It’s always a special treat to speak to Ian Anderson, especially when he has something new to share with the world. As it is, that something new is not from Jethro Tull, although it’s perfectly understandable to think a sequel to the band’s 1972 album Thick As A Brick couldn’t possibly be made by anyone else. As Anderson explained it to me, Thick As A Brick 2 (TAAB2) is a solo album very much in the spirit of the original and the band that recorded it. However, the singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist added that the new piece may not appeal to Jethro Tull fans because of its cerebral theme and non-abrasive tone. Anderson also wants to make sure people know that the original Thick As A Brick and its sequel were conceived by him and not by anyone else, including one Gerald Bostock.
Indeed, the absurdity of the original album’s lyrics being written by a precocious eight-year-old boy (the aforementioned Bostock) may have fallen on deaf ears in 1972, so Anderson was quick to point out to me that TAAB2 was more about the 40-year span between 1972 and 2012, and how times have changed, with Bostock as the protagonist. Like the original, there isn’t so much a story as there are anecdotal calibrations in which Gerald goes from banker to homeless to military man to chorister to a most ordinary man. Of course, when I spoke to Anderson, this was all still being finalized. In the following interview, we not only touch on the Thick As A Brick saga and all its accoutrements, but also the tour Anderson has planned behind it. Assurances that Jethro Tull is simply on hiatus, digital formats are better than vinyl, and he will never write book about himself after reading Keith Richards’ Life are also included.
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So, it’s been 40 years since Thick As A Brick, which I believe joins others like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Wall as one of the few concept albums in history to go No. 1 in America. When you think back to 1972 — writing, recording and touring behind this record — is there anything that stands out, maybe an indication that so many years later you’d still be performing and talking about it?
It was always a difficult leap of faith really, after the Aqualung album, which was just a collection of songs. It was touted by the critics at the time, the music writers, that it was a concept album. But it wasn’t, it was just a bunch of songs. We then went on to make the mother of all concept albums, a parody of the prog rock concept album style. It was a leap of faith that we would strike the right balance between a humorous dig at our peers like Yes, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Genesis, or that it might fail to hit the mark at all, and we end up looking a bit stupid.
It was kind of a risky moment…unbalanced…I suppose we were a little bit lucky and probably a little skillful in presenting it in a way that found the right nuance. It was a hard album to work with in some territories where the humor, the parody didn’t really communicate itself. And I’m not sure that even came across in the U.S.A. where we actually played most of the concerts that we did with the original Thick As A Brick…I would guess that it did vary from night to night and from city to city as to how the audience understood, or thought they understood, the presentation of the album live.
So now you have a sequel Thick As A Brick 2, or TAAB2 in the parlance of our times, and you did it without Jethro Tull. Why?
Well, that really depends on your definition of Jethro Tull. I and the other members of the band have all done concerts as Jethro Tull in the past. I’m billing this one using my own name as well as the name Jethro Tull so I can stand up and be counted since this is my baby, as indeed the original one…obviously I wrote all the music and most of the arrangements and all of the lyrics and so on and so forth. I guess I’m having a little Roger Waters moment here thinking I should put my own name to the fore, since it is something I am the author of.
I guess in some places, it’s a little more convenient for me to do it not as Jethro Tull simply because I really want to market it out as being an evening of different music. I don’t want people coming to the show thinking that somehow it’s going to be Jethro Tull-stock, classic rock radio repertoire, and going to have a few beers with their buddies before coming to the concert, which actually they have to sit and listen to and work a little a bit hard to grasp and to enjoy. I don’t think it’s a beer-drinking-buddies type of concert. I think they would be disappointed, and they would probably annoy the rest of the audience who would be there to listen to the music, not to screech, hoot and holler and shout out, “Rock and roll!” and “Aqualung!” and “Crossed-Eyed Mary!” Because that’s what happened last time and I didn’t like it very much. I’m kind of hoping those kind of people will stay at home, or in an ideal world, they’re probably as old as I am and some of them have probably snuffed it already.
Fair enough.
I’m saying this because you are connected to something called Vintage Rock.
Uh-huh.
So your audience is dwindling by the day (laughs).
Unfortunately, that seems to the case with many of the artists I cover, too. I interviewed Ronnie Montrose six months ago, and he just passed away from cancer.
