Happy birthday to the most furious, and talented drummer in the business... Michael Andrew 'Puffy' Bordin, 58 on November 27th.
HM Magazine | Issue November 1995
"For me, it's always been a search to get the sounds that I hear in my head. When someone says 'floor tom' or 'rack tom', I always hear the sound that it makes before I get a mental image of what the drum actually looks like. I don't see a picture of a naked chick in a magazine ad holding up a drum, or some sweaty guy posing, I hear what that drum should sound like."
Rhythm Magazine | April 1995
"It was just after the time when the Stranglers and the Sex Pistols and the Ramones saved me from Ted Nugent, if you will. Nah, I don't want to pick on him, but just things generally in that vein. I was playing with some other bands and somebody said they knew a guy who was into that kind of music - Killing Joke and PiL and that kind of stuff - who was looking for a drummer. They said he was kind of weird. I went along and talked to him and he was playing with this weird, scrawny looking kid. That was Bill. We realised that we had more in common with each other than we did with him. We became pretty good friends and went to Black Flag concerts and listened to the Misfits and all of that."
Drum! | 05.08.2010
“I was ten years old, just getting into music, when my mother died. I could have gotten mean and bitter and things might’ve wound up very differently for me. But one of the bands that I gravitated to was Black Sabbath. Their music wasn’t being played on the radio, it wasn’t on jukeboxes at the pizzeria – you had to go to a friend’s house and discover it in the basement. It was an underground thing, which made it more special. It’s no joke that Black Sabbath saved my life. I always dreamed of meeting Ozzy and telling him that.”
Drummer Magazine | October 2012
"It would be easier to bank the drums, but I've never done it. My teacher told me about the physics of drumming: he said, 'Strike it up and down as much as you can and get off again'. If you're going in at an angle, you're going to have to pull the stick away again."
Modern Drummer | 22.09.2015
"...live music should be; it should be physical, it should be in your face, it should be compelling and energetic and powerful. Otherwise, you might as well sit at home and watch it on your computer. I want some hair on it where it needs to be. And certainly all of our guys have that same approach. That’s just sort of where we come from. It’s that punk rock ethic. Musically I feel like I’m as much Black Flag as I am Black Sabbath, you know?"
Rhythm Magazine | June 2015
"What that did was, we all kind of learned a language together and we were the only ones who really spoke it. Because they were learning what I learned but not only what I learned but how I learned it. It wasn't like they were taking the same class from that same guy and getting something different out of it I was saying, 'The guy said this or we did that, check this out. I think Roddy at the beginning, his melodies were very syncopated, pretty simple but very syncopated, but we were all playing percussion to each other, all syncopating with each other around the rhythm, we were all speaking the same damn language. Regardless of what happened in the class, you take a little chunk of that plant out of there and stick it somewhere else and it grows into something."