Wit & Attitude Quote by Noel Redding

Long hair, pink suits, purple glasses: Redding lists the era's visual heresies like evidence in a trial, then shrugs at the verdict. The line is doing two things at once. On the surface it reads as a goofy tour anecdote from the psychedelic boom, the moment when rock stopped dressing like a polite entertainment business and started dressing like a dare. