A Quote by Joe Elliott
There were incredibly few rock songs making it out to the airwaves until the '80s came along.
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Hit songs did not come out of musicals. Pop-rock was creating the hits. There were very few songs that made the charts out of any Broadway musical.
The '80s, no matter what kind of wacky fashion or whatever else that went on in the '80s, the songs that came out of it, there was really great songwriting, in my opinion.
I went along and basically learned a few of the songs they were doing at the time, which were quite a few of the songs we ended up doing on our first album.
When the second album came out, everybody gravitated immediately to the three and a half minute rock tunes and ignored the ballads. They thought all the Raspberries were was players of high-energy rock songs.
The 1980s were such a shock for me. I was really young, obviously, and The Slits were just mutilated. We were totally sabotaged to such a point that we were put out in exile. So that was the best way for me to spend the '80s: in the jungle, naked. Maybe there are more options now, and there's more girl groups. The only thing good that came out of the '80s was breakdancing.
What people don't understand is that the underground that existed was created in the early 80s and was thriving throughout the 80s. Until the industry showed up it was a pretty significant network. It was all happening, but the smell of money had not wafted up high enough for the industry. It wasn't really until they came descending on Seattle that things really got out of control.
Until House came along I don't think the English made very good dance records, you know, there were very few really good English Rap records, whereas once House came along all of a sudden we started and now I think we probably lead the world, and have overtaken America in dance music.
When punk rock came along, the one thing you were not supposed to be was musical.
Well, after Zombie Birdhouse came out, I toured behind it in the fall of 1982, into the spring, and in the summer in the Far East. At that time, I found my work self-referential; it was getting to be rock songs about a rock singer who lived a rock life on the rock road, and I was starting to wonder what I would be like to rent my own apartment, what it would be like to have a checkbook.
It's strange because even in the vaudeville days, ventriloquists were never the main attraction. They were the guys brought out to stand in front of the curtain while sets were being changed. Ventriloquism wasn't even celebrated as an art until Edgar Bergen came along in the 1930s.
People define themselves to some degree by the music that they listened to as teens. My mom had Elvis. Me, I had 'The Who' and later punk rock. Kids who came up in the '80s had other songs and bands. It's a way of placing ourselves culturally and temporally.
And at the time, for one of the few times in my life I didn't have a band, I just had myself and the guitar, so I was going to have to do something with just my voice, just the guitar and just my songs that was going to move someone enough to give me a shot. So I wrote songs that were very lyrically alive and lyrically dense. And they were unique, but it really came out of the motivation to - or I understood it was - I was going to have to make my mark that way.
I've been writing songs all along, and since moving to Nashville in the late-'80s, I'd begun writing something like 15-20 songs a year, instead of the typical three or four in previous years.
My friend Fred Coury, the drummer in '80s rock band Cinderella, told me that in the rock world, you're either still there, or you're struggling to get back to where you were.
We came along at a time when people were really focused on music. We were part of the second generation of bands after all of those great 60's bands when rock was still in its' infancy.
People were making fun of redheads before I came along.
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