So how did it evolve? Like what was the soundtrack when you were leaving or like getting towards the end of your prison sentence versus when you first got arrested?
STOP EDITS HERE.
RAW AI TRANSCRIPTS FOLLOW.
Gregory Roberts (42:14.759)
Well.
I was once told that some of the music I liked was a genre called happy gay house.
Graceann Bennett (42:23.919)
I like that kind of music.
Gregory Roberts (42:28.109)
It’s like poppy, poppy, woo! know, fun, good bass beat. And I definitely, in prison, like got harder and more soulful. There was one song in particular that just about broke my heart. Like I said, I’d asked people what they liked and they were like, well you need to get some Tupac on your playlist. I was like, okay, I don’t know Tupac. I mean, I know who he is, but I don’t know his music. And he’s like, well here’s five Tupacs, I’ll get these. And there was one he did called Dear Mama, which is
Graceann Bennett (42:33.933)
you
Gregory Roberts (42:57.905)
Bass, do you know this song?
Graceann Bennett (42:59.214)
Yeah, listen to it from your playlist.
Gregory Roberts (43:01.947)
Like, my God, what a Harper. You know, it’s basically him going like, like, Mom, you raised me and I just went and went to the streets and still fucked up. you know, but I owe everything to you. And I’m like, listening to this song, like, I mean, I almost felt that for every woman in my life. I was like, like that song is real. And yeah, so that, I would listen to that a lot.
Graceann Bennett (43:04.748)
Right.
Graceann Bennett (43:15.406)
Mm.
Graceann Bennett (43:21.646)
Mm-hmm.
Graceann Bennett (43:26.964)
Okay. And then how do you still listen to the same music now? Or would you say like your playlist, what’s on your playlist now? The happy gay house? What is on there now?
Gregory Roberts (43:36.719)
No. More like, more like, like, hard driving house.
Graceann Bennett (43:45.208)
Hard driving house, okay. So you kind of like blend in the two. So you’re forever changed in terms of your musical taste. So you’ve got some grit and some hard driving in there.
Gregory Roberts (43:57.829)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I still have sometimes and also I should say I have a whole bunch more of like of good Christian music in there now. Like there’s some like my experience with Christian music before prison was like, I don’t know, like songs that were like Jesus loves you, Jesus is good, you should love Jesus, you know, just goofy ass songs.
Graceann Bennett (43:59.874)
Okay.
Graceann Bennett (44:12.142)
Hmm.
Graceann Bennett (44:27.512)
No.
Gregory Roberts (44:28.093)
And there are some extreme Christians in prison. I can almost say I was one of them. But people who just do their Bible like 24-7, like that’s their life in prison. People like do their thing in prison because you have time and you don’t have bills to pay and you don’t have to worry about anything other than violence. So people…
once they kind of secure their social structure, they can do their thing. And so I got, yeah, some pretty good, like very soulful, meaningful to me Christian music in there too. So, yeah.
Graceann Bennett (45:13.154)
Okay, cool. Well, we can’t wait to take a look at your playlist and then any chess tips, maybe you put those in the book as well. So.
Gregory Roberts (45:21.917)
Yeah, I gotta get some notes. I did a lot of meditation on like the analogs between chess and life. Chess in business is easy. It’s kind of like order of war, but chess and life is a little trickier, but still, it’s, yeah, it’s a good.
Graceann Bennett (45:24.811)
Yeah, we can’t wait.
Graceann Bennett (45:41.422)
Well, we’re going to end with one last chess question. chess is all about strategically seeing more moves ahead. So five moves, and Gregory Bauer Roberts is moving on the chessboard. right now, we’re playing, but you’ve got five moves ahead.
Gregory Roberts (45:44.605)
All right.
Graceann Bennett (46:05.198)
what’s going on in terms of how you’re strategizing and what’s the fifth move ahead that we’re gonna see later. Are you strategizing in the future?
Gregory Roberts (46:23.163)
I told you that I’d be giving up my strategy.
Graceann Bennett (46:26.158)
I don’t want to. okay. That’s okay. Don’t know the strategy. yeah, can keep it close to the best. you have?
Gregory Roberts (46:32.989)
I would say the book tour is primary and then actually extracting some messages from this book fairly explicitly that I’m not going to explicitly put in the book, that I feel confident talking to people about and in the context of this AI tsunami that we’re in.
Graceann Bennett (46:37.803)
Okay.
Graceann Bennett (47:00.366)
the AI tsunami. that’s a whole other, we’ll have to get into that later because I’m having a hard time understanding how AI tsunami and prison and some of these things go together, but I’m, okay.
Gregory Roberts (47:03.516)
Yeah.
Gregory Roberts (47:10.661)
I want to tell you real quick, because prison, up until the time I left, was one of the most Luddite places on earth. The MP3 player was the most highest tech thing we had. So you learn about just raw animal-human relations and all the good and bad of that. There’s no shielding of technology. And so we can isolate with technology very easily or fool ourselves into thinking we’re doing things that we’re not.
Graceann Bennett (47:18.362)
huh.
Right?
Graceann Bennett (47:28.45)
Mm-hmm.
Gregory Roberts (47:39.761)
Whereas there’s a physical reality to prison that I think would be healthy for many people, especially in America, to understand. Just to be physically with people in physical spaces.
Graceann Bennett (47:53.046)
Okay, so understanding that, because that is a real human advantage versus AI is that we do have a body and that we’re social creatures and we can leverage those social skills and understanding how to interact with humans in the real world in a way that is our edge against AI.
Gregory Roberts (48:01.541)
It may be our only advantage.
Graceann Bennett (48:17.985)
Yeah, that’s interesting. And I was thinking of other things that they could put. Maybe they could have put in the AI algorithm all the things that you had done, right? Like profile you and then figure out the right course for prison, right? So they can say, maybe this might do this to kind of analyze you and say, OK, this is the best way to get
this inmate to comply or to be a good citizen or you could, could, mean, who knows what the algorithms could tell you, but they could.
Gregory Roberts (48:51.345)
Graceanne, there are fantasies on the outside about why prison is correctional and education and rehabilitation and all these things. I’m a complete cynic with all that and I do believe it’s correctional, but not for any of the efforts of those programs. It’s correctional because you’re in
Graceann Bennett (48:59.212)
Yeah.
Gregory Roberts (49:21.391)
an alpha community, a violent community, and you figure out how to survive, and you figure out what you value.
Yeah, the education stuff, programs, at least where I was at, didn’t play a role in that. Well, there’s one exception, which we’ll get to at later thing.
Graceann Bennett (49:43.15)
Okay, but you were in the school of you. You were face to face with yourself. So if you’re about that, that education system is you by yourself with you. And so you corrected yourself with yourself. So I’m glad that happened. So anyways, you’re a good teacher. You were a good teacher to yourself.
Gregory Roberts (49:48.431)
Yeah, yeah.
Gregory Roberts (50:08.637)
I’m the child of two professors, so…
Graceann Bennett (50:11.02)
Yeah, and so you taught yourself and you got yourself corrected. So that’s great. Okay, well next time we’ll go into some more stories and give people a little sneak peek on the book you’re writing. So thank you and until next time.
Gregory Roberts (50:26.577)
Thank you so much. Yes, until next time!
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