A Quote by Ed Kowalczyk
We came from a small town where there was no music scene or no other bands, and we decided to put ours together and go for it.
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For music, I always just played music myself - and, I had rock bands and wrote songs and put bands together that were loud, but not especially good. That was sort of the place music had in my career.
In a small town, everyone works together and does life together, and because of that everyone takes care of each other. That's Iowa. Whether it's Des Moines or Sioux Center, Decorah or Davenport, Iowans exhibit those small-town values. They work hard, but not so much for themselves. They're ambitious, but not at the expense of others.
I was living in upstate New York, in Kingston - small town, no comedy scene except for my friends and I doing these DIY shows and whatnot. And we put together this thing called the 'Altercation Punk Rock Comedy Tour.'
Imagine a music business where all the music press talked about, all day long, was cover bands of old rock and pop groups. Beatles cover bands, Rolling Stones cover bands, The Who cover bands, Led Zeppelin cover bands. Cover bands, cover bands, everywhere you go.
My vision of punk rock was these dudes who were spitting on the audience and moshing. That's why I kind of left that scene. Then I see all these people around my same age or between 17 and 25 that were making music themselves in their own town. They weren't just singing, but creating. I see them putting out this music where there are tons of women involved in the scene and involved in the bands.
You never know that this is the moment when you're in the moment. When I was sixteen I moved to a smaller town in Vermont, and at that time I didn't have a band to play in. So I was forced to play in Top 40 bands and fraternity bands and wedding bands. That was all pop music, but I was listening to Weather Report and classical music. Then I went to Berklee College of Music in 1978, and you had Victor Bailey there, and Steve Vai. And suddenly I was among my ilk.
After all, in today's music scene every band seems to steal from other bands.
I definitely grew up as a small-town... I guess you could call it the 'small-town football player,' according to the stereotype. I wasn't involved in music at all.
I was the first one in my family to go away to college. I came from a small town where there was no guidance in the high school at all. It was a mill town, and I never knew anyone who made their living from the arts. When you did go away to college, you went away to be something - an engineer, or a teacher, or a chemist.
There wasn't a lot of live music that you could hear where I came from, which was a small town in southeast Missouri.
We're in this band, the Foo Fighters, making music for the love of music. We all came from bands that had disbanded, and we were drawn to each other because we missed playing.
I'm not talking about what came later [after the American underground punk scene], indie music, or whatever you want to call it, but the music that came before that - that's an important story. So many interviews with musicians get the time or context wrong. You have these older bands, usually men, who tell stories about "Oh, we got into this huge fight, this guy punched that guy," that's the wrong sort of story. My view of the time is truly pioneering.
Usually bands with violins - it's this little, poorly amplified looking kind of futile on stage, and that's not the way that my music is put together.
I was in punk rock bands, heavy metal bands, world music bands, jazz groups, any type of music that would take me. I just love music.
I've always been a fan first and foremost - obsessing over bands and seeking out bands, and spending hours and hours listening. When I played music, the scope of my fandom became more myopic; I was focusing on the bands we were touring with, or the bands on the label. And you're always positing yourself in relation to other bands. Since I haven't been playing, I feel a little less cynical. I'm able to seek out music and approach it strictly as a fan.
The first time that you escape from home or the small town that you live in - there's a reason a small town is called a small town: It's because not many people want to live there.
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