Archive for category: Medium Rare

Ray Davies of the seminal London band The Kinks, with the conclusion of my interview in conjunction with their live & unplugged "best of" collection, "To the Bone".

Melissa Etheridge:"And I got to lie still, and I stopped being a rock star. I stopped working, I stopped striving, I stopped everything. And I was completely still . And being still is the best thing you can do for yourself. I mean it. We just don't do enough of it in our lives , and it is so important. And I just laid still, and I finally got to the point where my brain stopped chattering. It stopped waking up and wandering, and I started dreaming again. I started dreaming of what I wanted the rest of my life to look like ." RB: "With the diagnosis of breast cancer, you still could make plans for the future even before you completed chemotherapy and radiation ?" ME:" Oh my gosh , I want the rest of my life ! No no no, I'm not done at all, I'm just beginning . And with that new excitement, I started looking at what I had created , what I'm creating now, and what I wanted to create. I started reading like crazy , I started reading everything from cosmology to quantum physics , string theory, agnostic gospels, Buddhism, everything ! And everybody is saying the same thing , this simple thing : that we're all here to create, to be happy, and to love. You know, give me the peace signs and all the gooey stuff, but that's really what I started feeling.And when I started thinking ,'Oh my gosh , I want to write a new album ' , I had this joy behind it . I had this great desire to put my experience down and to ignite people and light 'em up and say , 'Look , you can do this too . We don't have to do it this way '. " RB: What attitudes and behaviors should we all look at ? ME: Today , right now, we have a choice .We have marketed ourselves into a little bitty corner of sound bites and fast food , and we think we can sustain ourselves on this . We think we can go to McDonald's every day , eat in our car , and be fine . We can just download that one little song that sounds just like that other song . They're little pieces . If you want to live your life on just little pieces of life , okay , that's your choice . But I think that there's a large bunch of us who really want more , who really do believe that the best food comes from the earth ; that it grows up out of the dirt ; and then you eat it and it nourishes you . And that music is made channeled through an artist . They craft it , they put it down in a certain place , and you can enjoy it for three minutes , or an hour , or you can even go to a live concert and enjoy it for three hours . Imagine giving yourself that time ! But I think our society needs to take a breath and step back , and get off this wheel that we're on of faster , faster , faster . I do ."

The various subjects on Peter Gabriel's "Us", like the deep funky grooves, are all killer and no filler, from the pleading divorced parent to his regressing child on "Come Talk to Me". the matter-of-fact demystification of personal therapy in "Digging in the Dirt", to the Biblical allusions in "Blood of Eden", inspired by Gabriel's study of capital punishment. My exclusive classic rock interview with Peter Gabriel, in front of a small intimate audience, was his first reveal of those songs in September 1992, plus "Love to Be Loved", "Steam", "Kiss That Frog", and "Secret World". Part one of two.