HANSON! - music group - Interview

Interview, July, 2000 by Gus Van Sant

ISAAC: What you really learn is nobody realizes it or cares that much if you screw up. Most people have no idea. The worst show we ever did, the piano went out, the guitars went out--

ISAAC: We had things shorting out.

TAYLOR: Speakers were exploding. All this stuff is just frying. Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong.

ISAAC: And after the show, people were coming back going, "Oh, the show was amazing!" And it was like, that was hell! That was hell incarnate.

TAYLOR: Oh my gosh, we were so, like--

ISAAC: We just wanted to kill.

TAYLOR: My keyboard went out. It just died, and the next song was basically just piano. The whole song is me playing piano, and I looked at the other keyboard guy who had never played the part and said, "You've got to play the part." They were showing me on the Jumbotron, so I had to fake it, but the keyboard is dead. So they are looking at my hands as I am faking, and the audio is actually coming out of him.

ISAAC: And my guitar was shorting out. Like, it would kind of fade in and out ... [makes a loud distortion-type noise]

TAYLOR: The whole show.

ISAAC: Which the audience probably thought was a pretty cool sound.

TAYLOR: And the guitar amps were turning off and on.

GVS: What was going on?

TAYLOR: We don't know! That's what we couldn't figure out. We think one of the other bands was, like, sabotaging us!

ISAAC: We joked about it.

TAYLOR: I think it was just bad outlets or something. There are so many things that can go wrong.

ISAAC: It was kind of a learning experience. We realized the audience doesn't always catch on.

TAYLOR: If we just stopped, everybody would be like, "Oh my gosh, what happened?" But the show must go on.

ISAAC: Another thing is that when you are playing live, you've got the energy of the audience and they are all excited and it's loud and you re performing live ...

TAYLOR: It's more about the stage presence than how tight the band is, but you want to be tight.

ISAAC: We went to see Lenny Kravitz last summer in Austin and he was awesome. His show was just awesome. I mean, like, when you see some of these great bands, you sit there and think, man, if only we were that tight, you know?

ISAAC: It just really inspires you ... you just realize how much practice and how much more you have to do because they are just so good. It sounds like the record, you know? And you'd like to get that good.

GVS: Are you guys going on tour soon?

ISAAC: Yeah.

TAYLOR: We're definitely planning on doing a world tour and promotion stuff. Even before we actually do the concert tour ...

ISAAC: That's kind of the way we did it last time, but we didn't get back--

TAYLOR: We did it for too long; we spent like a year just promoting--

GVS: You guys were riding the big wave, like, "Where do we go? What do we do?"

TAYLOR: Exactly. We didn't have the experience. We didn't know how to plan.

ISAAC: The album was No. 1 in twenty-seven different countries at once, so everybody was like, OK, you need to be here, you need to be there. ... It was so hectic.

TAYLOR: So beyond crazy. And the tour was incredibly successful for as long as we waited.