Food For Thought
"I've always felt that blues, rock 'n' roll and country are just about a beat apart."-Waylon Jennings (1937-2002)
"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." -Decca Recording Company rejecting the Beatles, 1962
"It's much too late to do anything about rock & roll now ..." - Jerry Garcia / Grateful Dead
"It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception." (When asked about his theory of relativity) - Albert Einstein
"Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art." - Charlie "YardBird" Parker
"There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another." -Frank Zappa
"... Just as Jesus created wine from water, we humans are capable on transmuting emotion into music..." Carlos Santana
"I don't know anything about music, In my line you don't have to." -Elvis Presley (1935-1977)
" DIZZ FOR PRES " - a bumber sticker seen in 1956 during the U.S. Presidential Election when Dizzy Gillespie decided to run for president
"... when I saw Jimi Hendrix I knew immediately that this guy was the real thing ... and when he played it was like a rough sketch of what he was going to become ... this guy was our generation, and he wasn't in a suit .. he played a Howlin' Wolf song 'Killing Floor', and then we (The Cream) had to carry on the set. It was pretty hard to follow ... " - Eric Clapton / Yardbirds / Cream / Blind Faith / Derek and the Dominoes
"Most of us go to our graves with our music still inside of us." -unknown
"Whenever society gets too stifling and the rules get too complex, there's some sort of musical explosion" - Slash / Guns 'n Roses
"Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung." -Voltaire (1694-1778)
"...regardless of what you play, the biggest thing is keeping the feel going ..." - Wes Montgomery
"Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosphy. Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents." - Ludwig van Beethoven
"Little Wing is like one of these beautiful girls that come around sometimes ... you play your gig; it's the same thing as the olden days, and these beautiful girls come around.. you do actually fall in love with them because that's the only love you can have. It's not always the physical thing of "Oh, there's one over there ...", it's not one of those scenes. They actually tell you something. They release different things inside themselves ... "Little Wing" was a very sweet girl that came around that gave me her whole life and more if I wanted it ... " - Jimi Hendrix
"... guitarists shouldn't get too riled up about all of the great players that were left off of 'Rolling Stone Magazines' list of the Greatest Guitar Players of all Time' ... Rolling Stone is published for people who read the magazine because they don't know what to wear ..." - Joe (Sach) Satriani
"Bach gave us God's Word. Mozart gave us God's laughter. Beethoven gave us God's fire. God gave us Music that we might pray without words." - quote from outside an old opera house
"Use the talents you possess, for the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except the best." - Henry Van Dyke
"When you strum a guitar you have everything - rhythm, bass, lead and melody" - David Gilmore / Pink Floyd
"... Andres Segovia literally created the genre of classical guitar, which hadn't existed before around 1910. There was flamenco, which he borrowed from, but he actually arranged the works of Mozart and other classical composers for guitar, something that had never been done before ... Segovias' style is not slick or contrived, but it's still very clean and his timing is impeccable ... it's got a feeling of casual elegance, as if he's sitting around the house in Spain with a jug of wine, just playing from the heart." - Roger McGuinn / Byrds
"...You can't over-hype Sam Phillips ... think of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Howlin' Wolf, B.B. King: if you were associated with just one of those names, you'd be immortal" - Andy McLenon
"Go and Say Goodbye" by the Buffalo Springfield stands as one of the first examples of what would later be branded country rock" - Chris Hillman / Byrds / Manassas
"The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, "Is there a meaning to music?" My answer would be, "Yes." And "Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?" My answer to that would be, "No."" -Aaron Copland
|"... I don't want you to play me a riff that's going to impress Joe Satriani; give me a riff that makes a kid want to go out and buy a guitar and learn to play ..." - Ozzy Osbourne
"Music is an outburst of the soul." -Frederick Deluis
"... everyone was using tiny brushes and doing watercolors, while Jimi Hendrix was painting galactic scenes in Cinemascope. We are working in a field of mystical resonance, sound and vibration... that's what makes people cry, laugh and feel their hair stand up ... " - Carlos Santana
"... Clear Channel owns all the major radio stations and venues. Most musicians aren't aware that a few people control so much of what we hear..." Susan Tedeschi
"There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself." -Johann Sebastian Bach
"I've always wanted the sound of Muddy Waters' early records - only louder " - Eric Clapton / Yardbirds / Cream / Blind Faith / Derek and the Dominoes
"I have my own particular sorrows, loves, delights; and you have yours. But sorrow, gladness, yearning, hope, love, belong to all of us, in all times and in all places. Music is the only means whereby we feel these emotions in their universality." -H. A. Overstreet
"When Lonnie Mack came out with the guitar instrumental "Memphis" I thought, Oh God, finally somebody we guitar players can relate to !" - Dicky Betts / Allman Bros. Band
"Without music, life would be a mistake." -Friedrich Nietzsche
"... We're all about trying to play better every night, not just singing hit songs ... we ad lib, and every night there's jamming .. it's almost like the Grateful Dead meets Buck Owens some nights, because we'll go off on little adventures and sometimes we do crash the bus! ..." - Brad Paisley
"Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays." -Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
"... Jeff Beck is my idol .. sometimes he finds notes that I just do not have on my guitar. Frank Zappa's another one .. I loved Frank Zappa ... I do think Van Halen reinvented the guitar ... he's an excellent musician, a shrewd guitarist and as a person he's wonderful..." - Ritchie Blackmore / Deep Purple
"Your talking to someone who really understands rock music." -Tipper Gore
"I think I got the idea of tapping watching Jimmy Page do his "Heartbreaker" solo back in 1971. He was doing a pull-off to an open string, and I thought wait a minute, open string ... pull off. I can do that, but what if I use my finger as the nut and move it around ?" ... I just kind of took it and ran with it - Eddie Van Halen
"Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics." -Pietro Mascagni
Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule." -Samuel Butler
"...I liken feedback to the effect of when you go surfing; you can get pummeled by a wave, but if you balance the forces right, you can have a dandy ride ... that's pretty much what feedback is..." - Jorma Kaukonen / Jefferson Airplane / Hot Tuna
"I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it and you need them to hear it." -James Taylor
"...the blues appealed to me, but so did rock. The early rockabilly guitarists like Cliff Gallup and Scotty Moore were just as important to me as the blues guitarists..." - Jimmy Page / Yardbirds / Led Zepplin
"... As far as being a 'player's player', you've only got to go to Nashville or Argentina, and you can forget about it. The world is full of amazing guitar players, and you know it, and I know it ... it's a humbling experience..." - Mark Knopfler / Dire Straits
"There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it." -Ron Wood / Rolling Stones / Faces
"Country music is three chords and the truth." -Harlan Howard
"... I just didn't know what direction people want, you know music was going down a path, and I couldn't turn on a radio without being disgusted completely. And now it's just gotten to the point where I can't listen to anything, it's trashy. It's just a hundred channels of garbage all over. And not just here, it's in England as well. It's almost just like a global effort to knock the sense out of you if you're a musician (laughs). There's not any little morsel for musicians to latch on to. It's all glossy, lipstick s--t. More tits and bare midriffs. Unless you go to a blues club, or some outrageous, hip dive somewhere that nobody knows about until the night before, the pickings are slim for inspiration... I still listen to Django Reinhardt, his catalog. I'm just catching up with that after several years of not really listening to him proper. You know he's the greatest... it's the fear thing. ... but now I'm getting used to it... He (Django Reinhardt) was God. Just amazing" - Jeff Beck / Yardbirds / Jeff Beck Group
"... hearing Andres Segovia in person was quite a revelation ... It was a knockout..." - Julian Bream
"... Charlie Christians' contributions to the electric guitar are as big as Thomas Edisons' contributions to the world..." - Barney Kessel
"Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. -Victor Hugo
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music." -Aldous Huxley
"...Everyone has their own sound, and if you're heard enough, folks will come to recognize it. Style however, is a different thing. Try to express your own ideas. It's much more difficult to do, but the rewards are there if you're good enough to pull it off ..." - Chet Atkins
"The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it." -Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
"... When I heard "Pride and Joy" by Stevie Ray Vaughn on the radio, I just said "Hallelujah" .. he was just so good and strong and he would not be denied... he single handedly brought guitar and blues oriented music back to the marketplace" - Dickey Betts / Allman Bros. Band
"Secretly, I wanted to look like Jimi Hendrix, but I could never quite pull it off." -Bryan Ferry / Queen
"Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously." -Henry Mille
"...protect your hands! Some fans demonstrate their enthusiam with bone-crushing hand shakes. My former teacher Julian Bream often bows Japanese style with his hands behind his back. Smart man !..." - Liona Boyd
"...some musicians, man, you hear the note almost before they hit it. Jimi, Coltrane and Charlie Parker were like that... " Carlos Santana
"... Albert Lee and I have become real close friends, and he comes out anytime I'm in the L.A. area, and he'll sit in for the whole show ! ... we've got a habit of doing that ... in Austin Redd Volkaert does the same thing ... it's fun ... I love to make it a guitar thing and the audience doesn't know any different - they think he's some new band member they don't know. They don't realize Albert's the reason we all play Teles ! ..." - Brad Paisley
