Confessions of a Judas –
June 8, 2020 –
“Breaking The Law” has become an anthem. How do you keep a song like that fresh, night after night, for 40 years?
“It’s fresh every night that you play it. That given moment in time, it’s new, it’s fresh, it’s different. It’s never exactly, identically the same, and that’s just the way it is. I think what’s important with these kinds of songs is, you don’t put them on autopilot. You don’t go through the motions. It has to be coming from a real sincere place of performance. It’s not like, ‘Oh, shit. We’ve got to do it again for the fucking 4,000th time.’ You never feel that way. You look forward to it. I still look forward to doing ‘Breaking The Law’, \Living After Midnight’, ‘Electric Eye’.”
You got sober in the mid-Eighties. What advice do you have for people still struggling with their demons?
“Oh, every day is a fucking struggle. It’s just unbelievable. But what sobriety gives you is just this incredible strength that is in all of us. All of us are strong people; sometimes you have to go to the bottom of the shit pit, as I call it, to realize that you have tremendous strength and resilience to survive. In terms of sobriety and learning to live as a sober person, you have to dig deep for the strength to do it, because you can lose it. It’s incredibly fragile. Strength is a funny thing, because it can break at any moment. It’s finding something in yourself that you can only find by going to the darkest of places.”