Oh dear. That’s the reality of the world we live in. Not many months go by before I find myself on stage lamenting somebody who’s departed from the narrow world of rock music — some of whom I know and some of whom were not feeling well at the moment.
Forty years ago it was drugs and other tragedies, now we’ve lost people like Davy Jones and Ronnie Montrose to more natural causes. Anyway, when I spoke with Martin Barre last December, I got the feeling he wasn’t too happy about you going out and doing Thick As A Brick, at least without him. Any thoughts on that?
Not really. Martin and I had a long talk last June about this year and various projects that we had in mind. He has a whole bunch of plans this year, different sorts of things he’s doing, some of which I have been urging him to do for quite a few years before he gets too old to tackle something that necessarily demands departures of working with other musicians and other musical alternatives to the repertoire that’s he familiar with playing all the time, so I think it’s a good time for him to be doing that sort of stuff. But I’m not aware that he’s not too happy.
Well…I just sort of got that feeling without getting into anything specific.
We’re all grumpy old guys these days, so it’s understandable that that’s the impression we probably leave with people. I’m very confident that Martin is looking forward to a year of doing shows with two different bands that he has in mind, doing a repertoire, some of which is his own and some of which is early Jethro Tull material. I’d be surprised to hear anything other than he’s raring to go and looking forward to having an interesting year….taking a little time off from Jethro Tull as we know it in terms of playing the standard repertoire, going out on another concert tour and playing places we have in the past. I think taking a break is a good idea and I’m pretty confident he thinks it’s a good idea. But I haven’t heard anything to the contrary. Maybe you have.
He did tell me he was getting a new band together, so it sounds like a good thing. As for Thick As A Brick itself, the actual concept revolves around the “controversial” lyrics written by an eight-year-old boy called Gerald Bostock. Are the lyrics for TAAB2 also, supposedly, written by Gerald or is the concept simply about what Gerald is doing at this point in time?
There are clearly going to be a few musical references, which as a composer I feel compelled to do, to make an artistic point and make some musical references to the album from 40 year ago. While we can accept the idea of the convenience of Gerald Bostock as a vehicle to take us from 1972 into 2012. It’s not a sequel in the sense of what happened next to Gerald Bostock, i.e., what happened in 1973. It’s a big giant leap forward, I suppose, through Gerald’s various possible experiences, to use that as a way to identify the many things that have changed in the world, particularly in the last 40 years. Amongst those, for instance, is the change in communication, the Internet, social media, things that we now take for granted that have radically changed the way we live and work, 40 years on. So using Gerald Bostock as a means to go somewhere to now, it is a big leap forward. I’m not trying to do a sequel in the sense of Rocky 4 or Rocky 5 or Bat Out Of Hell 7. This is a jump forward.
So yeah, I’m not pretending for one minute that this is written by Gerald Bostock — this is written by me on the subjects of various alternatives that might happen to all of us in our lives. From the chance intervention and fate and conscious decisions too, that we hope we are capable of making when required to do so. It’s using Gerald Bostock as a way to precipitate all of us through a 40-year black tunnel to bring us out in the present day.
“Thick Is A Brick” is one long song, whereas TAAB2 is, according to one list I saw, 17 songs. Is that right?
Not really. It has 17 ID points, but it is essentially one unbroken piece of music. There is no digital silence anywhere on the record, just as there wasn’t on the original Thick As A Brick, other than the fact that you had to turn side one over to play side two because it was on vinyl when it was originally released, and only on vinyl when it was originally released (Editor’s note: I didn’t mention that I had it on 8-track).
These days we have a big piece of music, but it’s 53 and some minutes long. For the convenience of downloading various sections on iTunes, I’ve given the various sections names and identities, and given them actual ID points so you can replay a piece, you can jump forward, you can treat it as you would if they were separate songs. They’re not separate songs because many of them are using elements, which are reiterated, reprised or developed. There are a number of musical themes that crop up several times across all of the music. As a writer of music, you try and use your intelligence and your ability to compose music, to use the same elements, I suppose, if you were a classical music composer. This is, after all, not pretending to be a bunch of pop songs. It’s supposed to be a little more than an intellectual exercise. It’s supposed to be thought through and fully formed, so it does employ many of the elements that you would find in symphonic classical music, but within the context of what we might loosely call progressive rock. Like the original album, it has quite a few acoustic passages on it, it has some big ensemble band sections, it has some middle tempo stuff, some up tempo stuff, it’s, I hope, an album of varied musical content. But 17 songs? Not really. That’s just the necessary way of acknowledging that today’s music is listened to in a different way, i.e., we don’t buy a record and invite our friends over to sit and listen to the new album in a darkened room and listen it twice all the way through, like we did with Sgt. Pepper or maybe even the original Thick As A Brick. That’s not the way people listen to music any more, like it or not. I mean, I wish they did personally, but they don’t.
