My grandfather John came from Cork. I have six degrees of separation in Ireland.
Keep a meter on your fear. Fear can cripple you.
It's a modern world we live in, with everything at our fingertips, and if it's not at our fingertips, you can dot-com anything.
I didn't start off as a bass player, and Guns was the first band I really, like, 'Oh, I'm gonna be a bass player. This is what I'm gonna do.' And I really dove into it head first.
I have a teenage daughter and a 10-year-old daughter. Things are pink and fluffy at my house, with two little dogs. It's pretty funny to be me now. And I'm in on the joke that is my life.
Any musician in any band - for a really good band - you know your part in the band.
I do love the term 'rocker.' The word itself imbues a ton of imagery and romance. But I don't think a rocker needs to have AC/DC and Metallica and the Black Keys rumbling through their car speakers speeding headlong into the night.
Playing with Iggy pulled me back in for a while and reminded me of what I love about music.
It's funny: when I started playing bass in 1984, you had guys like Paul Simonon fron the Clash, John Paul Jones, Lemmy, and Nikki Sixx was the head guy in Motley Crue, and you had all this post-punk stuff like Magazine and Killing Joke where the bass sort of lead the way. Not that I picked it to sort of be a main dude, but it intrigued me.
By the time Guns n' Roses spent 28 months from 1991 to 1993 touring the 'Use Your Illusion' albums, the tour staff sometimes approached 100 people. We were carrying not only backup girl singers, a horn section, and an extra keyboard player, but also chiropractors, masseuses, a singing coach, and a tattoo artist.
The thing is that business and success, and how hard it is, doesn't look any different whether you're playing a gig at eleven o'clock at night or you're going to work at nine in the morning at a law firm.
Not to name names, but a lot of pop female artists you see, they don't write their own songs. Lot of top male artists and boy band artists, they don't write their own songs. They're just a product. They sell, they sell, they sell. They don't care about musical integrity, any of that kind of stuff.
In rock n' roll, we don't sell records at all like we used to. Yet the artist still has to pay to make records. So you've just got to get out on tour and be smarter about your merchandising.
I have mutual funds. I have a lot of individual stocks. I'm across the board, really well diversified.
Being in a band is the best place I can think of to be as up-front as possible. If you let something stew, it'll grow into a mountain of nonsensical black mud in no time.
I think you can tell stories and give perspectives and yet still keep stuff for yourself, too. I keep a lot of my life private, even in a public forum like writing.
I read Slash's book because we were on the road together with Velvet Revolver when that came out.
If you don't have a good rhythm section, your band is toast; you're a bar band. Good rhythm section, you've got a chance to get out of the bar.
One of the first 45s I ever bought was the Stooges' 'I Got a Right.' Probably one of my favorite singles, ever.
I'm not Cormac McCarthy, but I can get my point across in a thousand words.
