by Bob Bert

Mention the name Vincent Gallo to anyone and you are bound to get many varies and diverse reactions. He is mostly known for the masterpiece film, Buffalo '66, which he wrote, directed and starred in with Christina Ricci. What most people don't know is that Vincent is also an accomplished musician (he was a part of the downtown early 80's band Gray, which also included artist, Jean-Michel Barquiat). His artwork has been shown in galleries all around the world. He is also a professional motorcycle racer, and a collector (owns a zillion records, many vintage guitars and recording equipment). He's acted in a nice array of films, although, his best work is always when he's in complete control. We all know that to interview Gallo, he must be on the cover, but at least he delivers the substance. I consider this the most entertaining interview I have ever done. I felt like I was in one of his films during the time we spent together, one spring afternoon trolling the Lower East Side. We met backstage at a White Stripes show at the Bowery Ballroom, where he was with PJ Harvey. While the drunken Von Blondie girls were fawning all over him, I mentioned Gray and that I replaced Richard Edson in Sonic Youth, his face lit up and he said, "Good move! All right, old school!" We hooked up for this interview in Little Italy near his NYC pad and walked over to the Odessa dinner on Avenue A, discussing Johnny Thunders lame hairdo, when he first formed the Heartbreakers with Richard Hell in the mid 70's. We were joined by Richard Kern, who took the photos for this feature. I'm bummed that I didn't turn on the tape recorder while we were walking down Houston Street after the interview. Vincent offered to buy me a knish. A young bohemian college girl romps up to us and recognized him. It was just like a scene from Buffalo 66', when Billy Brown is buying a heart-shaped cookie for Layla. The overly-enthused girl walked along with us, while Vincent was telling her that if she expects to ever get a boyfriend she better do something with her hair and wear heels everyday. It sound insulting but it was extremely funny. She knew Vincent was putting her on. When she tried to talk us into going to a poetry reading that night in Union Square because there was gonna be some great spoken word performers, his response was, "There is no such thing as a great poet but if they could scrape up at least $500 maybe I'll make a special appearance." Vincent Gallo released the excellent album When last year on Wrap Records, which (of course) he played and sung everything on. Also on Wrap is his Recordings of Music for Films.

He is currently directing and starring in his next film called The Brown Bunny. What you can't hear from reading this interview is all the laughter.

BB: Your book, Vincent Gallo, 1962-1999 (Petir Grand Publishing) makes it easy to interview you.

VG: My favorite thing in there is the picture of me and Christina Ricci on the day that we met, the luckiest day of her life.

BB: (laughing) Then you go on to say that when you run into her now, she acts like she doesn't know you.

VG: Just before Buffalo '66, Christina's career was sort of in flux; she was in transition. She was too fat to be skinny; too old to be young; too ugly to be pretty. That Darn Cat was a little awkward. For Buffalo '66 I used her to play her first adult role. I did her hair and her make-up before we had a hair and make-up person... before that talentless, phony bastard Gucci Westman. When I first met Christina for Buff '66, she was wearing horrible, big, fat, wide-legged, skate-rat pants and those big clodhopper shoes, but not a good version of that ugly look. If you were a skate-rat, you would have known how out of touch she was. She had burnt hennaed hair. My least favorite. I hired her before I met her and when she showed up to meet me on the corner of Elizabeth and Prince (Street) I thought, "Oh great, Vincent Gallo... you spent your whole fucking miserable life waiting for this day and you fucked yourself". I felt I ruined my film. However, after one hour with her I felt it was meant to be. It could be perfect. Christina is an extremely good performer, in away that very few people are. She's extremely reliable, extremely focused and natural and entertaining. She was loving to me on set. She never really subverted against me, even when she was having her own problems. She was too late drunk one night and I yelled at her in the morning for being late. Five minutes later, she was on my side again. Because of my unlikable personality, it would have been very easy for her to demonize me in a way that prevented us from working well together. She never did that, ever. After Buffalo '66, she went on to do that faggot's film, The Opposite of Sex, the fag soap opera, whatever it was. The two movies came out at he same time. I was a little sad because in the faggot's film, The Opposite of Sex, she decided to keep her hair from Buffalo '66. The dye job I did for her that caused her to say to me that I ruined her life and that she hated me. Plus she used my make-up cunt, Gucci, for the fag film. What if in De Niro's next film after Taxi Driver, he had a Mohwak? Then when the two films came out she cancels all her press for Buffalo '66 instead putting all hew focus on The Opposite of Sex. She canceled The Face cover with me. I know The Face is a stupid magazine. She wound up doing The Face cover on her own for The Opposite of Sex. Tricky, sneaky. Try to find an interview other than the thing I made up for the Village Voice. The fake conversation between her and I. That is the last press she did for Buffalo 66'. If you look at all her interviews, she certainly never mentions the film. Never! Unless somebody confronts her with it, she'll shrug it off with an anecdote about how I made her dress short or something. Even if she pretends now that she didn't have fun making Buffalo '66 she won't talk about the film in a real way. I didn't have a great time with Abel Ferrara. He's still the best, most interesting filmmaker I worked with and I still am lucky to have worked with him period. I did not have a good time with him because he's a difficult person. It was a difficult experience. I would work with him again any day. Any day.

