Literature gives us a window into other people's experiences in other places, in other times, so I thought it would be really interesting to investigate how different people had written about motherhood, and childhood.
There were a whole lot, I bought every blues record I could find, it wasn't just one or two people. My vocal influences were Ray Charles and Bobby Blue Bland.
The number of strokes to the inch controls the pitch of the note: the more, the higher the pitch; the fewer, the lower the pitch, the size of the stroke controls the loudness... the tone quality is the most difficult element to control, it is made by...
I've always admired the tradition of storytellers who sat in the public market and told their stories to gathered crowds. They'd start with a single premise and talk for hours - the notion of one story, ever-changing but never-ending.
We are taking close to $10 a CD the way we are doing it, and I think that is a fair amount to split up between five guys. Each of us makes like two bucks a record.
Who's the new Ramones, who's the new Guns 'N Roses, who's the new Motley Crue, who's the new Black Sabbath? They're coming, they're on the street, they're 16, 17 years old.
Even as a kid, I saw the world in my own way and thought most things that were different were beautiful and magical. Even things that other people thought were horrifying and disgusting and weird.
I think - I honestly think that my story is not 100 percent that unique. I think that I'm - just the whole rock star part kind of throws an interesting twist on it.
I picked all the tunes before I went to Memphis, and the band was all set. Willie Mitchell is an arranger like I am, and he let me do what I had to do.
I didn't know Albert back then - I just learned to play that way. He and I were the only guys that played left-handed. Then left-handed people came from every direction.
It seems like if you are not painted up special way or have some tailor made outfit to put on to go out on stage... I don't know... there's too much of it out there.
I wasn't that wild about that. I told them basically if they were really going to want to bring back heavy metal to a program on MTV, then they are really going to have to get in touch with what real heavy metal is.
I don't care at all about the mainstream; I don't care about popularity contests; I don't care about who's got the biggest-selling album; and I don't care about glossy production.
It's a younger generation running the show, and I miss the generation we had in the '70s. They were really very honorable guys, like Neal Bogart and Bill Graham, people who will never be around again.
If I had my way, I would have sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll at least 4-6 hours a day. So long as there are going to be things in the way of that, we're going to have a revolution.
And that format was - we'd been using that format, I guess, since the late '70s, and it was starting to get very predictable. In other words, certain songs would surface in the same points in the set every so often; it was like rotation.
Of course, we didn't survive to play all the way through the '90s, so I can say that - as I said, everybody in the band was aware of this, and we trying to figure out ways to make it different.
Because, first of all, we were becoming aware during that tour that there was a group of people that was following the band around, and they weren't interested in coming in to the shows, they were just interested in hangin' out outside and tryin' to ...
You can't force something like that. But we have encouraged our audience, because we avoid the confrontation of regular rock concerts: us up here, you down there. Instead, we're looking for interaction.
Every piece has its own identity which we develop by the rule 'We know no limits.' We follow the inspiration of the moment and don't worry if what we're playing is alternative, progressive or fusion rock.
If Bill jumps into something that relies on a lot of cymbals, I'll jump into something that relies on a lot of skin sounds; if he goes into metal tones, I'll go into wood, and so on. I basically play in his holes.
