My brother’s my best friend, without a doubt. Me and my big sister get along so well. She moved to East London, though, so points off, but she’s wicked. And then my little sister is a little genius. She’s super talented and such a great person, always been far more mature and cool than me.
Oftentimes, whenever I do interviews with guitar magazines and we discuss my influences, I mention people like Steve Morse, Alex Lifeson, Al Di Meola – but John Scofield’s name never comes up. And that’s funny because he’s so amazing; he’s the epitome of a really cool guitar player.
At my age, I’m not trying to score cool points. I’m just excited when I can speak to younger members of our audience in the WWE. I just get to be a superhero to kids, but I’m not trying to be on the cutting edge of style or anything like that. Once you reach that point of deprivation, you don’t mind it.
What I think is so amazing about having everything, and feeling like I have everything, is that I don’t really find happiness within materialistic things. Like, it’s cool if I can buy myself a new car, and I think it’s amazing for a week, but then the thrill is over, and I’m like, ‘Oh, so I guess that wasn’t really happiness.’
In the movies, every crazy old fart needs a cool old car. Jack Nicholson drove a spiffy yellow 1970 Dodge Challenger two-door in ‘The Bucket List.’ In ‘Gran Torino,’ the cranky pensioner played by Clint Eastwood not only owned a 1972 GT Sport, he also used to build cars like that at the Ford plant.
‘Boyz-n-the-Hood’ was actually supposed to be written for Eazy’s group. He had a group out in New York called Home Boys Only, called HBO. One of them looked like LL Cool J. Eazy wanted to write a song for them, a street song, like what we were doing on the mix tapes. So when I wrote it, it was too West Coast for them.
But this is Miami, you can’t come to Miami and not show any skin. You gotta show something. If you’re all covered up in this heat, you’re gonna make me pass out out just to look at you. It’s sweaty in Miami-but the diamonds will keep me cool.
Remember the first time you went to a show and saw your favorite band. You wore their shirt, and sang every word. You didn’t know anything about scene politics, haircuts, or what was cool. All you knew was that this music made you feel different from anyone you shared a locker with. Someone finally understood you. This is what music is about.
I think adidas really understands that it’s cool to be in business with the right people. It really feels like a bunch of creative minds rather than some rap guys stamping their names on a sneaker. We’re arguing over shoes, ideas, and everything – it’s like a tug of war.
Racism is taught in the home. We agree on that? Well, it’s very hard to teach racism to a teenager who’s listening to rap music and who idolizes, say, Snoop Dogg. It’s hard to say, ‘That guy is less than you.’ The kid is like, ‘I like that guy, he’s cool. How is he less than me?
More than anything, Play Cloths has taken risks in regards to the pieces of clothing that we’re even creating. We started out as straight T-shirts. It was just T-shirts and a couple cool things. Now, it’s leisure pants, it’s all types of clothing. We’re evolving even with fashion trends on a super high level.
I don’t really think much of any songs I put out like I know… I think they’re good, that’s why I’m putting them out. But like I don’t ever try to expect anything, so even with ‘Caroline’ or ‘Red Mercedes,’ I just put them out and hope for the best and people kind of gravitate towards them and I guess that’s pretty cool and that’s a blessing.
It’s just so cool when you meet people who are different than you are. That can give you a different perspective, a viewpoint on life, or inspire you. I mean, what would the world be like if we were all the same? I think it would be very boring.
The cool parts – the parts that have won Dubai its reputation as ‘the Vegas of the Middle East’ or ‘the Venice of the Middle East’ or ‘the Disney World of the Middle East, if Disney World were the size of San Francisco and out in a desert’ – have been built in the last ten years.
No matter how good you are, at some point your kids are gonna have to create their own independence and think that Mom and Dad aren’t cool, just to establish themselves. That’s what adolescence is about. They’re gonna go through that no matter what.
I was a big party guy in my twenties, and kind of a playboy as well. I adopted a lot of values and goals that were fairly superficial and, in many cases, self-destructive. They looked cool and sounded sexy on the surface, but underneath, there was no real meaning going on, just a lot of escapism.
I’m a video game enthusiast. I love video games! They were a huge part of my upbringing in their early form, when I was all about ‘Dig Dug’ and ‘River Raid.’ As they evolved, so did my music-making, and we just kind of grew up together like cool friends.
You think aerobics is not a cool sport? I think you are wrong. It requires amazing discipline – flexibility, fitness, knowledge. And you have to do it with a big smile on your face. Also, I once performed in front of 10,000 screaming women. I tell you something, I’d rather do that than kick a ball around in front of a few men.
My problem was that I was blond. There were no heroes with blond hair. Robert Taylor and Henry Fonda, they all had dark hair. The only one I found was Van Johnson, who wasn’t too cool. He was a nice, homely American boy. So I created my own image. It worked.
‘In Search of Excellence’ – even the title – is a reminder that business isn’t dry, dreary, boring, or by the numbers. Life at work can be cool – and work that’s cool isn’t confined to Tiger Woods, Yo-Yo Ma, or Tom Hanks. It’s available to all of us and any of us.
The first time I got into astrology was being in New York. I was like, ‘Oh, this is a real thing here!’ Now, I’ll Google what your sign is and what my sign is to see the predictions of friendship, and I find that really cool. But that’s the most I know.
My advice to young people wanting to make music and to be in this industry is to really spend your time making music. Make so much music you have no friends. Make music. Figure out what it is you love, and… because if you’re making cool art, then everything else will fall into line.
I get people who come up to me and are like, ‘You make me wanna live my dream.’ I was them, so I’m like, ‘Me, out of all people? No way.’ Eddie Guerrero did that for me, so to have little girls and guys tell me I inspire them, I didn’t know that came with the job, but it’s so cool.
Me and my brother get along super well. We’re, like, best friends. So we’ll stay up until, like, five just talking because we get along and, you know, it’s cool. And he respects my opinions, and I respect his, even if we don’t have the same opinions, but a lot of the time we do.
‘Jack & Diane’ was originally about race. I was playing nightclubs, and I was seeing new American couples, mixed-race couples. I thought it was cool. The song was my effort to make a song about that, but of course the record-company guy didn’t like it.
