Quotes About Music

If you don't know the blues... there's no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll or any other form of popular music.

We've got the sound and we know we can find it one way or another if we've got the song - we'll chase the damn thing all around the room, up to the ceiling. We know we've got it and we'll lock on to it and find it.

Wild Horses" started in a B-minor chord, and Stu didn't play minor chords, "fucking Chinese music.

There's a certain moment when you realize that you've actually just left the planet for a bit and that nobody can touch you. You're elevated because you're with a bunch of guys that want to do the same thing as you. And when it works, baby, you've got wings. You know you've been somewhere most people will never get; you've been to a special place.

There is no such thing as a rock-and-roll venue; there's not one in the world that's made to play this kind of music as an ideal form.

Charlie Watts's drums on "Street Fighting Man" are from this little 1930s practice drummer's kit, in a little suitcase that you popped up, one tiny cymbal, a half-size tambourine that served as a snare, and that's really what it was made on, made on rubbish, made in hotel rooms with our little toys.

Y, aún con todo, la gente quiere llegar al otro, al corazón del otro, por eso existe la música: si no eres capaz de decirlo, cántalo.

What you're looking for is power and force, without volume--an inner power. A way to bring together what everybody in that room is doing and make one sound. So it's not two guitars, piano, bass and drums, it's one thing, it's not five. You're there to create one thing.

Then the bass player would be battened off, so they were all in their little pigeonholes and cubicles. And you're playing this enormous room and not using any of it. This idea of separation is the total antithesis of rock and roll, which is a bunch of guys in a room making a sound and just capturing it. It's the sound they make together, not separated.

In the '70s, showtime was when I woke up. I might have been three hours late, but there was no such thing as curfews for shows. If you went to see a show, you would be there for the whole night. Nobody said it would start on time. If I was late, sorry, but it was just the right time for the show. Nobody left.

You realized that you were really in one of the sleaziest businesses there is, without actually being a gangster. It was a business where the only time people laughed was when they'd screwed someone else over.

I've never wanted to play like anybody else, except when I was first starting, when I wanted to be Scotty Moore or Chuck Berry. After that, I wanted to find out what the guitar or the piano could teach me.

was a very important distinction in the '60s. Either you were blues and jazz or you were rock and roll, but rock and roll had died and gone pop—nothing left in it.

Andrew created an amazing thing in my life. I had never thought about songwriting. He made me learn the craft, and at the same time I realized, yes, I am good at it. And slowly this whole other world opens up, because now you're not just a player, or trying to play like somebody else. It isn't just other people's expression. I can start to express myself, I can write my own music. It's almost

you've ever had in your hand ever, and more than your dad makes in a year, schlepping and working his fucking arse off. I mean, what to do with it is another thing, because I've got another gig to do, and I'm working. But I must say, the first taste of a few hundred crisp new bills was not unsatisfying. What to do with it took some time. But it was the first feeling of being ahead of the game. And all I did was write a couple songs and they gave it to me.

What they were reacting to was being in this enclosed space with us—this illusion, me, Mick and Brian. The music might be the trigger, but the bullet, nobody knows what that is.

never thought drugs per se had very much to do with whether I was productive or not. It might have changed a few chords, a few verses here and there, but I never felt any diminishment or any extra lift as far as what I was doing was concerned.

To write a song that is remembered and taken to heart is a connection, a touching of bases. A thread that runs through all of us. A stab to the heart. Sometimes

And there is the offending line "Black girls just wanna get fucked all night" from "Some Girls." Well, we've been on the road with a lot of black chicks for many years, and there's quite a few that do. It could have been yellow girls or white girls.

We never realized just what the scale of this thing would become. How did it get so big when we're not doing anything much different than what we did in 1963 in the Crawdaddy Club? Our usual set list is two-thirds standard Stones numbers, the classics. The only thing that's different is the audiences have grown and the show's gotten longer.

Everything they'd been brought up not to do, they could do at a rock-and-roll show.

His understanding of the DNA code in all bands is that sooner or later the two principals will turn on each other because one of them will be driven crazy by the knowledge that to be at their best they need to perform with the other person and therefore they need that other person to be successful, or even to be heard. It makes you hate that person.

He told me that because he was left-handed, he and John could play the guitars like mirrors opposite each other, watching each other's hands.

But after a while, if you've got some musical ears, you pick up on the difference between Pat Boone's "Ain't That a Shame" and Fats Domino's "Ain't That a Shame." Not that Pat Boone's was particularly bad, he was a very good singer, but it was just so shallow