Famous Quotes Vol. 48: September 2023
Veteran rock critic Jim Sullivan looks back on a career of epic interviews in the latest installment of his inquisitive column
It’s the 48th 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. This Boston-based hard rock band had a No. 1 hit in 1991 with a song that was, well, not exactly that. It was a power ballad the went through the roof, became a prom standard. I thought, “Good for them, it’s a catchy song, and there’s an emotional tug, but it ain’t really what they do.”
“Right,” the lead singer told me, “and then the record company releases ‘[title redacted]’ to follow it up – an acoustic little shit-kicking foot-stomper. Two acoustic hits in a row and the die, the perception of the band, was cast. We’ve come full circle though. At one point in our career, it was frustrating ‘cause that was one-tenth of the band, but looking back it gave us the freedom to do [our third album]. We did what we wanted to do. We had no constraints. That made it all worth it. Now, there’s a couple of generations that have grown up with ‘[title redacted]’ being a prom song, a wedding song, a Bar Mitzvah song …”
And that’s a good thing? I asked.
“Yes, it is,” he said.
I asked what his prom song was.
“I did not go to the prom. I told [the girl I asked] she’d regret it someday.”
What would his prom song have been?
“I was in the Class of ’79. I think our song that year was ‘Still Crazy After All These Years’ but as far as a prom song goes, ’79 was a funny period. All my friends were cutting their hair telling me rock is dead and screaming ‘Disco!’ because that’s where all the girls were. For me, my prom song would probably be ‘You See Me Crying’ from Aerosmith’s Toys in the Attic album.”
Bonus clue: The singer also takes the stage in one of the still-working Aerosmith offshoot bands.
2. The singer-songwriter and his band of Brits were late bloomers. The lads formed the group in the late ‘70s, had some personnel changes during the ‘80s, when they released two (largely ignored) albums. But in 1995, when Brit Pop hit, there they were, welcomed and beloved. (They broke up in 2003, reformed for two years in 2011, broke up again and then kicked it up again last year.)
Never big in the U.S., their breakthrough UK album came in 1995. “It was the time we magically came into sync with the times,” the singer told me, wryly. And then the follow-up album really jettisoned the band upward.
The singer considered the band’s songs as highly personal. He said he didn’t create characters as much as he wrote from experience and extrapolated. The ups and downs of sex and drugs were part of that. While the band’s sound could be playful and buoyant, there was often bitterness or sarcasm at the core. Wit and wordplay were very much part of the songwriting arsenal. Awkward situations abound. One song on their biggest album was reportedly inspired by the singer peeping in on his sister and her boyfriend as they had sex.
He didn’t answer that exactly, but said “I don’t like to take a kind of `scientist’ view of human relationships. I think it’s better if you’re in the thick of it yourself. To me, it’s kind of a report from the front line, rather than a godlike overview.”
How difficult was it to shed inhibitions, to cast himself in a less than flattering light?
“I really can’t get emotionally involved in the song unless there is some risk-taking,” he said. “It’s just what I’ve always done. It came naturally to me.”
How had stardom tipped the scales when it came to writing songs for the next album? How can you mix and mingle when you’re a celeb?
“It’s been difficult in England, definitely,” he said of living a normal life, trying to be part of the common people. “But there’s no point in worrying about it, because it happens. We haven’t really started writing our next record, so I don’t really know what I’m going to write songs about. I know I’m not going to be writing about hotel rooms and airports and stuff like that.”
VIDEO: 1995 Commercial Break
3. “We were the most misunderstood band of the ’80s,” this group’s co-founding bassist told me in 2008, as they were readying a tour. Originally from the Midwest, their first album was produced by one of rock’s top avant-garde artists. “They called us Nazis and clowns. We were thinking, ‘Wow, Nazis and clowns, this is great, maybe we should be Nazi clowns.’ I think the problem is in this culture: irony was something that got pierced, and then after 9/11 all sense of humor was lost, so it really put [our band] in a bad position. Now I think people have realized, “We get it.” Life got bad enough that we make sense; we’re like the house band on the Titanic.”
The band, which began back in 1973, was way ahead of its time when it came to rock video and when MTV hit, they were MTV-ready. That era yielded some hits, including one definitive song that everybody thinks of when they think of this band, but it also moved the band into a more commercial, less adventurous lane. He didn’t disagree, but phrased it like this: “Any band I can ever think of that I loved, like Roxy Music or Nine Inch Nails, has seminal work that’s groundbreaking and mind-blowing and establishes an æsthetic that hadn’t been there before. And they kind of work inside that, do variations.”
The acerbic humor was always there. They did not see the world coming together in peace and harmony. I asked how the humor and music came together.
“We were serious about our joke,” he said. “When it came to the music itself, we never treated the music as a joke. Maybe the lyrics had satire in them because we raised contradictions — the world’s a contradictory place. We know that even messages of hope are often cynical; there are hucksters selling false hope to people all the time.”
4. “I don’t think my music translates very well on a large scale,” this much heralded English singer-songwriter-guitarist-bandleader told me on the verge of a 1993 tour. “It takes a long time for people to come to grips with what we’re doing and it’s best seen on a small scale to start off with for people to get their heads around what we’re doing.”
Her music had whisper-to-a-scream dynamics, an erotic charge and an angry, sometimes violent overtone. As to her exploration of graphic sexuality in her music, she told me, “I think it’s one of the most potent subjects anyone can deal with, one of the most intriguing emotions. I want to explore it all the time. I don’t think I’ve had a rougher time than anyone else. I don’t know. I’ve never been anyone else.”
Yes, she said, there was a correlation between her own mental state and the lurching, corrosive sound her band made. “That’s all part of going to the extremes which makes life interesting. Who wants to go along an even keel all the time? I find it very difficult to relax and completely switch off. I haven’t got a calm disposition. All those highs and lows are living. [The lows] are as important as feeling happy.”
She released her tenth studio album this past July. The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis called it “enigmatic and occasionally disturbing” as well as “a rough-edged LP full of potency and atmosphere … eerily forbidding, but intoxicating, and easy to lose yourself in.”
Answers: 1) The singer is Gary Cherone, the band is Extreme, the song in question is “More Than Words,” and the Aerosmith offshoot band is the Joe Perry Project, 2) The singer is Jarvis Cocker and the band is Pulp, 3) The bassist is Jerry Casale – or Gerald V. Casale – and the band is Devo, 4) The singer is PJ Harvey
VIDEO: Extreme “More Than Words”
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