To me, if you're going to talk about funk, you have to go back to George Clinton and Bernie Worrell. Those guys are the giants. I've played with Bernie, and it was unreal. He's the master.

You might have a favorite book or film, but you can only watch or read it so many times before you have to let it sit and then go back and realize it's your favorite still. At some point everything gets a little stale and you have to step away from it.

We've all had our thing. I listened to the Monkees when I was little kid.

San Francisco is an interesting place. It's always been such a nice culturally diverse environment, which it still is, but there's a lot of money there now and a lot of dot com's so it's a little different than it used to be.