Growing up as a kid my father was British and a soccer player. His idol was a guy that passed the ball a lot, Stanley Matthews. Our family thought if you could be unselfish your teammates would always like you.
I've seen 48 Stanley Cups in my life. I was about six or seven when I started going to games with my dad.
I wish - I wish instead of just recommending these books, I could set them down at your doorstep. The collected stories of John Updike, the second volume of T.C. Boyle's collected stories, and Stanley Crouch's book about the rise and times of our genius saxophone player Charlie Parker. These are deep books, books that you can get lost in.
Anyone who plays in the NHL dreams to win the Stanley Cup and I dreamed as well to be one of them and raise the cup in Washington and bring it home to Moscow and celebrate with my friends and my parents.
The most important thing for us is winning the Stanley Cup and I want to win.
As far as being onstage, commanding presence, I've always looked up to people like Axl Rose and Freddie Mercury and Paul Stanley - the rock gods. I've always wanted to be able to achieve that level of commanding nature onstage and really leading people at a show.
Kiss will always be Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley to me.
When I started playing the bass, I became kind of fascinated by it and started investigating various styles of bass playing, and I was really struck with funk music, mainly American funk music - Stanley Clarke, Funkadelic and that kind of stuff. That comes out in a couple of songs like 'Barbarism Begins at Home.'
I enjoy where I am and I don't have a problem with being Steve Buscemi, Stanley Tucci, Don Cheadle, or Jeffrey Wright. They're not the lead of every movie they're in, but every time you see them they're really good.
I'd done my time in corporate America, from McDonald's making shakes to Morgan Stanley making deals and, yet, I felt awfully constrained by the uniform - not just my clothes, but how I felt I needed to conform - that a traditional job required me to wear.
