Even within the band, if I cannot manage to persuade the members of what I see to be the next course of action, how do you expect the group to deal with the expectations of thousands of people. It is not possible.
I don't know who's left to hear us. But if there are people who want the real thing, we've got it. My band rocks, and I plan to keep doing it 'till nobody shows up to see it anymore.
I was 17 years old and in my first band, and we played at the university. I was kind of a gawky, unpopular teenager and there was about 400 people smiling and dancing to what we were doing.
I quit my band in New York City in 1969 and I got really angry at them. I got angry at one of my guitar players and I dove over the drum set and we got into a fight.
I think we in the Alpha Band, which was a strange group anyway, weren't dealing with any of these issues. They sneaked up on us and took us over, before we know what was going on.
It's like they had a backlash the first 11 years. I think the reason why it always seems like there's a backlash is because when bands are unknown, they only get written about by fans.
I had written movie scores, television series, played with other people. Carl had done the same with Asia, with other bands, everything. We weren't about to entrust Greg automatically with a production credit.
I think that certainly, whenever you have a new band, the first record always has a certain energy to it before you know what you're doing. I think some of the early Sonic Youth stuff was maybe like that.
When you tour with a band, you're just out there, and it's just you guys. That's your little universe. If you do a play, it's the same deal. That becomes your world, for the cast and crew.
Another thing that was unique about working on this stuff was that I was engineering it. I used many of the things I had learned while I was away from the band. It sort of vindicated my decision to leave in '87.
I had to seal off my feelings about Stevie while seeing her every day and having to help her, too. But you get on with it. What was happening to the band was much bigger than any of that.
It's a gamble. A band like Kiss, a lot of those are our audience but we don't do as much make-up. Alice would have more to lose if we got back together.
If Nirvana had remained a small, underground punk rock band, Kurt Cobain would still be alive. And he'd probably be living in Seattle, getting kind of fat and balding, be relatively happy and producing records for other people.
I've had some really wonderful opportunities in my career, 'Band of Brothers' being one of them. That's material that can really make a difference, but I don't think of that going into it - at least not consciously.
I was the lead singer in a lot of the bands I was in. You have to be comfortable. You gotta get up there and sell the song. You have to get up there and sell the lyric. You gotta be able to feel it.
For a period in the '90s, I felt that the Cure was massively undervalued. But there has been a paradigm shift. There's a bunch of newer bands coming up who've grown up listening to the Cure and don't understand that you're not supposed to like us.
Even the two times that I left, I never really felt like I left the band. It's very bizarre. It's like there's sort of an umbilical cord that stretches between us spiritually.
The pirating thing is bad. The people it hurts the most are the ones you least think it hurts. It's not the big Britney Spears albums that are being pirated; it's the indie bands that don't have two cents to their name.
In 1980, I moved to Chicago, and I recorded demo tapes for my friends' bands, and in 1981, the first Big Black record - the first thing I did that was an actual record.
The bands that have been the most important to me, and the records that have been the most important to me as a fan, have been records that surprised me for one reason or another.
I began with dance, doing ballet at 3, then tap, jazz, modern. Then I sang in church choirs, learned how to play clarinet and drums, sang with rock bands and only then did I get into musical theatre.
