The drummer on the current Joe Walsh tour, he is a veteran musician and drummer whose career has spanned over 40 years of touring, recording, songwriting, and producing with legendary and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame artists. Along with vocals, he also plays percussion, keyboards and flute. The list of who he has recorded and toured with is a virtual who’s who in music history. He has had TV and film placements, co-produced albums, released three solo albums, and there is a book about him.
“It was really fun to do because I got rid of all the pressure of ‘Is this line funny? Is this line gonna work? What if I did this?’ There’s so many things I could’ve done in life, and so you can’t put ‘em all in a song.”
“You’re your worst critic. If you really, really love the song and you love listening to it and you never get tired of listening to it, you’re done. Put it away, master it, get it out there.”
“It’s not all glamorous at all times. I think that out of a 24-hour period – in a given day, a show day let’s say – two hours on the stage, there’s your fun time. That’s why you do the other 22 hours, is to have that two hours of fun on the stage.”
“If you are starting out in this business or you want to do this for a living, the very first thing you have to learn is to be flexible and you can’t count on anything going your way so you have to be flexible and you really have to have people skills and get along with people. You have to respect people just as you want them to respect you.”
“With all the years playing in these dumps, in these dives, in these bars – which is, you have to do, you have to start somewhere – when you finally get a shot to break out of that, you so appreciate the next step. The next venues are nicer, better conditions, better, p.a., better lights, more people, less drunks to deal with, just, when you get out of the bar scene. I spent so much time doing that as a young musician that when I finally got on a concert stage nothing could offend me or bother me… I don’t take that for granted today.”
“To end a song with 15 thousand people out there on their feet, cheering, that means a lot to me and I don’t take that for granted, so, I’m excited to play those songs every night for whoever’s out there.”
“If you have one person out there or a hundred, your performance should not be altered by the amount of people that are out there.”
“That’s what I love about this job so much is that it’s really widespread as far as emotions. It can go from ‘Man, this day really sucked’ to ‘This was the greatest day of my life.’”
“There’s struggles when you’re first working out tunes. And, for young musicians you gotta know this, that it doesn’t always happen the first time you rehearse a song and also it’s a process that evolves when you play a song on a stage for the first time live you can’t expect it to be that matured sound of six weeks from now.”
“Yes a producer is to be listened to and you trust your producer but that doesn’t mean that your personal taste in something should be defeated by him.”
"I Play the Drums"
"Rocky Mountain Way" (Joe Walsh)