MR WONDERFUL:

MR WONDERFUL: ERIC ERLANDSON

quotes

*"I let my ego go a lot of times.I let my pride go. People in my life sometimes don't understand and get frustrated when I have to do that. But I know what I want. I'm not a 'yes' person or a sycophant. I don't see myself as supporting somebody all the time or following them around like a puppy. I'm my own person. I can put up with a lot if I think something good is going to come out of it. Somebody recently said to me, 'it seems like you're the perfect combination of patience and obsessiveness.' In order for us to make music, I have to be patient. And at the same time, I'm very obsessive. I can't do anything else until I see a project done. That's aproblem I have. I had no life for the past two years, exept for working on this album (Celebrity Skin). My whole life is in that piece of plastic."

*'The Amazon Planet, featuring Poor Eric,' that's another band joke," he says. "Then there's the Viking thing: I'm a Viking you're an Amazon. Fine. Vikings and Amazons can co-exist.

* "Kurt had always heard that Nirvana producer Steve Albini played this metal guitar and that's how he gott all that sustain and high end on the early Big Black records," says Erlandson. "So Kurt told me about this Veleno thing, and I said, 'I'm going to look into it.' I found this shop inTacoma, Washington, that had one. It was when Hole was recording Live Through This. I loved it. Pure sustain. I started looking aroud for more."

* Australian Journalist: "A question for Melissa and Eric then. Is Courtney a difficult person to work with? Is she the demanding star"? Melissa: "Eric's the difficult one." Courtney: "I agree." Eric: "Diva diva diva". Courtney: "Eric!" Eric: "I mean it! I am!"

* "The difference is that Courtney hates the fact that I'm not a girl" he says. "That creates more tension. There's not a lot of rock bands where the female calls the shots."

* "That's not me waxing the surfboard."

*"I believe in free speech...write whatever you want, but there should be a code (of emotional ethics).... it's just being sensitive."

*"Patty decided to go in a different direction but she was a part of the shaping of this record and... let's leave it at that."-- Eric on Patty leaving Hole

* "It was Courtney and Lisa on the bass with no drummer. I stood there playing whatever noise I could think of, and they were strumming their guitars, screaming at the top of their lungs. I thought 'Wow, this is gonna be interesting!'"-- Eric on his audition with Hole

* 'We're all little misfits

* 'I'm a surfer! I'm a surfer!'

* 'She was no longer delicious…' (why he split up with Drew Barrymore)

* 'Grammar Grammar Grammar!'

* Courtney: 'You are a bad interview.' Eric: 'Well, Courtney, maybe I'll just practice in front of the mirror.'

* 'I don’t have any friends' (spin magazine 1995)

* 'My parents never told me I would go to hell if I masturbated.'

* "I don't know. I had to be rock star"

* "I'm against all these bands coming back--Sex Pistols--you just destroy everything that's cool about you. Once you're in a band and you die, stay dead."

* Eric about the new hole album- "I know it's going to be different than [Celebrity Skin]. It might be a lot moodier. I'd still like to work with a real producer, more of an old-school-type producer...that's into making sure things are recorded right and working on the songs instead of just throwing it down." Erlandson says that he would have liked to work with legendary country producer Owen Bradley, who died in 1998 at the age of 82 (LAUNCH, 1/9/98)

In a related note, Erlandson came clean about why Hole pulled out of the Marilyn Manson tour halfway through the trek. "A lot of our audience couldn't go to those shows," he says. "They weren't allowed in...Either they weren't into that other band or they had parents saying, 'No, you can't go'...And also just being pulled into this wrestling match thing that was going on in the press between the two frontpeople in both bands, [and] what was being said onstage. [There was] just a lot of negative energy around it."

Erlandson adds that the tour wasn't exactly lucrative for Hole, giving them more impetus to pull the plug. "We found out financial reasons why it didn't make any sense. So I think it's important when something is going wrong you stop it and try to fix it sooner rather than later, so that's what we did. I think [we were] real wise by doing that when we did instead of carrying it on and then suffering."