So they buried you in the sand on the album cover. I bet that was a fun photo shoot.
No. For the other three guys, it was hilarious. I’m really buried there. It was at the Santa Monica Beach, and we had Danny Clinch as the photographer. That was an outtake of the session we did with the designer John Varvatos. It was a lot of fun … not. They dug the hole there in the beach and then put me in, with a suit on and everything. I had my legs kind of crossed in there, and as the sand got poured on me, it’s like waterboarding except it’s itchy.

Did you just draw the short straw among the four of you?
The other guys, they’re too sophisticated to do stuff like that. I’m like Mikey – I’ll eat anything: “OK, I’ll sit in the sand and do that.” We couldn’t ask Bun. E to do it. And Robin, he’s a singer and he can’t do it. Tom is funnier than I am, but nobody knows it. Some people think I’m kinda funny, but I can’t tell jokes at all.

The Latest sounds just as good as the band always has. What was the band's mindset when recording the album?
It depended on what we were doing and when we doing it and who was in the studio. With our band, whoever’s not in the room gets picked on. So I never leave the room – I’m afraid to. If Robin were left in the room with the engineer alone, all of a sudden there’s keyboards and strings on stuff. And if Tom’s there, we’re not sure what’s going on. And Bun E., he’s always there. He’s left alone while he’s doing the drums a lot of times. We were also getting ready to do Sgt. Pepper, so it’s probably a bit heavy-handed on the strings here and there. Muscially, we were having fun.

Ah, yes, Sgt. Pepper’s. You performed the classic album at the Hollywood Bowl for its 40th anniversary in 2007 and you’ll be doing it again in Vegas. How did that all come about?
The powers-that-be at the Hollywood Bowl said, “You guys are the perfect band, would you do it?” Usually we just say yeah to a lot of different things and then the night before, “Whoops, we promised we were going to do it! Better get the record quick!” But we passed the audition and after that, none of us said too much about it because we had never done anything like that. Two nights, 38,000 people. And they really liked it. But you can’t goof around, you can’t jam on the guitar solo because everybody in the audience is like, “That’s not it.” It better be better, or it better be pretty spot-on. Well, I’m not better and I’m not spot-on, but I’m pretty close.

Surrender and Dream Police have shown up in recent Guitar Hero video games. Is that cool to appeal to a new generation in a different way?
Oh yeah, definitely. I always say when I talk about Surrender, everybody I’ve ever known thinks their parents are weird. That’s a given. I’ve heard Green Day do it for their encore. Anthrax just did it and they wanted me to play on it. It’s like a universal, melodic song about how dopey your parents are, and to stick up for yourself. We’re never going to learn how to dance quite as good as Britney Spears, although I’m trying, and the fact is that we’ll never get that kind of new band airplay, or any airplay except on classic stations. That they still play that one on classic and new stations is tremendous.

Even Conan O’Brien used it on his first-ever Tonight Show.
He called me the next day and he was bowing down to me: “This is the greatest song!” Or on The Simpsons, Apu singing Dream Police or Homer saying, ‘I’d rather listen to Cheap Trick.” We’ve earned kind of crazy compliments from high up, from like Homer and Beavis and Butthead. You can’t buy that kind of credibility. The creators are fans enough where they put you in an oddball way, where it’s not too horrible.

I Want You to Want Me has also had that same staying power.
It’s the whole basis for that Mexican movie that just came out, Rudo y Cursi. Usually in a trailer for any kind of movie, there are four or five things from the soundtrack, and this thing is I Want You to Want Me almost from start to finish, and I knew nothing about it. So I’m moving to Mexico.

Recording the Transformers theme song probably puts you at the epitome of cool for a lot of young people.
You can’t really vary too from “Transformers, robots in disguise” – I thought it was “Excuse me while I kiss this guy”! I didn’t know what it was. I said it to my kids and, oh yeah, they knew all about it. I wrote the international song for Pepsi years ago. They give you a list of stuff you can say in there – in other words, “Make love to Pepsi.” Same thing with Coca-Cola, they have their selling points so you can’t jump around too far from that.