We have to be realistic. There’s no point in being precious, like our friends Pink Floyd who refuse to let their record company unbundle (The) Dark Side Of The Moon and sell it on iTunes as separate bits. I can understand if that’s the way they want to do it. I mean I won’t be buying Pink Floyd from iTunes because I don’t want to listen to the whole bloody thing. I would rather choose the bits I want to hear before I think about buying all of it. Given that I didn’t buy it back then, I’m unlikely to buy it now.
You talk about this digital age that we’re in, which may deprive you in getting creative with the cover art. For TAAB2, you have a website for the St. Cleve Chronicle, but will there be anything like the physical newspaper you did with the original Thick As A Brick for the rumored vinyl release?
Well, just as most the small-town newspapers have disappeared in the change of news-reading habits…the world press, whether it’s the New York Times or the London Times or any major national or international or city newspaper, is probably facing a downturn in circulation of hard copy of 30 or 40 percent. It’s a lot like the music industry — people just don’t buy newspapers anymore. They watch news on TV, they hear it on the radio…these days they probably will be downloading stuff off the Internet in the way of news. It’s hard to get away from it these days as soon as you open up your browser. You have some news pages jumping at you as soon as you go online or go to check your e-mail. So things are different, and I rather think that that’s the whole point of my making the St. Cleve Chronicle no longer a print issue, but rather like other small-town and village newsprint magazines and papers that might have existed from years gone by, they’re online these days.
As I did with the original album, I went to look in the real world to take the model that I would use for StCleve.com; I didn’t have to go any further than the village near which I live. It has an online news magazine. I was able to look at a few examples like that and try to find the right nuances between making it look reasonably polished and reasonably well-presented, but not something that would be out of keeping a slightly homesy, slightly homemade feel of a small-town or village community magazines. It’s carefully researched…it’s a spoof, it’s meant to be tongue-in-cheek, just as the original one was. It parodies rural life. However, it is also quite an accurate mirror of real life, and I think that we who live in our little country are quite good at laughing at ourselves in the way that we can see the absurdity and the humor in the way we structure of our lives. A little part of me kind of likes the idea of going into print in the hard copy sense. My gut feeling is I have to stay true to the idea of this. The whole point is it doesn’t exist in print any more — it couldn’t economically — so it exists only in its virtual form online.
Having said all of those things, EMI will be bundling together the new album and the old one in a vinyl form at the end of the year. So there will be a reissue of Thick As A Brick 1 and Thick As A Brick 2 on vinyl for those collectors, who in spite of all common sense, insist on having a scratchy piece of plastic to make them sleep easier at night (laughs). Personally speaking, I hate vinyl. I’ve always hated it. From the very first time I ever heard myself recorded, it was just such a deep sense of disappointment that this scratchy, horrible, thin awful little noise came off a vinyl record. Even when I could afford to buy very expensive turntables and speakers and cartridges and styluses, it didn’t sound much better. It’s always been a big disappointment to me. And those people who love vinyl — God bless them, you know, that’s very nice and for them, I want to make sure we do this as well as we possibly can.
I should be going to listen the version of Thick As A Brick 2, which is being cut on copper in order to try to get a reasonable and solid cut. I shall be at Abbey Road studios listening to a needle sliding its way uneasily across cooper grooves instead of soft black. But don’t think I’m going to enjoy it. It’s an ugly business.
You talked about how Thick As A Brick is a satire. However, there is a story, I think, and with all the effort you put into the cover art in 1972 and choosing a young man to portray Gerald Bostock in the photos, did you ever explore the idea of making a feature film based on Thick As A Brick?
