Actually, when I was in elementary school, I saw a saxophone. A band came to my school, and I saw this guy get up and play this solo. And I said, 'Oh man, what is that! That must be fantastic!'
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 played the tuba in high school. I wanted to be a member of the marching band. I thought, what can I play that has the most effect? What can I play to get people to laugh?
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 ...
Nothing could ever stop Kiss. I've seen the band in down times where critics were like vultures circling overhead saying things like, 'Well, you know it's the end of your career.'
Anyone who follows the Middle East and Islamic world in general can't deny it is often a very violent place, that a band of instability now stretches from Algeria to Pakistan.
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 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.
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.
