Jazz can be so serious, no sense of humor.
I'm being a dad and a good husband.
Edible names are what drives me as a musician. My next band will be called the Hot Dogs.
The Meatbats are a throwback band.
I just try to approach and serve the music in the way that I think is right for the band I'm in at the time.
Family time is really important to me.
I'm a musician. It's what I do! I wouldn't be too good at anything else.
Going up north with the redwoods and driving along the coast, it's got everything, man. It's got the desert, the mountains, and the ocean. It's beautiful.
I'm a little more of a lead instrument in the Meatbats.
The Chili Peppers do a lot of improvising, but it's within the framework of song structures. The Meatbats is from a purely instrumental standpoint. But when you hear the term 'instrumental music' you think it's real serious stuff and everybody's playing a million notes and it's about playing fast. That's not what we do.
People who come up to me are drummers or fans of the band. I don't get it too much, but I'll be somewhere and someone will have me take a picture or something.
There's something about the rawness of the live thing, there's no rhythm guitars behind the solo, nothing other than what you hear the people playing at that moment. It's exciting, it's about the performance.
We always feel pretty creative as far as writing songs. We write them together; we just get in a room, or on occasion in Flea's garage. We just sort of improvise, like jazz musicians.
I had sort of exhausted all the avenues playing in Detroit. So again, through the stewardship of my brother, I ended up in California and went to the Musicians Institute in L.A. I wanted to get better as a player.
I took a private lesson, but it didn't really work out, so I went back to playing along with records. That's really the thing that got me into playing a lot - getting excited about playing along with my favorite bands like Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.
Flea and Anthony are into funk, like old school Meters and stuff like that.
Drums all have their own particulars - each drum has a place where they sound the best - where they ring out and resonate the best, and the head surface isn't too loose or too tight, mainly so you get a good rebound off of the head.
In some of the L.A. clubs, people can act too cool to get into your music. That can get to be a bit much.
Its very sort of spontaneous and organic, not a preconceived sort of jamming. Now we record everything, cause sometimes you'll forget, you know, 'what was that thing again?' So we record everything.
Playing along with records is key. And as far as equipment goes it has gotten so much more affordable and the drum sets are of great quality. I play Pearl; their Export Series is great for a beginner.