No, I didn’t because it seemed to be very much a standalone thing where you had this precocious young schoolboy who was writing this sort of rambling and slightly disturbing poetry full of imagery that was redolent I suppose of growing up in England at that time…the slightly odd mixture of romanticism, of frustration, the blood, the gore, the military, lots of little elements. When I came to revisit those ideas today and to re-examine my own little bit of autobiographical contribution to the original album, because clearly what was written supposedly by an eight-year-old school boy, I was putting some of myself into that. But when it came to writing this new one, I put a lot more of myself into it. I think with the benefit of looking back 50 years, or a little more, I had a kind of a clarity or vision about my own growing up, my own school days, and more importantly in terms of what it leads on to, thinking about the various things that could have happened to me.
So some of the possible Gerald anecdotes that I explore on the new record are indeed things I know something about because either I had nearly gone down that route myself or I knew people who did. The new thing is written really from more of an autobiographical perspective. The original one was me trying to fantasize about a precocious schoolboy kind of just going over the top. Someone I guess we wouldn’t really like. He wouldn’t have been a popular kid; he would have been picked on, he would have been bullied. He was probably pretty bright and people would be, on the one hand, jealous of his academic ability, but at the same time, probably despise him because he probably wasn’t good at sports, he wasn’t a good social mixer. You can imagine all those things about this rather precocious child. In a way, a little bit of that is my own experience, so it was kind of fun exploring those ideas.
But to make a movie out of the original — there was no substance. It wasn’t about real things. It was like a tapestry; it was like a tapestry of disconnected events and little vignettes of different aspects of life, as it might appear, confusingly, to a young boy growing up too quickly. I don’t think there was a movie there. It was a series of snapshots.
When you reissued Aqualung last year (2011), you went all out with a 5.1 surround mix and a quad mix. And you have Steven Wilson on board again, who did a 5.1 mix of Thick As A Brick.
Yeah, we did that last August. The original Thick As A Brick was remixed in stereo, 5.1 surround, and, of course, the 24-bit audio version. Those will be released in September as part of the re-release of the original Thick As A Brick bundle, in vinyl as well and with vinyl of the new album. For the collectors, there will be that rather expensive edition. So yep, all those things are already very done and dusted and put to bed. That one was kind of easy.
The new album is, in its simple, cheap and cheerful jewel box edition with an eight-page booklet is accompanied by a special edition released at the same time, which is the album on CD and on a DVD, there are the 5.1 surround mixes in two different formats, there’s the 24-bit stereo mix, there’s the hour of audio-visual material, including the making of the album, the interviews with the band and musicians, me reading the lyrics, a series of video episodes, along with the PDF pages of StCleve.com, and the multilingual translations in seven different languages. The special edition has more content for a very modest extra amount of money. In fact, in my view, it’s actually way too cheap. That DVD, a lot of the material took some very serious long and hard work. We made the album in basically a week’s rehearsal and 10 days of recording. And it probably took me from mid-December until the beginning of April, if you like, to get the DVD put to bed and the web site and everything associated with it. Just the same with the original album, we spent more time on the album cover and packaging than we did actually making the record.
When I interviewed you some years ago and we spoke a little about surround, you were a little standoffish about the whole concept. Have you come around more to surround now that you’ve had both Aqualung and Thick As A Brick mixed in 5.1?
I still do not own a surround sound system — professionally in my studio or in my living environment domestically. I really do believe that if you’re going to listen to surround sound, you need to be in a very neutral room with very carefully placed speakers. Even more than listening through stereo speakers, you need to sit in one place because someone’s gone to an immense amount of trouble to make it sound right with you sitting in the middle, facing forward. Consequently, the idea of going to that kind of time and trouble in a domestic context, like in our home here, would be a huge upheaval to at least one room in the house because of book cases, television sets, furniture, other things. It would be such a compromise to do surround sound.
If someone can figure out a way to do surround sound — and I know this has been done, so I’m not ignorant to the reality, but it’s not been commercially or practically speaking successful — but if someone could come out with surround sound that just involved putting some headphones over your ears and you could hear all the way around 360 degrees, I’d be all for that. But so far, that’s not, practically speaking, happened. So we’re not there yet.
Whether or not it is ever possible, through psycho acoustic phenomena that has yet to be invented, it’s something I’d keep an open mind about. Personally speaking, unless you really have the time and the trouble and the will to invest in a lot of fairly expensive equipment, my gut feeling is…if like me you make music to be listened to…and don’t get me wrong here I mean, of course, I’m listening to a 24-bit audio myself, which is sitting on my computer screen right now, but I have accept the fact that I got to make this album sound good at a reasonable middle-to-high rate of MP3 compression through the little white Apple earbuds…made by Fostex.
