What was the first record you bought?
I don’t know if I bought it, but the first record I remember listening to nonstop, oddly, was Dean Martin, Everybody Loves Somebody. And then Boots Randolph. And then the record album of Blackbeard’s Ghost, with Peter Ustinov. I’d never seen the film — I didn’t see it until I was in my late thirties. But I knew it verbatim. Slightly ironic. And then I turned that corner into preteen and I remember listening to Frampton Comes Alive! too much. My brother’s ten years older than me. He grabbed the needle off the album and there was this horrific noise — wrrrraarrrar. He said, “Listen, man, you’re killing me. Try this.” And he put on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. And it stirred me. I’d never heard anything like it. I said, “OK, maybe Frampton Comes Alive! is a little tired.” Then my brother, very pleased with himself, started turning me on to other things, like the soundtrack to Last Tango in Paris.
What was your first band?
When I was about thirteen, I got together with some other kids in the neighborhood. This one guy had a bass, we knew a guy who had a PA system, we made our own lights. It was really ramshackle and great. We’d play at people’s backyard parties. Everything from the Beatles to Led Zeppelin to Cheap Trick to Devo — and “Johnny B. Goode” was the closer.
You’ve got that wistful look in your eyes.
You’re thirteen years old and you’re playing rock & roll. Loud. Poorly. But somebody’s letting you do it in their back yard. And it was absolute perfection. It was freedom. Right off the bat, there was no question: I had found my future.
For more of this interview pick up your copy of Rolling Stone’s Jan issue.
Are DeAnna Pappas and Jesse Csincsak going to last?
Subscribe to our RSS Feed