Mark Winchester has left the band. He's decided that he's tired of the road and just wants to concentrate on his career in Nashville. I don't blame him at all. He'll certainly be missed.
My only general rule was to steer away from things I played with the band over the past couple of tours. I was interested in re-shaping the Rising material for live shows, so people could hear the bare bones of that.
I was the only person I'd ever met who had a record contract. None of the E Street Band, as far as I know, had been on an airplane until Columbia sent us to Los Angeles.
I learned to play piano in a rock n' roll context or band context from country records - you know, Floyd Cramer - and from the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Stax. And none of those are keyboard records.
Even though we're not the most punk rock band, the way we've done things is pretty punk rock. Just kinda say it with a big middle finger to the record labels and do it ourselves.
Nobody told Don Henley or me that we were going to make it as solo artists, but I can speak for Don when I say that we are both really happy now that the band is not together.
People from major labels were afraid to go to Black Flag gigs throughout most of the band's existence. They treated our gigs as something threatening. I'm sure that it probably was. They probably had reasons to be scared.
There was no such thing as production at Starday. We'd go in with the band, we'd go over the song, I'd look over and tell the steel player to take a break or kick it off, and I'd get the fiddle to play a turnaround in the middle.
It was about working with other musicians, but more than that it's about exploring musical areas that you could never do with the band you're in, in my case Judas Priest. You could tackle musical areas and lyrical areas that wouldn't be appropriate f...
If you ever see shitty ass rock dudes in shitty ass rock bands asking you to show them your tist for backstage passes, I want you to spit right in their fucking faces and yell 'FUCK YOU!
There were some situations where I was giving up everything I had for the band and I just expected everybody else to feel the same way. I realized I was just kidding myself.
I didn't have an agent, I didn't have a headshot. I didn't even know if anyone would know where to find me. I just went back to highschool and started playing with my band.
I still feel the impulse to give young writers a hearing, and I believe I have played more unpublished compositions than any other band leader in the country.
When I write a tune - and it's been like this for many years - I always hear in the back of my head some sort of vague, orchestrated, fully fleshed-out big-band version of the song with other parts going on.
When I left the band I said Look, I am ready to move on. I was interested in playing with some of the other people that I had bee a studio musician with.
I enjoy looking at old photos of some of my favorite rock icons, but also get inspired from the younger bands that are coming up and really creating their own style, their own image.
It's certainly no coincidence that big bands became the entertainment of the army in WWI and WWII, and that jazz drumming style is very military influenced. The snare drum comes from the military and becomes the core kind of sound of jazz drums.
In the early to mid-'90s, everywhere I turned, someone had died. It wasn't just people in bands. It was the people I was hanging out with. At some point, I thought, 'I may be heading down that road.'
It's been said that I formed The Wallflowers to hide my name but, really, I've always wanted to be in a band - right from the day my friends and I soundproofed a garage with bed-covers for our first rehearsal.
I had done a lot of rock 'n' roll photography when I was in college. I was one of many photographers who worked for The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, and all of these rock 'n' roll bands.
We used to have our own plane with the band's name on the side. It was a dream come true. You drive to a local airport. There's none of this checking in stuff; you just get on the plane.
