Quotes from Jon Landau

It didn't matter that Charlie Chaplin may not have been a great director or a great anything else. He made great movies.

To her audience, Janis Joplin has remained a symbol, artifact and reminder of late Sixties youth culture. Her popularity never derived from her musical ability, but from her capacity to link her fantasies of freedom and immortality with ours.

The Rolling Stones have been the best of all possible worlds: they have the lack of pretension and sentimentality associated with the blues, the rawness and toughness of hard rock, and the depth which always makes you feel that they are in the midst of saying something. They have never impressed me as being kitsch.

As long as Elton John can bring forth one performance per album on the order of 'Someone Saved My Life Tonight,' the chance remains that he will become something more than the great entertainer he already is and go on to make a lasting contribution to rock.

There were many stars in Motown's firmament - among them, Stevie, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Martha Reeves and Diana Ross - but I happen to have loved the Four Tops most of all.

Joni Mitchell seems destined to remain in a state of permanent dissatisfaction - always knowing what she would like to do, always more depressed when it's done.

James Taylor is the kind of person I always thought the word 'folksinger' referred to. He writes and sings songs that are reflections of his own life, and performs in them in his own style. All of his performances are marked by an eloquent simplicity.

In the end, the sign of Aretha Franklin's artistry is that she always leaves her mark - first, on the music, then on us.

As a performing group, the Beatles began by playing old rock favorites, for dancing, to tough audiences in Liverpool and Hamburg. When they began writing seriously, they discovered that they couldn't compose in the early American rock tradition.

Soul was the music made by and for black people. For most of the Sixties it was thoroughly divorced from white popular music, but by the end of the decade several artists with their roots firmly in both soul and R&B traditions had crossed over.

Aretha Franklin's 'Let Me in Your Life' is one of the few recent R&B albums that places the emphasis entirely and deservedly on a voice. Many R&B producers have been making records on which the singer is outshined by the song, the arrangement and the sound.

The Beatles never sounded intimidated by their idols. They never interpreted old rock; they simply played it as well and as joyfully as they knew how. On 'Rock 'n' Roll,' John Lennon does nothing but interpret old rock.

To her audience, Janis Joplin has remained a symbol, artifact and reminder of late Sixties youth culture. Her popularity never derived from her musical ability, but from her capacity to link her fantasies of freedom and immortality with ours.

'Call Me' is not an exceptional Al Green album, but it is as solid as a rock at its center.

The early Stones were adolescent rockers. They were self-conscious in an obvious and unpretentious way. And they were committed to a musical style that needed no justification because it came so naturally to them. As they grew musically the mere repetition of old rock and blues tunes became increasingly less satisfying.

The Beatles production is often so 'perfect' that it sounds computerized. 'Sgt. Pepper' really does sound like it took four months to make.

'Let's Get It On' is a classic Motown single, endlessly repeatable and always enjoyable.

Part of me believes that the completed record is the final measure of a pop musician's accomplishment, just as the completed film is the final measure of a film artist's accomplishments.

On first listening, Joni Mitchell's 'Court And Spark,' the first truly great pop album of 1974, sounds surprisingly light; by the third or fourth listening, it reveals its underlying tensions.

The early Bob Dylan was compulsively drawn to the conflict between stability and the search for immortality.

Elton John can be a master of the sleight of hand. The arrangements make it seem like there are substantial melodies underneath the tracks - but almost nothing demands repeated listenings. Similarly, he always sounds like he's singing up a storm, but his voice glosses over the material, reducing most things to an uninteresting sameness.

Often, equipment can as easily function as a security blanket for musicians unwilling or unable to risk anything personal in the studio. Whether one catches the feeling on a record is a subjective matter. How can you be sure? The machinery can hold out the promise of at least mechanical perfection.

'Dance to the Music' was just Sly Stone being his natural crazy self right from the beginning. The man was an original and his first AM hit was nothing if it wasn't the example per excellence of the Sly Stone music machine.

While the Beatles always had George Martin around to clean up their act, the Rolling Stones had Andrew Loog Oldham to coarsen theirs.