A Quote by Jay DeMarcus

We started out as a bar band. We were sometimes playing in front of 20 people. — © Jay DeMarcus
We started out as a bar band. We were sometimes playing in front of 20 people.
We started the band when I was about 19 or 20. At that age, it would have been kind of hard to imagine a lot of the stuff that I've written. We were playing garage rock. I wanted to dash out three chords and scream. But if you do that for 20 years, what's the point?
When I came out of the military, I had a club in Memphis and I started using the The Bar Kays as my club band. They were still only in the middle school - but I'd take them on the road with me on the weekends, sometimes.
When I started out playing live, it was different. I felt good about it. Nobody knew who I was. I just opened for so-and-so. Now, I'm playing to people who are coming out to see the band. There's too much attention on the band and me.
If I started at 13, by the time I was 14 I was already good enough to play in front of people. I started off playing drums when I was 5, so playing in front of people didn't matter - not a problem.
Guitar gigs were everywhere in the '50s, and I started diddling around so I could keep working. Playing honky-tonk, simple stuff. I took a few gigs with an organ band that put me out front.
There were so many specific things from high school jazz band that I remembered: the conductor searching out people who were out of tune, or stopping and starting me for hours in front of the band as they watched.
I started playing music when I was around 10. I always wanted to be in a band, so I started out by playing drums.
When I'm representing my music live I think of it very much in a rock band sense. When I first started doing festivals in the 90s there really weren't other DJs playing the stages I was playing. So I felt I was being afforded an opportunity to kind of make a statement about what DJ music can be live. In the 90s, if you were a DJ you were in the dance tent, and you were playing house music and techno music. There was no such thing as a DJ - a solo DJ - on a stage, after a rock band and before another rock band: that just didn't happen.
I get way more nervous playing golf in front of 500 people than being on stage in front of 20,000 people.
We haven't started playing it live yet but we're going to. And then 'Warpaint' is a song that's really, really close to me because it's actually - we've had that song for many years now and it's changed so many times, it's been through every reincarnation of our band with every drummer, with sometimes with me playing drums, it was when we were a three-piece, every incarnation of the band that we've had we have played that song.
When we were younger, playing a bar or a club, we did what we did to get as many people to like what we were doing. I wanted the person in the back of the room to like it as much as the ones in the front. That's how I've always looked at it.
I remember in the days when we started, when we first went on the road, we went to Berkeley and played with Exodus. We couldn't believe another band was playing the same kind of music we were playing because there was only a handful of bands that were doing it.
When the Eagles started, I was the best-known one in the band. I remember when Poco would play the Troubador, Glenn and Don would be in front of the stage, drooling and wishing they were in the band. But they'd never admit that now.
If this were all to go away tomorrow, all the big success, I would still be very happy going from bar to bar playing music for people.
I enjoy playing the band as the band. I 'be' the whole band and I'm playing the drums, I'm playing the guitar, I'm playing the saxophone. To me, the most wonderful thing about playing music is that.
I like being out front, doing what I do, but then I also like playing in a band too. I'd like to do stuff like I did with Deee-lite. I went out and played with them and they were the stars, that was cool.
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