"It's a marvelous feeling when someone says "I want to do this song of yours" because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after." -Mary Chapin Carpenter
"There was mass hysteria in the Chess Recording Studio when I did the "Shapes of Things" solo ... they weren't expecting it, and it was just some weird mist coming from the East out of an amp." - Jeff Beck / Yardbirds / Jeff Beck Group
Everywhere in the world, music enhances a hall, with one exception: Carnegie Hall enhances the music. -Isaac Stern
"Music is the art of thinking with sounds." -Jules Combarieu
"When I started to play with my fingernails, it was not just for volume. The most important thing was giving the guitar different colors in its voices..." - Andres Segovia
"Music, the greatest good that mortals know, and all of heaven we have below." -Joseph Addison
"It's not how much you play, it's what you play and where you play it" - James Burton
2,400,000 Americans play the accordion - hopefully not at the same time." -unknown
"Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it." -Liam Gallagher
"Sam Phillips always encouraged me to do it my way, to use what ever other influences I wanted, but never to copy ... that was a great rare gift he gave me: believe in myself, right from the start of my recording career... if there hadn't been a Sam Phillips, I might still be working in a cotton field" - Johnny Cash
"...Johnny Cash has only passed into the greater light. He will only become more important in this industry as time goes by ..." - Dolly Parton
"...The world has lost a legend, and I have lost a friend. Johnny Cash was the rare soul who could be both..." - Emmylou Harris
"...I think it was a modest thing I did (Fahrenheit 9/11) ... this is an election year ... I'm not telling them how to vote. I'm saying get information about the issues ... at first there's just silence, then there's 'Yeah!' and then there's 'Boo' ... I have never seen a reaction like this, in all my years of touring ... Clear Channel can't threaten to not play my records because they are not going to play them anyway ..." - Linda Ronstadt
"...the music you make is shaped by what you play it on ... if you feel that you're not getting enough out of a song, change the instrument - go from an acoustic to an electric or vice versa, or try an open tuning ... do something to shake it up..." - Mark Knopfler / Dire Straits
"I remember that first week at the Whisky and the gigs we (The Buffalo Springfield) did with the Byrds, We could really smoke ! That band never got on record as bad, and as hard as we were. Live we sounded like the Rolling Stones..." - Steven Stills / Buffalo Springfield / Crosby, Stills & Nash
"I don't even know if I can take credit for writing "Cliffs of Dover" ... it was just there for me one day ... literally wrote in five minutes ... kind of a gift from a higher place that all of us are eligible for. We just have to listen for it and be available to receive it" - Eric Johnson
"... I don't like to go into the studio with all the songs worked out and planned before hand ... you've got to give the band something to use its imagination on as well. That can make a very ordinary song come alive into something totally different ... the X-factor - so important in rock and roll - which is the feel.." - Keith Richards / Rolling Stones
"... I thought 'Stairway' crystallized the essence of Led Zeppelin. It had everything there, and showed the band at its best ... every musician wants to do something that will hold up for a long time, and I guess we did that with 'Stairway To Heaven' ..." - Jimmy Page / Yardbirds / Led Zepplin
"... I'm not conscious of the speed ... it's not my motive ... my motive is displaying a voice through the fingerboard ... it can get to the point where I don't have control over what I am playing ... I never end the gig until I can't sing anymore" - Alvin Lee / Ten Years After
"... I played 'Eruption' two times for the record, and we kept the one that seemed to flow ... there's a mistake at the top end of it whenever I hear it, I always think, Man I could've played it better ... but I like the way it sounds. I'd never heard a guitar sound like that before..." - Edward Van Halen
"I don't believe in having bands for solo records." -Mick Jagger / Rolling Stones
"Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life." -Berthold Auerbach
"... I got home, picked up my ax, turned on the four-track and just played it ... I played three solos back to back on Cemetery Gates ... the next morning, the second and third solos weren't bad, but the first had that first take magic ! .. I didn't touch it..." - Dimebag Darrell
"Music is love in search of a word." -Sidney Lanier
"Duane Allman inspired the group to explore the extended jam format that was already a staple of the Allman Brothers act. Moreover, his ferocious slide playing motivated Clapton to turn in some of the finest guitar performances of his career" - Bobby Whitlock on "Derek and the Dominoes" making the "Layla and other Assorted Love Songs" album
"Cute little babies that fall out of swings - These are a few of my favourite things. -Oscar Hammerstein, working lyric for a piece from "The Sound of Music"
".. my instrumentals try to create some of the basic feelings of human interaction, like anger and joy and love ... with Jessica, I couldn't quite find it, then my little daughter, Jessica, crawled into the room, and I just started playing to her, that's why I named it after her ... I came up with that melody using just two fingers as a sort of tribute to Django ... in general writing a good instrumental is very fulfilling because you've transcended language and spoken to someone with a melody" - Dickey Betts / Allman Bros. Band
"Neil Young played Helpless, and by the time he finished, we (Crosby, Stills & Nash) were asking him if we could join his band" - David Crosby / Byrds / Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
"At a beach house in Malibu that the Buffalo Springfield had rented, I set up my big amps, we (Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Miles, Bruce Palmer and Steven Stills) ... just went. We played quite literally for twenty straight hours. We must have made up fifty songs, but there was no tape running, no nothing, we just played for the ocean .... and that night I really started to learn how to play lead guitar" - Steven Stills / Buffalo Springfield / Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
"Wealth and fame can only be so important in the face of musical magic" - Graham Nash / Hollies / Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end." -Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
I feel a great responsibility to deliver for our audience ... I am like their servant, but there's only one honest way to lift people up, which is to feel genuinely elevated yourself. And the way to do that is follow your heart. That's all we try to do." - Trey Anastasio / Phish
"... although one can get very clever at home, progress comes a lot quicker if you step into a room with other people and start playing .. " - Steve Howe / Yes
"Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk." -Oscar Wilde
"... the Yardbirds actually asked me to join their band twice. They asked me before Eric Clapton had even left the band, because their manager wanted to get more commercial and Eric wanted to get more purist; their manager wanted to force him out. Then they asked me again when Eric finally left. But I was still too nervous about getting ill while on the road, and I wasn't quite sure about the politics with Eric Clapton, because we were friendly. So I recommended Jeff Beck, who I think was amazing as far as pushing the Yardbirds to the next level. His imagination on those Yardbirds albums is incredible..." - Jimmy Page / Yardbirds / Led Zepplin
"Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains." -Paul Whiteman
"All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds! "-Yoko Ono
"Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory." -Oscar Wilde
"Hell is a half-filled auditorium." -Robert Frost (1874-1963)
"... I like the Pretenders' James Honeyman-Scott; the Cars' Elliot Easton, who is one of the best lead players of the last 25 years; Joe Walsh, who's one of the best rock and roll guitar players of all time; and the Sex Pistols' Steve Jones. I'm also a fan of ElvisPresleys guitarist Scotty Moore and Surf-Rock guitarist Dick Dale ... I shouldn't forget David Lindley, who played with Jackson Browne for years. It might suprise some people to hear me say it, but the dude is incredible..." - Slash / Guns 'n Roses
"I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive _expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music." -Billy Joel
"An intellectual is someone who can listen to the "William Tell Overture" without thinking of the Lone Ranger." -John Chesson
"For optimum amp tone onstage, plug your amp into your own AC outlet.." - Eric Johnson
"I've always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music." -Aretha Franklin
"I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500." -James Brown
"Musically, we're more talented than any Bob Dylan or Paul McCartney. Mick Jagger can't produce a sound. I'm the new Elvis." - Time Magazine quotes Milli Vanilli "singer" Rob Pilatus (2-27-1990)
"Music is moonlight in the gloomy night of life." -Jean Paul Richter
"...Surrender your whole being into a note, and gravity disappears ... with one chord, John Lee Hooker could tell you a story as deep as the ocean..." - Carlos Santana
"Without Elvis, none of us could have made it." -Buddy Holly
"Neil Young and Barry Friedman had stolen a Buffalo Springfield sign off the steamroller for Barrys house. They put it up. We all looked at it on the wall and a light went off. That's how we came up with the name" - Steven Stills (note: That steam roller was parked out in front of Sol Betnuns Music Store, which was a converted house on Larchmont Avenue in Hollywood ... Sols' was the music store that supplied most of the great used stuff, the other one was "Mad Man Louies' Pawn Shop" on Main Street in downtown L.A., and you had to find out about them to even know that they were there - Dr,Duck)
"A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time. -Mariah Carey
Americans true music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today." -George Gershwin
"... when I heard Apache by the Shadows, that was it ! ...then there was a guitar player named Steve Gordon, he was "the player" in town ... I still remember him saying to me 'Is there any reason you're not using your little finger?'..." - Ray Flacke / Ricky Scaggs Band
