Robert Corn-Revere: Pardoning Lenny Bruce, Janet Jackson's Super Bowl & a Life in Free Speech - Video

He's been called the finest First Amendment attorney in the country... and he started out playing tuba in an Illinois high school band. Robert Corn-Revere joins Mike Jones to talk about the music that shaped him and the censorship fights that made his career, from "Louie Louie" to the Super Bowl. It's a warm, funny conversation about why words matter and who gets to police them.

Chapters
00:00 Intro
01:03 What Bob's listening to: Dead South, Robert Plant, Brubeck
03:05 Classic rock kid, coming late to jazz
04:55 Tuba, debate, and the road to law
08:00 Music vs. AI and the lost ritual of the album
18:54 "I hate bullies" why First Amendment law
20:04 Moral panics: the jazz age, Tipper Gore & Zappa
25:12 The "Louie Louie" FBI investigation
28:42 Janet Jackson and the eight-year Super Bowl case
37:23 Pardoning Lenny Bruce
50:57 FIRE today: Ann Selzer and the fight ahead

In this episode
- How a posthumous pardon for Lenny Bruce actually got signed and the phone call Bob took in a Sports Authority parking lot
- Why the FBI spent 18 months trying to decode "Louie Louie" before anyone checked the copyrighted lyrics
- What really happened in the control room during the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction"
- Why Bob argues that "pretty much everything politics touches, it diminishes or destroys"
- The case for free speech that has nothing to do with left or right

???? Listen everywhere: TheStereoImage.com
???? Instagram: @the.stereo.image
???? Bob's book: *The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder*

jazz podcast, The Stereo Image, Mike Jones, Robert Corn-Revere, First Amendment, free speech, Lenny Bruce, Janet Jackson Super Bowl, Louie Louie, music censorship, Frank Zappa PMRC, FIRE foundation, censorship, Penn and Teller