No, this is the thing. I started hanging out in the Buffalo music scene, and everybody was playing original music. Robby grew up in the cover scene, so he could get out and get gigs. The only guy in Buffalo who would give anybody a gig was this guy Bud, who ran a club called Continental. He was responsible for Buffalo having a great original music scene. Idiot bar owners didn`t want anything to do with it.
Absolutely. If you were in a punk band or new wave band in Buffalo, it was cool. The dude would let you play.
So you were in bands before the Goo`s, doing original material?
Yeah, usually you would write five or six original songs, play two or three times at a backyard party or something like that, and then break up. That was it.
I was in a hardcore punk band with Robby`s cousin, Paul, when I started college. That`s when I was into absolutely wicked hardcore music. We had a band called the Beaumonts, which was named after Hugh Beaumont [Leave it to Beaver], authority figure of the suburbs. I met Robby through that whole scene. We hung out together a few times. Robby is incredibly motivated. Robby`s who kept this band together, not me. Robby kept me going.
That`s what Robby said. He was the first guy to see the potential I had as a musician. At that point our biggest aspiration was to get an indie record deal, put the record out, and get to headline Saturdy night at the Continental. That was it. Pretty simple.
I always had the stuff I played with other people. I wrote for myself and my band. Then I always had an acoustic guitar, and that was when I was in my most private thing. That was stuff that I would just play free-form. I would make up tunings; I would experiment with different shapes of chords in my room. It was nobody else was around. I would play free of judgement, free of anything. There was no outside criticism; no "this has to be good," no goal. It was a real medative kind of experience, and it helps you find out where your musical pulse is, what you are about as a musician. I sort of combined that super private time with what I would in public, and that`s how I came up with a lot of the songs for the band on the last two records.
My whole life. That was my fist experience with the guitar, sitting down winding the tuning pegs and trying to make something that sounds cool.
The Goo`s slugged it out for years, making several recordings before breaking through. I don`t think that attitude prevails on the big labels in the 90`s.
That was one of the benefits of not getting a big record deal. Right from the start, we had a pretty small, pretty lousy record deal. I don`t know why, but I had a good A&R guy at Warner Brothers, Rob Cavallo.
We didn`t make a living we always had day jobs. But we were putting records out, so we were happy. It was just what we did. It was a natural thing to make records. We went to our stupid jobs, and then we went to a recording studio. I was a hot dog vendor, I roasted nuts, I was a bar tender at the Continental. My last job was doing independent radio promotion for a company called Could Be Wild in Buffalo, New York. It was great, I learned a lot. That was A Boy Named Goo. It paid me $150 a week, bought me lunch everyday, let me call long distance-and they let me rehearse in their garage. I was like, "F**k yeah, that`s a sweet deal."
No, I mean, yeah, you dream about it. For a long, long time, music like ours didn`t get played on the radio. It didn`t happen. It got played on college radio and that was it. WBNY in Buffalo was really instrumental in this band`s career, too. I`m sure they won`t play us now. It`s an indie college radio thing; we don`t belong there anymore. But we were an alternative rock band when that meant something-when it wasn`t a clever marketing euphemism for mainstream rock.
My first guitar was a Hondo II LesPaul copy, which I bought secondhand. I had an amp called an Alamo. It had a 10" speaker, and i would turn all the knobs on 10, just so it would crunch. I could never afford a Strat. I started playing Mexican ones on the Boy Named Goo tour. I`d get these Mexican Strats for $250 a piece and then add $75 for the EMG pickup. It was like, "Yeah, man, it`s great." So I bought four or five of them when we had a little bit of dough. Now I`ve got a deal with Fender and Alex Perez makes my Strats and Jaguars and stuff like that. I love those sparkle finishes. I`m way into those so I get as many as I can from them. Alex is really cool about that. I`m sort of switching back to Seymour Duncan pickups because they are a little more natural-sounding. They are not as boxy or compressed-sounding.
I have seven Marshalls now. Four of them are stock JCM 800s with the six knobs on the front, like from the `80s. I htink those were the best sounding Marshalls right out of the box, with none of this channel-switching bulls**t. I have two JMP amps; the Mark II lead 100 heads that Bob Bradshaw and Mark over at Custom Audio did the mods on. My main amp is a Custom Audio Electronics head, which is Bob Bradshaw designed and built. That thing`s amazing. It`s a sick amp.
Oh yeah. oh my God, there is nothing like a Strat with a humbucker ripping through a Marshall. Just that power man, that aggression. "Long Way Dow," on A Boy Named Goo, was all about having a Marshall tickling your ears.
I play Guild`s and Alvarez Yairi. Those are nice.They are seal-chambered guitars, because I play so loud. I can`t have a guitar with a hole in it.
From the beginning you messed with alternate tunings. Did you ever study them or is it serendipitous?
That`s pretty much it. I bought a book of alternate tunings. I played around with a couple of them.
No, I never got that far into it. The one that always kills me is Zeppelin. Rob Cavallo, the guy who produced our record, is a Zeppelin freak. He knows everything about Zeppelin, can play every single song. It`s amazing. He said, "Oh man, dude, he is totally tuning the guitar," and he`d show me how they did it. I was like, "Damn that`s so cool." But I always tried to keep it me and the guitar.
For example, on "Name" you spell the tuning D-A-E-A-E-E. But you didn`t know that, you just did it?
I did it, and then I took it to a tuner and saw what notes the sritngs were tuned to, and then I wrote it down.
It`s B, then five D`s. The lowest string is a B, but here is the weird thing: we took a G bass string and put it on the guitar. We couldn`t get enough tension on a guitar string.
When you have a tuning like that, it makes it easy to play, as well.
Hey, man, just because it`s hard don`t make it better.