A Quote by John Bush

I certainly never doubted the ability for the guys to get together and make good music, but there was so much legal business with the record company that it ended up being like five albatrosses around our neck.
I certainly have gotten caught up in the music business at various times in my life, mostly because you want to get along with whatever record company you're dealing with. I don't want to be flaky. I don't want to be some temperamental, hard-to-work-with musician.
If you take five white guys and put 'em with five black guys, and let 'em hang around together for about a month, and at the end of the month, you'll notice that the white guys are walking and talking and standing like the black guys do. You'll never see the black guys going, "Oh, golly! We won the big game today, yes sir!" But you'll see guys with red hair named Duffy going, "What's happenin'?"
I can certainly see a band like Nirvana, like when they started having to play to the kind of guys that beat them up in high school - that was probably shocking. But you make music to move people and you don't get to pick who you move. You just don't. It's exclusionary and elitist and I just never felt that way about music, of all things. The great unifier.
You don't get a lot of life milestones in show business. It's really difficult to make things, and a lot of times you don't know you're at the end of something. With Mr. Show, I was only a writer and we knew we were going into the movie, and we thought, "Okay, like Monty Python, we're going to make five movies." And we didn't know it was the end. So it ended up being a bummer and such a terrible ending for Mr. Show. We never got to feel like, "Wow, we did it! We did something."
We got bigger, much scarier competitors. We ended up with Microsoft, a company with all the money in the world, the way I look at those guys. And IBM, another company that, historically, dwarfed us.
The real reason we ended up getting into that type of music was our dad worked for an oil company so we spent a year overseas when we were young kids. Because of that, it was all Spanish TV and radio so we ended up having these '50s and '60s tapes, tapes of that music.
The music business has made a 360. It's a whole 'nother game. It's not nearly what it was. And I fear for it, because, you know, with the advent of the computer and online and downloading and all these things, they have destroyed - that stuff has destroyed the record business, not the music business, but the record business. The music business is well, and it's alive and thriving. Now, I hope something happens to turn it back around to the point whereas it's - you're earning a living from writing your songs, from your work, you know, because it's not like that anymore.
The spirit of Burzum never changed, but my ability to make music changed dramatically when I was imprisoned. It is more or less impossible to record music in prison, and the only music I could record was electronic music, when I was allowed to have a synthesizer for a few months in 1994 or 1995 and in 1998.
I've never had a relationship with a record executive. I always went to the record company by someone that liked my playing. Then they would get fired, and I'd be left with the record company. And then - because they got fired - the record company wouldn't do anything for me.
I like to be around people, so I ended up being roommates, right? I had a house. I lived with four guys.
It is said that any virtue when taken to an extreme can become a vice. Overscheduling our days would certainly qualify for this. There comes a point where milestones can become millstones and ambitions, albatrosses around our necks.
If you have good songs and a real desire to make music, the next thing to do, instead of approach record companies, is to get yourself a really good manager because then it allows you to focus on your profession of being a musician. Then they can focus on the darker art of the record label and the music industry.
In the first season (of 'Californication'), when we had the threesome with the nipple clamps, I was, like, 'I don't get this, I don't know how you're gonna do it.' And then, all of a sudden, there's a crane with a camera hanging over our heads, and you're, like, 'Okayyyyyyy. But how are you gonna sell this? How are you gonna make it work?' And they ended up shooting it brilliantly, cutting it together, and it just all ended up working without me having to compromise my own personal morals.
A lot of record company people, even though they're our age, want to be perceived as young hip guys, and they're hurting the business.
Most artists have contracts directly with the record company, and when they do music, all of their music is owned by the record company. But I did mine through a production company.
I never doubted my ability, but when you hear all your life you're inferior, it makes you wonder if the other guys have something you've never seen before. If they do, I'm still looking for it.
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