A Quote by Bruce Springsteen
When I first started in rock, I had a big guy's audience for my early records. I had a very straight image, particularly through the mid '80s.
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I think that when I was younger and had my first round of big success and was plastered on magazine covers in the early and mid-'90s, I was kind of outspoken and had kind of a pretty aggressive attitude in my life.
My first year, I was really a kind of a wild guy. But I had a very difficult car to drive and I was very young. I think I was maybe too young to have started straight away.
I started playing guitar at the age of 8 or 9 years. Very early, and I was like already into pop music and was just trying to copy what I heard on the radio. And at a very early age I started experimenting with old tape recorders from my parents. I was 11 or 12 at that time and then when I was like 14 or 15 I had a punk band. I made all the classic rock musician's evolutions and then in the early nineties I bought my first sampler and that is how I got into electronic music, because I was able to produce it on my own. That was quite a relief.
I got into computers back in the early '80s, so it was a natural progression of learning about e-mail in the mid-'80s and getting into the Internet when it opened up in the early '90s.
As a kid, my parents had the typical stuff going on in the home, like Bee Gees, The Carpenters. Then I got exposed to what my brothers were listening to: a lot of classic rock, Led Zeppelin. It was around the mid-'80s when the whole Electro-Techno-Pop-House music thing started happening in Chicago.
I'm the first to poke fun at myself when it comes to the hair. I even ask the audience 'hands up who had big hair in the 80s?'.
I have fights where I thought I'm going to destroy the guy and then I had a very tough fight, I had fights where the guy's a big name and I win in the first minute.
When I first got started in the late '70s, early '80s, and first was thinking about the interactive world, I believed so fervently that it was the next big thing, I thought it would happen quickly.
Jazz stopped being creative in the early '80s. After your acoustic era, where you had the likes of the Miles Davis Quintet, when it gets to the '70s it started being jazz fusion where you had more electronic stuff happening, then in the '80s they started trying to bring back the acoustic stuff, like Branford Marsalis and the Wynton Marsalis & Eric Clapton sextet. It started dying down from there. Miles was still around in the '80s and he was still being creative; he was playing Michael Jackson songs and changing sounds, but a lot of people were still trying to regurgitate the old stuff.
I had made a couple of records in Europe. One as a leader, and one as a sideman before that. It was what it was. I started to work with Maria Schneider around that period and some other people, I started to get called to sub at the Vanguard in my mid-20s.
One day I woke up, had an early mid-life crisis, and decided it all had to change. I went and did Logan Murray's comedy course for 11 weeks and then started sneakily doing open-spot gigs, and that was it.
The early 2000s for me were a very emotional time, politically. I'd been through Reagan and been through first Bush and Clinton, and it's not like I had an easy time through those years. But I just thought it was particularly rough. I have to say the World Trade Center attack was very weird for me. The events that followed were worse. It was a really long swath of time.
I was just utterly oblivious to how difficult it was, and how difficult it was going to be, and then also in the mid-eighties through the mid-nineties there was a boom of sorts. So there were plenty of stages. If I had started now, there would be very few places to get better and better.
I noticed that difference early on, like if you were successful in rock 'n' roll, that was a really bad thing, you almost had to hide it. You had these guys selling 200 million records with dirty T-shirts on. I was like, 'Come on, man. Come on. We know you're successful.' Hip-hop is more about attaining wealth. People respect success. They respect big. They don't even have to like your music. If you're big enough, people are drawn to you.
Buddy Holly had something very different from the other great early rock n' roll stars, whether it was Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Bo Diddley. He came across as so ordinary, as such a nerd. You know, he was a big guy, and he carried a gun. He was anything but a nerd.
I got my first real job, one that didn't involve wearing a hairnet or bending over the hood of a wet car with a towel in my hand, in the early '90s working for CBS Records. While there, I started my first of several rock bands and eventually wrote my first book, the semi-autobiographical novel, 'Don't Sleep With Your Drummer.'
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