When I left Van Halen, I went in the studio and made a CD called Marching to Mars with all studio musicians. I did it immediately. With the disappointment riding on my shoulders of the breakup of the band.
Unless the clients want, I don't like to have dancers for my shows. I prefer a rock show look and like performing with a live band.
It's really hard when you break up with somebody, or somebody breaks up with you, and you're in this band; guess who you have to see in the next day in the hotel in the breakfast room? That person.
Fighting the Taliban and the various radical organizations on the front lines is like adding a Band-Aid to a cut, it may stop the bleeding but unless you clean it with antiseptic, the germs stay and multiply.
The photograph, the clothes, the sets - this was about 1974, and I started hanging out with my friend Richard Sold, who was playing in a band with Patti Smith.
My friend Fred Coury, the drummer in '80s rock band Cinderella, told me that in the rock world, you're either still there, or you're struggling to get back to where you were.
Yeah, yeah I think that's one of the biggest misconceptions towards the band. The biggest one is that we're Satan worshippers, but next to that just the fact that we're normal.
I learned the songs and played the gigs, and then they called me about a month later. They told me they were like super stoked on me and asked me to join their band.
Getting on stage, for me, was a huge thing when I first started. And back in high school, everyone was in rock bands and I was a singer/songwriter. It just seems kind of lame.
My uncle was in a ska band called the Top Cats; that was my first proper influence, as I was taken to see them every week. It sort of built up, the want to replicate it creatively.
When you keep the caliber of musicians very high in the band, people are going to come and go. Some of them will be people who have to try various things, it's natural.
In the mind of the kid in skinny jeans leading the worship band, there isn’t a large enough gap between holiness and sinfulness, truth and error, demons and angels, or heaven and hell.
The songs were really complicated. I used to meet people in bar bands who were trying to play our songs and they were really struggling with it. Technically it was really difficult stuff.
When people say 'stadium songs,' it's really negative. All the festival headliners, I've realised, are usually the worst bands.
They tried to get me to use a pick when I first joined the band. They had certain things they thought were appropriate. I tried to adapt as much as I could.
I'd wear any of my private attire for the world to see. But I would rather have an open flesh wound than ever wear a band aid in public.
The rock star stuff never came up for us. The Band was never attacked by groupies before, during or after any show that we ever played.
My brother Leon started it all. He played the piano. In school they made me leader of the orchestra because I played the violin, but I followed Leon and the boys in his jazz band around.
There's a whole apparatus for indie bands now, but back in the eighties it was just getting built. The early people really took it on the chin.
When I joined the band, being that I was going to take this up as a profession, I realized that there were no two finer guitar players in the world that I'd rather play with.
There was a band in Australia named Midnight Oil, and they were a very, very political, and they literally hit you over the head with a hammer. U2 sometimes can hit you over the head with a rubber hammer.
