Buzz Osborne

To me, traveling by bus is like climbing into a closet and watching 'Das Boot.'

I'm not interested in constructive criticism, believe me.

By and large musicians are pretty lazy; they don't do a whole lot. They're usually very busy doing nothing.

To me, everything outside of Los Angeles is the 'south,' including places like San Diego. It's sort of like the saying, 'Everything is God.' Indeed it is.

I'm not a complainer, I'm a doer.

I never solicited a major label and I certainly wouldn't now.

Now I have never met a group of people who hate music more than professional roadies, and it is clearly obvious that 99.9 percent of them know nothing at all about music. Nothing. I find this to be quite strange, really. It's like someone who works in a bakery knowing nothing about baking.

I don't want to stay underground for just the cool people.

The Who is one of my favorite bands of all time. 'The Who Sell Out' is one of the greatest art-project albums of all time.

If you take a band like Nirvana, their biggest hits are structurally the same as even a hair metal band's biggest hits. The structure's not different - the attitude was different. Except it really wasn't. It seemed a little more human.

I've toured the U.S. every single year and I've put a record out every single year whether it was on a major label or not; that doesn't make any difference to me.

We went into that knowing that we were never going to sell a major record 'cause we didn't sound like these bands, so I just thought this was an opportunity for us to make the kind of records that we wanted and make some money at the same time.

I've been a list maker for years, even before I was a musician. I was always writing things down and kept long lists of things that would make good album titles and things like that. I'm constantly thinking in terms of songwriting.

I can't go into Oklahoma without thinking about Larry Clark's photography book 'Tulsa.' It's a great book about how life works.

I conquered my stage fright a long time ago. In my line of work, it's kind of a pre-requisite that you not feel bad about looking stupid in front of a lot of people.

I want to travel around the country and make my living playing music. I also try to behave in a way that I would appreciate as a music fan. That's how we conduct ourselves, be it in writing music or playing it live.

I've always had the idea that multi-millionaire rock stars should work harder than anyone because they have the ability to do it. Look at an artist like Andy Warhol. He never stopped working, even after he didn't need to work again.

I would love to sell millions of records, but that's never gonna be the case.

All teens are in trouble in one form or another.

I was a huge Bowie fan since I was 12 years old. That was the first 'punk' rock I got into in the Seventies. I didn't find out about a lot of the other stuff that was going on, like New York Dolls and Roxy Music, until a lot later.

I started playing guitar when I was in my late teens, and within two years I was starting to play shows.

It's not the journalists; it's the critics that I can't understand. I've never understood what kind of a person would want to criticize someone else's work.

The band that changed my life was The Who. It's hard to pick just one album, but if I had to pick the one that really showed me how things could be done, it's 'The Who Sell Out.' They really went to town on that, doing something that no one had ever done before.

Stupidity knows no bounds and certainly no city limits, but by and large, 99 percent of the people who come to Melvins shows seem to be relatively well behaved... I'm happy and relieved by this.

I never wanted to be part of any scene, I never wanted to be a part of anything, I wanted to do my own thing. Those are the lessons I learned from punk rock.

One of my main problems with music is that the basic formula is always the same: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus, chorus, chorus, end. One of the bands that changed that was The Beatles. If you listen to 'Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey.' It's three verses, bridge, end.