I think that Van Gogh is really the ultimate crazy artist that we all think of.
I'd love to work with Julia Roberts and Johnny Depp or Dick Van Dyke. I love 'Mary Poppins' - when I was little I was obsessed with it.
There are plenty of millionaires who would pay millions to hang a Van Gogh painting on the wall, but hardly one that would have ever had the crazy nut over for dinner. I feel like the big companies are like that with musicians. They'll say, 'We love music! It's all about the music!' - but if a musician shows up at the door, they call security.
Theo van Doesburg wanted to teach in the Bauhaus in 1922. I refused, however, to appoint him since I considered him to be too aggressive and too rigidly theoretical: he would have wrought havoc in the Bauhaus through his fanatic attitude, which ran counter to my own broader approach.
If Christ can die in a barn, I think the death of a human in a van is not so bad.
Greg Ginn was certainly a huge influence on my guitar playing. I put him up there with people like Eddie Van Halen. Eddie Van Halen changed everything; I don't necessarily like everything he did, but he definitely changed everything.
As a child I wanted to be a ballerina, ice-cream van owner, wife of George Michael, a nun, and a music conductor.
I always wanted to be a filmmaker, but I started acting when I was 9 years old. I looked a certain part that I wasn't, really. I played, you know, a high school jock with a lot of attitude or a spoiled rich kid, and I was neither of those things. I was from a very working-class family in Van Nuys.
There was a time when we were in a van and handing out the CDs at Warped Tour. We had a two-song EP that we were just handing out for free just to promote ourselves. That was on the 'Waking the Fallen' record, and we were just going around and handing out the CDs and stuff like that.
I traveled to Morocco once, and I only saw one television when I was there, but I did go into this dirt cave and I saw this kid chopping tomatoes and pita, and he had a picture on the wall of Jean-Claude Van Damme holding a gun. That connected with him on the other side of the world, so no wonder these big movies are made - they have a mass appeal.
My bedroom was plastered with pictures of Van Damme. My mother was worried about me. Most teenage boys have half-naked women on their walls, and I had Jean-Claude.
More people seem to know the Van der Graaf Generator material than my solo work - thanks, I suppose, to their parents' lingering vinyl collections.
When my father became vice president, I was a sophomore in high school. I'd do things like go on a run with my soccer team and purposely dodge the security van. Then my parents compromised with the Secret Service when I went to college. I just had a panic button in my dorm room, so if I pressed that, they'd be there within 2 or 3 minutes.
David Lee Roth had the idea that if you covered a successful song, you were half way home. C'mon - Van Halen doing 'Dancing in the Streets'? It was stupid. I started feeling like I would rather bomb playing my own songs than be successful playing someone else's music.
I would have liked to have had more to do with Kristin Bauer van Straten. She's the nicest human being that I think I've ever met.
I felt like it was inevitable that I was going to fail in life and die young. So I was frantically scrambling to document my stunts and pack my message into a bottle. I thought maybe I could be discovered after I'd died, like Van Gogh.
Van Gogh never made a penny in his entire lifetime. He painted because it was his soul, his excitement. It was what aligned him with his Source of being. It's the same with me and writing.
Van Gaal gave me all the confidence I could ask for. He made me striker, my favorite position.
New Kids On The Block were never my thing; my middle school crush was on Rob Van Winkle.