What I've found is that a lot of soldiers are surprisingly apolitical. Their reality is, "Today I'm going to leave the gate for twelve hours, and I'm going to make it back to the dining facility by sundown with the arms and legs of me and my buddies intact."

I am neither pro- nor anti-gun. I am gun-conscious.

If it were a choice between me getting killed or one of my friend's kids, I would happily take the shot.

I wasn't playing the music, the music was playing me... and once that went away, and I had the feeling I was playing music, I had to stop. The need to go onstage and get my brain flattened every night left me, and what I didn't wanna do is go onstage and perpetrate a fraud... You cannot fool an audience.

Quite often governments are one way and the people are another.

If the death of Osama Bin Laden brings any peace to those who lost loved ones on that awful day in September 2001, that is a great thing. It is more likely, however, just a painful reminder of what was lost.

For the last 30-plus years, I have been doing one long, uninterrupted improv.