I'm a struggling guitar player.
After I left Texas and went to California, I had a hard time getting anyone to play anything that I was writing, so I had to end up playing them myself. And that's how I ended up just being a saxophone player.
I think it's just an awkward time right now to be a musician.
And I had not much of a voice. I didn't play that great guitar either.
People are familiar with my songs, especially through Eric Clapton. But I have a hard time drawing a crowd, because I have been a songwriter.
I actually started playing in little cafes around New York, and I have a lot of good friends of mine who are musicians who are struggling in New York.
I wish I could have more faith in my own music. Unfortunately, I don't.
A musician can get lost to what he is in the session busines as it was.
My dad, bless him, was a musician. And his dad had thought that his music was rubbish.
Doing interviews and touring are two ways that I can try to bring my music to people. It can be tiring, but it's better than working at Burger King.
So what, I'm living in a park. Parks are beautiful. I'm a musician. And I'm tired of dumb people who don't know where I come from.
If North American musicians would only know how uncomfortable life is for European musicians.
I had to deal with being somewhat of an outcast because it's not socially acceptable to be a struggling musician. There have been times where I've felt sorry for the person I was dating. I felt she deserved better.
'Some Kind Of Monster' is such a nightmare for any musician to watch because you're watching a band be honest to each other. Not a good idea, man!
The songs were really complicated. I used to meet people in bar bands who were trying to play our songs and they were really struggling with it. Technically it was really difficult stuff.
I've always considered music stores to be the graveyards of musicians.
When I got hoarse, the manager would say, 'Drink this. Joplin used to drink this,' and I used to say, 'Joplin? Joplin's dead.
You had many jazz musicians who lived in the United States, who had a hard time being accepted over here and had to play in sort of these inferior type dives.
I can't really sing and play live, because I can't play bass efficiently and sing at the same time. If I concentrated on the vocals, I'd mess up the bass, and if I concentrated on the bass, I'd forget the lines.
I joined Count Basie's band to make a little money and to see the world. For two years I didn't see anything but the inside of a Blue Goose bus, and I never got to send home a quarter.
The problem was the journalists who also did not understand much of my music, but they wrote about it. I think you fell into the usual trap laid out by parts of the press and other writers: that the poor musician has always to fight the evil companies and managers.
Life on the road is murder. It's as though life begins and ends when you have your horn in your mouth.
Playing live, you can't survive, certainly not in England. We used to work daytime jobs and play gigs at night. It was very exhausting.
I was a bar-back, which is the person who cleans the bathrooms at the end of the night in the bar, and a cook. I had kind of given up. I was into backing other people up. Music was something I just did on the side and I don't think I had the energy to pimp myself out, like call people up and ask them to book me to play.
I thought eventually I'd have a family and I really didn't want to be a loser like that guy in his 40s still shopping his band's shitty demo tapes around.
