Bassist Tommy Stinson discussed working with Guns N’ Roses’ Axl Rose, The Replacements’ Paul Westerberg, and Soul Asylum’s Dave Pirner in a new Observer interview.
“They’re all completely different people but also very similar in a lot of very important key ways. They’re all very sensitive to everything, I mean music and on some levels they’re in another place than most people because of what they’ve experienced or where they wanna be in life, or whatever. Their similarities are pretty interesting and I’ve had to adapt to all three, of course.
Their similarities—and I can’t really get into it—are quite profound, just in the makeup of their personality and their genius. There’s a certain thing, I think Paul and Axl, and I think all three of them, have a genius quality to them. They are very bright and with that kind of genius comes a lot of mental hardship because you’re in this whole other mental capacity to get out of what you want to get out of your music that’s hard to convey.
It’s hard to accomplish because getting what’s in your head on a fuckin’ record is completely…[laughs]…it’s our hardest gig we’ve got as musicians is tryin’ to get the ideas in the brain on the fuckin’ disk.
All three of them have their own peculiar problems getting the idea from their head onto the disk. It just takes a lot to pull that out and get it where they want it, exactly where they want it, where they fuckin’ think it’s supposed to be, the way it’s supposed to sound. All that.”
