Going out and looking for managers is like going out and looking for rattlesnakes.
— Walter Becker
I think we're right up there with Herman's Hermits and the other greats. Maybe somewhere between Herman's Hermits and the Gershwins.
Our career had a sort of funny shape.
When you're collaborating with somebody, there has to be a spirit of cooperation. There are a lot of times when you just can't persuade someone to write a certain type of song, either musically or lyrically.
When you start to work with someone, there's a negotiation that takes place involving what's going to happen when you have a difference of opinion. Most attempts at collaboration never survive the negotiation. Merely being agreeable is not enough.
I spent a couple of years not doing any music or anything, just here in Hawaii trying to get healthy and adjust to the new regimen I was setting up for myself.
I don't think that the Grammys are in any way a just way of grading music.
I guess actually playing on the records and touring is a great forced practice regimen for me. And you learn a lot playing with people.
I learned music from a book on piano theory. I was only interested in knowing about chords. From that, and from the 'Harvard Dictionary of Music,' I learned everything I wanted to know.
We've been allowed to operate unmolested on the fringes of the music scene, really. That's where we enjoy it most.
We try to write things that work on a variety of levels at the same time: A sleek exterior with a turbulent lyric.
Some places you play in America, it's like 'On the Waterfront.'
Given a choice between Charlie Mingus and Eric Dolphy or Joe Strummer and Lou Reed, there was no choice. I like Reed and Strummer, but it's kiddie music.
What gets people into trouble with records now is that they want to build something up without substantial musical ideas. Without that as a foundation, you can add all the layers of sound you want - it's still going to sound like a mess.
I thought Twitter was a joke. I really thought it was a gag. I thought it was like National Lampoon or the Onion.
If any artist abuses his audience as a means to any end, noble or ignoble, he better have a damn good reason for it.
With any relationship that goes on and is productive over a long period, there have to be some sort of interlocking qualities in those personalities that make it possible to survive.
I don't particularly like L.A.
ABC had all these schlocky, bubblegum acts, and we had to come up with suitable material for them. In which we were amazingly unsuccessful.
When the first album came out and I heard 'Do It Again' on the radio, that was the greatest thing that had ever happened. After that, it was all downhill.
There's a great freedom in writing by yourself. You can write anything you want.
With 'Aja,' there was a sort of happy conjunction between our tastes and the backgrounds and styles of studio musicians at the time.
It was the 'Gaucho' album that finished us off. We had pursued an idea beyond the point where it was practical. That album took about two years, and we were working on it all of that time - all these endless tracking sessions involving different musicians. It took forever, and it was a very painful process.
It's good - it's great when somebody who is 20 years younger than you comes up and says, 'Wow, we just got turned on to you guys, and you're really great,' or something like that. I like that.
It's a mystery to me why everybody doesn't love jazz. I've never been able to figure that out.
We play rock & roll, but we swing when we play. We want that ongoing flow, that lightness, that forward rush of jazz.
I think that there's the self-imposed pressure to come up with something that's good. For guys like us, that's much more important than any external pressure could really be.
You can't always count on the devices, attitudes, and conceits that stood you in good stead in 1972 or 1973, or 1978-79, to still have the same impact all these years later.
If you're playing in a room that holds 15,000 people, it's just a question of how bad the room acoustics are and in what way they're bad.
We fly to the town in the little private airplane, and then we have to get in cars and drive to the hotel and then drive to the gig. So, I want to do a tour where the performances will actually be at the small airports.
In the '70s... there were rock players, and there were jazz players.
It's great fun to play with a really good band.
People are really exercised about one particular thing, and that is themselves. They will bore you endlessly with their broken hearts.
I think the audience for Limp Bizkit is probably not going to be particularly interested in what we're doing. I don't think they'll find much that satisfies them in what we do.
In the '70s, my playing was completely untutored, but it sounded good to me, and I tried to find ways to make those very simple things work in more ambitious contexts.
If it feels like we're re-creating something rather than creating something, we don't do it.
There was a time in my life when one aspect of my lifestyle called for watching a lot of television.
Most of our songs are about relationships.
The perfect day for me is waking up and having a cup of tea with my kids before I drive them to school; Then, I go into the studio and try and write some music for three or four hours and give up about noon.
It wouldn't bother me at all not to play on my own album.
The more of what our music does violates the premise of its format that it's presented in, the better. So, hearing our music in the supermarket, a Muzak version, is great.
Originally, we had a band known as Steely Dan. As we moved away from the band, we got whoever was appropriate for specific tunes. In a lot of cases, we gravitated toward jazz players who had more sophisticated harmonic concepts.
I'm not interested in a rock/jazz fusion.
I think every time, before we do an album, we have a discussion where we sort of consider the idea of doing something radically different.
Let's face it, us '60s folks had pretty high expectations.
What about that Dave Brubeck live album, with a version of 'Like Someone in Love' on it, and long sax solos by Paul Desmond? That's what got me hooked on jazz.
I love guys like Charlie Parker.
I'm glad we turned into a big-time touring band later in life. In fact, it's almost like we planned it out that way.
We opened for the Kinks, the Beach Boys, the Guess Who, Chuck Berry, Sha Na Na. We opened for Cheech and Chong - I opened for Cheech, and Don opened for Chong.
'Gaucho' was a struggle for us for a lot of reasons, and in the end, we just sort of survived it.
