Record companies are not necessarily interested in you realizing your artistic dream. The bottom line is that they got to sell records.
I produced Run DMC. I produced some early records, lots of records early on.
Our managers hadn't had that kind of success - the record company hadn't, we hadn't - and the feeling was that the next record had to be even bigger, and if it wasn't it would be some kind of failure.
I guess that my life has been a series of flukes in the record business. The first thing I ever did was the biggest record that I'll ever have.
I'm not going to say that every record I've put out was the greatest record in history, but I'd stand by even the bad ones. Don't make excuses, make hits.
I recorded a song called, I Fall to Pieces, and I was in a car wreck. Now I'm worried because I have a brand-new record, and it's called Crazy!
There are three things we need to do for a band. We need to make a great record; we need to get the record played; and we need to find an audience for the live shows.
Our records, if you have a dark sense of humor, were funny, but our records weren't about comedy. They were about protests, fantasy, confrontation and all that.
And for me the only way to live life is to grab the bull by the horns and call up recording studios and set dates to go in recording studios. To try and accomplish something.
I love the idea of a record containing an entire universe; where the sounds span decades of recording from all over the world and all sorts of different sources.
I'm a pretty big P.J. Harvey record fan and you can really hear New York in his record.
Tower Records is like a temple to me. I'll stay there for hours. Nobody can shop for records with me. It drives them out of their minds.
We certainly strive for trying to make a quality record throughout, and I think that's true of all of our records.
I know if I don't tour people will forget the record and you run a high risk of the record failing.
All the records I've made have pretty much been big club turntable records. You need to feel the rhythm.
All my records have been written to be records, rather than writing a group of songs and seeing if they fit together.
I like making little videos and little records. I've always loved video cameras and four-track cassette recorders, still cameras, anything.
From then on in, me and Sonny started makin' records. My first records, Sonny was backin' me up. Sonny wasn't singin' natural at the time; he was singin' falsetto.
Back in the day, I used to be in the studio recording 20 hours a day. And that was all of the time. I still record a lot of hours, but I don't go as long as I used to.
My real interest in music was the old 78 records and the sound of the music. I loved it and began to realize that one of the main sounds on those old records I loved was the guitar.
And once the music is out there, when you're selling a record and selling music and people are going to do whatever they want with it, it's kind of hard to resist certain opportunities, especially in the record market now.