BB: The few times I've seen him on talk shows, he seems high like he's nodding out or something.

VG: He makes his life difficult, but I would rather have a difficult time in an Abel Ferrara film than a good time in a faggot film like The Opposite of Sex. And Christina is smart enough to know that and I never understood why she turned against Buffalo 66' even if she didn't like me.

BB: I think her performance in your movie is incredible.

VG: I like her so, so much in the film. She is so pretty and so sweet and I am lucky to have had her in that role.

BB: It sounds like she's a puppet. You arrived in New York City when you were sixteen, did you quit high school?

VG: Yes.

BB: Tell me what your life was like when you first arrived here.

VG: I came down from Buffalo and drove over the George Washington Bridge. I don't know if you remember those days, but there used to be a hundred dirty old mattresses there on the side of the road under the bridge. It was incredibly polluted, unbelievably polluted! I slept at somebody's house on 3rd Street and Avenue C, somebody I met outside of Max's. Then I met a girl, and older girl. She blew me right away. She lived in a cat-riddled, roach-riddled, horrible, crooked apartment. The worst part about it was that it was so crooked, the building was crooked. When I got back to Buffalo, I was thinking about the sex I had in NYC. There were sexual things there for me. Sexual things and that was the whole hook. The whole obsession to come back to NYC was very sexually motivated. Also, Max's was the best club I've ever gone to. That's where I'd seen Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers. After Max's closed, hanging out in front of the club... that was the greatest day of my life. CB's was like that, too. People would sort of mull around after they would lock the door, and that moment was your chance to meet a gal, hook up and go somewhere else or something. It was really good. That's all I was thinking about. The girls in New York. Buffalo had slim pickings. In Buffalo, my value was down. M exchange rate was really low. I was like the Mexican peso there. If the girl wasn't 600 pounds, she didn't look at me. In NYC, even pretty girls liked me. I thought, "Wow, I can lay on top of them." Fags liked me, too, which was good. Anyone on your side is good, even a faggot. One day I met this guy named Wayne Richard Clifford. He was best friends with Jean-Michael Basquiat. Wayne lived in that building 200 Central Park South... that round building. I remember in New York, those days, if somebody looked interesting, they were definitely interesting. Wayne had a good look. He invited me to hang out at his fancy place, the fancy 200 Central Park South. I kept asking him about his house the whole time. "How do you live in this building?" Remember how poor people were then? What person could live in 200 Central Park South? No one. How do you live in this building? He said, "Have you ever seen the movie, The Servant?", I said, "No, I've never seen it. The Dick Bogart film? No, I've never seen it. Why? He kept going... see The Servant! See The Servant!... and he kept going like that with his hands [Vincet gestures with his hands.] So, we go up to the top of the 17th floor. He lived in 17H with this guy, Chuck Prentiss, and old Jewish piano bar, singing insurance salesman...and we go to the door and Chuck comes out the door... a sort of fat guy, and he goes, "Hey Wayne!"... and Wayne screams, "Chuck go to your room!" I was sixteen and Wayne was eighteen. Chuck was like fifty or whatever and he was in Fruit of the Looms, you know real nasty, saggy underpants. And he just turned around and went to his room, like a kid or a dog. I said, "Who's apartment is it?" I was still confused, I didn't understand, it was too big for me. Then I saw The Servant, a month later, at Theater 80 and then I understood. Wayne is the one who introduced me to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Danny Rosen. Then I met Johnny Dynell and started dating Chi Chi Valenti. Then I hooked up Johnny Dynell with Chi Chi and they've been a couple ever since. Johnny was cool because he was one of the first queers to have that you know that sailor boy, gay look. I like a good gay look. Fags don't look gay anymore. Too bad. Johnny and Chi Chi have been together since 1979.

