I love my bandmates, and they’re my friends, and even though we had fun and got to tour and I got to play the drums a lot, which I’ll always appreciate, we had a really rough time. We toured and tried to get people to come to our shows and put out records, and we really struggled.
When you’re in a band, you spend most of your time in a van. Like, there were four of us, we toured all the time, and you’re stuck looking at three other people for a month straight. And all of those times, we all just liked making fun of people, doing impressions of people, coming up with songs.
It was very interesting, and we went to Germany and we toured Germany like we were a German band in 1985.
There’s been a lot of crossing paths with the Yes camp over the years for me. The first one was when Dream Theater and Yes toured together in 2004, which was a lot of fun.
It’s hard to live up to The Beatles. When Wings toured, they got slated. Even Dad found it hard living up to The Beatles. I started out playing under an alias because I wanted to start quietly.
Even in my really bad, drugged-out days, I didn’t go away. I still toured, still did interviews. I never gave up the fight. That’s why I’m who I am today, because I didn’t leave. And I think I made the right choice.
My dad is Jean-Paul Bourelly, a really prestige guitar player in Europe, and he toured with Miles Davis. I was always surrounded by the most prestige kind of musicians from Senegal, Trinidad, Poland, Nigeria, and all around the world.
The fact is, for the first 10 years I toured as a solo artist, I wasn’t playing any of the songs I didn’t write or sing.
I was producing demos for a band that was called Physical Ed. Out of production of demos I went and did a few jam sessions with then in Northern California clubs, but I never actually toured with them.
When Steve Jobs toured Xerox PARC and saw computers running the first operating system that used Windows and a mouse, he assumed he was looking at a new way to work a personal computer. He brought the concept back to Cupertino and created the Mac, then Bill Gates followed suit, and the rest is history.
Scandal rarely toured after those first few hits. I want to go out and sing and connect with fans who may have never seen us live.
The book tour has been really interesting and very gratifying. I have not book toured before. I’ve never had quite as much pleasure, as much satisfaction.
I toured. I played, I was in that world so intensely, and then I had to bow out.
Pages: 1 2
