EricWFUV2

P: Laughs. Eric Bazilian and a live version of one of the Hooters� earliest and biggest hits, �And We Danced�. There is Hooters news, as we mentioned, but I wanna ask, I have to ask you if there have ever been any regrets along the way about the name?
E: You know, for a wh-- I gotta admit, they made me think about it. They, with a capital T. For a few years, I was sort-of, �what were we thinking?� First of all, when we came up with the name, the other vernacular had not been introduced yet. You know, Steve Martin with the thing, �I believe that women�s breasts should not be called giant winnebagos, they should only be called �hooters��. This was right before that. When he did that, we thought, �Oh, this is really funny. Ha ha. How cool�. But for us, it was an instrument. And the thing is, what we wanted was a plural noun that was not a household object. So that each of us could proudly say, �I am� a Beatle. A Stone. A Whale.� But not like, �I am a shoe,� or �I am a bottle of water�. So when John Senior, props to John, called the melodica a hooter for the first time, that was obvious that that�s the name of the band. And then for a while, like in the �90s, I was like, �oh man, why did we let ourselves get stuck with this name?� And you know what? Now, I�m proud of it. I wear that humiliation proudly.
P: Laughs. Political correctness aside, it has served certainly the band well, and you well.
E: Well, in Europe, it�s cool. They don�t really know what it means yet.
P: Laughs. So, why are you guys, almost from the beginning, to this moment more popular over there than in your home country?
E: I guess they just have better taste. {laughs} I�m sure you know we�re not alone in that phenomenon, where a lot of Legacy artists who continue to have thriving careers in Europe. I think a lot of that has to do with the culture. People over there just, they grow up with a much deeper appreciation for music, for the arts in general. They go out, they go out to see live music. They�re not as saturated with television as we are here. Here, it�s easier to watch the 9th rerun of the Grammys on VH1 than it is to go out and see one of these artists and, you know, have to buy the tickets and pay the service charge and go to the gig and then get vomitted on�
P: All of that fun stuff.
E: All of that fun stuff. And look, I admit it too. Especially since having kids, I�it�s hard to drag me out of the house. But over there, people just do it.
P: How far will you go with this? Is it just a summer thing, or will there be new recordings?
E: We�ll see. The recording thing is�you know, what happened to the band before is we just sort-of ran the course. I mean, if you think about it, the Beatles� entire career was 10 years. We managed to punch out 15. Rob and I have started working together on some projects and it�s great, and we�re even flirting with the writing thing. We�ll see how that goes, if we can find that, get that resonance between ourselves again. But as far as the band goes, when we did our gig last year, in Philadelphia, I had this epiphany on stage where I just realized I�m never going to play in a better band than this in my life. I�ll play with better musicians. I�m sure I have, but I will never play in a better band. Nothing would make me happier than to see this just roll on. Even if we just play the hits for the rest of my life every summer in Europe, that would be fine.
P: That�s great.
E: Just to get to do it. The guys are�they are my brothers.
P: I�m glad to hear that. There�s a great representation of the group. Sony Legacy, that�s their heritage department, has put out a compilation called Hooterization. Did you have any input into that?
E: We actually did. We gave them the correct spellings of our names. {laughs} I know we did� I think� not in the artwork, certainly, but then again we never did, but I think sort-of the sequencing, some of the song choices�
P: Alright, let�s play something from it before we move on to other things. I think we�ve decided on one called?
E: �Day By Day�.
P: You got it. The highest charting single in the United States.
�Day By Day� plays
P: You, after the Hooters, became much more engaged in a songwriting career, and a producing career, and one of the fruits of that was, I think, one of the most talked about songs of the �90s. The one called �One of Us�. There�s a couple of angles from which I�d like to approach it, Eric. First of all, were you raised in any particular religion or formal religious training?
E: I was somewhat raised in one particular religion. It hasn�t really survived into my daily life now, I�m not proud to say, but actually, I was educated by the Quakers, which is a total panreligious upbringing. You learn all about all the world�s religions, and it�s very tolerant. Quaker meeting is about every week, which is totally non-secular. So, I was raised to have an open mind.
P: Now, I know you were already working on the album, the project with Joan Osbourne, but the way this song came into existance had some interesting twist to it if I�m remembering correctly.
E: Yeah, the truth is, and it sounds so trite to say this but it really is the truth, I wrote the song to impress a girl. {laughs} And it worked because I married her. Or she married me.
P: Didn�t she have a role in it�s creation?
