Yeah, the industry has always been both the enemy and the best friend of the artist. They need each other. That’s the bottom line.
There’sthemeat eaters and there’sus. And that’stheway I look at the world.
I don’t think it’s good to be sentimental, so I try not to be.
Songwriting is like working on a jigsaw puzzle, and it doesn’t make any sense until you find that last piece. It has to make sense or it doesn’t work.
One person can make all the difference in the world. For the first time in recorded human history, we have the fate of the whole planet in our hands.
The Clash were innovative, radical and helped drive a change in music that was ground-breaking. In comparison to some of the music today they sounded like they meant it. I still listen to their music today to remind myself what music made with commitment sounds like.
Everybody had to own and maintain a car. It was the biggest con in the Land of the Free. Well, along with the tobacco and alcohol industries, which also pumped out poison and had the nation in their grip. Pharmaceuticals and firearms would join the party in due course.
Confidence is usually a bluff – if you’re lucky you might have it, but frankly nobody will know the difference.
It’s always sad when you start to hate what you love.
I held my plastic “Jesus Saves” cross near a lightbulb before going to bed so it would glow in the dark. I didn’t think I was religious and didn’t think about whether I believed or not. Having said that, I could never understand how anyone with a modicum of rebelliousness or sense of fair play couldn’t appreciate He who hung with lowlifes and healed the sick. I especially liked the story about Him driving those merchants out of the temple. Even Jesus could lose it if pressed.
Well, ’any experience is better than no experience;, was my motto.
When you’re alone and don’t know anybody it’s easy to meet people.
It’s amazing how much can happen in a few weeks on the road. This was going to become a habit to me; seeing new places would become like a drug. Better than drugs. And there was a whole world still to discover. I was as optimistic as a junkie in a poppy field.
I was constantly imagining a couple of comic or sci-fi writers at the end of the fifties, stoned on weed and speed, trying to outdo each other with outrageous scenarios of the Beat world of the future. It was called England.
After writing a song, there’s first a feeling of elation followed by the sinking feeling that it will never happen again, and you go back to thinking that you can’t do it. It creates an ongoing feeling of inadequacy.
Smoking while vacuuming makes vacuuming better but smoking while sitting on the couch makes vacuuming harder.
Before Janis Joplin even hit the stage I was remarking to my friends how incredible the light show was. “Chris, the show hasn’t started yet,” they replied. But on three different tabs of acid, guess what, the show HAD started.
So I listened to Jimmy and he always had the answer. That lasted another fifteen years or so, Jimmy in my ear telling me what to do, and then slowly, he seemed to fade away.
I can’t not be alive.
They say you always feel better after a good cry but when does the feeling better start?
I enjoy my little meditations and find that humor is everywhere once you strip away your grief.