I'd say, chronologically, we're a little older than most bands so we have those roots to draw on, and unlike a predominant new wave feeling for a 'while, we don't believe in destroying our pasts. We believe in utilizing it, learning from it, and being able to move from there. We don't feel like making the same mistakes over and over and over again. Which also accounts for our longevity and our patience. I think over the past few years we've demonstrated a kind of patience in a band, of being able to wait for our changes and our evolutions to come naturally. To not force any kind of movement on ourselves that would put us in a direction in which we feel artistically uncomfortable.

If that's one of the things you're interested in dredging out. I think we work on a lot of different levels because we feel that cutting yourself off from any level cuts you off from a mode of experience. On a practical day to day level, it means that we run the gamut in our shows from entertainment-oriented stuff, from straight, happy-go-lucky songs that make you wanna groove in place, to wide open sound vistas in which anything can happen. We have the freedom to go that entire spectrum, whether it's a hit single, in the requirements of what a hit single is-not like some kind of requirements that some music biz guy sets up and says, "Well, this is the way to repress America" - reaching a large amount of people. You have to do it in a way that will speak to all of 'em. Short and punchy. Not waste a lot of time. And "Because The Night" and "Frederick," or even 'Free Money" or "Ask The Angels" have that kind of instant accessibility, the kind of thing that makes a song great, no matter what category you hear it in. And you can go from there over to the other side with Radio Ethiopia.

But that kind of variety is also something involved in our meanings, the depths of level within each song. You can go as far into each song as you want and still find stuff to take out because we have those complexities. Frederick's a great love song, it's a great dance song, but if you look at the words, and how they relate to words ... especially lyrically, 'cause Patti's really sharp lyrically. It's like if you look at how the songs relate to each other, what the world view that's being presented is saying, what the philosophy of the band is, what the philosophy of Patti is. 'Cause I think that Patti is one of the world's great thinkers, and the kind of ideas that she's dealing with are not your usual everyday rock 'n' roll ideas. To me, and to all of us, it's always been a little frustrating that people deal with the form of what we do first, probably because it's easiest. When to us, the most significant thing is the continuity of the content. The fact that you can see a direct line of ideas and changing ideas and transforming ideas that run from even before "Gloria," from "Hey Joe" or "Piss Factory," right through all the records. A whole body of thought. And that's why I'm doing this interview today rather than Patti, because Patti understands these changes. She also is involved in a feeling of transition and she herself doesn't quite know where it's going to lead. I haven't got that forward vision that she does, which is why what you'll mostly get from me is everything up to our present.

Patti's like the arrow at our head and where she points, the rest of the shaft follows. She's feeling her way, scouting out the next terrain for the band. I'm really interested in where it's gonna happen, 'cause I find that one of the ways for Patti to operate best is to find her own way, and where she comes out is consistently always greater than you could have possibly imagined under any circumstance. I mean, at the beginning, nothing we could have imagined In our remotest fantasies could have turned out to be as great as what we actually have today. All of us sometimes step outside the daily life of the band and look at what we've created and it's pretty awe-inspiring.

One night in Washington, I was playing the Star Spangled Banner and suddenly I thought about the weight of the symbol we were dealing with and how wherever you go in the world and you see an American flag and something just responds inside. It's my allegiance, my faith invested in becoming an American, and by extension, what is an American but a creation of man, of his idea of what he is. So it's like an allegiance to a belief in man. We declare allegiance to these symbols but we make sure of the freedom of choice in the declaration so that we're not trapped by them. I don't know, we're romantics in a way, we believe more In these things as symbols and ideals rather than their actual realities. I mean, when we do a song that has some reference to Algeria, we're not specifically referring to 1954-1962 and the FLN versus the OAS or whatever and the human consequences of that, which is a lot of people killed and tortured. What we're looking at are the noble virtues of it, and when we declare our allegiance to something in that respect, we declare ourselves to that which is positive, that which is good, in that which may be a little fuzzy-headed around the edges.

In some mays, we're a little out of step with the times, 'cause we're not calculating or cold. But then our experience proves that we can be right. We've gotten through with our ideals intact, which I believe is something tough to do and its often cost us fans and dissension within the band itself... We fight like crazy. But the fact is that by holding forth to allegiances and keeping them open-ended enough, you don't get stuck within the bounds of your own dogma, 'cause we're against dogma. There's allegiance to an idea and then there's the concrete shell that grows up around it and that's the dogma. Rock 'n' roll is important enough to take around the world like that. We did a TV show in Germany not long ago that was broadcast to eight countries in Europe, our entire set, an hour and a half. Broadcasted to countries that I'll never get to play in, like Bulgaria, Rumania and Yugoslavia. And that's carrying, the word of a certain type of life to people who might -not otherwise have that option open to them. Might help provide inspiration, and we're all aware of this, 'cause of Ivan's delicate non-citizenship status and why he left Czechoslovakia to come to America. We're not saying that America is perfect or even halfway successful, but I know that there's more freedom to create here than anywhere else in the world.

We've set ourselves up as a band whose job it is to work on the road and to continually progress beyond ourselves 'cause we owe that to ourselves and to our audience. Often the movement forward is painful and often boring, but we don't like to talk down to our audiences and we think that even if they see us at our worst, they'll be able to utilize the mechanics of out movement in some way in their own lives. If we reveal ourselves as human onstage, I think that's all to the good in the final analysis. It's too easy to set up something in which there's only safety.

At each stage of our career, we probably could have stayed at that stage and gotten successful. People always have the one perfect way in which they see Patti succeeding and becoming queen of the universe and we've outlived them all, we've been all of them. I mean, we want to do this for a long time; we don't want to be a footnote on Nuggets Vol. 12. Instead of being part of a genre or a time, we want to be our own genre and often the demands of our movement piss people off. I mean, Radio Ethiopia -despite the fact that it's provided practically all of our most beloved songs like Ain't It Strange and Ask The Angels and, of course, the classic title cut which everyone loves (ha ha) - was completely a shock to people, 'cause we had dared to be what we always were- which was a rock 'n' roll band. I don't think we changed so much between Horses and Radio Ethiopia. With Wave, we wanted an album whose edges were a little blurrier. So concise was Easter, so to the point, that our natural rambling instincts weren't given enough room. So out of that grew such things as Seven Ways Of Going and Wave.