I like the wildness of Buddy Guy.

I loved Motown. I loved the musicality and the sound.

I do a very poor man's pedal steel on the Stratocaster.

Nowadays music is as disposable as a McDonald's wrapper.

Cliff Gallup is one of my heroes; I'd dearly love to meet him.

I've become very conscious of how easy it is for people to lie.

If you don't have an album or you don't have any tune, you can't start.

As long as there's something original going on, that's all that matters.

I'm happy in English studios. I just feel like there's no pressure anywhere.

The only way you can get Scotty Moore's tone is with a big hollowbody guitar.

I cherish my privacy, and woe betide anyone who tries to interfere with that.

Things turn out better by accident sometimes. But you can't organize accidents.

Nothing is more annoying than a great singer getting drowned out by a loud guitar.

A lunatic lifestyle on the road doesn't permit you to get too hip to stuff as you should.

If you can make it sound exciting with a joke drum machine, you know you've got something.

If you were to plot my success or failure, it goes, it very seldom stays on a high plateau.

It wasn't the muso thing that got me recognition in the beginning. It was doing 'Wild Thing.'

I'm not committed to putting myself up for a blues guitarist, even though I love playing the blues.

I play purely from the heart, y'know, and so if it doesn't work the first couple of hours, forget it.

I'm a very emotional person. If I've got something on my mind, that would stop me from giving my best.

I would have loved to have been two people, but I was determined not to devote my entire life to my career.

I don't care about the rules, if I don't break the rules at least 10x every song then I'm not doing my job.

After I saw Jimmy [Hendrix] play, I just went home and wondered what the f*** I was going to do with my life.

My first wife said, 'It's either that guitar or me,' you know -- and I give you three guesses which one went.

You stop anybody on any street, around the world, and they know who Eric Clapton is. They don't know who I am!

When Jazz broke through in England, I remember sneaking to listen on the radio much to my parent's disapproval.

I have to have people around who are of a certain strain of humour. I can't deal with people who have no humour.

I play the way I do cause it allows me to come up w/ the sickest sounds possible. That's the point now isn't it?

I like an element of chaos in music. That feeling is the best thing ever, as long as you don't have too much of it.

I've never stuck around long enough to know if anyone would miss me. That's rock 'n' roll, though. Here today, gone tomorrow.

I was going to write an autobiography once. I started writing it, and then I thought, 'No, let them dig around when I'm dead.'

I wanted to be in Rolling Stone number two with a tomorrow feel to it, like an experimental Rolling Stones with Jagger singing.

Some are skeptical. My mom thought the guitar was going to fizzle out in two weeks, that it was just a fad-and that was in 1958.

That old funny-shaped bit of wood is still staring me in the face every day saying 'come on, you haven't started yet!' It's infinite.

I don't care about the rules. In fact, if I don't break the rules at least 10 times in every song then I'm not doing my job properly.

The Strat covers the complete spectrum of human emotion .. the tremolo enables you to do anything - you can hit any note known to mankind

London is a dead duck, as far as innovative new music is concerned, unless you want to have your head blown off with some outrageous, rubbish, pounding dance music.

A lot of solos I hear sound so incredible, but they sound like somebody practicing. They sound a bit soulless - fiery, but at the same time, lacking in spirit and soul.

The fun that I've had needs to be seen on the screen. I like the thought of a bunch of people laughing at what I laughed at - because my life is surreal, completely wacko.

... by far the most astonishing guitar player ever has got to be Django Reinhardt ... Django was quite superhuman, There's nothing normal about him as a person or a player.

At the end of the day, there are a hell of a lot of notes being played out there and I defy the average middle-American or the average punter to differentiate between them.

I was really small when jazz broke through in England and I can still remember sneaking off to the living room to listen to it on the radio - much to my parent's disapproval.

I've tried to become a singer with the guitar and not let any technological licks run my life. Just write the licks and play them as best as I can as a part rather than ad libbing.

I thought there couldn't be a better backdrop for some kind of powerful music than a big orchestra. My wish to hear how a guitar would sound in front of an orchestra has always been there.

There was mass hysteria in the Chess Recording Studio when I did the "Shapes of Things" solo ... they weren't expecting it, and it was just some weird mist coming from the East out of an amp.

I couldn't not play a Les Paul guitar. Les always used to point to my Strat and say, 'Why do you have that piece of crap around your neck?' I'd say, 'Yours are too heavy. I had to drill holes in it.'

I never really felt at home with that - the headbands, the roses, the feet, the peace sign, all that bollocks. That wasn't me at all; I felt like a fish totally out of water during the mid-'60s thing.

When they said there was gonna be about 100,000 people at Woodstock, and it went up to 200,000, I just blanked off and thought, 'I don't want to do this.' If they're filming it, it's too nerve-racking.

I try to become a singer. The guitar has always been abused with distortion units and funny sorts of effects, but when you don't do that and just let the genuine sound come through, there's a whole magic there.

I was interested in the electric guitar even before I knew the difference between electric and acoustic. The electric guitar seemed to be a totally fascinating plank of wood with knobs and switches on it. I just had to have one.

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