You can buy those for about three or four bucks if you look online. They are absurdly cheap. I just bought several pairs actually and they are the real thing. When I wear those, I think in all honesty they are nowhere near as good as the Sennheiser reference headphones that I wear in the studio, or for mixing, or for general working, but they’re pretty good. If I can make a record sound pretty good using some good quality earbuds, I’m thinking this is such a huge advance over the way we used to listen to music even up to 10, 12 years ago.
I don’t think we should be to ready to dismiss the technology of MP3 and ear buds. That’s how most people listen to most music most of the time. And when they’re not, the alternative is sitting and listening in their car on their way to work against all the tire noise, the wind noise, the engine noise. It’s horrific. I’d much rather sit in a room with ear buds on and close my eyes and hear a good stereo picture and hear a good bass and top-end response. It may not be moving the air mass in the way that big speakers will, but it’s pretty good. And I have to say, a whole lot better than anything we had just over a decade ago.
I’m someone who kind of believes that if we’re going to take a starting point, I’ve got to try to write music — I mean, right from the point of view of writing the music — I have to be thinking of the end result and the media that will put that music across. It’s no longer, of course, what it was back in 1972 when it was vinyl or nothing…or vinyl or playing it live on stage. Now we have all those media to consider, including vinyl since we have to try to get the best vinyl cut we can. I have to say these days I’m not thinking too much about making vinyl, although I was at the time I was writing the album, knowing that I had maximum theoretical time limit to put on the whole project. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to cut it on vinyl and I always had in mind that I was putting this album out with the original Thick As A Brick as a pair of vinyl releases, side by side. I had to edit and really try to work within tight time constraints when I was writing this music. In terms of the audio quality and the instrumentation, I wasn’t being too picky about it because I know I’m going to lose a whole lot putting compression on everything and put limiters on everything, cut the whole thing down about 3 or 4 dB from the normal level in order to get it on a vinyl disc. Horrible compromises to be made, but it’s been in my head from the word go, so I kind of got used to the idea.
I wanted to touch on the live show you’re taking out behind TAAB2. Are you incorporating any theatrical elements like you did with the original? Are you going to come out dressed in a rabbit suit or taking phone calls for Mike Nelson?
If you’re asking me if there’s a frogman, yes there is. You’ll see him five times. If you’re asking me if I’m going to take a phone call, yes and I’m also going to take a Skype call. You’re going to see the person at the other end on the video screen behind the stage. And what else did you mention? Oh, the rabbits (laughs). Obviously, the way I want to do this is to reprise some of these different moments. You probably mentioned three out of four or five that would work. Yes, it’s nice to put some of those elements back in, but turn them around and bring them into a different age. There will be weather report, but it’s not just a weather report. Some weird shit happens after the weather.
Yeah, there are lots of those theatrical elements and that’s indeed what we’re working on right now, and for the next four weeks we’ll be busy compiling all the final audio and visual files of all that theatrical stuff. There will be an extra performer with me on stage who’s an actor, singer, dancer, mime artist person to help with that more rather cheerful, amateurish presentation of that theatricality. We don’t want to make this look like it’s Madonna on tour or Michael Jackson on the tour that he never did. We don’t want to make it look slick and big and glossy and expensive. We want to make this look like it’s something you would see at your village hall, something you would see presented well, but by amateurs, people who love what they do. I want this to have this kind of feeling of homeliness, a feeling of not being too slick and polished. But in order to achieve that, I’ve got to be incredibly slick and polished and professional, and use all the tricks in the media and the technology to make it come across. But I don’t want to make it look like it’s too slick and polished and technical. But, of course, behind the scenes, you bet it is.
In the self-interview currently making the rounds on YouTube, you stated that you will not be revisiting the follow-up to Thick As A Brick, 1973’s A Passion Play, in 2013 because it’s too dense and complex. You, of course, have other milestones in 2013, such as Jethro Tull’s 45th anniversary. Is it too early to tell, or do you have tentative plans to recognize other Jethro Tull milestones next year?