BB: Hoe did the band, Gray form?

VG: Those guys were playing together. They had a guy in the band named, Shannon, who quit. I was in a different band with Danny Rosen.

BB: Was that the same Shannon that was in Konk?

VG: Yeah, the same Shannon. The most interesting people to me in the band, Gray, were Nick Taylor, who then became DJ High Priest in the early hip-hop days and Wayne Clifford. Those two guys were interesting and that was seduction for me. Jean-Michael had good song titles. He brought around Upper East Side, Upper West Side white girls, who liked to be with dark people. You know, those open-minded Jew daughters of a professor, who thought it was so open-minded to fuck a black guy. Jean spread a lot of herpes around the Lower East Side. I remember every now and then, one of my good friends would confess to me that they just got herpes. I'd say, "Aw, man fuck that's awful!" Then I'd say, "How did you get it?" They would always say, "You know that girl Jean was dating...?" (laughing) It was like that. Thank God for Jean because it put the fear of disease in my mind by 1979. Otherwise, I probably would have gone up a few girl's assholes, without a rubber. But I was afraid of herpes. That probably saved my AIDS life. I was famous for the rubber. Girls would always say, "I'm not gonna get pregnant!" I would say, "Pregnat? I'm going up your ass. I'm not worried about pregnancy."

BB: How long did Gray exist?

VG: Gray's legend is based on Jean's fame. Gray only exited for a short time. Gray played very few shows. I was only with them for two and a half shows.

BB: What did you play, guitar?

VG: No, I didn't play guitar with Gray. I played guitar and bass in every other band, in Gray I played drum machine, in an odd way... not making beats making industrial sounds and I played synthesizer.

BB: You're not on the recordings that have surfaced recently on the Downtown '81 soundtrack and the Anti-NY comp?

VG: I'm on the only good recordings of Gray but I've just never released them. The Bohack album I did after Gray blows away anything that Gray did, Bohack with Wayne from Gray. The band I did with Danny Rosen, I'll Wear You, was even better. I have tapes of everything. Every band that I've been in from Buffalo to now. To me DNA was the best band of the Gray days and also James White's band. Gray was not on that same planet. James White or James Chance was a big hero for me. Anyway, the minute Jean-Michael Basquiat had a chance to move into the place he really wanted to be: the art world. He quit the band [Gray] in three seconds.

BB: Tell me about your trip into the hip-hop world as Prince Vince?

VG: By the early 80's, the prettiest girls in New York for me were the light-skinned, Puerto Rican girls that looked sort of Italian because they reminded me of the girls that were Italian in high school in Buffalo. By 1981, the Buffalo Italian girls had frizzed their hair, they got fat, they got that ugly 80's look. The Puerto Rican girls were left somehow in the past. They had beautiful straight hair, beautiful skin. I married a Puerto Rican girl for two months. Denise Lopez.

BB: Did you record any of this stuff?

VG: I recorded a lot of things with Nick Taylor from Gray, who was then DJ High Priest. I was in a band for a while with Phase 2 and Nate B. I still think Puerto Ricans are the underrated geniuses of the New York hip-hop scene. I was very good friends with Kool Moe D and Special K and all those people. But somehow Puerto Ricans got pushed out because of a couple of black rap acts that got so big, it made it seem like they invented hip-hop. Blacks were a little more square then. Blacks are not as open-minded, they are more conformist. Puerto Ricans were the ones who had more friends in the white scene... more art world friends... and they were more goofy in their fashion. They had come from another place. They were not doing soul. Remember Kool Moe D would wear Porche glasses and that leather from that leather guy in Harlem, tacky like Funkadelic Kool and the Gang leather? That was not cool then. Puerto Ricans would put a nameplate like this big (making a wide, measuring gesture with his hands) and wear ski googles. Hip-hop was not about a black soul thing, it was about New York City, in a more integrated way. The early hip-hop scene definitely had a vital white and Hispanic section. Black focused more on making music. Puerto Ricans were more into dancing and cool clothes.

BB: Tell me about your painting career?