"... Aqualung was a difficult and very tense album to record... while I was playing the solo, Jimmy Page walked into the control room and started waving, I thought, should I wave back and mess up the solo or should I just grin and carry on ? ... I just grinned" - Martin Barre / Jethro Tull
"A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges." -Benny Green
"..When I first heard Elvis' voice, I knew that I wasn't going to work for anybody ... hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail" - Bob Dylan
"For me, jazz, R&B, jump swing, Chicago blues, country blues, early hillbilly music, and honky tonk all stem from the same source" - Duke Robillard
"Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life." - Red Auerbach
" I also generally play slide guitar in standard tuning, which enables me to switch back and forth between using the slide and fretting notes and chords conventionally without having to relearn the fretboard, as one must do when playing in an open tuning." - Warren Haynes / Government Mule / Allman Bros. Band
"There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between." - Sir Thomas Beecham
"... when Ray Flacke came out, it was like 'What in the heck is this?' ... there's a guy who had that Tele players attitude, and he plugged straight into that amp with a delay, and it was unbelievable the way he would bend those big strings ... he was really unique..." - Brad Paisley
"...every once in a while it seems like the cosmos part and something great plops into your lap, that's how it was with "Hotel California".. a leased beach house in Malibu ... all the doors wide open on a spectacular July day probably in 1975 ... soaking wet ... thinking the world is a wonderful place to be... with an acoustic 12 string ... those chords just oozed out." - Don Felder / Eagles
"... Ritchie Blackmore was a huge early influence on me, but after that I had to find my own way ... Johann Sebastian Bach was probably the most influential guy ever on me ... Vivaldi, Beethoven and eventually Paganini ... all of a sudden I was thinking in all these other areas, instead of blues riffs ... " - Yngwie Malmsteen
"... there is still a very strong subculture of people who want to do great things on an instrument, and who are stimulated by hearing people who can. That's reassuring. But it's gonna take a person - and I don't know who this is - to come along and reinvent the guitar as a virtuosic instrument in a completely different realm than any of us have done, or anybody else in the past. That's the clincher. Maybe that will happen and maybe it won't ..." - Steve Vai
"... each artist attracts his own different set of fans. And G3 over the years has created it's own audience as well... they know it's something unusual and special that they're not going to get anywhere else ... young and old, both sexes, all come out. They all look at each other like, Wow, what are those people over there ? ... They're surprised at their own diversity..." - Joe (Sach) Satriani
"Without music, life is a journey through a desert." - Pat Conroy
"... I would urge a young player to listen to Charlie Christians' sense of time ... I'll never forget listening to my father (Bucky Pizzarelli) and Tal Farlow playing Christians' 'Solo Flight' backstage at a gig... that's when it hit me how big of an effect Christian had on jazz guitar. 'Solo Flight' was like the gospel..." - John Pizzarelli
"... one thing people always ask me is 'How do you play outside?' ... I have no idea how to teach that, but when I was discussing this with our bass player Jesse Murphy, he said 'tell them to go cliff diving'... In other words, when you're jamming, you have to take risks if you want to find new sounds..." - John Scofield
"... In 1938 I went out to Tulsa, Oklahoma to see Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys perform. After the set, a bunch of musicians were sitting around talking, and I remember seeing this young black fellow standing around. He came over and asked if I had an extra pick. I gave him one, and then he asked for my autograph. I asked him if he played. He said 'yes' and began to pick. I'll never forget what I said - 'My God, you're good !' that was the first time I met Charlie Christian. ... as a guitarist Charlie was simply the best around ... he had a way of getting on one note and driving it right into the ground. I figured if you're going to be great, you've got to play a lot of notes, right? not Charlie - he'd hit one note and he'd own it ..." - Les Paul
"I think a lot of the more successful artists of our time basically have barracudas for managers" - Robben Ford
"You are the music while the music lasts." - T. S. Eliot
"Sounds like the blues are composed of feeling, finesse, and fear." - Billy Gibbons / ZZ Top
"Music is the vernacular of the human soul." - Geoffrey Latham
"...we worked the medley on side two of Abbey Road out carefully in advance. All of those mini songs were partly completed tunes; some were written while we were in India a year before. So there was just a bit of chorus here and a verse there. we welded them all together into a routine..." - George Harrison / Beatles
"If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing." - Zimbabwe Proverb
"I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time." - Bonnie Raitt
"If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong." - Simon Rattle
"Music should never be harmless."- Robbie Robertson / The Band
"Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music." - Gioacchino Antonio Rossini
"... I would just like to say that Ritchie Blackmore did a bunch of great stuff guitar - wise. I'm happy to play the solo from 'Highway Star'. I always thought it was one of the most exciting guitar solos I'd ever played ..." - Steve Morse / Dixie Dregs / Deep Purple
"Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains." - John Philip Sousa
"... I'd have to say that "Mr. Crowley" in my most memorable solo... I had spent hours trying to figure out a solo for the song ... Ozzy came in and said "it's crap - everything you're playing is crap" .. he told me to get in there and just play how I felt. He made me really nervous, so I just played anything. When I came back to listen to it, he said it was great.." - Randy Rhoads / Ozzy Osbourne
"...Scotty Moore plays one of the first really amazing riffs in rock history on Heartbreak Hotel with Elvis Presley ... it was dangerous, it scared everybodys parents, which was part of the attraction then - as it still in now... it totally blindsided me and made me want to get a guitar and do that ..." - Roger McGuinn / Byrds
"...The movie "The Girl Can't Help It" (1956) completely did me in, particularly seeing Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps who looked really dangerous. it started me wanting my own guitar ...another motivating factor was the collapse of rock and roll in 1959. Elvis was drafted, Buddy Holly was dead and there was no real danger anymore. Overnight everybody was named Johnny This or Johnny That, and they were all singing this terrible V-neck sweater music. So it was like, "What are you bastards doing with my music? I'm not going to have that taken away!" So I think we decided we just wanted to take it back..." - Jeff Beck / Yardbirds / Jeff Beck Group
" A good composer does not imitate; he steals." - Igor Stravinsky
"I looked at the Branson Mo. deal but it's all old people and their parents" - Bill Medley / Righteous Brothers
"Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra, not choreography to the audience." - George Szell
"The most perfect _expression of human behavior is a string quartet." - Jeffrey Tate
"We were doing a charity show and he (Jeff Beck) actually came down with Jimmy Page... they were both playing "air guitar" as they watched us (laughter)..it was very odd !" - Jim McCarty - Yardbirds drummer
"Music isn't just learning notes and playing them, You learn notes to play to the music of your soul." - Katie Greenwood
"Right away I thought I'd been hit by a hand grenade ... her (Joni Mitchells') voice, those words ... she nailed me to the back wall with two-inch spikes... I promptly fell in love with her..." - David Crosby / Byrds / Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
"I always like the studio best, once I got the hang of it and the control. I like it because it's complete control" - John Lennon / Beatles
"Just as a blues player can play 20 blues songs in a row but find a way to make each one different, ... I always want to find different ways to do something" - Joe Satriani
"A real leader faces the music, even when he doesn't like the tune." - Anon
"...A lot of guitar players get stuck on a person ... before they find out who they really are ... every guitar player should remember be yourself - just let it rip ..." - Henry Garza - Los Lonely Boys
"Mozart has the classic purity of light and the blue ocean; Beethoven the romantic grandeur which belongs to the storms of air and sea, and while the soul of Mozart seems to dwell on the ethereal peaks of Olympus, that of Beethoven climbs shuddering the storm-beaten sides of a Sinai. Blessed be they both! Each represents a moment of the ideal life, each does us good. Our love is due to both." - Henri Frederic Amiel
" Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth." - Ludwig Van Beethoven
"Extraordinary how potent cheap music is." - Noel Coward
"... you watch Jimi Hendrix literally reinvent the instrument. He was playing from somewhere else. He was really a kind of hybrid, and I can't even begin to imagine where he came from " - Steve Vai
"There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music." - George Eliot (1819-80)
"... just because a guitar is old doesn't make it good... I've seen guitars that were old but weren't as good as the reissue ... for me, it's not the age that makes it happen, it's the quality of the instrument..." - Jorma Kaukonen / Jefferson Airplane / Hot Tuna
"... even when I'm touring, I feel like a sideman ... everybody's working together. We get to play longer solos; it's not just "Here's the record! Thank you for coming Goodnight" ... it has always had a "band" feel instead of being a singer and his backup band..." - Vince Gill
"The history of a people is found in its songs." - George Jellinek
"The great British blues guitarists of the Sixties - people like Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and Peter Green - could play like virtuosos, but they also understood the importance of energy and intensity" - Joe Perry / Aerosmith
"Music is the vernacular of the human soul." - Geoffrey Latham
"Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind." - Hal A. Lingerman
"... my daughter McKenna thought I sang with the Everly Brothers ... I said, 'no I was one of the Righteous Brothers' and she said 'didn't they invent the airplane?'" - Bill Medley / Righteous Bros.
