NH (Continued): I’m out there trying to earn a living. I’m telling people buy a ticket to the show, come out, have a good time, we’ll do what we can to entertain you so that you can forget your problems for one night. In the meantime, you’ve got these guys, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who are showing up, dressed like slobs—they can’t even make the effort to dress up for the folks, putting on a horrible, horrible, shameful performance at sometimes 20 times the cost of a ticket to my show, and that makes people very angry. And these guys are taking all the millions of dollars and buying drugs and that sort of thing with it, and it’s just a disgrace to our industry. You could call it shop-talk or you could call it a howl of rage, I’m not sure how you want to look at it, but it is a problem, and I’m going to address it.

JCS: You get flack for some of those comments, making fun of The Red Hot Chili Peppers or bigger entertainers, especially at rock shows. You seem to get good materials from being well-prepared for hecklers. Do you like having confrontations with hecklers?

NH: No I don’t. If you’re a wood chopper, and you swing the axe down on the wood, and it slips, and hits your leg, you’re very happy that you have a bandage and a splint to repair your leg before you bleed to fucking death. And that’s how I look at my responses to these hecklers. I would rather that they weren’t there, but I do want the proper tools to repair the situation so I don’t, not literally, but figuratively bleed to death on stage. And so the responses that I have, some of them are reused, some of them are spur of the moment, that is my only defense against what can really spiral into a bad, bad situation. Because these guys don’t let up sometimes. And unfortunately, a lot of the security at these venues, these people are paid a nickel an hour and drinking whiskey out of an empty mineral water bottle that they’re hiding in their boot, and the last thing they care about is trying to stop these hecklers and trying to keep the night moving in a good way. So a lot of the time, it’s up to me to shut them down. Now I know that some people enjoy listening to these confrontations, of course the YouTube crowd loves it because those people thrive on human misery, and that’s fine. But obviously, no one would wish it on themselves.