A Quote by Amine
When Prince and James Brown were doing live sessions... recording a band is not easy. It's all delicate, important stuff you want to make sure you're doing the right way.
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When I first played New York, it was with James Brown at the Apollo, and I was playing in a band under the name The Valentinos. I remember Sam Cooke saying, 'I want you to go in there with James Brown. I couldn't be as hard on you as James Brown would be.' But we came out marching like soldiers.
When I was a little bitty kid, I was listening to the stuff my parents were listening to. My mom was a huge Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige fan. My dad had a cover band that I sang with, and he loved Parliament, Prince, Jimi Hendrix, and Eric Clapton, the blues, James Brown.
I'm not opposed to doing a fashion line, but I want to make sure it's the right thing and make sure its something people actually want instead of putting out a bunch of stuff that's already been done.
Prince is from the school of James Brown, and I love James Brown because of all the great rhythms he plays.
The whole thing with the Rick James story sketch and the Prince story sketch - I recounted my past, you know? - and that's what I was doing. It's not like I sat down and said I want to come up with a great story about Rick James. That stuff really happened.
Doing 40-minute track sessions is easy money compared to what we were doing on the Tour. What you used to think was hard now feels like a walk in the park.
James Brown's Live at the Apollo is not just a musical whiplash, it's a spiritual cleansing. You can just close your eyes and see him doing the splits, kicking the mic stand and doing a 360.
Imagine if James Brown was your roommate. What? Do you know how much fun you'd be having all the time? Oh my God, he would have you looking the freshest. He would have you doing the funnest stuff for sure, easily. You'd be having the most crackin' parties.
I love doing it. It's great. I love doing the sessions, 'cause you're kind of like in a different band every day. I used to do them all the time. I think my first one was John Wetton from U.K. and Asia and all that stuff, King Crimson. It was so great. Really a lot of fun.
If you wanted to chart new territories and head off over the horizon, you had to make sure you weren't overly influenced by what others were doing ... so it didn't matter what other bands were doing ... we did what we were doing.
There's a right way and a wrong way to do things. If you make a chair, you want to make a nice chair. You want people to admire it. I think doing something well is a form of respect for humanity in general. I have found that all incompetence comes from not paying attention, which comes from people doing something that they don't want to do. And doing what you don't want to do means either you have no choice, or you don't think that the moments of your life are worth fighting for.
We as producers need to keep an eye on things and make sure we're doing great stuff, which is sometimes easy to do because of the talent we have, and sometimes not so easy.
I recall that my workshop leaders were tactful in their ways of acquainting me with my shortcomings as a writer. So much so that I hardly realized they were doing it. I want always to keep that sort of thing in mind when I'm teaching. The way you get better in everything in this life is to make mistakes. Otherwise you're probably doing it right by accident. But you have to do everything wrong before you can really start with some authority to do it right.
When it comes to public policy, doing the right thing is more important than doing it for the right reason. The best way to get people to do what's right collectively is to make it the best thing for them to do individually. You have to give individuals a personal incentive to do what's right for society.
That was very flattering, meeting Steve Vai and hearing his stuff, because he was kind of a fan, even though we kind of dumbed down what he was doing and what people were doing in the '80s. We weren't doing solos; we were doing sounds and all this creepy, trippy stuff.
I always think it's just best to just make stuff and to carry on making stuff, even if it's not off your own back, because that's the only way... especially as a comedy writer, I make short films and then show them to live audience, so if they're laughing you know you're doing something right.
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