You have to get past the idea that music has to be one thing. To be alive in America is to hear all kinds of music constantly: radio, records, churches, cats on the street, everywhere music. And with records, the whole history of music is open to everyone who wants to hear it.

The Japanese are hard to figure out.

So we are pretty convinced we don't want to play huge stadiums unless we can play them well.

But hey, when you live in Watts, you need a little smack to get by, you know what I mean? You need something soft and comfortable in your life, 'cause you're not going to get it from what's around you. And society isn't going to give it to you.

You need music, I don't know why. It's probably one of those Joe Campbell questions, why we need ritual. We need magic, and bliss, and power, myth, and celebration and religion in our lives, and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it.

Things come up from the outside, the outside world says, okay, you have do this, you have to go here and here and here, and these are your options. You can be here or you can be here. You can do this, or you can do this. You can go here, or you can go there. So each one of those things becomes a place of decision, and the way we make decisions is that we all get together and if somebody doesn't feel right about it or it doesn't seem to sit right, usually we'll go with the no vote. If somebody's not comfortable with it, we'll figure it's not going to be worth doing.

What we need is something, a definition of a human, starting from the ground up, so that the suitable moral structure that goes around it makes sense. The context has to come from the human first, rather than bits and pieces of fragments of old religion and all of the old moral superstructure, whatever it used to be.