“It’s amazing how much of that music I still listen to actually. I was such a fan of music, even after I got started professionally”

I had promised myself when I first got started that if I got to the point my life where I started feeling ‘Gee, I’d rather be at home than at work’, and that started happening more often than not, that it would be time to leave.

I’d wake up some days and go “Oh, I don’t even know if I want to go face this anymore”. I would, I would go do it, I’m a dutiful kind of person and not afraid of work.

Now that I’m afraid was institutionalized, and the great thing about the Canadian content regulations is that it broke that open.

I remained a fan. But what happens when you’re so involved is you start spending all your time based on the music that you’re involved with, you just don’t have as much time.

And then all of a sudden that starts disappearing from the book, and just about everything I’m talking about from that point on are the records that I’m totally involved in.

I took that opinion to the wall, often in public, often had to… I often had to fight in public with the very same people who I was trying to convince to play my records!

I noticed when I was writing the book that I would tend to mention ‘outside’ songs right through to about the middle of the 70’s.

I couldn’t believe it the first time I heard one of my records on the radio, and I STILL love hearing anything I’m involved with on radio, and some of my best friends were from radio. But we were on different sides of that argument, there’s no question about that.

Yes, it’s true – I love the roar of the crowd. When the fans are with you, their voices come together in a big booming rush of sound that you can actually feel in your body – almost like a wave that lifts you and carries you past your own limits.

I’m one of those freaky people that actually reads books.

I actually went to study with the Ramapoughs in New York. I wanted to be able to see the mountains and the forest, be around the people.

The P.C. police are out in force at all times… We’ve reached a point where people are actually afraid to talk about what they want to say.

We’ve reached a point where people are actually afraid to talk about what they want to say, because somebody might be offended. We’ve got to get over this sensitivity and it keeps people from saying what they really believe.

The only time you are actually growing is when you are uncomfortable.

At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.

I couldn’t wait to get out of school, but once I did, I didn’t actually know what I wanted to do with myself. I don’t really know how it happened, but I just started writing music and realized that’s what I wanted to do.