As writers, we start with the feeling and everything follows from that.
We are always worried about being satisfied. When you become satisfied, it's sort of like you just die.
There is a tension in that music that you can feel. It just feels like there's this place where, you know, my soul rests and these guys were expressing it.
I got really into drumming, playing along with the records. Those rhythms got into me early. 100% only caring about music and rhythm. I had a bedroom that was about 7 by 7 feet, really small. There was so much junk I had collected. I had two drum sets in there, a guitar amplifier and a reel-to-reel, and no bed. I took the bed out. I slept on a piece of foam on an angle by the door.
...and so I found ways of playing these chords where I'd eliminate certain notes. So there's a more clear sound... Really paring it down to the absolute bare minimum. When it's so simple, you can turn it up really loud, and it's got more aggression.
Pop music was rubbish, so we weren't gonna be playing that...not going with the flow.
They thought it was going to be counterculture or something. It wasn't doing harm to anybody. Not then it wasn't.
When people take a guitar that's known for a certain sound, and throw it into a whole different context, something interesting happens.
I got this echo unit and I brought it back to rehearsal, and just got totally into playing, but listening to the return echo, filling in notes that I'm not playing, like two guitar players rather than one. The exact the same thing, but it's just a little bit off to one side. I could see ways to use it that had never been used. Suddenly everything changed.
This spoke to me in 1000 different ways. I didn't know that you could do that. Just singing and clapping. And it meant everything. It meant everything about rock'n'roll, everthing about expression and creativity and art. One man against the world in one song... I heard everything disappearing. It didn't matter that he was clapping off time. It didn't matter that there was no instruments being played. All that mattered was the attitude of the song.
Jumping off into the unknown. Hope and have faith that the next chord or the next few notes will come to you. On occasion you get nothing and you come out feeling like a complete idiot and that you don't know everything and you can't play guitar and you can't write songs.
So many lives destroyed. Perverted, distorted ideas of freedom.No life was sacred.
And I thought about it for a long time, for days. There's this whole new world that's just opened up in front of me and I have to figure out, "How do I get there?" "Am I not allowed to get there? "..."Am I a writer, or just a guitarist?"
I shed this coat off me, and then I wanted to try everthing that was breaking rules. I wanted to do things that sped up. I wanted to do things that were like playing a bow and hurting people's ears.
We're presenting ourselves in a really childish manner, almost like cartoon characters. And a lot of distractions to keep people away from what was really going on, which was we were just really trying to play this.
Total disregard for human life. We are not buying into this.
Clarity of Vision. What you've been looking at from the wrong angle and not seeing at all. You labor. You sweat to see, what you couldn't have seen from that other perspective.
I come in here and sometimes it's just not a great day. But there's always gonna be something if you just keep going.
There's a total concentration on music and creativity and writing. Pushing the boundaries. Looking over the horizon. Musicians that were absolutely on top of their game.
The biggest thrill is creating something that has the power to really connect with people.
For me it was a much bigger world. I had a voracious appetite for everything. All of it.
Music keeps progressing and moving on and people come up with new ideas and new tricks and new ways to tell the same story in a different way. We are all doing the same thing, attempting to share something with another human being. In essence, we are effectively the same band. We are a little bit more complex. But we are really still the band that's crowded into the small rooms, trying to play with each other, and find those clues that will take us new.
I loved this whole somewhere idea of, you know, getting a band together.
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