I actually think we’ve come to the end of milestones frankly. I think after I’ve done this, I don’t want to really think about anniversaries or repetition. I have a few other projects I’m going to be working on this year, which may see their fruition in terms of maybe recorded and released material in 2013, 2014. Right now, I think the Thick As A Brick project — I’ve always thought of it as being an 18-month scenario. So, if we finish up next summer in the USA, I think it will have come full circle and I will very, very happily tear down the video screen, smash up the projectors and all the audio-visual stuff, and we’ll plan something fairly spectacular in terms of improvised explosive devices to make sure it will never ever be used again. And while I’m on the subject, I might throw in a couple saxophones and violins on there as well.
There’s some things in life you need to declare you are not going to this do again, whatever that thing might be. I mean, some people may say, “I’m never going to do crack cocaine again. I’ve quit mainlining heroin. I’m never going to do that again.” In my case, it’s “I am never going to play the saxophone again. I’m never going to sit in front of a video screen, editing video.” I’m getting this all out of my system now. I’m not going back there after the summer of 2013 because I’ll have something else to do, at least for a little while until I’m too old to do anything at all. And apart from anything else, it would be good to do some Jethro Tull dates, doing “Aqualung” and “Cross-Eyed Mary” and “Locomotive Breath” again (laughs). I’m looking forward to that when it comes up.
With everything else you have going on, have you ever considered writing your autobiography?
I’ve thought about it a few times. There’s one fundamental flaw — it’s that I don’t feel comfortable writing about all those people that I worked with, that I counted as my companions through life, my musical friends. I really feel uncomfortable writing about those people. I enjoyed, in a scurrilous, naughty kind of way, reading Keith Richards’ book, and I loved the way he wrote fairly scathingly about a lot of people, especially Mick Jagger. As a reader, sure, I can see why that has such commercial appeal — someone’s digging the dirt here and you can participate (laughs). It’s all kind of tabloid newspaper stuff. It’s glorious if you’re not the subject of that unveiling of intimacies and trust. I couldn’t do that to people.
You asked me a question earlier about Martin Barre, and I could have answered that in a lot of different ways. There’s no way I want to tell you the truth about individuals who have been part of the band…our disagreements, our good relationships, our bad relationships. It’s just not something I would feel comfortable in doing. If I wrote an autobiography, number one you’d have to assume it would pretty much be the most boring biography you ever read because of no sex, drugs and rock and roll in there. I mean, there just wasn’t any, so I can’t invent something I didn’t do. All I have to talk about is kind of rather factual stuff. And when it comes to people, I would keep it in a very bland, down-the-middle kind of way. I wouldn’t want to tell you about personal moments that might be juicy and exciting. I mean, I have loads of interesting and exciting secrets I could tell you about lots of the members of Jethro Tull. And all the things we know about each other. I would never do that. I just think that’s something you shouldn’t do and Keith Richards was very, very naughty for doing that to Mick Jagger. But like everybody else, I loved reading it (laughs). I can see what’s attractive about it, but I would write you the most boring book you ever read, so there’s little point in writing it.
I can’t imagine it being boring considering your history.
Where you can get that little bit of autobiographical stuff is in all of a songwriter’s songs. Maybe for someone who doesn’t write lyrics for a living, maybe there is a need to somehow get it out in prose, those betrayals of intimacies and relationships in the way I’ve been describing it to you. For me, you do this in songs. You do it using simile, analogy — you paraphrase things, you use metaphor, you use devices of the literary trade, to give your own little autobiographical experiences. Or in portraits of other people, you do it in a way that doesn’t really betray the origins or, I hope, I don’t want to embarrass them. I’m really confident I’ve never written anything about another person that would lead to them — “A” being sure it is based on them in some way and “B” that it would be embarrassing to them if indeed they found it was. So that’s something I’ve been very careful in life not to do.
I’m not a guy who writes about me, me, me, me. I’m not an Alanis-Morissette-heart-on-sleeve kind of songwriter. I’m an observational songwriter. I’m someone who writes about people in an environment. I imbue those characters with something of myself very often to give it authority. I also give them perhaps the elements of other people I know, other experiences, other examples. I tend to make composite characters based on things I know about. It’s either a little bit of me or a little bit of somebody I do know about. I’m really very, very careful not to cross…it’s a line not just written in the sand — it’s scored in concrete and you don’t cross that line and actually betray the intimacies of a relationship, I just would never do that. Do I have any stories I could tell you? Over a beer, I possibly would.
