A Quote by Mark Mendoza

I like all of the typical hard rock bands. I'm an AC/DC fanatic. I love ZZ Top, just about any Van Halen, any Judas Priest, the list goes on and on, most of the Iron Maiden stuff. Those are the big bands, but I got my feel from, I grew up on Mountain and Humble Pie. That kind of stuff is where I get my feel from.
Hard rock for me is AC/DC, Def Leppard, Tesla, Kiss. Metal tends to be louder, ruder, darker, like Judas Priest, Slayer, Iron Maiden.
I was a huge 'Pyromania' fan. You would never expect it, but I was in love with Iron Maiden; I was such a huge fan. I went to a lot of rock stuff like Van Halen, too.
I was never really that aware of commercial things. The stuff that was really influential to me were bands like the Misfits or the Birthday Party, or things like that. If someone said, "Do you love Judas Priest?" - I never really even had a Judas Priest record. That's not what I grew up with. That wasn't really my scene, you know? That's why White Zombie never really fit. I still don't fit.
Influences come from everywhere. I don't really feel like I had too many influences for the first record because I grew up listening to music in church, and that was pretty much it. I didn't really grow up listening to AC/DC and all those bands.
I get my inspiration from a lot of bands actually. I really like AC/DC, Nirvana, Led Zeppelin and new bands. I like The Pretty Reckless.
We grew up listening to so much hardcore: everything from the very early D.C. stuff - Teen Idols, Minor Threat, Dag Nasty, SOA, Government Issue - to bands who weren't straight edge, like Negative Approach. I really feel they were one of the greatest punk bands ever.
These days I don't look to other people with the objective of trying to steal their licks, although I've got no objections to stealing them if that seems like a good idea. I'm sure that I'm still influenced by Mark Knopfler and Eddie Van Halen as well......I can't play like Eddie Van Halen. I wish I could. I sat down to try some of those ideas and can't do it. I don't know if I could ever get any of that stuff together. Sometimes I think I should work at the guitar more.
At some point the label 'hard-rocker' began to get on my nerves, and I decided to break those chains. My music definitely doesn't sound like AC/DC or the Scorpions - nothing against either of these bands, they're okay. But I was fed up with that image.
Me personally, I side more with punk rock bands. I grew up with The Misfits, The Dead Boys, The Damned, Dropkick Murphys, and early AFI. That was the stuff that really got me into music. Song writing wise, bands like Alkaline Trio were very important to me for beginning to write songs.
Few bands in hard rock history have been so adept at balancing the awesome and trivial as Van Halen in their prime.
At some point I decided I didn't want to learn any more guitar technique. I was at that level where the next mountain there was to climb was Van Halen and I didn't really like Van Halen.
I was in several bands before I joined Judas Priest. Being in those early unknown bands were the stepping stones, really, so I learned a lot in those short few years jumping from one band to another.
When I first started, it was the real basic stuff that was being played on the radio, so I was into Zeppelin, and Sabbath, and AC/DC, and all stuff like that. I grew up in New York, on Long Island, so the local radio stations played all that kind of thing.
I think everyone's trying to come up together and bring up other bands along the way, and we've always been really blessed to have bands like Metallica and Iron Maiden take us under their wing and say nice things about us.
I was in bands as a singer-guitarist-songwriter until 1980-81. So, there's a bunch of stuff. A lot of the stuff is hard to come by-stuff by the Special Interest Group and the Zobo Funn Band. The Zobo Funn Band was a big Northeast cult band. We had about a billion skirmishes with the big rock industry.
I don't like bands who would play music like Code. I mean I hate most bands with emotional singing parts (I adore metal singing like Iron Maiden though!)
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