Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
While Paul Simon is revered, I don't think people get how deep he is. I love the guy. He comes from that early street-harmony, first-generation type of rock and rollers. He gets it.
I got one of the best sax players in the business - Arno Hecht. He plays with the Uptown Horns and all the great blues bands. He expresses the heart of the Apollo Theatre, let me tell you.
I left Columbia in the mid-'60s. I had a guaranteed contract for, like, $100,000 a year. And I just let it go. And I wasn't a rich man. There were a lot of bad vibes around the whole thing.
There's a lot of unreleased blues stuff I did with the Apollo Theater musicians, and there was of experimenting going on for me in the mid-'60s in that studio, which I think frustrated Columbia.
With Del Shannon - and I've got to tell you this - there's nobody probably on the face of the earth that I identified more with musically. We used to sit and sing George Jones and Hank Williams tunes.
I think one of the greatest compliments I've ever received was when a young kid came backstage at Joe's Pub, when I had the "Bronx In Blue" album out. He said, "What Jimmy Reed did for you, you do for me."
That is amazing that a guy like St. Jerome who lived in the fourth century could bring people together. Sometimes you think people are dead and forgotten. But they can actually bring you together in the best way.
If you don't have God in your life, you have to fill up on something. And you usually reach for the four great substitutes, the classical addictions: wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. So you try to fill yourself up.
Hank Williams seemed, like, so total to me, so committed to the lyric. He would actually rip the ends of the words off at the, you know - the end of the sentence. It sounded like he'd bite into the word and rip it off.
What are you gonna fill your life up with when you don't have that ultimate satisfaction or peace in your life? You try to fill it up with wealth, pleasure, honor, power, sex, drugs and Rock and Roll to try to feel good.
The form of the blues helps us express our joys, our fears, our - anything you want to express. And it helps you get it out instead of it spiraling inward, and you're getting twisted up and exploding. So it's a bit of salvation.
When you're a kid, you get all these rules and regulations coming down on your head. You've got a need to be recognized. But as time goes by, this stuff, if it remains, can kill you. The attitude alone can't sustain anyone forever.
A rock-and-roll group needed a name that fit criteria in three areas: It had to be great for a bowling team; it had to be great for a gang; and it had to be great for a rock-and-roll group. So we called ourselves Dion and the Belmonts.
My first tour, for six weeks straight, was with Bobby Darin, in 1958. It was just fun hanging out with him. He was older than I was; he was a college guy. It was kind of a mutual-admiration society, I guess. He taught me how to pay taxes.
Back when I was in high school, I came out onstage with my guitar and had four guys playing behind me. We were just playing a dance, but I was standing in front of an audience rocking out. I'm still rocking out like when I was a kid. I haven't changed.
I grew up with my parents screaming and yelling at each other for the rent in Bronx, New York City at the time. It was $36. So my mind hadn't stretched out to that place where I could spend a whole month's rent on a 45-minute plane flight to Fargo, N.D.
People were watching the TV set, and they said three rock-and-rollers died - Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, The Big Bopper, including the pilot. I walked out of the hotel. I got on the bus alone. Their clothes were hanging on the racks, their guitars on the seats.
I come from this macho Italian neighborhood. When I was thirteen, during those real vulnerable, impressionable years, and a boy starts becoming a man, to make that transition, and you start making decisions, and you start developing virtue and principles - I never made the transition.
A lot of blues music seems like it's moving away from God, or the center, and Gospel music is moving towards it. It's embracing a higher reality. When you look a little closer, the way that I define it or explain it, is that the blues is the naked cry of the human heart, apart from God. People are searching for union with God. They're searching to be home. There's something in people that seeks this union with their creator. Why am I here? Where am I going? What's it all about? Who am I? All this kind of stuff.