"People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet." - Witold Lutoslawski
"George Harrison and John Lennon were the ones most against touring ... I'd been trying to say ..Ah, tourings good and it keeps us sharp .. but finally I agreed with them" - Paul McCartney / Beatles / Wings
"A good composer is slowly discovered a bad composer is slowly found out." -Ernest Newman
"Wagner's music is better than it sounds." - Mark Twain (1835-1910) - Famous Writer
"Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself." - Truman Capote (1924-84), American novelist, short-story writer
"Jeff Beck is compelled by his inner artistic drive to keep evolving the instrument. He'll use the whammy bar with the volume knob and the tone control all at the same time - creating harmonics that no human being should be able to hit." - Steve Vai
"... Charlie Christian was the biggest influence on me. The sheer beauty of his lines, and the way he played them, gave people no choice except to take notice. Nobody else could do that then. He had no competition... " - Herb Ellis
"... if Chopin had played the guitar, he would have sounded like Lenny Breau..." - Chet Atkins
"... cascades create wide intervals without busting your knuckles ... plus chicks dig 'em ... " - Steve Trovato
"...What it is, it's the remains of an old guitar. All the electrics and the neck are off a Sea Foam Green guitar called Richard, because Little Richard signed it. That's hanging in a safe place at home. But I didn't want to lose the sound. I've got a big split appearing in the back. I threw it in the air and missed it; it clattered on the floor. But the sound...you couldn't really put your finger on how it did it. I took all the guts out of it and put it on a new body and it just didn't sound the same. It's some freak thing, I don't know what it is. So whoever says that solid body guitars have no acoustic properties at all, or they think you can get the same tone if you use the same pickup - it's rubbish, because it just doesn't have the same quality, the character. .." - Jeff Beck / Yardbirds / Jeff Beck Group
"...I was doing someones hair the day I first saw my guitar ... a guy was walking down the street with it, and knew that guitar was mine (a 1953 weathered Fender Telecaster) .. I said I'll get you the most beautiful guitar you've ever seen and I'll trade you straight across ... I found him a purple Telecaster and said here's your guitar ... that was it, it was like he knew that guitar belonged to me..." - Roy Buchanan
"... I practice more than ever ... mostly scales and arpeggios ... and anything I can't do ... " - Julian Bream
"... sound is what drives my solos, not verbal concepts, I never think 'I'm going to use a Lydian Dominant scale and then go up a half-step', even though that might be exactly what I end up doing..." - John Scofield
"I think there are only three things America will be known for 2,000 years from now when they study this civilization: the Constitution, jazz music, and baseball." - Gerald Early, writer, baseball documentary
"It is only by introducing the young to great literature, drama and music, and to the excitement of great science that we open to them the possibilities that lie within the human spirit-enable them to see visions and dream dreams." - Eric Anderson
"... there were many people in the U.S. who recorded bolero. Nat King Cole was one of them, Perry Como sang boleros, there were many in that vein. There was a very good interaction between the style and the Brazilian romantic songs too, of before the bossa nova era. They kind of travelled together, even Jobim wrote boleros. In Brazil actually they got very big and before the bossa nova, the samba cancao of Brazil had a form that had a bit of that influence too, a certain laid-back pulse. Robert Caras became so big in the 1960's ... his style was developed from the traditional Brazilian song form (samba-cancao) and the bolero..." - Carlos Barbosa-Lima
"Love is like a violin. The music may stop now and then, but the strings remain forever." - June Masters Bacher
"Leaders must encourage their organizations to dance to forms of music yet to be heard." - Warren G. Bennis (b. 1925), American writer, educator, University of Southern California sociologist
Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself." - Samuel Butler (1612-80), English poet, author
"If I hadn't been a woman, I'd have been a drag queen" - Dolly Parton
". . . I improvised, crazed by the music. . . . Even my teeth and eyes burned with fever. Each time I leaped I seemed to touch the sky and when I regained earth it seemed to be mine alone." -Josephine Baker
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." -John Lennon / Beatles
"Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything." - Plato
"The life of the arts far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is close to the center of a nation's purpose-and is a test of the quality of a nation's civilization." -John F. Kennedy
"Music may achieve the highest of all missions: She may be a bond between nations, races and states, who are strangers to one another in many ways; She may unite what is disunited, and bring peace to what is hostile." - Dr. Max Bendiner
"All the sounds on the earth are like music." -Oscar Hammerstein
"Sugar is not so sweet to the palate as sound to the healthy ear." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
"... I always use the Jeff Beck model. Jeff Beck is just a genius, and he keeps getting better ... If there's anybody in your field you want to aspire to be like, it is a guy who does what he wants to do. Every record at least he comes out with one thing that makes everybodys' jaw drop ... I would hope that Jimi Hendrix would have done that, although, man, the odds are against him because he did so much in such a short amount of time ..." - Joe (Sach) Satriani
"... by far the most astonishing guitar player ever has got to be Django Reinhardt ... Django was quite superhuman, There's nothing normal about him as a person or a player ... and you can't forget Gene Vincent's guitarist Cliff Gallup ... he was my guiding light through my teenage years ... if you want to take a broader view, I think country guitarist Albert Lee is a gas ... there's also Paul Burlison, who played with Johnny Burnette ... people don't think of Les Paul as a rocker, but as far as I'm concerned he laid down the building blocks of rock and roll .. from a jazz perspective there's Charlie Christian, Thumbs Carlyle, Grant Green - they're all fabulous players... you can't forget Buddy Guy, I once saw him throw the guitar up in the air and catch it in the same chord ... Eddie Van Halen brought tapping to the forefront and I still think he was one of the tastiest players doing it ... George Harrisons got great intonation ... Eric Clapton is certainly the ambassador ... he's the guy everybody makes reference to, He's the household name for electric guitar, blues and rock and roll ... Erics got so much to offer, in addition to playing so well, he gives the world songs they can identify with ... " - Jeff Beck
... whatever your standing in life, the most important thing is behaving in ways that help other people. It's the same with music. I am a servant of the music ... and if I get caught up in ego, I'll lose everything .. it'll burn and that's a guarantee ... " - Eric Clapton / Yardbirds / Cream / Blind Faith / Derek and the Dominoes
"I'm not saying a guy shouldn't take lessons ... but if you want to play like the artists, you have to go and get what they're putting on records and take it from there .. " - Grant Green
"...the elephant smoked too much."(explaining why the keys of his piano were so yellow) -Victor Borge
"If music be the food of love, play on: give me excess of it..." -William Shakespeare
"Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was a musical fragmentation grenade, exploding with a force that is still being felt ... it changed the entire nature of the recording game - for keeps." - George Martin
"Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time." -Igor Stravinsky
"We all have idols. Play like anyone you care about but try to be yourself while you're doing so." -B. B. King
"For so long we plowed different furrows ... the greats ... be it of country, rhythm & blues, rock 'n' roll ... you know what they were doing ? they were messing with your heart and soul. That's what it was. Nothing has the strength, the power of music" - Sam Phillips
Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
~ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." -Decca Recording Company rejecting the Beatles, 1962
"It's much too late to do anything about rock & roll now ..." - Jerry Garcia / Grateful Dead
"It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception." (When asked about his theory of relativity) - Albert Einstein
"Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art." - Charlie "YardBird" Parker
"There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another." -Frank Zappa
"... Just as Jesus created wine from water, we humans are capable on transmuting emotion into music..." Carlos Santana
"I don't know anything about music, In my line you don't have to." -Elvis Presley (1935-1977)
" DIZZ FOR PRES " - a bumber sticker seen in 1956 during the U.S. Presidential Election when Dizzy Gillespie decided to run for president
"... when I saw Jimi Hendrix I knew immediately that this guy was the real thing ... and when he played it was like a rough sketch of what he was going to become ... this guy was our generation, and he wasn't in a suit .. he played a Howlin' Wolf song 'Killing Floor', and then we (The Cream) had to carry on the set. It was pretty hard to follow ... " - Eric Clapton / Yardbirds / Cream / Blind Faith / Derek and the Dominoes
"Most of us go to our graves with our music still inside of us." -unknown
"Whenever society gets too stifling and the rules get too complex, there's some sort of musical explosion" - Slash / Guns 'n Roses
"Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung." -Voltaire (1694-1778)
"...regardless of what you play, the biggest thing is keeping the feel going ..." - Wes Montgomery
"Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosphy. Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents." - Ludwig van Beethoven