VG: I had a retrospective of all my work in Paris, in December. In that show, I showed my newest works, which were these forty photographs called Stranger #1, Stranger #2, etc. They were very elaborate photographs that I did for and advertising job of me and my last girlfriend. Only I crossed her out of the photos, but I crossed her out of the photos in the most beautiful way possible.

BB: Is that one of those photos inside of your CD, When?

VG: Yes, that is one of the Stranger series.

BB: Didn't you use to show with Annina Nosei?

VG: I'd shown with Annina Nosei for years. I showed at the same time as the other 80's artists. My work sold well.

BB: What was up with these trips to Europe when you were sixteen? Didn't you have a nervous breakdown in Paris?

VG: I went to Paris with Danny Rosen and a guy named Dominick. We were in a band called I'll Wear You. I went there and I had a German girlfriend, who was much older than me. I went to Berlin to meet her. I had to fly to Paris and then take the train to Germany. I really only smoked pot once in my life, which was on the flight to Paris. Somebody told me it would help me go to sleep. I smoked a joint in the bathroom and I came back to my seat and a Beatles song was playing in my head and I couldn't get it out of my head. I was freaked out. So, I arrived in France already freaked out. I went to Berlin to visit my girlfriend and we had a bad time. She lied to me. I wandered around for days very sad. I would go through Checkpoint Charlie every day and wander around East Berlin looking for microphones. Finally, I pretended like I didn't care about her anymore and I went back to Paris. I had real feelings for her but I made a big effort to blackout my feelings. I just told my friends 'fuck her' and went to the opening of Banduche and there was a girl with a yellow dress on. The prettiest girl I had seen my whole life and I chatted with her and I said, "Listen, I am staying in a house in Bastille, would you like to come walk with me over there and we could lay down together or something?" She said yes. We had walked out of the club and I was with the prettiest girl I had ever walked with in my whole life and I thought for a second: I'm happy. A second later, I was on the ground in a nervous breakdown, in dementia. I allowed myself to be happy. For a second all those voices from my father telling me you're sick, you're sick, you're evil, you're bad, you're evil, you'll never be happy... all those things. It was almost like I was so afraid of letting myself be comfortable for a second because all my life I made everything painful and scary and nervous. Just then I loosened up for one second and tried to be at ease with the world. It threw me into a breakdown. I was hospitalized. I had a catheter in my pecker because I couldn't pee. I was in a hospital. Somehow after a week, I got out of the hospital. I went to Sicily to kill myself. I had one of those train tickets to go anywhere, so I got a train to Sicily. Something got blown in my eye from the window and I had a swollen, blind eye by the time I got to Sicily. I filled up a tub and I was going to kill myself. I wanted to die in Italy. I just didn't want to die in France because that would have been awful because they are so nasty there. Anyway, I thought about some unfinished business in New York. There was my coin collection, my guitar and my private things. I just couldn't die and let people see my notes. I had a dirty picture of me and a girl. I just couldn't let anyone see that so I held on. Kept living and got back to New York. I would say that I was pretty complex and phobic for five or six years after getting back. Slowly towards my thirties, I drifted towards almost being a real person. I remember the first time I had a normal day, I was in Rome. It was very odd that I had a normal day in Europe because of what happened. I was walking down Via Canditi in Rome and the sun was shining and I didn't think about fear or doubt or any negative thought for one whole afternoon. I was just a normal person and I thought, "Wow! It's nice to just have a normal day!" I was twenty eight years old and that was the first nice day of my life. For twelve years, I had not gone ten minutes without fear and doubt. I had been seeing a psychiatrist for a few years up until that point. I remember when I got back to America, I told Dr. Hill, I had a normal day. I remember really talking about it, he didn't say much, he just went hmmm. He died two years ago, which was sad because I was having a bad time with my girlfriend.

BB: What's the longest relationship that you have ever been in?

VG: Bethany. She's the girl I liked. I really loved all the things about her. I mean I really liked her. I liked her hands, her feet, her nose. I liked everything about her, but I think I created an atmosphere that made it difficult for her to be honest with me. That's my nature and her nature was to be dishonest. There was a lot of dishonesty. She would lie about everything. I had a hard time with her. Then it was a long break-up. She joined a group called The Forum, a philosophical cult like EST. After a year of not talking, I just saw her and spoke awhile. She lied right away. And lied again and again. It was sad.

BB: Are you related at all to Joey Gallo (famous mobster that was gunned down at Umberto's clam bar in Little Italy)?

