Quotes About Music

the Beatles and the Stones, never the Stones and the Beatles.

Remember how once, just once, you scored the best dope in the world? Remember how you smoked till your mouth and your throat were all sandpaper and your lungs thought you'd gone down on a fireplace? Remember how you put on your headphones—took three tries, didn't it?—and cranked Dark Side of the Moon or "The Ride of the Valkyries" or whatever most got you off all the way up to eleven, man? Remember what it was like?

it's one thing to follow #alienmusicstories about it and another to be practicing the tricky sax solo for the rachmaninoff and see one slither through your open dorm window and re-form into elvis.

Nn omns qu habent citharam sunt citharoed.

When the topic of pseudonymous composition arises, I like to ask my students whether all those albums issued under the name of Bob Dylan for the last fifteen years can possibly be the work of the same person who performed "Highway 61 Revisited.")

The discovery of song and the creation of musical instruments both owed their origin to a human impulse which lies much deeper than conscious intention: the need for rhythm in life the need is a deep one, transcending thought, and disregarded at our peril.

Being able to play these memories forward with circus music and backward with silly music allows the feelings to become separated from the images and the memories will no longer haunt you. The purpose of memories is to learn from them or to enjoy them or to use them as guides for your behavior, and it doesn't help to relive trauma. Over the years, I've helped many, many people whose lives had been crippled by traumatic experiences to get away from the memories.

Simon's interest and love for life comes from arts, from music, books, his collection of paintings and beautiful cars. My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them.

Happiness isn't happiness without a violin-playing goat.

Rinzler was struck by the fact that for all its onstage spontaneity, Monroe's music wasn't intuitive. He had consciously created it and could relate exactly where he had gotten each sound, like a painter who knows exactly what colors he has used from his palette.35 Rinzler began to see that this enigmatic man did little that he had not very deliberately decided upon.

Flatt and Scruggs formed a band called the Foggy Mountain Boys, taking its name from "Foggy Mountain Top," a Carter Family favorite they decided to use as their theme song.

Rock & roll music is a derivative of rockabilly music; rockabilly music is Bill Monroe and the blues tied together. That's it.

The bitter irony, of course, was that the same young musicians who stood in awe of Bill Monroe were about to push him, and others like him, off the stage. Rock 'n' roll began to take the youth audience away from country music. And that was a disaster.

In a multifaceted, trend-setting career, he had truly become the most broadly talented and broadly influential figure in American popular music history. He had been much more than the Father of Bluegrass: He had been an uncle to country music, a first cousin to the folk revival, and a grandfather to rock 'n' roll.166

Of course, the most common response is that Bill Monroe was "the Father of Bluegrass" and its true creator. It was his melding of a band sound around fiddle playing, his high singing, his revolutionary mandolin stylings, and his distinctive surging rhythm that set bluegrass apart from the rest of country or folk music.

The most striking hallmarks of so-called traditional bluegrass were fully defined during the Jimmy Martin years, long after Flatt and Scruggs had left the Blue Grass Boys. If Bill Monroe started bluegrass, Earl Scruggs certainly made it as popular as it is today. But it is crucial to recognize that Monroe was the prime creative organizer and artistic guiding force behind bluegrass.

Arguments about the origins of bluegrass are particularly intense because—as "traditional" as bluegrass is in comparison to the rest of American popular music—it has a starting point within living memory (unlike opera or symphonic music), and its origins can arguably be credited to one man

For those unhappy with modern society, folk music suggested the colors, scents, and textures of a more authentic time. The folk scene offered a purer cultural identity, or at least the fantasy of one.

Bill Monroe's earliest paid music work was thanks to Shultz, who asked Bill to "second him" on guitar when he fiddled for square dances.

Contrary to popular belief, the performers who emerged from the southern hills to become the pioneers of country music and bluegrass were not from an exclusively aural folk tradition. Formal musical education, albeit rudimentary, was available each summer in towns like Rosine in the form of "singing schools!

Meanwhile, the Flatt and Scruggs juggernaut rolled on. Under Louise Scruggs's shrewd management, Monroe's former sidemen had become the bluegrass darlings of the northern folk music revival.

Ralph and Mike would soon be caught up in a remarkable phenomenon that transcended prevailing regional, class, and gender boundaries. It was an intertwining cultural grapevine that united northerners and southerners who shared a common passion for rural string band music. This network proved crucial to the survival of Bill Monroe's career and even bluegrass itself.

Meanwhile, David Grisman, a Ralph Rinzler protege and Monroe devotee from New Jersey, was living in California and developing his own newgrassy sound, a blend of bluegrass, swing, and Jewish klezmer that he called "dawg music" (after the canine nickname bestowed on him by friend Jerry Garcia).

Performing at the Sea of Galilee, a huge full moon shining behind him, he launched into "Blue Moon of Kentucky" and the crowd came to its feet. He encored seven times that night. Bill had been pleasantly surprised that Jewish Americans like Gene Lowinger, Steve Arkin, and David Grisman had become his devotees; now he was happy, indeed profoundly moved, that Israelis loved and understood his music.