You're not gonna believe this, but Rod Stewart is white!

I'll eventually get around to writing about The Fray show I lost night, which was excellent, but right not it's kind of too cold to think so instead I'm going to regurgitate some great quotes from the one and only Little Steven. Quotes come from an interview in Esquire magazine by Ryan D'Agostino. Enjoy.

Raised on the Jersey Shore, the E Street Band guitarist played Silvio Dante on HBO's Jersey-based The Sopranos.

You gotta have cinnamon in your coffee. Pour it on.

The Super Bowl — they ask us every year, literally for twenty-five years. Since Born in the U.S.A. You can only do it once, I guess. You want to save some things.

Here's the wonderful thing that Bruce Springsteen and David Chase are capable of: Those two guys have the remarkable talent of transporting you to their own time zone, to their own rhythm, and slowing things down. That's an extraordinarily important talent these days, when everything is temporary and disposable and going by at a hundred miles an hour. In the old days, they would have been called wizards, because they control time.

Scandinavia is another planet. They get health care, education, there's no homeless, they barely have a prison system. We joke about how they're overtaxed, but it's the same fucking 50 percent I'm paying.

Art is not a luxury.

I remember when flying was fun. When did we become a Third World country? What day was that?

February 8, 1964, there was not one single rock 'n' roll band in the country. February 9, the Beatles played The Ed Sullivan Show. February 10, everyone had one. In the garage. "Garage rock" is traditional rock 'n' roll. If you think of it as the early Stones, you're fine.

My life began on February 9, 1964.

To have impact in two minutes and thirty seconds — that's very hard to do. It's much easier to write Pink Floyd's The Wall than it is to write "Louie Louie."

The history of rock 'n' roll is the history of America in the twentieth century.

Bruce wasn't gonna get a third shot. His first record did like ten thousand, second one did like twenty thousand, and they were just done with him. And somehow, by sheer willpower, that song got done — four or five months recording one song. Turned out to be worth it. They sent it out without the record company even knowing, and a couple of big rock stations picked up the song, the "Born to Run" song.

People got upset when we'd start playing bigger places. But you can either play sixty nights in the club, or you can play the arena. Hmm, let me think.

I modeled the role on The Sopranos after my real role in life with Bruce. You'd see Silvio have to deliver bad news, Tony Soprano would get totally angry, and guess what? That's part of the job of being the consigliere, or being the best friend in real life. The main job of a producer is telling the artist the song's not good enough yet. You try to be as truthful as you can be without being insulting. And then you get past it. I enjoy doing that.

Every successful person needs to have at least one person in their life who's not afraid of them. That you gotta give Bruce credit for, because it's easy to surround yourself with people who don't know your character flaws and you can pretend to be God.

Nebraska was written and recorded as a demo. He played it for me, and I said to him, I think you should put it out as is. He said, What are you talking about? It's just demos. I said, Because you didn't intend to put it out makes it extraordinarily intimate. Eventually, he agreed and they put it out.

We have no place for greatness in our society anymore. Is there no talent, or is there no infrastructure to support talent?

I remember a kid running into band rehearsal one day, in '68 or so, and saying, You're not gonna believe this, but Rod Stewart is white! We said, Get outta here. We didn't believe him. There was just not that many places you could see pictures of people. There wasn't MTV. And we never heard any white person sing like that. We knew he was black.

Immediately upon working for fifteen years to make it, as soon as we make it, what do I do? I leave, right before the Born in the U.S.A. tour. Everybody bought houses off that tour. I'm in Africa with an eleven-piece that I'm paying for, using my little money to keep a band on the road talking about politics.

I learned everything I know from leaving the E Street Band. And of course, one of the things I learned is, I never should have left.

The Beatles were a band, which we had never seen before. Four guys working together. Brothers. I had no interest in being Elvis Presley. We thought the Beatles were best friends. We thought the Stones were best friends. We bought the illusion, and it's the illusion that matters sometimes. That's what makes art work; that's what makes religion work.

Believe me, your parents would have preferred that you be a criminal — anything more respectable than a rock 'n' roller.

We are all suffering from a terminal time-deficit disorder. What'd you do today? I don't know, but I had no time for it.

I believe that hundreds of years from now, history will be divided into pre-1960s and post-1960s. Questioning things as a regular part of normal life — that didn't exist for my father's generation.

I ran out of money every year for the last thirty years.

Little Richard opens his mouth, and out comes liberation.

In Europe, everybody in the audience has the new record before they come to the show. Why? Because that's the script of the stage production they're about to see and participate in. They come, and they all sing every word of every song. They don't move, they don't go to the bathroom, they don't order hot dogs.

I've had offers through the years to write a book, but I don't feel that I've quite done enough yet. I got some big ideas left.

Interviewed by Ryan D'Agostino, August 12, 2008

My 100th Post

Well it's been over a year since I've been writing this blog and I've just hit my 100th Post. Guess I'll have to step up my game the next couple weeks to keep everyone up to date on life and music and everything more often than I have been. So let's get started.

