When people come up to me and say, "I was at your Game 7 in the playoffs in Toronto," or, "I saw your first goal in the NHL," that triggers memories. But I don't sit around my kitchen table and tell my kids, "You know, one year I got 92 goals."
My first year in baseball, there were only one or two reporters. My second year, I got to the Triple-A playoffs, there were four or five. When I came up in 1984, I never saw so many people.
Christmas time, you're at home with your friends and your parents. You sit down around the table and just play Scrabble. It's a fun game for me.
Growing up, your whole goal and dream is to make the NHL. Once you get there, you kind of have to expand your goals on and off the ice. It took a little bit of time for me to do that, but again, with age and maturity you understand what you want more and how to achieve those things.
It's one thing to make it to the NBA. It's one thing to make the playoffs your first year. It's one thing to make the playoffs your second year. But if you want to be great, you've got to continue to work.
I jokingly say that the enemies are children, you know. I always say, if you have young kids, your whole goal from the moment they wake up is to make them tired. It's exhausting. Anybody who's got kids knows what I'm talking about.
I would sit at the table with the black kids during lunch, and we'd do our banter back and forth. But occasionally, I'd get up and I'd go sit down with the white kids and chat with them and what not. Of course, because I come from the black table they would look at me like, 'Why are you here?'
If you're going to be an artist, you have to create music that moves you, and to not try to fit in so much with what's happening around you. It's a career choice. I could have done other kinds of songs that got me in the radio or Top 10, but I wouldn't feel proud of the work. I come up short when I create music I don't like, and fans can tell too. The goal isn't to get into it to be famous; the goal is to perfect your craft and create your own sound.
Inspiration is a really hard thing to describe, but it's something that triggers your brain, like the first time I heard a certain guitar player that I loved or the first time that I saw a monster or the first time that I saw anything that really was an epiphany for me. It just stays with you your whole life.
If you've got craft, you got game. If you got game, you can write your way in and out of anything. Writing is the best gig in the whole business, as far as I'm concerned. It's the only job where you don't have to wait for someone to tell you what to do. You just sit down and make s**t up.
Everybody is welcome to come to dinner, but there's going to be the adult table and the kids' table. Whiny people who want to throw food and make noise and interrupt and be rude and act like children, they can sit at the kids' table.
If your kitchen table is like mine, you sit there at night before you put the kids to bed and you talk about what you need. You talk about how much you are worried about being able to pay the bills. Ladies and gentlemen, that is not a worry John McCain has to worry about. It's a pretty hard experience. He'll have to figure out which of the seven kitchen tables to sit at.
What happens at the average church or synagogue or mosque is that I don't know many priests or ministers or rabbis who say to their congregation, 'go home and talk about the religion at the kitchen table with your kids...talk about God, talk about what this is all about.' They say in general, come back on the weekend, we'll talk to you about it.
You tell your kids that no matter what, you set your goals and you go for them. Whatever it is you achieve, never give up. You want your kids to have that good attitude, the confidence, and the will power to believe in themselves.
You look at the best players in the game - Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Orr - they didn't sit on the couch and then one day join the NHL. They worked on their game. Their talent was perseverance, dedication. Those are talents to me; that's what gets you to the NHL.
In terms of cooking with friends, I realized early on that all great meals seem to start and end in the kitchen, and the more you can get people engaged and hands-on, the better the memories will be. So when people come into your kitchen while you're cooking and prepping and politely ask, "Do you need any help?" the key is to say yes.
When I was a kid I used to scoot under the table, and whenever company would come around you know or my sisters or parents would tell me, go under the table and I'd do it because it was entertainment for the family or aunts or whatever. And one time at the Paramount when I first did it, you know, Brooklyn Paramount, I did it in the act during an instrumental and it got a big ovation and so I coined it as one of the things I should do in the act. And since I've been doing it.