On my 21st birthday we opened for Cream. I had spent the day transporting a two-hundred-gallon oil drum from Ann Arbor to Detroit so that we could put a contact mike on it and Jimmy Silver would hit it on the one beat of our best song. I got it up three flights of stairs into the Grande Ballroom, by myself, and then we discovered that our amps didn't work. And when we went out onstage everybody yelled, "We want Cream! We want Cream! Get off, we want Cream!"

I'm standing there, having taken two hits of orange acid, going, "Fuck you!" It was one of our worst gigs ever.

I went back to Dave's Alexander's house with him. I was heartbroken. I thought, My god, this is 21. This is it. things are not going well.

Dave's mom served me a cheeseburger with a candle in the middle of it. The idea was to keep going and things would get better. Don't give up.