Quotes on Music

If you wanted to chart new territories and head off over the horizon, you had to make sure you weren't overly influenced by what others were doing ... so it didn't matter what other bands were doing ... we did what we were doing.

You could listen to Woody Guthrie songs and actually learn how to live.

Johnny Cash has only passed into the greater light. He will only become more important in this industry as time goes by.

I was just a punk kid, trying to get a sound out of a guitar that I couldn't get off the rack, so I built one myself ... I wanted a Gibson type of sound but with a Strat vibrato .. I went to town painting it and I put three pickups back in, but they don't work - only the rear one works

When it came time to hire a guitar player ... I didn't even have to think about it ... Mike Bloomfield was the best guitar player I'd ever heard.

...the people at large absolutely gave James Brown respect. He was an original like a Rembrandt or a Picasso

..I wanted to create music that was so different that my mother could tell me from anyone else

If you want to please the critics, don't play too loud, too soft, too fast, too slow.

Monk taught me more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd Street.

Music is a defining element of character.

Rhythm and harmony enter most powerfully into the inner most part of the soul and lay forcible hands upon it, bearing grace with them, so making graceful him who is rightly trained.

The foundations of any subject may be taught to anybody at any age in some form.

When they turned off, it was still early in the pink and green fields. The fumes of morning, sweet and bitter, sprang up where they walked. The insects ticked softly, their strength in reserve; butterflies chopped the air, going to the east, and the birds flew carelessly and sang by fits and starts, not the way they did in the evening in sustained and drowsy songs.

We live on the leash of our senses. There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.

When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something.

It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness.

You need music, I don't know why. It's probably one of those Joe Campbell questions, why we need ritual. We need magic, and bliss, and power, myth, and celebration and religion in our lives, and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it.

When real music comes to me - the music of the spheres, the music that surpasses understanding - that has nothing to do with me, cause I'm just the channel. The only joy for me is for it to be given to me, and to transcribe it like a medium... those moments are what I live for.

If The Beatles or the 60's had a message, it was 'Learn to swim. And once you've learned - swim!

The idea of being a rock and roll musician sort of suited my talents and mentality. The freedom was great, but then I found out I wasn't free. I'd got boxed in...The whole Beatle thing is just beyond comprehension ... subconsciously I was crying for help.

I didn't leave the Beatles. The Beatles have left the Beatles, but no one wants to be the one to say the party's over.