We were playing popular music, but we were doing our own arrangements because we were too lazy to sit down and figure out the originals.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
In the early days, I had very little idea about arrangements, and I wrote songs a little flat, as it were, just on an acoustic guitar. They didn't really have quite enough nuance.
Me and my brothers started a musical group early on, and we were playing in places where we really weren't supposed to be.
We wanted to sit down and conceptually work out songs.
I was always playing the Hammond Organ back to front even during the days of the Nice, going back to 1968. Really what I was doing there, was choosing notes at random and trying to make some sense of them, improvising back to front.
I was making stickers for guys' bands. I was in the front row photographing bands, booking bands, doing all of the kind of backstage stuff, and I didn't even think for a second I could do it, and then I saw Babes in Toyland, and all that changed.
We used to sit around and listen to the radio and not hear anything like the stuff we like, so we decided to play it ourselves.
After the music that had been created by my family, I thought there was no way I could stack up.
Everybody was on the same page. Nobody has really gone out there on a different musical journey. When we got back together again, we all wanted to do the same kind of music.
When we first started playing we did a lot of rehearsing. We used to write out everything. In fact, that's the way everybody rehearses: we play the tunes and improvise.
Our songs were not written to be listened to in headphones or on the radio. They were written to be played. All of the little infinite detail that went into the arrangements and giving ourselves lots of breathing room in terms of playing what we wanted to play and using up any ideas that we had - all of those were conceived to be performed.