Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
[Elvis] Presley was definitely a great inspiration to every guy who ever had a hard-on in the whole of the Western world, I should think. He shook everybody well and true, and we just kept on shakin'. But he started it.
I'm just lucky because my kids are grown-up - I love them, very proud of them, and we are in close contact as big-time friends, but they don't need me that much now and I can actually enjoy this wonderful world of music.
I treat everywhere as being a center from which I can enjoy the surroundings. And so Austin is very stimulating. I'm familiar with a lot of very charming people who have brought a lot of color to my life and a lot of love.
I realized what Led Zeppelin was about around the end of our first U.S. tour. We started off not even on the bill in Denver, and by the time we got to New York we were second to Iron Butterfly, and they didn't want to go on!
Each album comes from definitely a different period in the evolution of each of us individually as creators and the role that we take in life. The external stimuli changed... so the songs are full of lots of different meanings.
You can't give up something you really believe in for financial reasons. If you die by the roadside - so be it. But at least you know you've tried. Ten minutes in the music scene was the equal of one hundred years outside of it.
My sort of stability as a character, it's never been one of my strongest attributes. I'm a bit of a clusterf*ck. I get so many great ideas that I kind of mesmerize people with another plan before the previous plan is hatched out.
And there are certain songs that are really timepieces and shouldn't be touched. But some of them are a celebration of good humour and sensibility and I think that's okay. I don't care about the past, I'm a musician with ambition.
Alice Cooper's weirdnesses must really make the kids feel violent. These kids are like my sister, young people of 14 or so who've come to enjoy themselves. So you put things like that in front of them, and I don't think it's right.
My mother was a gypsy, and she had a lot of dark blood in her, and her hair was very, very thick - she couldn't even get a brush through it. So I have been very fortunate. And every time I go to cut it off, hairdressers refuse to do it.
There's no comparison between the most precious parts of one's personal life and success and wealth. If you lost someone near and dear to you, you can't relate it to any amount of fame, fortune and luxury. You just have to go on living.
Yeah, I think the point has well and truly sunk in by now, and I can just carry on. I don't even know what I'm looking for except a bit of hilarity and mild insanity musically, and I can get none of that by just delving into the history.
Life is life. You do a lot of different things and you have great adventures but there's not a lot to talk about unless you're in the middle of an adventure at the time. Circumspection is not one of my better, favorite conditions, really.
The trouble is now, with rock'n'roll and stuff, it gets so big that it loses what once upon a time was a magnificent thing, where it was special and quite elusive and occasionally a little sinister and it had its own world nobody could get in.
It's part of me to get off on those moments where... well, what people would call attention. Obviously, that isn't the be-all and end-all of life, but at the states of creativity that I've reached, well, it helps the lyrics along a little bit.
Since I was a kid, I've had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties, Chicago blues of the Fifties, West Coast music of the mid-Sixties - but I'd never really touched on dark Americana.
It's sort of a feeling of power onstage. It's really the ability to make people smile, or just to turn them one way or another for that duration of time, and for it to have some effect later on. I don't really think it's power... it's the goodness.
I'm like one of those firecrackers that goes off in your pocket occasionally. I'm not really struggling with it as much as the people around me. But at least I'm not doing too much damage to anybody or to myself. It's just the condition I'm aware of.
I like to comprehend more or less everything around me - apart from the creation of my music. It's an obsessive character trait that's getting worse. I don't switch the light on and off 15 times before I leave the room yet, but something's going wrong.
I absolutely adore and idolise women. All women. I think they are all amazing. The female musicians I've met have been far more inspiring than the male ones. Women tend to be much more creative and ambitious. I think I may have been a woman in a past life.
It's funny, you know - time does travel pretty quickly, and I do have good friends, and the further away I go from them in location, it matters that I keep on the same line and the same groove that I had and preserve that groove with people who I see seldom.
Life isn't moving quickly - time moves very quickly. But I don't really have a schedule now that's very challenging. I make the calls and I call the shots, so I feel reasonably centered. Sometimes, I wonder whether or not it's even necessary to do concerts and stuff.
People run away, pull their hair, go off in different directions, nodding their heads and going, "Oh, God." I am slightly disheveled, I think. I'm really pleased that I am, because otherwise I could be in a really, really dull and boring place now, as a musician, at least.
I kind of disguise my limitations by hanging out with very talented people. The excitement of the collision between the microphone-twirling guy from 1966 to now is just a fantastic adventure. There aren't many of us left and I've managed to kind of cover my tracks pretty good.
I met some people who help in an archeological project in the South Pacific, between sailing to the Marquesas, which is an island group not too far from Tahiti, and I think, Wouldn't that be great? I have such a fascination with history and especially history in my own country.
Music means communication to me. I say 'listen you people out there, listen to my music, let's be one.' Music is a friend to me when I am lonely, when I am blue. You can't define music 'cause music is cosmos and it knows no barrier or definition. You have to feel music to dig it.
When you're singing we all phrase each other in the most remarkable ways. I might hit some sort of thing I've never done before - some vocal pattern. Bonzo will pick it up - he'll phrase with me instantly and then Pagey may join in or start some other phrase - it's like a quadrant.
