This week on After School Radio, Mark Hoppus celebrates episode 100 and chats with tennis legend John McEnroe, where they talk about his love of music and his time spent playing in a band.
John McEnroe on meeting David Bowie for drinks at his hotel…
"I was in a hotel in London, I would say it was 1981 or two, somewhere around there. It was around the time that I had sort of reengaged and started trying to play the guitar. And one of the songs that I was trying to play, it was a fairly straight ahead, simple song, "Suffragette City." So I'm in my hotel room, I'm playing this, I'm butchering "Suffragette City" and all of the sudden there's a knock on the door, and I open the door and it's David Bowie. And he goes, "Hey man, I heard you were staying in the same hotel. Would you like to come up in have a drink in my room." And I go, "Hell yeah. Yeah, absolutely." And then he goes, "Don't bring the guitar.”
John McEnroe on learning guitar from Bill Wyman, Eddie Van Halen and Carlos Santana...
"I did have a lot of people that did attempt to teach me to play guitar. Probably the first guy was Bill Wyman, a fellow bass player. He was trying to teach me the one, four or five blues move and I wasn't able to sort of digest that as quickly as he would've liked... But the late great Eddie Van Halen did try to teach me on a handful of vacations, but he'd get frustrated after a couple minutes. I remember I said, "Could you teach me that riff in 'Ain’t Talkin’ ’bout Love?' Because I thought that was like some incredible riff. And he's like, "Hey man, I had to do something. It was only two chords, that song." So I go, "Okay." So then he played the riff and I go, "Do you see it?" And I'm, instead of playing it remotely like him, I'm playing, "...," slow motion. And he was like, "Oh, forget it. Let's just go party, forget it." So he gave up on me, but I had Carlos Santana, for example, the great Carlos Santana...so I've had some teachers, or I would probably call them more somewhat friends as opposed to people that actually attempted to help me play guitar."
John McEnroe on his life as a touring musician…
"I was the greatest, most traveled, not greatest, I should say, take that back, the most traveled unsigned band in music history, I believe. When I went out on in '94 after I'd stopped playing and I was in the midst and the end of a pretty bad divorce, a little bit lost, trying to sort of just figure out how to spend some time. It seemed sort of natural to try to move away from what I was doing at that particular time, because I was sort of sick of it. Even though, as it turned out, it'd been pretty good to me and hopefully vice versa. So my agent at the time was Italian, so we had this idea to do this tour of Italy. It was the first tour... I played 12 shows in 14 days. I had a couple young guys with me. A buddy of mine was another bass player, Kenny Passarelli was his name. He used to play with Joe Walsh. He co-wrote "Rocky Mountain Way.” A great bass player. I saw him when he was playing with Elton John, he was with Crosby, Stills & Nash. He was the bass guy, the hired gun. They're playing stadiums, I'm thinking this is incredible. That was fun. I felt like a real rock group. I was like, "Wow." This is part of why I played tennis because you're out there on your own and you don't have to worry about all these other guys. And so it was certainly everything that I thought I envisioned in a rock band. And subsequently I did a lot of shows, and the following year I went to Japan, Europe on three, four occasions, South America, my wife was pregnant with our first child, my second wife at the time. And she was with me and playing all over the world because I would connect it with some tennis exhibitions and stuff. It was quite an experience, but at one point fairly early on in our relationship, my wife's Patricia Smyth who's was in Scandal and a solo artist, she said to me, after there was a festival I did in Belgium I think, and she said, "Okay, if anyone's going to play music, it's going to be me, not you. So that's the end of that." Because I also had this idea that I was like, "Okay, Patty was a little bit..." She had toured with Rod Stewart. She had had a platinum record. It was a big hit that Don Henley helped sing on one of her... "Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough.” But she seemed sort of disillusioned with the music business the way they treat females, so I thought I was going to come in and bring that positive energy. So I said, "Hey, we should play in a band together." And she was like, "Yeah, we should play mixed doubles at Wimbledon." I go, "You don't play tennis." She goes, "Exactly." So that sort of set me straight on what priorities should be. But I've long been a lover of music, love music and love playing just... And that's part of why I actually did do it and play as a group because I was so used to sort of being by myself and doing it on my own that I did want to experience something with a group of guys and see how that would work. So that was something that I always was interested in pursuing, but never really... Now it's sort of like a passion, it's not a job. It's more just, I love doing it."
John McEnroe on meeting The Allman Brothers…
"I remember when I was probably 20, 21, I saw The Allman Brothers for the first time, maybe 20, in New York at the Palladium I think. And I walked into the back and Gregg Allman's there with Dickey Betts, and they look at me and they hesitate and they go, Greg Allman says to Dickey, "Hey man, there's the golfer." And I go, "Well, close enough. I'll take it. But I'm the tennis guy, I actually run."
John McEnroe on how he looks back on his life playing tennis and raising his children...
"There's things that, did I need to take it that far? From that to, I could have trained harder. I could have done this better. I wanted to have children, but I thought I could juggle the children and still be the best player in the world. And for a variety of reasons, that proved to be more difficult than I thought. And so when you bring kids into the world, your responsibility, to me, is first and foremost to your kids and trying to make your relationship last. Not, put them aside, I'll see you in a couple months, I got to go train and got to try to win some more. So it was difficult to navigate, especially tennis in a way, because you're on your own. And as you succeed, to me, I was relying on my instincts and they work well for a while, but at a certain point, they call it in economics, the law diminishing returns, and eventually it started to, I don't want to say backfire, but not work as well. And then that's the difficult... To know when to sort of shift gears and do it in the right way, that's always the trick. So of course I would've liked to have handled things differently at times and done things differently, but all in all, if I want to send a message to kids or my own kids for that matter, I want to look at the glass half full as opposed to half empty.”
