Famous Quotes Vol. 43: April 2023
Jim Sullivan looks back on a career of epic interviews in the latest installment of his inquisitive column
It’s the 43rd edition of Famous Quotes, a little quiz where the basic question remains: Who said this?
It’s a deep dive into my published and non-published archives, quotes culled from 40+ years of yakking with rock ‘n’ rollers of all stripes – on the phone, in a bar, at a restaurant, backstage, scenarios from the penthouse to the pavement as the old Heaven 17 song has it.
I give you the situation and the quotes; you guess who spoke those words back when.
1. For more than a decade, they were punk-inspired standard-bearers of well-crafted American rock ‘n’ roll, even if sometimes they were a bit drunk and sloppy in doing so on stage. In 1993, two years after their breakup, I had mid-afternoon coffee with the band’s 33-year-old ex-lead singer-songwriter-guitarist in a Cambridge, Mass. restaurant.
Why did it end? “I think we were all just tired,” he said. “Tired of it all. Tired of each other. Tired of everyone’s role. They wanted to stretch out and be singers and writes and I was tired of that vibe. My role in the band was to sing and lead. To be thrown a curve, it put me in a position: Do I step back? I have a certain amount of arrogance. No, I wasn’t going to step back for anyone.”
Quitting the drink and getting divorced might have been part of the group’s end, too. “Broke up the band, lived alone, sober. One would think, ‘Oh, this is the time to cry and be pitiful’ but “I couldn’t have been happier. I felt free and it spilled over to [my first solo album]. The record’s been criticized for being too simplistic and carefree, but that’s how I felt. … You can never peg me as in ‘Oh, he’s going soft.’ The yin and the yang was there from day one.”
2. “It was all we had,” the famous producer told me back in October of 2000. He was going to be giving a lecture at Harvard University keyed to an album he’d made back in 1967 with a fairly well-known British band. He was talking about the number of tracks they had back in the day.
“If we’d had more tracks, we’d have used them. You use what tools are at your disposal. Like primitive man. He only had a stone hammer, but he made some pretty good stuff. I believe if we had been able to use more tracks, it wouldn’t have been as good. Four tracks exerted a lot of discipline on me and [the band] as well. If you say ‘Give me four tracks – live’ you had to know where you were going. You had to think in advance. These days, kids don’t do that. I see young musicians record 80 tracks and don’t know what to do with them.”
VIDEO: 1990 TV Commercial
3. One of my favorite songs is the Modern Lovers’ “Pablo Picasso” and it starts with, “Well some people try to pick up girls and get called assholes … “Our man here has often been called an asshole and it bothers him not a whit. This famous New York-based hard rock bass player hated that some musicians thought what they were creating had anything to do with – eech – art.
“Anytime anybody tells you otherwise,” he told me, “that it’s for some great artistic notion or they have a message, you have to remember rock ‘n’ roll musicians are not schooled, can’t read or write music, certainly never went to school to pay dues and have no certification of any kind that we’re even qualified to do what we do. We took the lazy way out.”
What’s life all about?
“The pursuit of life is the pursuit of pleasure. What it all means, I don’t really care. The message is: Every day above ground is a good day. Enjoy it. What does it mean? It means nothing.”
Is there an afterlife?
“Who cares? I have problems with that, an afterlife. It seems greedy to me. I’d like you to come back and get another chance. Me, I’m completely happy. My life has been a hoot.”
4. He’s been a rapper, a mogul, an owner of a clothing line and two restaurants, a designer and a vodka merchant. And has allegedly had his hand in a few dustups he shouldn’t have. Run-ins with the law. I’m riding in van with him in Boston with his posse. It’s the late summer 1999, he’s got a new album coming out and he’s going from radio station to radio station, chatting it up incessantly. He juggles mobile phones like a Karamazov brother; during a rare moment when he’s not on the phone or talking to me, his eyes shut behind his dark glasses, as he catches maybe a 30-second catnap, before a phone beeps and the process starts up again.
He apologizes for the seeming rudeness — “family business” — but he is the consummate multitasker. Cell phones are his lifeline to the world outside his immediate physical orbit, and there are a lot of folks he needs, or wants, to be able to reach out and touch.
Right now, we’re talking about a video he appeared in, a friend’s video where he appears crucified on a cross, Jesus-like, raising the aura of this bling-wearing rapper as a persecuted Messiah.
What was he thinking?
“I ask myself that question,” he says. “When I get in trouble: Why the hell did I do that in the first place? I mean, when we did this, I didn’t think that I tried to portray Jesus, but it looks like I did. . . . People [would have thought] my relationship with God was just a joke. I love God and would never do that. I got myself into a situation and had to handle it.”
He handled it, maybe, not in the best way. There was an altercation between him and an executive at the other rapper’s label. He wanted out; the executive held his ground and then alleged that the man I’m talking to turned over his desk, broke his arm and jaw, an assaulted him with a champagne bottle. No bottles, no broken bones, the rapper tells me. Earlier in the year, they came to a settlement.
“That might be a learning lesson,” he says. One of his flaws, he adds, is, “I have to take time to appreciate certain things. Sometimes, I don’t realize the stuff I say, because of who I am, they may take it in a different way. If I say ‘shut up’ to somebody, it’s like, I gotta watch stuff like that.”
Answers: 1) Paul Westerberg, The Replacements, 2) George Martin, The Beatles, 3) Gene Simmons, KISS, 4) Sean Combs, aka Puff Daddy, aka P. Diddy, song “Hate Me Now” by Nas.
VIDEO: Nas feat. Puff Daddy “Hate Me Now”
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