and he's a great friend and he is the world's fastest man backwards, he went 3 g's backwards in Skylab in 1972. And in the movie Being There Chauncey Gardner. He's Peter Sellers. Probably my favorite movie. Basically, it is the Theater of the absurd.
Exactly. Embarrass yourself ya know. Do something dif- ferent, ya know.
It's like, I was talking to these guys about writing songs, and one guys goes, “I want to play this song that I wrote about my daughter” or whatever, and I was like, well go out and play it! “Well, I'm just afraid it's too personal.” Well, that is what you've got to do, you've got to bear your soul if you are going to be an artist. Real artists, that is what they do every day, they just go out and be themselves and put it out there, and if somebody laughs and says that you are a - I don't know, what- ever, because you are singing a love song about your daughter, so be it. I don't know, whatever you are doing, if you are standing on a pizza singing (laughing.) You are still doing art, ain't that right? I know you did that one time, standing on a pizza singing. Once, when I was young and wild and crazy. Now I'm old and mild in many ways.
I wanted to ask you to relate for my audi- ence the ever popular, every famous Colo- nial Bruce Hampton and Three Dog Night story. That's funny... we just told it in front of a couple of people about an hour ago at a session. It was 1968, and we were opening for Three Dog Night in Alabama in their new basketball aena, which I guess held about ten-thousand people. It was a big arena. George Wallace and Bear Bryant were in the front row and they were dedicating the building. We came out and we opened with “Wipe Out,” you know, just for a joke. A little bit of laughter. And within 15-seconds othe people were completely hating us and starting throwing every- thing at us they could find and it was quite an on-
slaught, to say the least. The rumor has it that we came out and did all of Three Dog Nights mate- rial, and I'll never tell if that is true or not but . . . (Laughing.) It lead to a full-scale riot, we had to leave the stage within four or five minutes, and it's so funny. You and I were just talking the other day about how people are not really interested in seeing to an opening act usually. There was this opening act called Prince opening for the Stones right after he started. I saw Prince get booed off the stage before he made it. That was in the the early 80's , I can't remember where I was, San Francisco I guess, and he was booed off the stage so I learned a big lesson there.
Wow. Yeah. It was amazing, the guy has his act together, whether you liked him or not, he had his act to- gether and they were and they had their act to- gether then, but the people listen to music with their eyes, ya know and they just weren't ready for it. He absolutely smoked and did his whole show through a mirage of bottles and cups and the whatever.
That's admirable. He went on to be so huge. Prince is an example of an artist to me ,one that morphs and changes, like David Bowie. People that you just never know what they are going to do next. I like that, I admire that. And to take all the peo- ple throwing things at you and still do it, I don't know. We couldn't finish five minutes, it just got too
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