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GOO QUOTES

JOHNNY QUOTES

"I get bored with standard tuning. I'm always twisting and turning the tuning pegs to find something new."

"I felt that I had to move, change and grow. Playing acoustic was a good way to do that."

"A lot of the punk bands paint themselves into a corner with a set of hard-and-fast rules that they can't stray from. So they can't grow, and they become obsolete very quickly. Only the Ramones can get away with making the same record seventeen times."

"The original punk spirit of individuality has really become mass-marketed."

"What he [John Prine] writes is so beautiful, and everything he writes is so real. It's like looking at yourself in a mirror after you've been up for three days under a fluorescent light."

"Did you ever see the movie 'The Deer Hunter'? Well, watch that movie and put on a John Prine record, and that is my life."

"He [Joe Rzeznik, Johnny's dad] could never rise above it, never see beyond it. He got drunk every day. Luckily, I've always had people around me who saw the potential for what is out there, especially Robby [Takac]."

"There are so many ways to derive power in music other than with a wall of screaming Marshalls."

"I think there's two things you have to do to sell out. You have to..you have to do something you don't wanna do, and you have to be paid off very handsomely for doing it...and we haven't had either of those things."

"If I think I'm about to do something 'jive' or 'boge' I won't do it, you know."

"You just have to play your guitar for the love of playing it, you know, and let it lead you, instead of trying to lead it into something."

"It's the music, it's about the music man."

"When it gets right down to it it's you and a guitar, and if you can't do that you ain't gonna be around very long."

"Everybody's subdivided into their little, teeny groups, and it's so weird, you know, because..everybody's got these blinders on."

"You can only stay within your little niche, you know..and, uh, sometimes you gotta poke your head up and look around."

"I just want another one of our songs to get out there, you know. I mean..the band is built on so much more than just that one song."

"They [Mike and Robby] know I'm outta my mind. I'm the most neurotic...I make Woody Allen look like Clint Eastwood."

"I can always tell how good a performance I had by how soaking wet I am, how many guitar strings I broke and how fast I fall asleep."

"The hippest of the hip don't come to see us anymore, which is fine with me 'cause they're boring anyway."

"It's fun to dress up every now and then. But when we're home, we just wear jeans and T-shirts. We're slobs at heart."

"When I was a kid bouncing on my bed playing air guitar, I didn't pretend that I'd be playing with Mick and Keith [of the Rolling Stones]. I used to pretend to be those guys."

"Nobody is going to pay 300 bucks to come see us. John Lennon could rise from the dead and get the Beatles back together again and I wouldn't pay that much to see them. I couldn't do it. I think it's too expensive when they charge more than 20 dollars for our shows."

"As a kid, I was a reject and an outcast...and you always carry a thread of that with you."

[On the band's name] "Now I'm really stuck with it, huh?"

"If I was going to be snotty I would refuse to play with anybody but the 'cool' acts. But what do I care? People mask their feelings of inadequacy with arrogance, and I'm not about to do that."

[On Y2K] "I'm kind of scared. I'm going to stockpile beef jerky and water and dig myself a latrine."

ROBBY QUOTES

"We've been a band since 1986, and you can really drive yourself crazy by having your goal be for you to be huge, you know. If it doesn't happen you're miserable constantly, and that's no way to go through life."

"The scene changes. You don't stay around for ten years when you follow the scene, you know."

[On 'City of Angels'] "I don't think I've weeped so much since, like, 'Born Free'. It's bad."

"We've been like a song orientated band for a long time, you know..and we're still writing songs, you know, and, uh..you know, they still come from the same place."

"We really didn't start out with the idea that we'd be successful, it's just that Johnny writes songs that have crossover appeal."