Am I Alone in This?
Bill Bottrell in the January 2001 New Settler

 
Eighties - creating cults. Because they didn't want a unified populace happening like happened in '67 again.
    I went to UC Santa Barbara. We had Perfect Park - copied after People's Park in Berkeley. It was our little version of that, we wanted to be like Berkeley. It was where we had rallies and anti-war things happened 1500 strong, and eventually the Bank of America got burnt down. It was a powerful meeting place.
    Then, during the late-Eighties, some entity came in and said: "We're going to landscape this park for you," and they put a pond in and bushes ten feet high all over the place, and there's not a space in that park where more than 100 people can congregate anymore. That is the metaphor for what the media has done to the entire population. Micro-marketing breeds micro-management and they can manage small cults who are suspicious of each other and generations who are suspicious of each other.
 

 
    I want to be here and I want these second-generation kids to re-appreciate what their parents did, and weed out what their parents didn't do, because they have a lot of complaints, those kids. [laughs]. . . Apparently there were a lot of bad parents with good ideas.
 
This emotional surge in your music now, it is a mature surge . . .
 
BILL: I hope it is still surging. It is hard to reach the young kids with rock and roll as we knew it, and that's all I have. My band gets very frustrated: because they want to record everything and put it out and sell records. And I keep saying "I don't want to record it."
I have to decide what to do with The Stokemen, and with the cabaret show. If I have the ambition to take it out of this county or leave it right here and let it grow organically.

 
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