This week the new Counting Crows album Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings was released. I've only listened to it all the way through a half dozen or so times, but I'm absolutely loving it. The first half of the album is what Adam describes as a typical saturday night that he had been going through for a while. Loud, rocking, and general just kick ass (remind me to tell you a funny story about this later on in the post). The second half is a little more mellow and laid back. Exactly what you need on those Sunday mornings recovering from your rough Saturday night. It is probably the best album of theirs since August and Everything After (Anna Begins has been playing on my iPod a lot lately.) The album reminds me a lot of the Live Across A Wire double-disc which was the electric MTV 10Spot Concert and the VH1 acoustic set. Definitely go out and buy this album though. Adam and the guys are going out on tour this summer with Maroon 5 who I wrote about here.
Definitely going to try and catch a couple of these shows depending on where I'm living this summer.

Which brings me to my next highlight of the week. So I was on Myspace the other night just chilling seeing what was up and I noticed a post from my old boss at Mtv. The bulletin headline was "MTV is looking for on-air VJs". Now you've probably read the posts where I talk about my dream of being on Real World. (I dream big huh?) But I never thought about being an on-air VJ. Just kidding when I was doing my internship at MTV, the few times I was able to work with TRL I totally could see myself hosting. So I decided what the hell I'll put my resume together and throw on a random head shot photo (Sent one from Gabe's Wedding over the summer where I was looking totally awesome) and wrote a cover letter about how awesome I am (Can I just say my ego has gotten and awesome boost from people telling me all week "I can totally see you doing that") and I sent it off thinking nothing of it. So I go about my business go to class and come back and check my email. Seriously like 1 hour later the woman emails me back (I know I've been telling people she called, it's way more exciting that way) and asks if I can put together an audition tape by the end of the week. My response "I'll overnight it tomorrow". She sent me everything I needed to do on the tape. I needed three video tosses (Up next grab your umbrellas, at number 4 it's Rhianna) then one minute review of a new album (see above Counting Crows review) and one host copy which is now taped on 7 different cue cards on my bedroom wall. So I take about an hour and half to film all of this stuff which should be 4 minutes long and go to the studio to edit it all down. Honestly I think some of the outtakes are funnier than the actual audition and I'm going to try and post everything here tomorrow so you can see how it came out. So then I overnighted it and they received it Thursday at 12:44pm and it was signed by a Mr R. Armstrong. (Not that I was concerned about whether it got there on time at all) And then there was nothing. What I'm hoping is that they got all the tapes they wanted by Friday at the end of the day and then they are going to review them at the beginning of this week and then call people back. I hope I didn't get everyone's hopes up including my own and now all I can say is I once sent in a tape to be a VJ as opposed to "Mom I know you haven't seen me in a couple weeks it's been crazy down here at work, but tune in this Thursday to catch my interview with Mariah Carey at 3:30pm all part of Spanking New Music Week" (How f*cking cool would that be?)

I'll keep you all up to date on the developments on that front. Life has been good besides all of that stuff going on. Have a major project that I've been majorly procrastinating on so now I have to kick it into high gear this week to catch up. Sure it will all work out. After all some of the project involves Bruce Springsteen so what more motivation do I need. The major upside/downside of this position will probably be leaving Boston sooner than expected. I believe the position would start sooner than later and recently I've gotten it through my head that I'm going to stay in Boston for the summer. But if the opportunity presents itself, I'm outta here.

Justin and I had a really interesting conversation the other night about friendships and how funny and fickle they can be. We were talking about how our relationship had changed over the years since when I first met him. We talked a lot about how things were different while I was in Australia and even this year. I've been working a lot and/or hanging out with guys in the chapter and haven't really been as close to my roommates as I was when I lived with them sophomore year. It's weird because as a sophomore I was the young and inexperienced one and I really looked up to guys like Hansen and took everything they said and did as the rule of thumb. And not in a bad way just in a different way as I went from being friends/roommates with him to my Middler year as President of the fraternity and him as my advisor, I tried to do things they way he did and run the chapter they way he did. But our leadership styles are very different and when I tried to emulate him it came off I suppose as not genuine or forced. Then I went away for a year and came back full circle and we are roommates again and its for sure different but so are most of my other relationships. Over time people change and grow and sometimes we grow closer and sometimes we grow apart, but I feel it's just the natural process of things. There is no really explaining it, or if there is I haven't figured that part out yet.

I'm happy that spring is finally here (although it was snowing Friday night). The more hours of sun there are in the day the happier I am for sure. To wake up to sunshine on my face is probably one of the best feelings in the world, and getting out of class at 7:30pm at night and still having some light is also awesome. I know that my birthday is coming and graduation and all kinds of fun things that the summer always brings. I am for sure a summer baby.

This post is getting entirely too long so I will save some for later in the week.

Until then I'll leave you with some Bruce...
"This one's for friendship...blood brothers on a stormy night, with a vow to defend, no retreat baby no surrender."