I'm a big, big fan of a lot of bands and a lot of different music and it's always thrown me for a loop when there's been a personnel change. I've got sixty thousand songs on my iTunes and I've got three hundred gigs of tunes on my drive. He's fantastic, but for me, whenever an original member of the band changes, it's not the same band. It was myself, Paul Gilbert, Richie, Pat Torpey and a couple of other people at the House Of Blues. We all love Richie and we love what his contribution to the band was. BIG lost some of its creative momentum once Paul Gilbert left the group? (Ex- POISON axeman) Richie Kotzen was obviously a more-than-capable replacement, but it couldn't have been the same…īilly: "It never was. It was very much like that."ī: Did you feel MR. Well, when you get back together again, it's like it never happened. Most of the animosities of the past, the difficulties are like when you meet an old friend that you grew up with all through your youth, but for some reason, in the fifth grade, you had a fight and never talked to each other again. You can tell people this is the real thing, right? And she says 'Tell them? I'm going to write a book about it.' So we actually did have a great time. I remember asking the translator…I forget what her name was, 'You've been around us the whole time, translating everything. We were together in Japan for a whole week in close quarters doing press for the upcoming tour, the upcoming releases and things like that and they had a hard time getting us from one room into the interview room because we were so busy telling stories about adventures we've had since the band and during the band. It was self-generated and organic in that respect, so now it's going to happen again."ī: Once the reunion commenced, how difficult was it to avoid the animosities and difficulties of the past?īilly: "I didn't notice a thing. Let's put you on a bus somewhere for six months before you break up again.' So it actually came from us, from our desire to really want to play together again and how much we loved the band. It wasn't where someone had an idea and said, 'Yeah, let's put your band back together. The good thing about it is that nobody dangled cash in front of us. The crowd went out of their minds and we were like, 'The only thing that could top this is if (vocalist) Eric ( Martin) was here.' So a couple of e-mails started floating back and forth and the next thing you know, we said, 'Well, let's get together and have dinner just to hang,' and right at that point, we just said, 'Yeah, let's just do it. Richie Kotzen was there and Pat Torpey was there and we played a couple of MR. So after that, we had a little more organized jam here in L.A. The first one is amazing and the second one somehow tops it (laughs). When he came in to do the solo on 'Dynamic Exhilarator', we had a blast. We jammed a zillion times and we hang out together a lot because we're both here in L.A., but we never actually thought about working together. It was the first time we had worked in a studio together since we had been in MR. BIG reuniting? I had always assumed, based solely on the rumors and half-truths that circulated in the press, that a full-fledged reunion simply would not be realistic.īilly: "One of the beginnings of that was when (guitarist) Paul ( Gilbert) played on (my solo record) 'Holy Cow' on the song 'Dynamic Exhilarator'. Several excerpts from the chat follow below.ī: What were the main motivations behind MR. recently conducted an interview with legendary bassist Billy Sheehan ( MR.
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