"Little Wing is like one of these beautiful girls that come around sometimes ... you play your gig; it's the same thing as the olden days, and these beautiful girls come around.. you do actually fall in love with them because that's the only love you can have. It's not always the physical thing of "Oh, there's one over there ...", it's not one of those scenes. They actually tell you something. They release different things inside themselves ... "Little Wing" was a very sweet girl that came around that gave me her whole life and more if I wanted it ... " - Jimi Hendrix
"... guitarists shouldn't get too riled up about all of the great players that were left off of 'Rolling Stone Magazines' list of the Greatest Guitar Players of all Time' ... Rolling Stone is published for people who read the magazine because they don't know what to wear ..." - Joe (Sach) Satriani
"Bach gave us God's Word. Mozart gave us God's laughter. Beethoven gave us God's fire. God gave us Music that we might pray without words." - quote from outside an old opera house
"Use the talents you possess, for the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except the best." - Henry Van Dyke
"When you strum a guitar you have everything - rhythm, bass, lead and melody" - David Gilmore / Pink Floyd
"... Andres Segovia literally created the genre of classical guitar, which hadn't existed before around 1910. There was flamenco, which he borrowed from, but he actually arranged the works of Mozart and other classical composers for guitar, something that had never been done before ... Segovias' style is not slick or contrived, but it's still very clean and his timing is impeccable ... it's got a feeling of casual elegance, as if he's sitting around the house in Spain with a jug of wine, just playing from the heart." - Roger McGuinn / Byrds
"...You can't over-hype Sam Phillips ... think of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Howlin' Wolf, B.B. King: if you were associated with just one of those names, you'd be immortal" - Andy McLenon
"Go and Say Goodbye" by the Buffalo Springfield stands as one of the first examples of what would later be branded country rock" - Chris Hillman / Byrds / Manassas
"The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, "Is there a meaning to music?" My answer would be, "Yes." And "Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?" My answer to that would be, "No."" -Aaron Copland
|"... I don't want you to play me a riff that's going to impress Joe Satriani; give me a riff that makes a kid want to go out and buy a guitar and learn to play ..." - Ozzy Osbourne
"Music is an outburst of the soul." -Frederick Deluis
"... everyone was using tiny brushes and doing watercolors, while Jimi Hendrix was painting galactic scenes in Cinemascope. We are working in a field of mystical resonance, sound and vibration... that's what makes people cry, laugh and feel their hair stand up ... " - Carlos Santana
"... Clear Channel owns all the major radio stations and venues. Most musicians aren't aware that a few people control so much of what we hear..." Susan Tedeschi
"There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself." -Johann Sebastian Bach
"I've always wanted the sound of Muddy Waters' early records - only louder " - Eric Clapton / Yardbirds / Cream / Blind Faith / Derek and the Dominoes
"I have my own particular sorrows, loves, delights; and you have yours. But sorrow, gladness, yearning, hope, love, belong to all of us, in all times and in all places. Music is the only means whereby we feel these emotions in their universality." -H. A. Overstreet
"When Lonnie Mack came out with the guitar instrumental "Memphis" I thought, Oh God, finally somebody we guitar players can relate to !" - Dicky Betts / Allman Bros. Band
"Without music, life would be a mistake." -Friedrich Nietzsche
"... We're all about trying to play better every night, not just singing hit songs ... we ad lib, and every night there's jamming .. it's almost like the Grateful Dead meets Buck Owens some nights, because we'll go off on little adventures and sometimes we do crash the bus! ..." - Brad Paisley
"Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays." -Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
"... Jeff Beck is my idol .. sometimes he finds notes that I just do not have on my guitar. Frank Zappa's another one .. I loved Frank Zappa ... I do think Van Halen reinvented the guitar ... he's an excellent musician, a shrewd guitarist and as a person he's wonderful..." - Ritchie Blackmore / Deep Purple
"Your talking to someone who really understands rock music." -Tipper Gore
"I think I got the idea of tapping watching Jimmy Page do his "Heartbreaker" solo back in 1971. He was doing a pull-off to an open string, and I thought wait a minute, open string ... pull off. I can do that, but what if I use my finger as the nut and move it around ?" ... I just kind of took it and ran with it - Eddie Van Halen
"Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics." -Pietro Mascagni
Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule." -Samuel Butler
"...I liken feedback to the effect of when you go surfing; you can get pummeled by a wave, but if you balance the forces right, you can have a dandy ride ... that's pretty much what feedback is..." - Jorma Kaukonen / Jefferson Airplane / Hot Tuna
"I would advise you to keep your overhead down; avoid a major drug habit; play everyday and take it in front of other people. They need to hear it and you need them to hear it." -James Taylor
"...the blues appealed to me, but so did rock. The early rockabilly guitarists like Cliff Gallup and Scotty Moore were just as important to me as the blues guitarists..." - Jimmy Page / Yardbirds / Led Zepplin
"... As far as being a 'player's player', you've only got to go to Nashville or Argentina, and you can forget about it. The world is full of amazing guitar players, and you know it, and I know it ... it's a humbling experience..." - Mark Knopfler / Dire Straits
"There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it." -Ron Wood / Rolling Stones / Faces
"Country music is three chords and the truth." -Harlan Howard
"... I just didn't know what direction people want, you know music was going down a path, and I couldn't turn on a radio without being disgusted completely. And now it's just gotten to the point where I can't listen to anything, it's trashy. It's just a hundred channels of garbage all over. And not just here, it's in England as well. It's almost just like a global effort to knock the sense out of you if you're a musician (laughs). There's not any little morsel for musicians to latch on to. It's all glossy, lipstick s--t. More tits and bare midriffs. Unless you go to a blues club, or some outrageous, hip dive somewhere that nobody knows about until the night before, the pickings are slim for inspiration... I still listen to Django Reinhardt, his catalog. I'm just catching up with that after several years of not really listening to him proper. You know he's the greatest... it's the fear thing. ... but now I'm getting used to it... He (Django Reinhardt) was God. Just amazing" - Jeff Beck / Yardbirds / Jeff Beck Group
"... hearing Andres Segovia in person was quite a revelation ... It was a knockout..." - Julian Bream
"... Charlie Christians' contributions to the electric guitar are as big as Thomas Edisons' contributions to the world..." - Barney Kessel
"Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. -Victor Hugo
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music." -Aldous Huxley
"...Everyone has their own sound, and if you're heard enough, folks will come to recognize it. Style however, is a different thing. Try to express your own ideas. It's much more difficult to do, but the rewards are there if you're good enough to pull it off ..." - Chet Atkins
"The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it." -Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
"... When I heard "Pride and Joy" by Stevie Ray Vaughn on the radio, I just said "Hallelujah" .. he was just so good and strong and he would not be denied... he single handedly brought guitar and blues oriented music back to the marketplace" - Dickey Betts / Allman Bros. Band
"Secretly, I wanted to look like Jimi Hendrix, but I could never quite pull it off." -Bryan Ferry / Queen
"Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously." -Henry Mille
"...protect your hands! Some fans demonstrate their enthusiam with bone-crushing hand shakes. My former teacher Julian Bream often bows Japanese style with his hands behind his back. Smart man !..." - Liona Boyd
"...some musicians, man, you hear the note almost before they hit it. Jimi, Coltrane and Charlie Parker were like that... " Carlos Santana
"... Albert Lee and I have become real close friends, and he comes out anytime I'm in the L.A. area, and he'll sit in for the whole show ! ... we've got a habit of doing that ... in Austin Redd Volkaert does the same thing ... it's fun ... I love to make it a guitar thing and the audience doesn't know any different - they think he's some new band member they don't know. They don't realize Albert's the reason we all play Teles ! ..." - Brad Paisley
"It's a marvelous feeling when someone says "I want to do this song of yours" because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after." -Mary Chapin Carpenter
"There was mass hysteria in the Chess Recording Studio when I did the "Shapes of Things" solo ... they weren't expecting it, and it was just some weird mist coming from the East out of an amp." - Jeff Beck / Yardbirds / Jeff Beck Group
Everywhere in the world, music enhances a hall, with one exception: Carnegie Hall enhances the music. -Isaac Stern
"Music is the art of thinking with sounds." -Jules Combarieu
"When I started to play with my fingernails, it was not just for volume. The most important thing was giving the guitar different colors in its voices..." - Andres Segovia
"Music, the greatest good that mortals know, and all of heaven we have below." -Joseph Addison
"It's not how much you play, it's what you play and where you play it" - James Burton
2,400,000 Americans play the accordion - hopefully not at the same time." -unknown
"Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it." -Liam Gallagher
"Sam Phillips always encouraged me to do it my way, to use what ever other influences I wanted, but never to copy ... that was a great rare gift he gave me: believe in myself, right from the start of my recording career... if there hadn't been a Sam Phillips, I might still be working in a cotton field" - Johnny Cash
"...Johnny Cash has only passed into the greater light. He will only become more important in this industry as time goes by ..." - Dolly Parton
"...The world has lost a legend, and I have lost a friend. Johnny Cash was the rare soul who could be both..." - Emmylou Harris
"...I think it was a modest thing I did (Fahrenheit 9/11) ... this is an election year ... I'm not telling them how to vote. I'm saying get information about the issues ... at first there's just silence, then there's 'Yeah!' and then there's 'Boo' ... I have never seen a reaction like this, in all my years of touring ... Clear Channel can't threaten to not play my records because they are not going to play them anyway ..." - Linda Ronstadt
"...the music you make is shaped by what you play it on ... if you feel that you're not getting enough out of a song, change the instrument - go from an acoustic to an electric or vice versa, or try an open tuning ... do something to shake it up..." - Mark Knopfler / Dire Straits
"I remember that first week at the Whisky and the gigs we (The Buffalo Springfield) did with the Byrds, We could really smoke ! That band never got on record as bad, and as hard as we were. Live we sounded like the Rolling Stones..." - Steven Stills / Buffalo Springfield / Crosby, Stills & Nash
"I don't even know if I can take credit for writing "Cliffs of Dover" ... it was just there for me one day ... literally wrote in five minutes ... kind of a gift from a higher place that all of us are eligible for. We just have to listen for it and be available to receive it" - Eric Johnson
"... I don't like to go into the studio with all the songs worked out and planned before hand ... you've got to give the band something to use its imagination on as well. That can make a very ordinary song come alive into something totally different ... the X-factor - so important in rock and roll - which is the feel.." - Keith Richards / Rolling Stones
"... I thought 'Stairway' crystallized the essence of Led Zeppelin. It had everything there, and showed the band at its best ... every musician wants to do something that will hold up for a long time, and I guess we did that with 'Stairway To Heaven' ..." - Jimmy Page / Yardbirds / Led Zepplin
"... I'm not conscious of the speed ... it's not my motive ... my motive is displaying a voice through the fingerboard ... it can get to the point where I don't have control over what I am playing ... I never end the gig until I can't sing anymore" - Alvin Lee / Ten Years After
"... I played 'Eruption' two times for the record, and we kept the one that seemed to flow ... there's a mistake at the top end of it whenever I hear it, I always think, Man I could've played it better ... but I like the way it sounds. I'd never heard a guitar sound like that before..." - Edward Van Halen
"I don't believe in having bands for solo records." -Mick Jagger / Rolling Stones
"Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life." -Berthold Auerbach
"... I got home, picked up my ax, turned on the four-track and just played it ... I played three solos back to back on Cemetery Gates ... the next morning, the second and third solos weren't bad, but the first had that first take magic ! .. I didn't touch it..." - Dimebag Darrell
"Music is love in search of a word." -Sidney Lanier
"Duane Allman inspired the group to explore the extended jam format that was already a staple of the Allman Brothers act. Moreover, his ferocious slide playing motivated Clapton to turn in some of the finest guitar performances of his career" - Bobby Whitlock on "Derek and the Dominoes" making the "Layla and other Assorted Love Songs" album
"Cute little babies that fall out of swings - These are a few of my favourite things. -Oscar Hammerstein, working lyric for a piece from "The Sound of Music"
".. my instrumentals try to create some of the basic feelings of human interaction, like anger and joy and love ... with Jessica, I couldn't quite find it, then my little daughter, Jessica, crawled into the room, and I just started playing to her, that's why I named it after her ... I came up with that melody using just two fingers as a sort of tribute to Django ... in general writing a good instrumental is very fulfilling because you've transcended language and spoken to someone with a melody" - Dickey Betts / Allman Bros. Band
"Neil Young played Helpless, and by the time he finished, we (Crosby, Stills & Nash) were asking him if we could join his band" - David Crosby / Byrds / Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
"At a beach house in Malibu that the Buffalo Springfield had rented, I set up my big amps, we (Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Miles, Bruce Palmer and Steven Stills) ... just went. We played quite literally for twenty straight hours. We must have made up fifty songs, but there was no tape running, no nothing, we just played for the ocean .... and that night I really started to learn how to play lead guitar" - Steven Stills / Buffalo Springfield / Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
"Wealth and fame can only be so important in the face of musical magic" - Graham Nash / Hollies / Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end." -Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
I feel a great responsibility to deliver for our audience ... I am like their servant, but there's only one honest way to lift people up, which is to feel genuinely elevated yourself. And the way to do that is follow your heart. That's all we try to do." - Trey Anastasio / Phish
"... although one can get very clever at home, progress comes a lot quicker if you step into a room with other people and start playing .. " - Steve Howe / Yes
"Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk." -Oscar Wilde
"... the Yardbirds actually asked me to join their band twice. They asked me before Eric Clapton had even left the band, because their manager wanted to get more commercial and Eric wanted to get more purist; their manager wanted to force him out. Then they asked me again when Eric finally left. But I was still too nervous about getting ill while on the road, and I wasn't quite sure about the politics with Eric Clapton, because we were friendly. So I recommended Jeff Beck, who I think was amazing as far as pushing the Yardbirds to the next level. His imagination on those Yardbirds albums is incredible..." - Jimmy Page / Yardbirds / Led Zepplin
"Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains." -Paul Whiteman
"All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds! "-Yoko Ono
"Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory." -Oscar Wilde
"Hell is a half-filled auditorium." -Robert Frost (1874-1963)
"... I like the Pretenders' James Honeyman-Scott; the Cars' Elliot Easton, who is one of the best lead players of the last 25 years; Joe Walsh, who's one of the best rock and roll guitar players of all time; and the Sex Pistols' Steve Jones. I'm also a fan of ElvisPresleys guitarist Scotty Moore and Surf-Rock guitarist Dick Dale ... I shouldn't forget David Lindley, who played with Jackson Browne for years. It might suprise some people to hear me say it, but the dude is incredible..." - Slash / Guns 'n Roses
"I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive _expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music." -Billy Joel
"An intellectual is someone who can listen to the "William Tell Overture" without thinking of the Lone Ranger." -John Chesson
"For optimum amp tone onstage, plug your amp into your own AC outlet.." - Eric Johnson
"I've always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music." -Aretha Franklin
"I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500." -James Brown
"Musically, we're more talented than any Bob Dylan or Paul McCartney. Mick Jagger can't produce a sound. I'm the new Elvis." - Time Magazine quotes Milli Vanilli "singer" Rob Pilatus (2-27-1990)
"Music is moonlight in the gloomy night of life." -Jean Paul Richter
"...Surrender your whole being into a note, and gravity disappears ... with one chord, John Lee Hooker could tell you a story as deep as the ocean..." - Carlos Santana
"Without Elvis, none of us could have made it." -Buddy Holly
"Neil Young and Barry Friedman had stolen a Buffalo Springfield sign off the steamroller for Barrys house. They put it up. We all looked at it on the wall and a light went off. That's how we came up with the name" - Steven Stills (note: That steam roller was parked out in front of Sol Betnuns Music Store, which was a converted house on Larchmont Avenue in Hollywood ... Sols' was the music store that supplied most of the great used stuff, the other one was "Mad Man Louies' Pawn Shop" on Main Street in downtown L.A., and you had to find out about them to even know that they were there - Dr,Duck)
"A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time. -Mariah Carey
Americans true music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today." -George Gershwin
"... when I heard Apache by the Shadows, that was it ! ...then there was a guitar player named Steve Gordon, he was "the player" in town ... I still remember him saying to me 'Is there any reason you're not using your little finger?'..." - Ray Flacke / Ricky Scaggs Band
"... Aqualung was a difficult and very tense album to record... while I was playing the solo, Jimmy Page walked into the control room and started waving, I thought, should I wave back and mess up the solo or should I just grin and carry on ? ... I just grinned" - Martin Barre / Jethro Tull
"A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges." -Benny Green
"..When I first heard Elvis' voice, I knew that I wasn't going to work for anybody ... hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail" - Bob Dylan
"For me, jazz, R&B, jump swing, Chicago blues, country blues, early hillbilly music, and honky tonk all stem from the same source" - Duke Robillard
"Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life." - Red Auerbach
" I also generally play slide guitar in standard tuning, which enables me to switch back and forth between using the slide and fretting notes and chords conventionally without having to relearn the fretboard, as one must do when playing in an open tuning." - Warren Haynes / Government Mule / Allman Bros. Band
"There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between." - Sir Thomas Beecham
"... when Ray Flacke came out, it was like 'What in the heck is this?' ... there's a guy who had that Tele players attitude, and he plugged straight into that amp with a delay, and it was unbelievable the way he would bend those big strings ... he was really unique..." - Brad Paisley
"...every once in a while it seems like the cosmos part and something great plops into your lap, that's how it was with "Hotel California".. a leased beach house in Malibu ... all the doors wide open on a spectacular July day probably in 1975 ... soaking wet ... thinking the world is a wonderful place to be... with an acoustic 12 string ... those chords just oozed out." - Don Felder / Eagles
"... Ritchie Blackmore was a huge early influence on me, but after that I had to find my own way ... Johann Sebastian Bach was probably the most influential guy ever on me ... Vivaldi, Beethoven and eventually Paganini ... all of a sudden I was thinking in all these other areas, instead of blues riffs ... " - Yngwie Malmsteen
"... there is still a very strong subculture of people who want to do great things on an instrument, and who are stimulated by hearing people who can. That's reassuring. But it's gonna take a person - and I don't know who this is - to come along and reinvent the guitar as a virtuosic instrument in a completely different realm than any of us have done, or anybody else in the past. That's the clincher. Maybe that will happen and maybe it won't ..." - Steve Vai
"... each artist attracts his own different set of fans. And G3 over the years has created it's own audience as well... they know it's something unusual and special that they're not going to get anywhere else ... young and old, both sexes, all come out. They all look at each other like, Wow, what are those people over there ? ... They're surprised at their own diversity..." - Joe (Sach) Satriani
"Without music, life is a journey through a desert." - Pat Conroy
"... I would urge a young player to listen to Charlie Christians' sense of time ... I'll never forget listening to my father (Bucky Pizzarelli) and Tal Farlow playing Christians' 'Solo Flight' backstage at a gig... that's when it hit me how big of an effect Christian had on jazz guitar. 'Solo Flight' was like the gospel..." - John Pizzarelli
"... one thing people always ask me is 'How do you play outside?' ... I have no idea how to teach that, but when I was discussing this with our bass player Jesse Murphy, he said 'tell them to go cliff diving'... In other words, when you're jamming, you have to take risks if you want to find new sounds..." - John Scofield
"... In 1938 I went out to Tulsa, Oklahoma to see Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys perform. After the set, a bunch of musicians were sitting around talking, and I remember seeing this young black fellow standing around. He came over and asked if I had an extra pick. I gave him one, and then he asked for my autograph. I asked him if he played. He said 'yes' and began to pick. I'll never forget what I said - 'My God, you're good !' that was the first time I met Charlie Christian. ... as a guitarist Charlie was simply the best around ... he had a way of getting on one note and driving it right into the ground. I figured if you're going to be great, you've got to play a lot of notes, right? not Charlie - he'd hit one note and he'd own it ..." - Les Paul
"I think a lot of the more successful artists of our time basically have barracudas for managers" - Robben Ford
"You are the music while the music lasts." - T. S. Eliot
"Sounds like the blues are composed of feeling, finesse, and fear." - Billy Gibbons / ZZ Top
"Music is the vernacular of the human soul." - Geoffrey Latham
"...we worked the medley on side two of Abbey Road out carefully in advance. All of those mini songs were partly completed tunes; some were written while we were in India a year before. So there was just a bit of chorus here and a verse there. we welded them all together into a routine..." - George Harrison / Beatles
"If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing." - Zimbabwe Proverb
"I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time." - Bonnie Raitt
"If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong." - Simon Rattle
"Music should never be harmless."- Robbie Robertson / The Band
"Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music." - Gioacchino Antonio Rossini
"... I would just like to say that Ritchie Blackmore did a bunch of great stuff guitar - wise. I'm happy to play the solo from 'Highway Star'. I always thought it was one of the most exciting guitar solos I'd ever played ..." - Steve Morse / Dixie Dregs / Deep Purple
"Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains." - John Philip Sousa
"... I'd have to say that "Mr. Crowley" in my most memorable solo... I had spent hours trying to figure out a solo for the song ... Ozzy came in and said "it's crap - everything you're playing is crap" .. he told me to get in there and just play how I felt. He made me really nervous, so I just played anything. When I came back to listen to it, he said it was great.." - Randy Rhoads / Ozzy Osbourne
"...Scotty Moore plays one of the first really amazing riffs in rock history on Heartbreak Hotel with Elvis Presley ... it was dangerous, it scared everybodys parents, which was part of the attraction then - as it still in now... it totally blindsided me and made me want to get a guitar and do that ..." - Roger McGuinn / Byrds
"...The movie "The Girl Can't Help It" (1956) completely did me in, particularly seeing Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps who looked really dangerous. it started me wanting my own guitar ...another motivating factor was the collapse of rock and roll in 1959. Elvis was drafted, Buddy Holly was dead and there was no real danger anymore. Overnight everybody was named Johnny This or Johnny That, and they were all singing this terrible V-neck sweater music. So it was like, "What are you bastards doing with my music? I'm not going to have that taken away!" So I think we decided we just wanted to take it back..." - Jeff Beck / Yardbirds / Jeff Beck Group
" A good composer does not imitate; he steals." - Igor Stravinsky
"I looked at the Branson Mo. deal but it's all old people and their parents" - Bill Medley / Righteous Brothers
"Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra, not choreography to the audience." - George Szell
"The most perfect _expression of human behavior is a string quartet." - Jeffrey Tate
"We were doing a charity show and he (Jeff Beck) actually came down with Jimmy Page... they were both playing "air guitar" as they watched us (laughter)..it was very odd !" - Jim McCarty - Yardbirds drummer
"Music isn't just learning notes and playing them, You learn notes to play to the music of your soul." - Katie Greenwood
"Right away I thought I'd been hit by a hand grenade ... her (Joni Mitchells') voice, those words ... she nailed me to the back wall with two-inch spikes... I promptly fell in love with her..." - David Crosby / Byrds / Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
"I always like the studio best, once I got the hang of it and the control. I like it because it's complete control" - John Lennon / Beatles
"Just as a blues player can play 20 blues songs in a row but find a way to make each one different, ... I always want to find different ways to do something" - Joe Satriani
"A real leader faces the music, even when he doesn't like the tune." - Anon
"...A lot of guitar players get stuck on a person ... before they find out who they really are ... every guitar player should remember be yourself - just let it rip ..." - Henry Garza - Los Lonely Boys
"Mozart has the classic purity of light and the blue ocean; Beethoven the romantic grandeur which belongs to the storms of air and sea, and while the soul of Mozart seems to dwell on the ethereal peaks of Olympus, that of Beethoven climbs shuddering the storm-beaten sides of a Sinai. Blessed be they both! Each represents a moment of the ideal life, each does us good. Our love is due to both." - Henri Frederic Amiel
" Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth." - Ludwig Van Beethoven
"Extraordinary how potent cheap music is." - Noel Coward
"... you watch Jimi Hendrix literally reinvent the instrument. He was playing from somewhere else. He was really a kind of hybrid, and I can't even begin to imagine where he came from " - Steve Vai
"There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music." - George Eliot (1819-80)
"... just because a guitar is old doesn't make it good... I've seen guitars that were old but weren't as good as the reissue ... for me, it's not the age that makes it happen, it's the quality of the instrument..." - Jorma Kaukonen / Jefferson Airplane / Hot Tuna
"... even when I'm touring, I feel like a sideman ... everybody's working together. We get to play longer solos; it's not just "Here's the record! Thank you for coming Goodnight" ... it has always had a "band" feel instead of being a singer and his backup band..." - Vince Gill
"The history of a people is found in its songs." - George Jellinek
"The great British blues guitarists of the Sixties - people like Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and Peter Green - could play like virtuosos, but they also understood the importance of energy and intensity" - Joe Perry / Aerosmith
"Music is the vernacular of the human soul." - Geoffrey Latham
"Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind." - Hal A. Lingerman
"... my daughter McKenna thought I sang with the Everly Brothers ... I said, 'no I was one of the Righteous Brothers' and she said 'didn't they invent the airplane?'" - Bill Medley / Righteous Bros.
