Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If you're familiar enough with my body of work, my voice is a familiar totem, in a sense. I guess I have something characteristic in the way that I sing, although I'm not very personally self-conscious about it, so I don't think about it that much. But when I hear the record I can tell it's me.
I got it into my head that I had somewhat neglected the guitar, and then I did a record called 'Arena,' and it was not a particularly bad record - it wasn't a bad record at all, but it was built around a certain concept, which is a guitar quartet, with a little bit of augmentation here and there.
I figure it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy; if I make a successful arena rock record, I'll wind up playing arenas! I wouldn't mind being back in that kind of venue because of the kinds of things you can do with production. You can make your shows more interesting, which would be fun to do.
My guitar heroes are Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck and people like that - so I've tried to make an album of Robert Johnson covers that, well, while not totally faithful for blues purists, is faithful for people like me that grew up with the '60s and the electric blues-rock versions of Johnson's songs.
I don't use any real vintage hardware any longer. That's always been the object as far as gaining control of the studio environment, going back to when I built my first studio, Secret Sound, in New York City. The whole point was to not have to pay studio bills anymore and not be looking at the clock.
When the Beatles first came out, you had to go to a certain amount of trouble to have long hair. You just couldn't have it immediately. Anything you can just go out and get - like platform shoes - is not going to inspire people as much as something they have to go through a little bit of hell to have.
When I got out of high school, I was in a blues band. It was the kind of music I was interested in, and listening to, mostly because it was becoming a vehicle for a generation of guitarists - like Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton. Mike Bloomfield. And that's what I wanted to be, principally: a guitar player.
I've been essentially not only deconstructing and reconstructing the material to make it suitable for the performance, but I've gone back and found some older material that's appropriate for the show and I've re-recorded that as well in kind of a newer format. So I've been pretty much focused on my own thing.
I was lucky enough to grow up in an era when radio was less formatted. It was really special. You could hear a jazz song then a pop song then a show tune then some jazz. Basically, whatever the DJ felt like playing, he would play. He was educating you and exposing you to things you would never hear otherwise.
All it takes to become president is money and a certain kind of power. Being president is the first thing I can shoot for, not the highest. It may come to a point where people take rock and roll musicians more seriously than they take politicians. It may eventually turn out that musicians have more credibility.
I've become kind of a haven for people who like pop music, but that's not the only thing they like. They also like music in general and want to be able to expand their own horizons. They haven't completely given up on music and are willing to have somebody mediate new things that are happening in music to them.
I think there are always people who, when they get the bug to play an instrument, they want to get as good as they can with it rather than just be simply adequate at it. You run into them every once in a while - some kid who wants to be the next Stevie Ray Vaughan, for whatever reason, and plays exactly like him.
'State' can be a word that is a noun or a verb or an adverb - it's kind of why I chose that title. It's not to confound the audience but to keep me from painting myself into a cul-de-sac in the early stages of making a record by having too high concept or having some really strict set of rules I have to adhere to.
I first started doing some somewhat technology-based shows in the '80s. If you wanted to get real technical about it, back in the '70s I used to open up with Utopia with just me on the stage with a four-track tape recorder. So, technically, I've been using the help of various devices pretty much throughout my career.
There are people who are known for some contribution to pop culture, but that doesn't mean that you've survived solely on your relevance to whatever is currently popular. That's what a pop star is, in that sense. You might start out as a pop star, but that's just an opportunity to become more relevant, if you possibly can.
By the time my first solo record came out, I was making a handsome living as a record producer. I had worked with the Band, Janis Joplin and all of these other artists in the Albert Grossman organization. So as my so-called solo career evolved, I never felt pressure that I had to come back and top when I might've done before.
'Something/Anything?' was kind of a different record, since I'm playing everything myself. A lot of the songs on there have a particular kind of instrumentation that is much like a guitar quartet, and in some ways, it's an exceptional song on that record because so much of the writing on 'Something/Anything?' is piano-oriented.
There's only one band that could ever even pretend to assume the mantle of what the Beatles did, who have been so pre-eminent and world-dominating that they could effect a paradigm shift in the culture, who have been willing to leverage their success into musical change, and that is U2 - regardless of what the result of that is.
It would be really great if someone would invent a new Internet with the specific purpose of not making money off of it, but making it what it originally was, a free marketplace of ideas, and there are still aspects of the Internet that are that. Wikipedia, essentially, is still the bastion of the original ideals of the Internet.
People have always said that I could have been a highly successful pop artist, if only that were my intention. It never was. My original intention was to be a kind of behind-the-scenes participant in music, to just be a record producer and engineer. And I made a record for myself just so I could have an outlet for my musical ideas.
We bought property after Iniki in '92. I figured we'd never find better bargains. As it turned out, we didn't get a bargain, but we did find the spot we wanted to live on. It actually took a couple years to secure that spot. Then, after we moved, it took over 10 years to start construction on the house. It's still a work in progress.
You would have thought that as you got older the voice would tend to deteriorate in some ways, but I always look at somebody like Tony Bennett, who is my senior, and still can hit those high notes and still can belt it out as good as he ever did. So it must be something about the voice that's unlike the rest of the muscles in your body.
I really consider myself fortunate to have been of age during the musical revolution that came in the form of the Beatles. People don't realize that previous to the Beatles, there really was no such thing as an album artist. People made singles. Then they would put a bunch of those singles together and call it an album. And that was it.
I've had production offers with artists I really admire, and oftentimes that doesn't work out. Sometimes it does, but... For instance I was asked if I wanted to do a Talking Heads album back in the late '70s, early '80s, and I was already working on a different project and didn't have time, so I never got the opportunity to work with them.
My very first records, I was very interested in how you get the particular quality you want out of it, and I began to learn about the engineering and aspects of production and things very early on. I got hands-on with the process and taught myself how to engineer, as opposed to just being a producer who asked the engineer to make it sound nice.
Wishing won't make it so Hoping won't do it, praying won't do it Religion won't do it, philosophy won't do it The Supreme Court won't do it, the President and the Congress won't do it The UN won't do it, the H-bomb won't do it, the sun and the moon won't do it And God won't do it, and I certainly won't do it That leaves you, you'll have to do it
Sometimes you're a psychiatrist and sometimes you're a group therapist. The dynamics in between people and the misgivings sometimes that artists have when they get into the studio because they're under a different level of scrutiny. A lot of them can be insecure about it. My job is not simply to make musical determinations but sometimes to just keep people from flipping out during the process.
It's never the same relationship. I see my job as filling in the blanks. Whatever it is that the artist lacks in the process of making a record, I'm supposed to fill that in. And sometimes it's a lot of stuff and I have to hector them about working on the material and that sort of thing. Sometimes you have an artist that's really fairly self-sufficient; they just need another ear to offer some objective criticism, but otherwise pretty much know what they're doing. It varies a lot.
Artists should re-emphasize performance and de-emphasize recording. You always make more money if you have a healthy performing life than you will if you have even a moderately healthy recording life. Don't make recording the most important thing you do. Make performing the most important thing you do, and then you can make recordings and sell them at your shows, because record labels aren't going to be around to help you get on the radio stations, and the radio stations probably aren't going to play you anyway.
I believe the word "infidel" is not particular to any religion. I believe we are all created in the image of God, in fact, we are all God, or at one with God, at our deepest core essence. I think "infidel" refers to one who does not believe that God is none other than the Self. The "infidel" is the individual personality who identifies with the body and thoughts and not the Divine Indweller. Therefore we are all "infidels" save the sacred few who have transcended the notion of the limited self. The ancient mystics of all tradtitions have said this.