“A friend of mine gave me a book on poetry by Pablo Neruda. I was reading this one poem called The Beggars and he used the term Gutterflower to describe homeless people. I thought that was nice. I thought it was a striking way of describing a bad situation. How he found beauty in this kind of bizarre situation.” ~John
I absolutely love this! I never knew the meaning behind “Gutterflower” but that’s always what it meant to me, looking at the album cover too - finding beauty among all the gray, all the bad things. I just love this <3
Do you guys know the story behind the girl in this photo? NO?
(In Johns Words):
You see that little girl…up there? (pointing to the screen behind him) I’m gonna tell you a story about that little, beautiful little girl. Man, I’m serious man, this is a serious story. We brought her out, we brought her out and we just thought she was just so amazing looking. She’s so, she’s strange looking and beautiful and she looked old even though she was a little kid. And we did a photo shoot with her and she turned out to be the biggest little monster I ever met in my life. No lie.
The crowd screams and someone yells something out, which you can’t understand, to which Rzeznik laughs and replies—
You’re gonna make my pants get tight. (Hmmm…I wonder what she said?) No lie, no lie. This girl punched me right in the balls and told me to go fuck myself. And her mother’s just standing there going, “Oh-ho-ho she’s so sweet.” And I go (talking like in severe pain), “Yeah, she’s *inaudible, cuz in pain* piece of shit.” So it escalated from there because she went around, then she punched the photographer in the balls, she punched Robby in the balls (the crowd screams cuz ya can’t have that!). That was the one time in my life when I said, “Man that kid needs a fucking beating.” And then I felt really bad for her because it was so obvious that she didn’t want to be there…so we fired her.
But uh, she is pretty amazing and uh…the best part when, she threw one of those Ramen cup-o-noodles things, right in her mother’s face!! (acts like he is throwing a cup) Whoosh! And you know on the cover she is holding this beautiful flower (cups hands as if holding the flower), and as God is my witness, she took that flower and she ate it. She fucking ate the flower. So that was when I was thinking we should just hire a midgit. Get him real high and just say, “Don’t move.” Put a wig on Mini-Me, smear some dirt on his face, roll him around on the ground and then put him in a dress.
