I don't know how many bands I saw who would try to wreck a hotel room, but I never wrecked a hotel room in my life! If I'm gonna sit there and throw a TV out the window... if it's a good TV, maybe I should just take it home.
I've been shocked for a long time in a lot of circumstances. I get shocked when they say, 'Hey, we're paying ya.'
I plug into a lot of old rock & roll. Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis - I love all that stuff.
I'm constantly surprised when people say, 'But you haven't changed!' It's like saying, 'You've got a wheel. Now why don't you make it a square?'
Soloing was pretty easy for me because it was probably the first thing I've ever done.
Over the years, the critics have said, 'They never change.' Maybe the little guy's got a new color of school uniform. I always thought, 'Well, what were we going to change into?' A jazz band? A keyboard band?
The mainstream media tend to lump everything together. To them, there's no difference between Madonna, the Rolling Stones, or whatever.
I've heard people say all our music sounds the same, but it's usually just the people who don't like us who say it.
Hearing a lot of early rock n' roll records from a very young age was a huge influence.
It doesn't take much for anyone to pick up anything I play - it's quite simple. I go for a good song. And if you hear a good song, you don't dissect it - you just listen, and every bit seems right.
The media, being what it is, is always looking for the next new thing. There are still bands out there playing, no matter what the new thing is. The Stones go out there, and people go see them without records or even airplay.
We came out in the midst of the hippie hangover. All this mellow music.
What we admit to is being a rock n' roll band. From day one, I was a big Chuck Berry fan.
We don't go around the world counting ticket and record sales, nor do we glue our ears to the radio to hear what's trendy at the moment - we're not that type of band.
I think the '60s was a great time for music, especially for rock and roll. It was the era of The Beatles, of The Stones, and then later on The Who and Zeppelin. But at one point in the '70s, it just kind of became... mellow.
If you know what you do well and stick to that, I think you can appeal to the different generations. You can strike a chord with them. I've got the brain of a teenager anyway.
When I was young, and I would see bands playing, I would dig the rock & roll and get excited, but when they would start to take the pace down, my attention span would start going.
You'd be playing in a pub in the afternoon. Then late at night, you'd be playing a club. You got into that habit: 'If we don't play, we don't eat.'
I found that pedals were too much to fool around with. You'd be halfway through a solo, and the batteries would go dead and conk out. And if you tread on the lead going to the pedal, something would always go wrong. Or some crazy kid would pull the lead out just at the moment when you're about to do your big number on it.
Because we grew up in Australia, to find information about a lot of blues guys, I used to go to the library and find the jazz magazines. They didn't even sell them at the time in news agents and stuff.
