A Quote by Ed Kowalczyk
From the very beginning, we were all a hundred and ten percent about the music, from the very early days when we could barely play our instruments, and we were just covering other people's songs when we were in high school.
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When we first started playing in the early days, none of us really had any idea about writing our own songs yet. We were struggling how to learn our instruments and play songs to be able to perform for people.
Shortridge High School was an elitist high school. In a way it was a scandal because you could go there no matter where you lived, if you could get there. It was for over-achievers. It was for people who were going to college. So we were very special and we were hated for being ritzy.
I wrote all my songs on my main instruments, and the songs I would record in my bedroom were just acoustic guitar, mandolin, and sometimes bass. I really like the texture the mandolin added to my music, but my fingers were too big to play it... I could only do little riffs and whatever.
I grew up middle class - my dad was a high school teacher; there were five kids in our family. We all shared a nine-hundred-square-foot home with one bathroom. That was exciting. And my wife is Irish Catholic and also very, very barely middle class.
In the early days, myself and my friends were into punk because we had no money, just very basic instruments and skills. It was more about the ethos and the energy.
From a very early age, I started to get really interested in how songs were put to tape. Not just listening to the songs, but the way the songs were recorded.
Our early days - our audiences were always very sparse. We played very obscure places in very obscure parts of the world, mainly Kansas. We played frat parties, we played high school proms, we played clubs.
If you read about Mussolini or Stalin or some of these other great monsters of history, they were at it all the time, that they were getting up in the morning very early. They were physically very active. They didn't eat lunch.
In the 1980s, when people were just beginning to talk about AIDS, there were just a few categories of those who were at high risk: homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin addicts, and Haitians. We were the only ones identified by nationality.
In the thirties a whole school of criticism bogged down intellectually in those agitprop, social-realistic days. A play had to be progressive. A number of plays by playwrights who were thought very highly of then - they were very bad playwrights - were highly praised because their themes were intellectually and politically proper. This intellectual morass is very dangerous, it seems to me. A form of censorship.
My parents were in high school when I was born. My mom was 16, my dad was 17. They were kids, at the very beginning of coming into their own and finding themselves.
All the songs that were written for that album are just all our first sophomore songs. So they're all from real life. Very sweet and very innocent. I think the theme of the album probably was just that it was our first record. ... Back when we were first making records, you didn't just make the music, you put a great deal of energy into the way it looked, and every word that was written on the whole thing.
My whole view of music completely flipped over on its head. I grew up listening to punk rock, SST. I liked people that were making music that weren't necessarily very good at their instruments, it was more about the ideas they had than how well they could play and sing.
When I was in high school in England, I wasn't sure that you could have a career in fashion. In those days, there were very few fashion magazines. I didn't realize there was a school where you could go and learn how to make clothes and design. I thought you just had to be discovered somewhere, like a film.
I remember when I was in Los Angeles, and there was one of the very big earthquakes, and it was just absolute pandemonium. I mean the streets were just - people were crashing into each other, people were looting, in just a very short amount of time.
Go back to the very beginning, when we first started playing in local pubs. We used to play Chuck Berry covers. Every now and then, we'd slip in one of our own songs, and we found that we were getting away with it - nobody seemed to know these were original tracks.
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