A Quote by James Murphy
One of the big things that broke the band up for me, which I've become much clearer on over the years, was that I had no desire to be famous.
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When Adam's House Cat broke up in 1991, which was Cooley and my band for six years, I put my entire life, heart, and soul into that thing. I mean everything. I ended up getting divorced over it, and then the band broke up and I was left with nothing. I had nothing to show for six years of my life except for a finished record that still hasn't come out. And I went through a pretty deep, dark, two-year depression after that, [which] probably resulted in some of the earlier songs that became Drive-By Trucker songs, for that matter.
What does surprise me, though, is the amount of attention this band [Guns'n'Roses] has garnered 11 years after the original lineup broke up. That's an interesting phenomenon. It was even interesting back in the day. I mean, [we were] this glorified garage band. It was a great band, but it was not the kind of band you expected to become what it has.
After Sleater-Kinney broke up in 2006 I had very little desire to play music. It took well over three years before picking up a guitar meant anything to me other than an exercise.
Family helps you make clearer choices about things. Your priorities become clearer. Your obligations become clearer, and that is something I welcome.
You don't accidentally turn into a big band. Not even Nirvana accidentally turned into a big band. They toured - they wanted to become a big band. They didn't necessarily want to become that big of a band, but they still wanted to make a really good record and wanted to come out and tour.
You do stand-up because you have to do it. If you're doing it to become 'famous,' you're wrong. If you're doing it to become a millionaire, you're doing it for the wrong reasons. In 2003, I was flat broke. I'd been doing stand-up for 14 years at that point. I loved it and just kept at it.
A lot of the music is the kind of thing I grew up with, listening to it with my parents. So there was a band in London called the BBC Big Band, and I sang with them. And I had never done a big band before, and it was just so fantastic and I had such a good time...so that's how it all came about
Maybe this is why I sleep only a few hours a month. I don't want to die again. This has become clearer and clearer to me recently, a desire so sharp and focused I can hardly believe it's mine: I don't want to die. I don't want to disappear. I want to stay.
My parents divorced when I was 3 years old. They had a lounge act in Las Vegas, where I was born. The band broke up and the marriage dissolved, and my mother, my sister and I moved to Southern California. And I didn't see my dad a lot growing up; he was on the road a lot. I'd see him every couple years.
The process by which the idea for a play comes to me has always been something I really couldn't pinpoint. A play just seems to materialize; like an apparition, it gets clearer and clearer and clearer. It's very vague at first, as in the case of Streetcar, which came after Menagerie. I simply had the vision of a woman in her late youth. She was sitting in a chair all alone by a window with the moonlight streaming in on her desolate face, and she'd been stood up by the man she planned to marry.
I had enough therapy to know when I broke it down, it became clearer to me: Yes, comedy was kind of a cleansing thing for me to do.
We became a band that was kind of a big band, kind of a band that quite uncool people listen to, people a lot like me. I've realized that's a much more beautiful fate than the plan I had.
My first job was in a Bohemian polka band, the Rejcek family polka band in Abbott. The old man in the band had another blacksmith shop in Abbott, but he liked me. All he had was horns and drums, and I was set up over there with my little guitar with no amps or nothing. I would play as loud as I wanted to, and nobody could hear me.
For me, I didn't want to be famous and there was a desire to be me and not 'that guy from the band' so I was happy to see it all go.
I know a lot of famous people, done a lot of cool things. Tell you what separates me from the guys I know is knowing this (holding up Bible). The famous people I know that have so much money, it's just stupid let me tell you what they want to know from me. It's not hunting, it's not TV, it's what I gathered over my life from this.
My version of a good role model is everything that I have strived to become over the years, as I have a deep desire to live an honest life and give relentlessly and openly to people who look up to me.
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