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to say what I want as anybody else does." I don't have to keep kissing people's ass because they're on a stage and everybody's cheering. I can go to a concert and 18,000 people are standing up - like the Kiss concert - I can go to a concert where everybody's cheering and still go, "This sucks!" But you really have to have a lot of confidence to do that. It's really easy to fall into the idea of, "Oh, well, it must be good because everybody likes it."

Do you think you attained this "equality" just by reaching out and grabbing it?

You gotta earn it. It's a craft, just like music is a craft, writing is a craft. You have to go after your craft with the same intensity and commitment that musicians do. And they're intense — this is what they've wanted to do ever since they were sitting in their bedrooms when they were twelve years old playing guitar to REO Speedwagon records.

[Tape Flips]

Why don't you talk about Oasis for a little while?

I didn't like them at first. A lot of bands that wind up becoming my favorites, that's the way it starts. Bruce Springsteen I didn't like at first and he's probably my all-time favorite now. The Velvet Underground I didn't like at first, Mott the Hoople, the Ramones I didn't like at first. AC/DC I liked right away., but all my other favorites I didn't like so much at first, because it's like active listening. It's not like background music, you have to really be into it. So Oasis, this publicist was trying to get me to do Oasis, to interview them. They were coming to Dallas for the first time. And I heard that one song on the radio, which I didn't really like, it was called "Supersonic." I didn't like that song at all. So I was like, "Well, I don't know." She was like, "They're really great." She was a publicist who was married to one of the Pixies and she knew really good music. If she said something was good, you sort of had to take note. So she said, "They're really great live, this is their record, blah blah blah." So I said, "All right, I'll do the interview as a favor. I don't really like this band, but I'll do the interview just 'cause you're so cool." So it was four o'clock in the afternoon, I get a call from her and she's got Noel Gallagher there on the line, and I didn't know what to ask him and I'm really bad at interviews anyway, so I only had 3 or 4 questions prepared. I knew he was from Manchester, so I went ahead and played up the Manchester thing and I was going, "The thing about the Manchester bands was, they made great records, but when you saw them live, they were never that