VG: No, but in Buffalo, NY, Joey Gallo's notoriety was so impressive that I threatened a high school teacher once. I had this teacher once who sort of pushed me around. I was certainly a tough kid. If you fucked me then, man... I crippled a senior, when I was a freshman, with a baseball bat right in school because he fucked me around for some money. This teacher was harassing me. Joey Gallo was sort of famous at the time. He had just been killed but that made him more famous. I told this guy, "Do you know who the fuck I am, you asshole? Do you know who the fuck my family is, asshole? All I have to do is fucking think it and I'll make you and your cunt wife disappear!" I said crazy things like that... crazy things. The teacher freaks out and begged for my forgiveness. He pleaded with me to understand where he was coming from.

BB: What were the circumstances of you getting shot?

VG: I played football in a football league. We played in Columbus Park in Chinatown. Remember when there were those Chinese gangster kids on Mott Street? We were coming back from a game and we were walking down Mott Street and one of my friends grabbed the ass of a Chino girl and it started an immediate fight on Mott Street. I played football on a Dominican football league. My friends, at the time, were like super heroes, some of the greatest fighters ever known. There were only seven of us and maybe fifteen of them. We did a beat down. I mean a beat down of Chinese gang kids... A BEAT DOWN! Right on Mott Street! One of those ones where you're kicking heads! I got so pumped up from the fight that I remember saying to this one kid... I had him down and I was banging his head... and I kept spitting on him and going, "You want to fuck with us?!" Really, pounding him. But I made it too personal. I looked him in the eyes, I spit on him, I humiliated him, I went too far, further than I needed to go on a personal level. Meaning... I didn't just kick ass, I made it personal. I made him look at me in the eyes and remember who the fuck I was. Eight hours later, we're on Prince Street. I was with two other friends and a car drove by... stopped and then drove back... a window went down and pow! pow! POW!! Like that... it was just a .22 automatic. I had on leather pants, a leather vest, and a big, think leather bomber and they were far away. I didn't get blown to bits, but I took a shot in the groin area and my friend got a shot in the arm. It's crazy to be shot.

BB: There's a picture of you in this book, where you're a kid playing the drums in a wood-paneled basement. I have a picture of me just like that.

VG: Yeah, the drum picture! My fashion was good for the time right. (laughing) I had the longest hair in school.

BB: You've driven across the country a number of times?

VG: Yeah, just did it now.

BB: You seem to do a lot of wheeling and dealing?

VG: Wheeling and dealing. Dealing and wheeling.

BB: You bought Johnny Ramone's guitar and sold it two days later?

VG: (laughing) Johnny's my best friend but he's a real ball buster! He sold me his guitar then ball busted me about it. I said oh yeah, all right, I'll show you ball busting, you wanna see ball busting! I made him buy it back. He resold it to that asshole, Daniel Rey.

BB: I've briefly met Dee Dee and Joey.

VG: Dee Dee in his prime is the greatest performer of all time. There's no one that's even close, not even Iggy. Dee Dee was really entertaining. Sad he died and sad about Joey, too.

BB: Are you working on a movie now?

VG: Yes.

BB: What's the story?

VG: It's a beginning of a movie, then a beginning of a movie, then a beginning of a movie and then sort of a difficult dark end of a movie.

BB: Are you going to be in it?

VG: Yes, I'm going to be in it.

BB: Let's go down your filmography list here...

VG: My filmography list or what I do for money? The Vinnie Gallo Story... how much? How many days?

BB: Gun Lover?

VG: That's my film, Gun Lover. It's about a fanatic repairman, who is a master repairman for the mob but who hates the sound of a firing gun. He hates gun violence and he hates gun sounds, but he's a master mechanic, a master metal worker, a master gun repairman. He's fixing a gun and it, accidentally, fires and kills his dog and that's what its about.

BB: You have said that you never read scripts?

VG: No, I've never read a script not even Buffalo '66. I was surprised when I saw the film how good it was. (laughing).

BB: But you wrote it.

VG: Yeah, but I never went back and read it. I really wrote it from the beginning to the end.

BB: Arizona Dream. I watched that and have no idea what it was about.

VG: Never saw it. Never read it. Got paid a lot, though.

BB: Did that help you buy your LA house?

