We didn’t deal with the songs at all, … We wrote a play. And at certain points in the play, because it’s about guys who made music, the music comes in almost like a character...

They were not taken seriously the way the Beatles were, or the Beach Boys, or the Stones ? bands who were written about.

There is no pit orchestra. The musicians are essentially characters in the show. That was a big idea from Des. And it set a structure within which we were able to write the show.

The more they got into this, the more it seemed they had kind of a Shakespearean history, … By that, I mean there’s love and hate, and life and death, and revenge, betrayal and greed...

We never knew their story because they were from Jersey, and because they were blue-collar high-school dropouts ? Italian kids with no glamour quotient at all,