I didn't want to be told what to do. I don't want to water down my music to fit into their formats. I know what rock and roll is to me, but everything's turning into one big commercial.

My influences were mostly gospel. So I was playing my twisted Jewish equivalent of gospel music over his twisted equivalent of rock and roll music. And it was a very excellent marriage.

I know life sometimes can get tough! And I know life sometimes can be a drag! But people, we have been given a gift, We have been given a road, And that road's name is... Rock and Roll!

There's no way I can compete with someone who can write rap or rock and roll. Nor do I wish to. But I've always kept up to date with music changes. I worked very hard not to type myself.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is not a public democratic organization; it's a private club basically. It's like a private golf club and they decide who they're going to let in the club.

Rock and roll to the beat of the funk fuzz Wipe your feet really good on the rhythm rug If you feel the urge to freak, do the jitterbug Come and spread your arms if you really need a hug.

To some extent at that time, we injected rock and roll into that scene- we played loud and that was a huge turning point for that scene. We were involved in playing with all those people.

I wanted to play rock and roll when I started playing. Nobody at that time ever thought about songwriting. You sang songs, that's all. You sang other people's songs. That's all there were.

The whole world loves American movies, blue jeans, jazz and rock and roll. It is probably a better way to get to know our country than by what politicians or airline commercials represent.

Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward life with all the courage you can find and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand.

I think there are certain genres of music where people are allowed to go on, but there is something about rock and roll, I guess because it originally started out to be a teenage rebellion.

I listened to classic rock and roll, and punk rock. 'Goon Squad' provides a pretty accurate playlist of my teenage years, though it leaves out 'The Who,' which was my absolute favorite band.

All I want to do, is write rock and roll that you could listen to as you got older, and it wouldn't lose anything; it would be timeless, in the subject matter and the literacy of the lyrics.

Lately, my mind is like an orchestra. If you don't have the conductor, you don't know what to do. One guy is playing jazz, one guy is playing rock and roll, another classical. It's a big mess.

The story of my life is profoundly unclear. It is a rock-and-roll story and, at the same time, a story of my walk with Christ. The two are melded together in ways both unpredictable and unsure.

I'm not someone who gets to play The O2 and places like that, but that's the kind of rock and roll venue. The popularity of stand-up means that some people are getting to play rock star venues.

People hear a powerful female singer in a rock and roll band, and they say, 'Janis Joplin.' I think people just make that comparison because it's easy. But I don't think I sound like her at all.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame traditionally has had a management style that is very supportive of American talent, first and foremost, over everything else. And I think that's right and proper.

As long as all four of my limbs keep moving and I can still sit up straight and play hard rock and roll for 2 and a half to 3 hours, I'm gonna keep doing it, and I'm gonna do it the way I do it.

Every performer who ever performed in rock and roll or even close to it is lying if they tell you that they weren't influenced in some way or another by Elvis Presley. He turned the world around.

I wanted to remember the original energy; strip away all the glamour and limousines and tons of drugs. I wanted to get back to the revolutionary ideas, merging poetry and rhythm and rock and roll.

Composers don't just sit in a room and write things that are in their heads, they actually listen to a lot of music, pop music, jazz, rock and roll, any combination of music that catches their ear.

Jazz was the beginning of rhythm music, which developed into rock and roll. But what the jazz musicians lost because they were so far from their homeland was the intricate rhythms of African music.

The new album is a childhood dream come true. Got to sing with Ronnie Spector, got to cover a bunch of songs that were influential in drawing a line between the punk form and original rock and roll.

The new album is a childhood dream come true. Got to sing with Ronnie Spector, got to cover a bunch of songs that were influential in drawing a line between the punk form and original rock and roll.

I wanted to have the adoration of John Lennon but have the anonymity of Ringo Starr. I didn't want to be a frontman; I just wanted to be back there and still be a rock and roll star at the same time.

I wanted to have the adoration of John Lennon but have the anonymity of Ringo Starr. I didn't want to be a frontman. I just wanted to be back there and still be a rock and roll star at the same time.

Music, Rock and Roll music especially, is such a generational thing. Each generation must have their own music, I had my own in my generation, you have yours, everyone I know has their own generation.

The original concept of rock and roll... was supposed to be this young angst with mistakes and all. Four or five guys get together, get angry and that's really how it starts, and it's all this energy.

We would not have rock and roll without Chuck Berry, and when I first heard Chuck Berry, I fell in love with that music, and when I saw him, I changed my whole career trajectory that I was on as a kid.

What I would really like to have been, given a perfect world, is a jazz pianist. I mean jazz. I don't mean rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-twice music the American black people gave the world.

That was our first major tour and we got a chance to play in front of like 5000 people every day so it was like a Rock and Roll boot camp for us really, we learned a lot and made a lot of good friends.

Look; being in this band, of course it would be great, yeah. But, I mean, I don't live and breathe every minute of every day thinking like, 'Oh, my God. We have to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.'

I have to give my family credit for putting up with the racket, because as some of you may know, its not the easiest thing in the world to live with a kid who's trying to become a rock and roll drummer.

The biggest problem in rock journalism is that often the writers main motivation is to become friends with the band. Theyre not really journalists; theyre people who want to be involved in rock and roll.

Deep Purple definitely belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. 'Cause they had great songs, great musicianship, they had an impact, and they're a huge influence on the heavy metal community as a whole.

I remember a song I did called 'If the Good Die Young' - I wanted to have a lead guitar solo on there, and the label flipped out! It was too rock and roll. They made us go back and put fiddle on the solo.

Rock and roll is not an instrument. Rock and roll isn't even a style of music. Rock and roll is a spirit that's been going since the blues, jazz, bebop, soul, R&B, heavy metal, punk rock and, yes, hip-hop.

I think, describing Elvis for me would be a very generous king. He was the king of rock and roll, will always be. He's whats made it possible for everyone to be performers and to do the things they do now.

I think the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, first of all, has got to be put into the context of being an American cultural showcase. It's there to be a museum showcase of all that's great about American music.

The biggest problem in rock journalism is that often the writer's main motivation is to become friends with the band. They're not really journalists; they're people who want to be involved in rock and roll.

I would say country is the one type of music I've spent the least amount of time with in my life. I grew up in Virginia, where there was a lot of it, but I was more interested in rock and roll. Southern rock.

I have undeniable evidence that many have awakened as a result of my raising hell. Raising hell is SO American rock-and-roll. And of course even soulless wimps love killer music and my incredible guitar tone.

Detroit has always been a rock and roll audience for me and picked up on me and my performances long before a lot of other places in the country. I will never forget that. It's a home away from home. I love it.

I'm a big fan of gospel music, and you cannot be a fan of rock and roll, you cannot be a fan of country western music, and you can't really be a fan of jazz without listening to a lot of music that's religious.

The whole idea of rock and roll lifestyle is a cartoon. It's a caricature. And at times, it's made up of people emulating others; a few who actually live that lifestyle and many who claim to live that lifestyle.

Rock and roll kind of screwed up my voice poetically. I found myself having this 'Beat' voice in my poems. It was like this self-fulfilled prophecy because everybody was calling me this rock poet, this Beat poet.

You really have to try and find a way to communicate [in the Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp], to respect each other's opinions and ideas, to be able to fight for something you feel is better than somebody else's idea.

African American music can't happen in Germany or in Italy or in Mumbai. If America disappeared off the face of the Earth today, the greatest single cultural loss would be blues, jazz, hip-hop, R&B, rock-and-roll.

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first - rock and roll or Christianity.

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