I love Steven Wright. I was in high school in the '80s, and there was a lot of stand up on television.
I started in the late 70s, beginning of the 80s, and I think I started to sing and make music as a therapy for myself; I never planned to be an artist; sometimes when I think about it it's crazy that I'm here, and I'm touring, and I'm doing what I'm doing.
The best advice I've heard was from a lady in her 80s at my grandmother's 90th birthday. I was telling her how wonderful my children are. She said, "Don't forget your husband: you only borrow your children; your husband you'll have for ever."
I was like a total cliched '80s child. I had Barbies, obviously, as well as My Little Ponies and Cabbage Patch Kids, but I used to destroy them. I used to draw all over their faces and cut off their hair.
The '80s to me, more than anything else, represents a time of real criminal activity in the office of the president: an incredibly disparate economy in terms of the class distinctions and whatnot, and a tremendous shallowness - a lot of sort of bank robbery by executives.
From folk to tribal to Cab Calloway, Cole Porter, Gershwin to the Rolling Stones, whose first record was all covers, to country-western, bebop, blues, and even the referencing in classic hip hop to cliched love ballads of the '80s or whatever - that is kinda gone, and that's just terrifying to me.
I do listen to Abba. And a lot of '80s and '90s pop music.
It has been difficult to hold onto many paintings but I have retained a few. Possibly the current favorite is titled 'Big Band' completed in 2005. It measures 13 feet x 9 feet. It has 18 nearly life size recognizable portraits of the biggest jazz stars that I knew and saw perform in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, '80s and includes Wynton Marsalis.
My biggest successes were mainly in the pop market during the 80s.
When I first started in rock, I had a big guy's audience for my early records. I had a very straight image, particularly through the mid '80s.
I was a choreographer in the '80s and I was doing these videos. I did an Extreme video, which was really weird having them here. I did "Get the Funk Out".
I don't know what it was like in the '80s. I don't really even know what it was like in the '90s, because I was broke and wasn't selling any art. I was in a few group shows, but I didn't have a gallery until 2006.
I don't look back with any bitterness, though there are a couple of judgment calls and some '80s hairdos that I'd like to do over.
I was a teenager in the '80s - and maybe I'm wrong about this - but it seemed like a bad era for movies that were scary. It was really the height of movies that were disgusting.
When some of the gangs got involved with the drug trade, particularlythe crack cocaine trade, and the lethal violence started to flare up in the '80s, then there was a great deal of public attention on gangs and a great deal of concern about what was going on in these social groups.
Justin Broadrick has stated that the drum machine sound was heavily influenced by hip hop artists in the late 80s, particularly the beat on “Christbait Rising” which Broadrick was quoted as saying, “It was my attempt at copying the rhythm sample on 'Microphone Fiend' by Eric B & Rakim”.
With MTV in the '80s, you made your album but then you needed to use any money you made to create a video - instead of being able to use that money to pay for you and your band to live on while you wrote new songs. So MTV upped the ante of looking for one hit. Conceptual bands who didn't have a hit were going to lose.
You make decisions, and that's what separates art from some other pop music. It doesn't mean that you can't make an embarrassing amount of money, for a borderline Marxist, doing something that you love, but it does mean that this huge pool of money that was out there when I started making records in the '80s is gone.
In the early '80s, I was blown away when I began to hear some of the earliest hip-hop songs, and I'm fascinated by all the permutations the genre has gone through.
Back in the '80s, a lot of the images I used were from TV or from films on TV.
The way my mom dressed was one of my earliest inspirations, in those '80s suits with shoulder pads and things like that. For years, I ran away from that style. But now, all I want to do is shoulder pads and nipped-in waists and padded hips and peplums and poufed dresses.
In the '80s, I was the only one who didn't watch the shows about teenagers. I had to go over to friends' houses to see them. I still don't have a TV!
I was heavily into AD&D in my teens (late 1970s-early 1980s) but fell off the RPG habit in the mid-80s and have never gone back to it; my lifestyle today isn't very compatible with having a regular gaming group (too much travel).
Television in the '80s was very limited. There was no Food Network. When I opened Spago, I had the kitchen in the dining hall. It was probably the first restaurant to do so. The dining scene became more casual. All these cooking shows have transformed our profession one-hundred percent.
There's something about Michael J. Fox that I loved when he did all the '80s stuff. His way of performing all the physicality, which is why it's so tragic now, but the way he used his body so much as well, I loved.
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