I've had the honor of sitting in with the Allmans at their Beacon shows a couple of times, and it just doesn't get better than that.
We've had the good fortune of performing to live music a few times in our career and it always creates a different dynamic.
Of course I want people to show up to the concerts and I am sure for that to decline would be a difficult thing.
My mum loved Joan Armatrading and used to play her records all the time and even took me to see her a couple of times when I was really quite young. I didn't really like her music back then because my mum was always playing it, but I've grown to appreciate it more.
I just played at a club in L.A. called the Baked Potato. It fits like 90 people. It's like playing somewhere in a basement in, like, Indiana or somewhere where all your friends show up. It's really fun and there's a very different energy to that than to play to 50,000 at a Tokyo baseball stadium.
I used to do covers gigs that would be 90 minutes, with a 30 minute break, then another 90.
When I go to a live show, I want to be moved. That's why you do it. And it's not very often that a band will move you live.
I remember having to quit school and quit my job. I just sort of moved all my stuff into other people's places. Within, like, six months, I was able to earn enough money from touring to rent a place again.
I've been going long enough to prove what I wanted to prove, to get the girl I wanted to get, to make the money I wanted to make, to drink all the beer I wanted to drink. I've played - not exactly everywhere, but I've played enough places.
I would rather go back to when I started doing music in Ireland and it was all live. I mean you just don't mime.
The Bowery was a place that would let us do original songs - not just covers - but we would have to work for tips, so we learned how to work an audience. In order to keep our jobs, we had to keep people happy, so that meant playing the latest Lynyrd Skynyrd and ZZ Top or Merle Haggard.
You'd be playing in a pub in the afternoon. Then late at night, you'd be playing a club. You got into that habit: 'If we don't play, we don't eat.'
Preservation Hall is the sound of joy. When they start playing, people start moving.
I don't like to do the same songs every night for a week. I just... it's boring and tiring and frustrating basically.
No matter where I go, I never write the setlist until I'm at the venue.
When I started playing music at East Tennessee State University I would sit on a stool with a tip jar in front of me and play four hours a night at a college bar called Quarterback's Barbecue. I wasn't thinking about doing it for a living. I was just making enough money to go to Taco Bell every day. People were eating chips, drinking beer and not listening to me. I'd had three or four years of people ignoring me, and I'd kind of gotten used to it.
Man I mean, the great thing about playing clubs in Harlem is people have an appreciation not just for the music but for the history of the music.
Scarborough never really began to live until the summer of 1964 when the Beatles played the Futurist Theatre, and no one in the audience, least of all me, heard anything but the screaming.
Jimi was always at The Scene when he was in New York and we played many times together. He was just everywhere - he went out and jammed everywhere he was.
I came out with my five-piece group and opened at Billy Burke's Swing Oar. This was when Hollywood was really jumpin'. This was when Frankie Laine used to come in and ask if he could sing a number.
When I was in high school, The Dave Matthews Band was a local band, and that was the first time I was starting to connect with a live band that was something that wasn't on the radio or TV.
There's an amazing intimate feeling in a small club but an insane rush playing a stadium or festival.
I feel like I've gotten myself comfortable making beats in front of people, so like, if I'm in a big room of people, I'm not like, nervous. I wanna be able to make beats on the spot.
A lot of bands were doing remotes from ballrooms around the country.
I was looking for some way to put my music to some service on a nightly basis. You go into a town, you play a little music, you leave something behind. That idea connected us to the local community. It was a very simple idea, but it really resonated with me.