VG: No, it didn't. But it took the fear and doubt of being homeless out of my mind. I have this big poor fear... big poor fear... so I would pay my rent four or five years in advance. Every penny that I made I would pay rent in advance. I told you, I have those depression and fear things. I felt that if I took that fear away... if I knew that I had food and a home... that I had the luxury to be sick and depressed again. And by having the luxury to be sick and depressed, I never got sick and depressed again. I was really the fear of it coming back that haunted me. As long as I could pay my shrink bill and my rent then I was straight.

BB: You talked about The Funeral before.

VG: Abel (Ferrara) is the best filmmaker I worked with. Claire Denis is a good gal, too.

BB: You made a bunch of films with her. You haven't seen Trouble Every Day yet?

VG: No. I've only seen two movies I'm in.

BB: Which two?

VG: I saw Buffalo '66 and I saw Palookaville.

BB: That's (Palookaville) a good movie!

VG: I liked it.

BB: I can't wait to see Trouble Every Day.

VG: Some good, pussy-eating in that film.

Richard Kern: Was it Beatrice Dahl?

VG: No, she eats the face off somebody. That's the only footage I've seen of the movie, which is the most upsetting footage I've seen in my life. I don't know why exactly, but it look real. You think, oh you see somebody do that and it's not disturbing, but when you see the skin pull and the way she is chewing on the face... unless you have cannibal instincts, it's really against what is normal. It's the same offense as smelling a dead body. My pussy-eating scene, I believe is more sexy. You probably go yeech when I come up with blood all over my mouth, but before I do it, there's a good fuck scene.

BB: That's not your dick in this photo that goes across two pages in your book?

VG: Nom that's a dildo. In another book, there is a picture of me driving 130 mph and there's a photo of my cock hard and the speedometer of the car at 130 mph. It was silly to do that pic. But I smile when I see it.

BB: What is the film Get Well Soon?

VG: $400,000 dollars for six days of work.

BB: You made a video for the song, Honey Bunny, off your album, When?

VG: My Honey Bunny video. (To Kern) It's what a video should be, lots of pretty girls.

BB: Tell me about the concerts that you played in Japan with Lukas Haas?

VG: The ones with Lukas were sort of banal and ordinary, sweet-natured. The last tour I did was better. My record sold a whole lot there, so I played 2500 seat venues, three nights in Tokyo, two nights in Osaka, one night in Hiroshima, Big fancy classical concert halls.

BB: What about the recording process for When? I love the album by the way...

VG: Oh, thank you. I did it in my own studio, which I named The University for the Development and Theory of Electronic Tape Recorded Music Studios.

BB: Tell me about the new record of soundtracks?

VG: It's all recordings that I've done for motion picture... from NYU student films to Buffalo '66. I did my first soundtrack recordings in 1978.

BB: For Eric Mitchell?

VG: No, before that.

BB: So, Vincent, how do you feel about Harmony Korine?

VG: Harmony is certainly an interesting person.

BB: How do you feel about Jim Jarmusch?

VG: Jim's another story because I blame him a little for the mainstreaming of the New York independent film scene. He seemed to be the first person to sort of pander to the European and Asian festival and film market crowd. Richard Kern is fifty times more interesting to me that Jim Jarmush. Jim doesn't have soul.

BB: What about Edson?

VG: I like Richard, he's a funny guy. But they (Sonic Youth) did the right thing by replacing him with you. (both laughing)

BB: Thanks. How many records do you own at this point?

VG: I own 15,000 but I'm negotiating a purchase of 4,000 classical records. Once you get into the 20,000 range, it gets pretty sick.

BB: Where are they all?

VG: I've been collecting things since I was a kid for the home I'll own one day. Then I get a home in LA. An esoteric home. A John Lautner house, which can't have these things in it because I have to pander to the home, architecturally. I have to keep everything ins storage in California. I just sold the house because I need a place for my things. I need to have my albums out, my hi-fi gear out, my recording equipment out and forget having a collectible home! I need a long, big box to fiddle and whittle with my things for the rest of my miserable life. That's what I've never had. I've been a pack rat since Buffalo. You know, in my bedroom in Buffalo, I was not aloud to have my hi-fi gear or my guitars showing. I had to hide my high-fi gear in the closet and have my guitars under my bed. My mother decorated the bedroom and we were not allowed to have our things because she didn't like the way they looked. I have never gotten over that... I still do it myself.

BB: Any thoughts on turning 40?

VG: I felt like I was dying twenty years ago. It seems like I'm here too long already.

Spring 2002