E: She did. We had watched �The Making of Sgt. Pepper� on TV, and she had just moved over from Sweden, and she had never had any involvement in the music business�creation of music at all, so this was all a new world to her. And she was fascinated by the four track recording technology that George Martin was talking about, and I explained to her that that mass of wires on the dining room table was a Portastudio, was a 4-track recorder, and she said those magic, those 2 magic words: �record something�. Oh, 4, �for me�, 4 words. So, I had been playing this guitar riff for the past day (plays intro to �One of Us�). And that just happens. I wake up and the first thing I do is I play a guitar riff. Then I do the�take care of the other stuff. {laughs} So, I figured it would take me half an hour. I could put together a little track, a little drum machine thing, made up a little b-section. And then put the track down and recorded it to 2 tracks and figured she�d be really impressed, and she wasn�t. She said, �No, you�ve got to sing it now�. I was in the middle of a 4-way song writing collaboration, which, even at its best, is arduous. But when you have 4 people in a room trying to write lyrics to the same song, it�s just, you know� So I was in the middle of this committee thing�fortunately Joan ended up writing most of the lyrics on that album, thank God�so writing lyrics was not something that I was thinking about right about then, but I figured I�d give it a shot. So I picked up a mic, put it in record, and then I heard a voice in my head. The voice of�pregnant pause�Brad Roberts of the Crash Test Dummies�that basso profundo of his, and I heard him singing (in a deep voice), �If God had a name��, and that was it. I put the thing in record and sang most of the song on the first pass, I did the chorus at the second pass, and I was stuck for a last line. And Sara, who was falling asleep in the other room: �try to get home�. I think she just wanted me to sing anything so I could go to bed, and I just (mumbles �try to get home�) �make his way home�. So yeah, she had a very integral part. I should ask her for lyrics more often. {laughs}
P: So, were you excited about what you had? Did you bring it in tenuously?
E: I was excited. I mean even at 3 o�clock in the morning I just had that feeling you get when you know you�ve tapped into the absolute in some way. I had no concept of what it was going to become. And the next day I brought it in, and during one of our breaks, I played it for the assembled multitudes for entertainment purposes, and that magic moment when Rick looked up at me, through the fog as it were because it was the early �90s, and I�m not naming names here, and he muttered those magic words, �Joan, do you think you can sing that?� And she did, and we recorded it, and I got in the car and popped the cassette in, and I started practicing that speech that I almost got to give. {laughs}
P: Grammy nominee 1996?
E: 6, yeah.
P: Can we hear the composer�s version?
E: Sure. Actually very close to the original. Although there was a part in my demo that you can hear on The Optimist, my first solo album, available on my website. It�s a hidden track, it�s after The Optimist, you have to wait 30 seconds, but there was a whole, like, Beatles section, a whole �I Am The Walrus� section in the middle which I�m going to try to approximate with this accoustic guitar.
Eric plays �One of Us�.
P: As I said, I think that�s one of the most remarkable songs of the decade. What chord do you think it struck in people that they responded to the way they did?
E: I think the F sharp minor.
P: Is that it? {laughs}
E: I don�t know. I mean I can only speak for my own experience of the song. I think that I experience the song pretty much the same way as everyone else because it was such a moment of divine intervention for me. I mean I really happened to be standing there when lightning struck and I just happened to be the one it picked. The chorus, it just�it doesn�t�everybody�s got some sort of feeling about a higher power, as they choose to call it, or not, and it�s hard to express that in a way that won�t exclude someone else. Like, if you�re Jewish and you think about it in those terms, well then what does that mean for all of our Muslim and Christian brothers and sisters in the world? And likewise. But the song, it doesn�t touch, well, it touches Jesus and the saints, but even in that case they�re just cultural icons. But it�s really just about how one sees oneself in context of the rest of humanity and whoever put us here�whatever put us here.
P: Joan�s performance was exceptionnal.
E: Yes, it was, God bless her.
P: And I will ask about her again in a minute, but I wanted to ask you�I�m sure people talk to you about it all the time, even to this day. What I�d like to know is did anyone tell you something about the song that you didn�t know, and agreed with? That�s the one part of it, and the other part is, what�s the most off the wall, misinterpretation of that song, that either makes you laugh or pisses you off?
E: Actually, I can answer the second one first, and it did make me laugh and piss me off. On Grammy day, we were driving up to the Grammys, and I remember somebody saying, �My God, they�re picketting.� And I looked out, and they�re picketting about �One of Us�, about that song. And it turns out it was the Catholic League, which has nothing to do with the Catholic Church. It�s a political organization. And the song offended them because, and I�m quoting, �It raised questions.� {laughs} I saw this guy speaking on TV, and I just couldn�t� And actually another thing that was very funny was Rush Limbaugh took the song as sort-of a cause for himself, and he thought the song was a great message for the youth of America. You know, for the great white Christian youth of America. Little did he know that it was a lapsed Hebrew Democrat who� {laughs}
P: Now there�s an odd couple: Rush Limbaugh and Eric Bazilian. I love it.
E: You know what, we can find fellowship together, I�m sure.