Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I don't think about what other people expect or anything. I mean, I sit and worrying so much about what I'M thinking, I'd go NUTS if I sat around worrying about other people.
There is a big age gap between my sisters Janice and Irma and myself so I didn't know them that well when I was younger although they have been very supportive in later life.
I think we live in a time where we can all distract ourselves from facing the pain or the reality of all of our lives - tons of ways to hide, to kill pain, to deal with pain.
In the Fifties, there were certain places we couldn't ride on the bus, and now there is a possibility of a black man being in the White House. You have to feel good about it.
I do the protest stuff. I do country and western. I play both acoustic and electric guitar in a lot of different styles, from loud, psychedelic stuff to quiet finger-picking.
Lyrically, I think I'm frustrated with this whole process of trying to figure out what I believe about the world and life. I don't like to adopt a sort of guiding philosophy.
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.
AC/DC is a prime example of taking that blues rock thing and just living in that world. They only really move the furniture around a little on each album, but it still works.
Maybe what I do isn't going to be acknowledged by people, but that's me. It's my nature to do things that are weirder and less understood and that was a path I needed to take
And for me the only way to live life is to grab the bull by the horns and call up recording studios and set dates to go in recording studios. To try and accomplish something.
You're about to walk on stage and play together for the next few hours so you want to feel connected and make sure that everyone is in the same head space; a good head space.
I do have a library of events I can talk about and I always expect to find a different point of view on it so even if I talk about the same event in the same town it's fresh.
I was into jazz even when I was a kid. My parents would play Ella Fitzgerald, George Shearing, and Dixieland music. I loved The Monkees, The Beatles, The Eagles, and America.
There's not a moment on it that will sound too familiar, as soon as it sounds comfortably familiar then we like to do something with it to take away that comfortable feeling.
The first time I heard Johnny play at the Fillmore East, I wasn't really impressed. He had come on the scene with everybody telling me how great he was, and I didn't hear it.
Some aspects of the fame are annoying, but at the end of the day it's something we're most grateful for. It's certainly opened the door to a whole new batch of opportunities.
A great solo does not make a great piece. Rather, a great solo in a great song - that's what makes a 10 out of 10. It's the combination of emotional feel and inventive ideas.
The way people come into your life when you need them, it's wonderful and it happens in so many ways. It's like having an angel. Somebody comes along and helps you get right.
Typically we don't think of cities as being particularly extreme environments, but few places on earth get as hot as a rooftop or as dry as the corner of a heated living room.
I belong to the scarce minority of artists who work in good faith, around whom the phenomenal world vanishes, as it happens to the mystics when they give themselves to prayer.
If you know what you do well and stick to that, I think you can appeal to the different generations. You can strike a chord with them. I've got the brain of a teenager anyway.
Music doesn't hurt anybody, that's what's amazing. Everything is in there, every kind of human emotion, from the darkest to the lightest. And it has power. Unbelievable power.
I never do anything to strictly satisfy a fickle, ever-changing commercial world. I do the music I like to play. It's the only way I feel comfortable existing in the industry.
I produced her first album, and I was breaking up with her at the time. That was not comfortable. Falling in love with Joni Mitchell is a bit like falling into a cement mixer!
I do like talking with friends about big concepts, you know, the stuff that will ruin a party. To me, the party hasn't begun until we're talking about the nonexistence of God.
Well I was on the one hand, the more I played the guitar the more I began to really love the guitar and to love virtually any kind of music that anybody played well on guitar.
I'm not interested in forcing my music on people, and that's what the whole music industry nowadays is based on is forcing stations to play it, forcing people to listen to it.
With the NDAA, his failure to close Guantanamo Bay and the ramping use of drones, President Obama looks suspiciously like President Bush, a man on a quest for American Empire.
I have to say, I do love the Ovation guitars. If I had one guitar to play, it would be that one, and it's got nothing to do with having my name on it. I absolutely rely on it.
I went into college undeclared. I had no idea what I wanted to do, but I knew that music was obviously this central big important thing in my life that I was gonna keep doing.
No two notes are ever the same volume. With the guitar, you really have to model in your mind this wider thing; you're trying to create the illusion of a bigger dynamic range.
When a record company makes a mistake, the artist pays for it. When a manager makes a mistake, the artist pays for it. When the artist makes a mistake, the artist pays for it.
For guitar players especially, blues is the foundation of rock and roll. You take country music and rock and roll and jazz and you mix it together, and that's my basic makeup.
If aliens came down and challenged us to a Battle of the Bands to decide the fate of Planet Earth, I would feel very confident putting early Van Halen forward as our champion.
'Underrated.' That is the word that best describes Prince, the Guitarist. Why? Because his phenomenal guitar-playing was just one arrow in a quiver full of remarkable talents.
I've learned that in the theater the story is everything. Every lyric, every line and every musical gesture has to propel the journey of a given character or the overall plot.
The basic idea is always constructed around piano or guitar and a voice, that's what we live and die by, because if you build up from that foundation, it's going to be strong.
Using double coil pickups kills a lot of the guitar tone - you lose the acoustic mechanics. With my single-coils driven through the Marshalls and overdrive, it sounds massive.
They have decided to tour under the name of Ten Years After which I don't think is very cool. To be honest, they have had to do that as it's the only way they can get any work.
The thing about photography is, some people surround themselves with extremely strong subject matter. And unless you're a moron, you're going to get a really strong photograph.
I need a little criticism while I make a record so that I kind of feel like: okay, I know that I'm doing the best that I can do because someone is actually here challenging it.
With the Stray Cats at least, we really took the music somewhere else. First, we wrote our own songs. That's a real weak point in modern classics if you do rockabilly or blues.
Listen to the lyrics - we're singing about everyday life: rich people trying to keep money, poor people tying to get it, and everyone having trouble with their husband or wife!
And I've also come to the conclusion that, as far as guitar solos and things like that are concerned, it's more important to complement the music rather than take away from it.
I liked a lot of the things other people liked - Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, Van Halen, AC/DC - but if I compared it to my dad's music, there just seemed to be elements missing.
My mother is probably the wisest person I've ever known. She's not schooled, she's not well read. But she has a philosophy of life that makes well-read people seem like morons.
There's no real reason for me to be so obsessed with trying to understand the true nature of things. You can live a perfectly happy life being utterly confused and not knowing.
I've been studying the cultures of Asia for many years, and I'm very attracted to the culture of Japan, in particular to the impact Zen has had on the Japanese mind and spirit.
I was just glad to meet somebody outside of my group of small town friends who was into music. Somebody else who had aspirations to do something more than sing at a record hop.
I realized if I'm not really making an album, I don't have to be concerned about things like stylistic consistency, pacing, a coherent mood. All that stuff goes out the window.