Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I think the frustration you can get into as a young artist is when you realize your limitations, but you want to accomplish that rather than seeing that you don't have to do everything. Just focus on your strengths.
A lot of times Mick will play me different things, or I'll listen to a cassette, and out of twenty ideas or whatever, I'll find two or three that are just blowing me away, and we'll start working on them right away.
Ted Templeman, the producer, and Donn Landee, the engineer, are the same team that signed Van Halen, when they were called Mammoth. Donn convinced them to change it to the last name of the guitar player and drummer.
Improvisation means coming to the situation without rigid expectations or preconceptions. The key to improvisation is motion — you keep going forward, fearful or not, living from moment to moment. That’s how life is.
I remember hearing the song when I was 12 or 14 in - it must have been in Chicago, 'cause we didn't have a radio on the farm, and it was during the second World War. I had three brothers in that war who went overseas.
I'd been studying philosophy at the University of Chicago. I hadn't been doing well, because I was sitting in with jazz musicians at night - it's hard to read Heidegger, but it's especially hard if you're half asleep.
When we finish this tour we are going to begin writing and go into the studio to hopefully have a brand new Foreigner album out in early spring next year. This will be the first Foreigner album out in about ten years.
They say military have the so-called 'secret intelligence' - this amount of intelligence must be very secret, since I've never seen any intelligent military person, nor I have seen any sense in the bloody stupid wars.
After it was sewn back on, they did a proper job of it, and now it's OK. It looks a little distorted, and the nail has not grown fully back yet, but I'm thankful I still have my thumb, and I can still do my horn sign.
I love Ruth Brown, not just her singing, but Ruth Brown has more girl power than anyone, because she fought hard against people who ripped her off and then helped other artists through the Rhythm and Blues Foundation.
Live we're a lot louder and noisier on the album. I think for the album we took a lot of time for the songwriting and we wanted to make good pop music, and I think there's plus and minuses to doing pop music and noise.
I did everything I could to not bring in any of the - any of the technical things I got from classical into jazz. And I did everything to really base it on my speaking voice and to just not try to make it sound pretty.
The best time is during the struggle. The top of the mountain is usually small, freezing and lonesome. To this day I'm continually reinvesting myself in something new. I'm not afraid to start as a beginner in anything.
Live music is proof that there's some things the Internet can't kill. In our lifetime, we're going to see more and more things start to disappear and get gobbled up by the Internet, but live music won't be one of them.
Music has the potential and the capability to create something much bigger... it has the capability to be completely free, to do anything. And I think you limit that idea when you put yourself in front of it, in a way.
If I had been born in Germany with family of Nazis and if I had been raised with those beliefs, there was very little chance that I wouldn't be exactly like all those guards and all those people who tortured everybody.
I used to smoke cigarettes, smoke dope, do smack, every f - - thing. First, I couldn't function without it. Then I couldn't do anything with or without it. Then I thought, "This is the end of the line for my fun days."
I became a vegetarian out of compassion for animals and to live as healthy as possible. I realized soon after that I was truly concerned with nonviolent consumption and my own health, a vegan diet was the best decision.
Chicago has a burly, action-oriented but still self-assured and relaxed confidence to its stride. The city has a lot of wide-open space and all the possibilities that suggests. There's a lot of horizontal grandeur here.
A lot of stuff is dark in a way, but unless you're really looking at a situation for what it actually is, it's hard to be hopeful - or meaningless to be hopeful about it unless it's actually based in a real possibility.
I've always wanted to do a solo record, and in 1999, I went over to Japan and did a project called NiNa, where I co-wrote with Yuki from Judy and Mary. It just sort of unleashed this realization in me that I could write.
We needed time off from each other after our last tour because there was a lot of personal stuff we had to take care of. Eddie needed hip replacement surgery. Al needed his back worked on. And I was going to have a baby.
I remember in school - in elementary school - I used to recite poems. We'd have to recite poems. And I would always just, like, roll on the floor, like, just make it such a huge, melodramatic portrayal of whatever it was.
I think when black performers performed in blackface, they were kind of taking back slave songs, but it was still a little bit iffy because they were performing, a lot of times, for white audiences who found it hilarious.
Being a musician has actually surrounded and immersed me in pop culture and youth culture from a very young age. But even before I was singing in bands and creating any kind of art, I was always fascinated by pop culture.
