Jamming with other people will create energy and excitement that you can feed off, and which will help push you to do things you'd never dream of doing by yourself.
I love jamming with my band because the guys inspire me every time. We all get off on each other's playing.
When you're a little kid, you have nerve. I'd walk right up to whoever was recording and say, 'Hey, dude, what's the lick of the week?'
Towards the end with Pantera - although I was never unhappy with the music we were making - it became one-dimensional, and we wanted to open things back up.
Way before we got a record deal, we were playing clubs seven nights a week, three one-hour sets a night. Then we got the record deal, and we took off on the road and stayed out.
I got food poisoning in Venezuela, and it sucked!
Initially, I just used the guitar as a prop. I'd pose with it in front of a mirror in my Kiss makeup when I was skipping school. Then I figured out how to play the main riff to Deep Purple's 'Smoke on the Water' on just the E string. Next, my old man showed me how to play barre chords, and that's when things started getting really heavy.
Music drives you. It wakes you up, it gets you pumping. And, at the end of the day, the correct tune will chill you down.
My whammy system is set up so I can yank the bar up as well as do dive-bombs with it. This means that if I accidentally push down on the bridge with my palm, my strings go sharp and sound out of tune. I make sure this never happens by never resting my hand on the bridge when muting. I always do my muting just in front of the bridge.
Each track has to be precise, and that is a problem on a rhythmically complex track like 'Slaughtered.'
If you improvise a riff and the crowd immediately reacts to it, you know you're on to something.
'I'm Broken' was a sound check riff.
Man, don't get me started on Pat Travers. That dude writes killer blues rock and roll riffs.
If you wanna get out of a rut bad enough, it'll always happen. It's up to you, though. No one else is ever gonna do it for you.
Spittin' blood, smokin' guitars, fire everywhere - Kiss is where I started.
I love 'Dogman' by King's X and Living Colour's 'Stain.'
The harder stuff has always done it for me. Man, if it rips, I'll give it a thumbs up!
I was lucky enough to get to see guys like Bugs Henderson, Jimmy Wallace, all those great Texas blues players.
A lot of bands whine about the road and how tough it is.