Quotes About Rock

PETE TOWNSHEND WROTE a lengthy essay, "A Discourse on Mick Jagger's Fortieth Birthday," and sent us a picture of himself holding a lit candle with "Happy Birthday Mick" written across his chest.

The fossil record is always there, whether or not you discover it. The brittle ghosts of the past. Memory is not like the surface of the water - either troubled or still. Memory is layered. What you were was another life, but the evidence is somewhere in your rock - your trilobites and ammonites, your struggling life-forms, just when you thought you could stand upright.

Living there [Horse Mesa] was like living in a natural cathedral. Waking up every morning, you walked outside and looked down at the blue lake, then up at the sandstone cliffs--those awe-inspiring layers of red and yellow rock shaped over the millennia, with dozens of black-streaked crevices that temporarily became waterfalls after rainstorms.

I've been a Nick Cave fan since the early '80s when he was part of The Birthday Party thing singing Australian self-destructive rock band and I've always followed his work and loved it.

Geniuses are at work in the rock music field, and great popularity is no proof you aren't good.

Recognize a rock 'n' roller for what he is, which is a damned lucky guy not to have to work for a living.

My first guitar was a Gretsch 6120, and I just loved listening to artists like Elvis, Chuck Berry and Stray Cats.

For the most part, rock fans don't go and buy CDs any more, very rarely. It's pretty much about downloads and streaming.

I'm a street player, and all of my influences come from bands that I was listening to at the time when I was growing up. I was very impressed with guys like Mitch Mitchell. I liked rock and roll drummers, and I loved rhythm and blues guys like Clyde Stubblefield with James Brown. Man, that band blew me away all of the time.

I have a couple of basses in my office. And I try to be courteous of my co-workers, but sometimes I get carried away and I crank up my amp and I rock out. It's kind of my stress reliever.

When I first started playing in a band, before the Beatles, working bands played standards and they saved their rock material til the end of the night when they were really stretched out. It could be pretty lame.

I can't read music. That's not where I come from musically. I come strictly from feeling, and that feeling comes from rock & roll.

Initially, I just used the guitar as a prop. I'd pose with it in front of a mirror in my Kiss makeup when I was skipping school. Then I figured out how to play the main riff to Deep Purple's 'Smoke on the Water' on just the E string. Next, my old man showed me how to play barre chords, and that's when things started getting really heavy.

The Gaslight Anthem is very streamlined. We don't usually use organs and strings and things like that.

The problem for me, still today, is that I write purely with one dramatic structure and that is the rite of passage. I'm not really skilled in any other. Rock and roll itself can be described as music to accompany the rite of passage.

Before Dylan, before rock became art, it was a wonderful fusion of pop structure and personal statements.

It was the early days of Rock 'n' Roll in this country. We were all struggling to learn music, it might be Country, Jazz, Classical, Blues or even Rock 'n' Roll.

The first nine albums there was never a Synthesiser, never any Orchestra. There was never any other player except us on the albums.

Our band was different. We were still playing rock 'n' roll, but we had an entirely different sound: just one guitar, but an organ and a saxophone.

A lot of places we go, when they see the organ coming in, they're expecting rock and roll, but after they hear us play they like it. To me, guitar cuts through-it carries more than organ. But organ has got more guts.

Basically we're a blues oriented rock 'n' roll band... easy to listen to.

Elvis was the king. No doubt about it. People like myself, Mick Jagger and all the others only followed in his footsteps.

We're not here to make the ignorant people happy. We're here to write our music for those people that are interested in good rock n' roll music.

The Grateful Dead were an influence on our music but they weren't by a long shot the biggest influence.