SRB: i had always thought of the situation more along the lines of sheryl's album taking off around the same time as the cavalcade of personal tragedies afflicting the TNMC members and her going, 'f this, i'm off to be a rock star, later'. any accuracy there?

DB: Oh, I don't know... Probably a combination, of those things and a lot of other ones, too. It was very disorienting for all of us seeing history being rewritten around us, and all the death made it even harder to keep our heads on straight. It took years for us to actually figure out what had happened, and even what limited understanding we gained was largely due to the efforts of a reporter named Richard Buskin, who sort of dug through the whole mess, and was able to speak directly with both Cafaro and Anderle. It's very hard to say, particularly in Kevin Gilbert's case, which came first, the chicken or the egg. The Billboard attack piece was written not long after his death. But there's no question that Sheryl was hounding Kevin in the months leading up to his death, with threatening phone calls from lawyers, etc... Clearly the string of tragedies was hard to know how to handle, for all of us, probably including Sheryl. Maybe in some ways, hardest for her, since she must have been aware of the spin campaign, and it was her appearance on Letterman that was the catalyst for John O'Brien's suicide. (Not the cause, understand, merely the catalyst, and she was very very aware of that fact.) It must have been difficult to maintain the whole charade at times. I can't imagine her not feeling some level of cognitive dissonance and pain over it all, too. Though, on the other hand, she immediately turned around and did it again. Her first single on her second album ("If It Makes You Happy") was written in entirety by Jeff Trott, who used to play the song in the Pete Droge band, and she wasted no time taking credit for that, too, so she couldnt have been feeling too raw, from a moralistic standpoint. Jeff was enough of a pro to just kind of shrug and take the checks, wisely enough. But who knows, let it go. It's a grimy tale, and an old one. There are certainly bigger fish to fry. The guy at Billboard, Tim White, who wrote the attack piece against us died quite young, too, of a sudden heart attack, apropos of absolutely nothing. All very tragic and meaningless

db