It comes back to the same old question people are always asking me: 'When are you going to do a solo record?' Well, if I did, it would probably be similar to 'Baluchitherium,' meaning it would be Van Halen music - which I write anyway - but without singing. ↗
For him to have understood me would have meant reorganizing his thinking... giving up his intellectual ballast, and few people are willing to risk such a radical move. ↗
Then, in 2000, John Reid, Elton John's former manager, asked me to audition for the stage version of The Graduate he was producing. So I worked on it, got the part, and after three weeks' rehearsal I was on stage! ↗
I've had two callers ask, 'Did you ever work for someone who is poorer than you are?' Their idea is it takes a rich person to give you a job because jobs are something that are given to you, an inferior, from on high. ↗
Call things by their right names - Glass of brandy and water! That is the current, but not the appropriate name; ask for a glass of liquid fire and distilled damnation. ↗
And I think one of the tasks that I always feel is how to get that vision out of them. Not exactly what they want, but what they want to accomplish for themselves or their community or their family. ↗