"People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet." - Witold Lutoslawski
"George Harrison and John Lennon were the ones most against touring ... I'd been trying to say ..Ah, tourings good and it keeps us sharp .. but finally I agreed with them" - Paul McCartney / Beatles / Wings
"A good composer is slowly discovered a bad composer is slowly found out." -Ernest Newman
"Wagner's music is better than it sounds." - Mark Twain (1835-1910) - Famous Writer
"Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself." - Truman Capote (1924-84), American novelist, short-story writer
"Jeff Beck is compelled by his inner artistic drive to keep evolving the instrument. He'll use the whammy bar with the volume knob and the tone control all at the same time - creating harmonics that no human being should be able to hit." - Steve Vai
"... Charlie Christian was the biggest influence on me. The sheer beauty of his lines, and the way he played them, gave people no choice except to take notice. Nobody else could do that then. He had no competition... " - Herb Ellis
"... if Chopin had played the guitar, he would have sounded like Lenny Breau..." - Chet Atkins
"... cascades create wide intervals without busting your knuckles ... plus chicks dig 'em ... " - Steve Trovato
"...What it is, it's the remains of an old guitar. All the electrics and the neck are off a Sea Foam Green guitar called Richard, because Little Richard signed it. That's hanging in a safe place at home. But I didn't want to lose the sound. I've got a big split appearing in the back. I threw it in the air and missed it; it clattered on the floor. But the sound...you couldn't really put your finger on how it did it. I took all the guts out of it and put it on a new body and it just didn't sound the same. It's some freak thing, I don't know what it is. So whoever says that solid body guitars have no acoustic properties at all, or they think you can get the same tone if you use the same pickup - it's rubbish, because it just doesn't have the same quality, the character. .." - Jeff Beck / Yardbirds / Jeff Beck Group
"...I was doing someones hair the day I first saw my guitar ... a guy was walking down the street with it, and knew that guitar was mine (a 1953 weathered Fender Telecaster) .. I said I'll get you the most beautiful guitar you've ever seen and I'll trade you straight across ... I found him a purple Telecaster and said here's your guitar ... that was it, it was like he knew that guitar belonged to me..." - Roy Buchanan
"... I practice more than ever ... mostly scales and arpeggios ... and anything I can't do ... " - Julian Bream
"... sound is what drives my solos, not verbal concepts, I never think 'I'm going to use a Lydian Dominant scale and then go up a half-step', even though that might be exactly what I end up doing..." - John Scofield
"I think there are only three things America will be known for 2,000 years from now when they study this civilization: the Constitution, jazz music, and baseball." - Gerald Early, writer, baseball documentary
"It is only by introducing the young to great literature, drama and music, and to the excitement of great science that we open to them the possibilities that lie within the human spirit-enable them to see visions and dream dreams." - Eric Anderson
"... there were many people in the U.S. who recorded bolero. Nat King Cole was one of them, Perry Como sang boleros, there were many in that vein. There was a very good interaction between the style and the Brazilian romantic songs too, of before the bossa nova era. They kind of travelled together, even Jobim wrote boleros. In Brazil actually they got very big and before the bossa nova, the samba cancao of Brazil had a form that had a bit of that influence too, a certain laid-back pulse. Robert Caras became so big in the 1960's ... his style was developed from the traditional Brazilian song form (samba-cancao) and the bolero..." - Carlos Barbosa-Lima
"Love is like a violin. The music may stop now and then, but the strings remain forever." - June Masters Bacher
"Leaders must encourage their organizations to dance to forms of music yet to be heard." - Warren G. Bennis (b. 1925), American writer, educator, University of Southern California sociologist
Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself." - Samuel Butler (1612-80), English poet, author
"If I hadn't been a woman, I'd have been a drag queen" - Dolly Parton
". . . I improvised, crazed by the music. . . . Even my teeth and eyes burned with fever. Each time I leaped I seemed to touch the sky and when I regained earth it seemed to be mine alone." -Josephine Baker
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." -John Lennon / Beatles
"Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything." - Plato
"The life of the arts far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is close to the center of a nation's purpose-and is a test of the quality of a nation's civilization." -John F. Kennedy
"Music may achieve the highest of all missions: She may be a bond between nations, races and states, who are strangers to one another in many ways; She may unite what is disunited, and bring peace to what is hostile." - Dr. Max Bendiner
"All the sounds on the earth are like music." -Oscar Hammerstein
"Sugar is not so sweet to the palate as sound to the healthy ear." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
"... I always use the Jeff Beck model. Jeff Beck is just a genius, and he keeps getting better ... If there's anybody in your field you want to aspire to be like, it is a guy who does what he wants to do. Every record at least he comes out with one thing that makes everybodys' jaw drop ... I would hope that Jimi Hendrix would have done that, although, man, the odds are against him because he did so much in such a short amount of time ..." - Joe (Sach) Satriani
"... by far the most astonishing guitar player ever has got to be Django Reinhardt ... Django was quite superhuman, There's nothing normal about him as a person or a player ... and you can't forget Gene Vincent's guitarist Cliff Gallup ... he was my guiding light through my teenage years ... if you want to take a broader view, I think country guitarist Albert Lee is a gas ... there's also Paul Burlison, who played with Johnny Burnette ... people don't think of Les Paul as a rocker, but as far as I'm concerned he laid down the building blocks of rock and roll .. from a jazz perspective there's Charlie Christian, Thumbs Carlyle, Grant Green - they're all fabulous players... you can't forget Buddy Guy, I once saw him throw the guitar up in the air and catch it in the same chord ... Eddie Van Halen brought tapping to the forefront and I still think he was one of the tastiest players doing it ... George Harrisons got great intonation ... Eric Clapton is certainly the ambassador ... he's the guy everybody makes reference to, He's the household name for electric guitar, blues and rock and roll ... Erics got so much to offer, in addition to playing so well, he gives the world songs they can identify with ... " - Jeff Beck
... whatever your standing in life, the most important thing is behaving in ways that help other people. It's the same with music. I am a servant of the music ... and if I get caught up in ego, I'll lose everything .. it'll burn and that's a guarantee ... " - Eric Clapton / Yardbirds / Cream / Blind Faith / Derek and the Dominoes
"I'm not saying a guy shouldn't take lessons ... but if you want to play like the artists, you have to go and get what they're putting on records and take it from there .. " - Grant Green
"...the elephant smoked too much."(explaining why the keys of his piano were so yellow) -Victor Borge
"If music be the food of love, play on: give me excess of it..." -William Shakespeare
"Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was a musical fragmentation grenade, exploding with a force that is still being felt ... it changed the entire nature of the recording game - for keeps." - George Martin
"Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time." -Igor Stravinsky
"We all have idols. Play like anyone you care about but try to be yourself while you're doing so." -B. B. King
"For so long we plowed different furrows ... the greats ... be it of country, rhythm & blues, rock 'n' roll ... you know what they were doing ? they were messing with your heart and soul. That's what it was. Nothing has the strength, the power of music" - Sam Phillips
Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
~ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
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