Faith No More founder and CEO of Koolarrow Records celebrates his 57th birthday.
Faith No More Followers team would personally like to thank Bill for all his help, he is always ready to answer our 'fan boy' questions and, when his memory serves him right, help with facts for us to post. He has been a fantastic support to our work and that of other fan pages. Thank you. Bass Guitar Magazine | 2013 “When I first started playing I was about 12 or 13. I liked progressive rock – Yes in particular – and in fact my tone is like Chris Squire’s, in a strange kind of way. I always liked that aggressive kind of tone. I had a Rickenbacker when I was a little kid and I was in a band that was a bit like the Buzzcocks – very fast, sixteenth-note type stuff. Then, when I moved to San Francisco when I was 18, I met Bordin, whose drumming style was totally different to any other drummer I’d known before that. He really got me thinking, because his strengths and weaknesses are different than the average drummer. I learned to work with the way that he works, and we found a way to work together. Even to this day I have a hard time playing with other drummers, because they’re on a different cycle and a different rhythm. He definitely accents things differently. He hits hard, too, and he has a little bit of a delay in his hits which I’ve made part of my rhythm as well. If you delay things and hold them back, they’ll come off a little heavier, and we got into similar stuff together. Even though I’d been in bands for five or six years I’d say that these were still my formative years when I was 18. I was still discovering dub music, for example. Public Image was the first album to me which was groundbreaking.” “I can’t do what Flea or Les Claypool can do, although I can do some of it. Louis Johnson would kick the crap out of me, ha ha! But the truth is that’s not what I’m looking for. I see making music as street fighting. It’s like kickboxing, it’s not like painting a picture. I’m not interested in that.” Machine Music | April 2015 "I think what really did it for me was there was a couple of albums that I heard that kind of gave me a strange…opened my eyes to what music was and what music could do, they were two albums of my father's. One album was Space Oddity by David Bowie and the other one was Plastic Ono Band by John Lennon. Those two albums were pretty radical, and I was about nine years old and they made a big impact as far as how I looked at the world and what I thought music should do." Consequence Of Sound | October 2010 “I feel sorry for this generation of kids because they don’t go out to shows and make them events where things can happen. The unpredictability and liability is really the thing, the spark… you know people wanted to see Jerry Lee Lewis, it was a bit of a wild thing, and it’s become very, very controlled now.” Bassist Magazine | March 1995 "I think being in a band that is successful is like having a higher limit on your credit card. You get a little buying power, but you get locked into the system a lot more as well, and the things that can come easy at first actually have tentacles that try to keep you in. The longer you're in and the better you do, the more indebted you are to the system that's slowly suffocating you." Kerrang! | 1989 "It has nothing to do with money or power or that side of things, and let's be serious, if I wanted to make money and be on that side I'd be smuggling cocaine because that's where the big money seems to be at." Kerrang! | 1989 "I have this really bad ulcer and when I see a thing that I truly hate, all I can do to soften the blow is face it and come to terms with it. To prevent a flare-up I have to use these methods of understanding and compromise. I can honestly say that Milli Vanilli are helping me cope with life." Koolarrow Interview | 2016 "Making music is always the most exciting, this is really what I was made to do, and I don’t see that part of me stopping. However, I like a good fight, and a victory here and there for one of my bands is a great feeling."