EDDIE TRUNK DISCUSSES SPORTS, MUSIC, BOOKS AND GROWING UP IF HE WAS CONSIDERED A “ROCK KID” OR “A NERD”

Leslie Michele Derrough of Glide Magazine spoke with Eddie. Portions of the interview appear below.

Glide Magazine: We know how much you love your New York Giants. What happened to them this season?

Eddie: Yeah, that is my favorite team and my favorite sport. I think we’re going to have a great year next year. I’m very optimistic, actually. I think that the big problem with this year was all the injuries that they had. So I think that Odell Beckham and Victor Cruz together on the field at the same time is going to be a lot for people to handle and if all those guys that were injured, if we get them back healthy and maybe a couple little additions, I think the Giants are going to surprise a lot of people and have a really, really good year. Again, if they don’t have a ton of injuries, which they had twenty-five guys on IR this year, and I know they say injuries are no excuse but obviously it plays a role. So we’ll see. I wish it was September already. I can’t wait.

Glide Magazine: AC/DC opened the Grammys the other night. How did you feel about that and their performance?

Eddie: I thought, and have thought my whole life, that the Grammys, when it comes to rock and metal music, is a complete farce and I’ve railed about it for a long time. I think it’s absurd, actually. They have no clue what they’re doing, and never did, and it’s embarrassing and unfortunately because they’re so lost in their nomination process of who they give Grammys to in those categories, it’s actually become utterly meaningless. Even if the artist every once in a while that deservedly win one, it’s meaningless, it does nothing. There’s no spike in their sales, it’s forgotten the next day, it’s kind of a joke.

But as far as AC/DC performing at it, I thought it was a really cool way to kick off the show and I thought that the band sounded good. I mean, there were a lot of people wondering who the drummer was going to be and obviously that was revealed that they brought Chris Slade back. I thought that Stevie Young replacing Malcolm, he looks like him and I’d guarantee 90% of the people watching had no idea Malcolm wasn’t even there. I don’t think in the mainstream world they follow it all that closely. Now I think if they see Angus in the schoolboy outfit, they see Brian Johnson singing, there’s AC/DC. They don’t get into it in the level that we might. But I thought it was a cool way to open the show and give everybody a dose of some hard rock music and then largely after that, unfortunately for the rock fan, there really wasn’t all that much to see.

Glide Magazine: Do you think Black Sabbath has another album in them?

Eddie: I don’t know. Possibly. I think Tony Iommi is the undisputed all-time master of riffs and when you have that catalog of riffs, I think that he could make twenty good records still if he wanted to. I’ve spoken to Tony about this, that “You should sell your riffs,” cause he said he’s just got archives of these riffs. I said, “You should sell them as ringtones cause you could never possibly make music with all of them. There’s just not enough time.” And he laughed and he said, “It’s kind of true.” So I honestly don’t know what their future is but I think that they could make as many records, great records, as they wanted to. The question just becomes, do they have the focus to do it, do they have the energy to do it, the desire to do it. Again, you’re talking about guys that are in their mid-to-late sixties and who have been through this for forty or fifty years and are now having some health issues with Tony. So it just comes down to if they WANT to. But I think if they want to, they certainly can, mainly because Tony has an archive, I know for a fact, of just riffs forever.

Glide Magazine: What were you like growing up? Were you the rock kid or a nerd?

Eddie: I was actually somewhere in the middle of the two because when I was growing up, if you were into the music I was, which was hard rock, you were considered a nerd. I graduated high school back in 1982, a long time ago, but the years I was in high school I was considered a total outcast. I was not in with the in crowd at all. I was not invited to the parties. I was considered this music geek and a guy that was not into the cool music of the time. A lot of the stuff I was into was not considered to be hip, cool music. And I didn’t care. I was defiant about what I liked: this is what I like and if you don’t like it, that’s fine. But I was judged a lot by what I liked at the time and what I didn’t like and I found that there were a lot of people that pretended to like music to just be in with this certain crowd and to get into parties and stuff; but they truly didn’t really like it. And I hated that. I always hated people that were fake and phonies about what they liked and didn’t like. So I always fought that and as a result, I kind of got lost in my own little world of music. I started pursuing a career in music as early on as my earliest days of high school. And that’s all that really consumed me at the time. I wasn’t a good student. I didn’t do well at all as far as grades or anything like that. I certainly wasn’t dumb, I just didn’t apply myself because I really didn’t have much of an interest in the stuff that was being taught. I was just totally in my world of caring about music.

Glide Magazine: Do you plan to do another book?

Eddie: Yes, I definitely plan to do a third book. I just don’t know when and I just don’t know what the format’s going to be…But I think that with the next book what I’d like to do, what I’m leaning towards, is kind of more an autobiography. I want to tell all the stories. I want to tell the stories about how I went from being this outcast kid in my high school in New Jersey to doing what I’ve done in the business on all levels, not just the things most people know me as, from the TV show or perhaps radio or whatever. But all the stories that led up to them, how those things happened, what it took to get them to happen. The good, the bad and the ugly. So I’d like to do that. I’m often asked by people all the time, “Hey man, how did you get to do this?” or “How did this happen?” I’ve got stories for days so I’d like to put those in some pages and get that story out there at some point.

Glide Magazine: What bands do you think are at the top of their game right now?

Eddie: It’s hard to say but I could tell you what I’m listening to and liking right now. That would kind of lead to thinking that those are kind of at the top of the game because they are bands that I like and are my favorite records at the moment. There is a new band called Farmikos that I like right now which features Joe Holmes, who used to play with Ozzy and David Lee Roth, and their debut album just came out and I really like that. There’s another kind of a new band that Scott Ian is a member of called Motor Sister and I like that record a lot. I love the new Marilyn Manson record. I was always a big fan of his since the beginning. I think he’s made a great comeback the last couple of years. I like the new Black Star Riders record, which Thin Lizzy kind of morphed into, and I think that’s really good as well. Those are a few of the new things that have come out that I really have been listening to and really enjoying.

Read Eddie’s entire interview Glide Magazine here.