There are now grandmothers and grandfathers coming to see us because they are of that age, they grew up in the '50s and '60s and they bring their sons and their daughters to hear the songs they heard when they were young.
There's very little you can do these days about having any impact at a launch for a record unless you keep it very secret, because communications are so immediate, and YouTube and everything else kind of spoils the party.
I hate it in America where the protocol seems to be you are expected to tip regardless of the quality of service. I like to tip when it's not being demanded of me, and if the service has been good, I tip quite generously.
I've never met or spoken to David Lee Roth, yet it's rather ironic that even he's saying Eddie's lying about things. I'm saying he's not telling the truth, yet Eddie insists that the two of us are lying! You be the judge.
I guess people have a hard time dealing with humour in music. But sometimes life is depressing, and sometimes life is fun, is about just laughing with your friends, and I wanted to express that as well as the darker stuff.
For me jazz is kind of an extension of hip-hop. Kind of the sad thing is that a lot of jazz people just listen to jazz, and a lot of hip-hop people just listen to hip-hop, and there's not a lot of crossover, unfortunately.
People just want to dig; they want to dance. They don't want to work all through the night, and neither do I. I like getting 'out there,' but communication should be occurring on more levels than heavy-laden philosophical.
We put out press releases to tell people what had happened to me and that I had a large weight gain but a lot of people still didn't know. The ones that didn't know were floored. That was a real humbling experience for me.
When we don't deal honestly with our lives and the losses we face, when we try to anesthetize the pain and move on, then the suppressed anger or fear or guilt will deal with us until we are ready to deal with those issues.
The Hall Of Fame thing, it's an American thing. We don't have that in England or Germany or Australia or Russia or anywhere in the world apart from America. And it's an institution. What's that got to do with rock and roll?
Our first two records are a lot quieter and more studio-based. We kind of had this feeling like we wanted to make a more quote-unquote 'rock' record. Then Patrick joined and really brought a new Herculean power to the band.
I had really long hair, and we had this hairdresser, Laverne, that was in Athens. And she did my hair up really big. And she said, 'Honey, when you hang your head over the bed and make love, that hair is not going to move.'
I feel like the world gets so consumed and gobbled up by action, and the pace of life is so frantic, and people feel like, in order to move somebody, you have to do something shocking or violent or something insane and fast.
Jeanie McCarthy is the love of my life. She's the only woman who really understands me, my music, and my heart. It took me a long time to find my soul mate, but thank God I found her before I moved to the other side of time.
Back in high school, I had this folk protest band, and I used to write all the time. And then, when I got in The B-52s, we began to write collectively, collaboratively - most all of our songs are written by jamming together.
I've had every known chemical - cocaine, booze - and tobacco is the hardest one in the world for me to quit. You watch old flicks? It's suggestion by looking at something: You see a cigarette, and it makes you want to smoke!
Live music is incredible because you get to be with people, and you get to have this tactile, real-world experience, but at the end of the day, if your eyes are closed and you're getting swept away, it's like... I don't know.
I finally came to the decision that I couldn't do it like that anymore. So I surrendered to that. I did (the Sabbath reunion tour) without anything - cigarettes, tobacco, dope, anything. And I had so much more fun without it.
I've been dictating to my son, who's helping me on his computer. I'm spending a lot of time doing research - I've just got up to 1971, when I went crazy and dived through the window. My life is so full of interesting stories.
What really changed my life was watching the movie Juice and the opening scene - just hearing that record rotate. When I heard that I started getting serious about DJing and making beats and recording myself on the four-track.
All our friends - so many friends are gay or lesbian and transgender. We're just in that world. We all went through the devastating time of the AIDS crisis, and I think that galvanized us to be more activists - AIDS activists.
In those days, if you wanted a new car or a holiday, you'd phone up the office and they'd send you some cash. You never had a bank account. I don't know anyone from the music business in the Seventies that it didn't happen to.
People say to me, you have not got stage fright. And if I haven't got stage fright, then I'm going to be comfortable within myself, and then something - I've always been that way and so I'm fighting to get away from that fear.
The bike went up in the air and landed on my back. It broke my neck, smashed my collarbone and splinters of bone severed my main artery. My lung filled up with blood. I severed my nerves and to this day I have no feeling there.
I remember my uncle, who was a jazz pianist, when we did Deep Purple 'In Rock,' he ran from the room screaming, holding his ears: 'I can't hear anything. I can't hear any instruments.' And I was rubbing my hands going, 'Great.'