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.
The three of us [me, Mike Dean, Woody Weatherman] all learned how to play our instruments together. We had a common interest in bands like Black Sabbath, Deep Purple. Bands who had different time signatures etc and for whatever reason, we morphed into Corrosion of Conformity. It's been about thirty years now.
Friends of friends had bands in college or in their early 20s and had a moment where they had some kind of interest from a record label or manager. It's always interesting how people handle those decisions and those moments.
I don't know if it was a single-blade or one of those straight-edge razors, but I used to play in bands that were, like, show bands and would play different clubs, and, in those days, I would go to the barber twice a week.
There are bands that I am friends with, who will invite me up on stage. Like Les Savy Fav, who have had me on stage, and I have played on their record. There are a couple of bands like that. Yo La Tengo has invited me to play with them.
We used to play the Savoy Ballroom, and we always had a boogie tune in the set. Bands like Tommy Dorsey used to do a little boogie woogie. The big 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.
You had your black bands, and you had your white bands, and if you mixed the two, you found less places to play.
I've always been in bands writing songs with friends in order to play shows or record a future record.
My older brother and myself always played together in bands, but we never knew we would be professional musicians.
I like getting together with friends and just making fun of ourselves and stupid things I've done or I've seen them do - and good races we've had together. When I go home to California, I always talk to my go-kart friends about when we were racing at Red Bluff or Cycleland.
We never had the most money, but my parents always did their best to take care of me and my brother. I had a real small but tight group of friends, and we would just ride our bikes all day after school and play video games, or we would actually wrestle out in the backyard.
I really care about my friends and I think I'm kind of the person who would be rounding up all the friends. I'm always getting everyone together.
I had a band when I was 14, and we would play around in my hometown of Middlesbrough, and we'd go to the club afterwards, which was the Purple Onion then. There would be live bands playing, and in between that, the DJ would be playing records.
Growing up, I went to the Warped Tour a lot, and I got to see bands like Rancid and AFI and Dropkick Murphys and these bands that meant so much to me when I was a kid - all in succession on these stages, so to get to play that same stage that I watched those bands play is a huge thing for me.
I've always been a fan of the band setting. I've always been a believer in bands, and I've always been in bands. That's where my comfort zone is. So to stand outside of that, that was never my intention or goal. I never had the dream of, 'I'm gonna go into all these bands as a spring board for my solo work.' But life takes you on different journeys sometimes. I ended up playing a bunch of songs and some of them I really liked.