There's so many parts of your life, you know? People say that you don't get any better after the age of about forty or something like that, as a performer. I find all that to be a misconception. I don't feel bad about the way I present stuff. The calendar and the mirror - they're bastards.
How much do people really want to learn? I mean, some people get into a groove and they stay with it indefinitely. And what starts off as a great moment of explosive passion can end up as cabaret 25, 30 years later. It just depends on whether you go and find the right habitat to extend yourself.
I love the feeling of letting fly, of pushing as far as I could go with my voice. The only way you can really graduate how you do it is by doing it regularly to people who don't have to be super impressed. You can do it in the studio all day long but you don't get the flashback that you get onstage.
It's a shame to see these young chicks bungle their lives away in a flurry and rush to compete with what was in the old days the goodtime relationships we had with the GTOs and people like that. When it came to looning, they could give us as much of a looning as we could give them. It's a shame, really.
There's a constant conflict, really, within me. As much as I really enjoy what I do at home... I play on my own little soccer team and I've been taking part in the community and living the life of any ordinary guy, I always find myself wistful and enveloped in a feeling I can't really get out of my system.
I come from a very small island which is packed with people. I mean, jam-packed with people. I've lived a life which has been pretty much full up with ambition, ideas, stimulus, creativity, some negativity, which I try to avoid. Austin is a great sort of stepping-off point, if you like. I'm from a temperate climate.
Each album has a different atmosphere. The third album and Houses of the Holy seem to be the two albums that people didn't get off on quite as strongly as the other ones. But I think they contain the basic ingredients for the further pursuance of what we're doing... the turning point to relieve the tedium of repetition.
The idea of actually taking sharp turns left and right has always intrigued me, but I've never really been bold enough to do that. As musicians go, I've allowed myself to be carried by other people's enthusiasm into places where I've learned a lot. There is no real tumult anymore. What I want to do, I do! I'm pretty fortunate.
I do spend a lot more time away from the U.K., it's important to me that I still feel the beat of the people that have been close to me for a long, long time. It's also important that I have really strong and beautiful relationships which I wish to preserve. That enables me - or challenges me, ultimately - to get a Texas driving license!
The essence of my lyrics is the desire for peace and harmony. That's all anyone has ever wanted. How could it become outdated?...We are trying to communicate a fulfilled ideal...I am a reflection of what I sing. Sometimes I have to get serious because the things I've been through are serious...The way I see it, rock n' roll is folk music.
I hate cliché. And when you're a rock singer in 1966, or whatever it was, psychedelic blues, through to the '70s, which we know all about, and the '80s, which was a scramble to hang on in, and the '90s, which was a great time for experimentation... and I'm really still excited. The huge vast diagonals within the music that I've been involved with.
When I was a kid, the world was such a big place, and I had no idea that I would be afforded these great moments in between doing what I love to do. I'm able to actually choose places to go which have intrigued me for the last god knows how many years, and Tasmania's always been one of those places. I see it all and yet I see so little because it's so fast.
I like to make my voice sound like a piece of tin that's been stuck on the side of a chair, lifted up as far as it would go and then let to spring - "doooiiinng." I like to make it into a piece of metal from time to time and I can do it, both with the movements in my throat and with, uh, my little toys... So I like to take it beyond just a voice, more into the realms of a weapon.
Well, when I was a kid I used to hide behind the curtains at home at Christmas and I used to try and be Elvis. There was a certain ambience between the curtains and the French windows, there was a certain sound there for a ten year old. That was all the ambience I got at ten years old... I think! And I always wanted to be a certain, a bit similar to that. But I didn't want to sell pizza.
If you do what you think is right for the benefit of everybody and everything and you make decisions, to go back and regret them afterwards - it's a futile experience and it's not worth thinking about. Because life just unfolds. Provided you do your best and you think you're on the right track, you can only be right or wrong. But to regret it - I don't think there are any huge errors or misdemeanors.
I'd break out in hives if I had to sing (`Stairway to Heaven') in every show. I wrote those lyrics and found that song to be of some importance and consequence in 1971, but 17 years later, I don't know. It's just not for me. I sang it at the Atlantic Records show because I'm an old softie and it was my way of saying thank you to Atlantic because I've been with them for 20 years. But no more of `Stairway to Heaven' for me.
Austin - it's a stimulating center. In this conversation, the very first two questions were talking about my kind of wanderlust and my adventures. Some people at my time in life travel forever. I don't know whether it's the British or the Australians - whoever it is, you can kind of stagger into some sort of far-off bastion in the middle of nowhere, and you'll find someone from Britain or someone from Australia or maybe an American.
It's amazing, it's pumping, it's furious, it's anxious, it's happy and it's far more real than anything you'll ever experience in a Western city. Morocco is a living, pulsating entity which is rapidly changing all the time but there are parts of Marrakesh that carry on as they have done for a thousands years. The music is a reflection of that, of all times and all religions and of all the natural expectations and conditions of the people who live there.
Well, once you get the groove of your life and you sort out the aspects of your life that you prefer, and you’ve performed all your responsibilities as a father and as a partner. And just discovery and the great adventure of having eyes wide open. There’s so much of this beautiful planet that is still actually spectacular and stimulating. There are so many amazing people that you meet along the way. By using my career as the wind in the sails of my adventures, I could see so many things and so many people that I might have missed had my career gone a different direction.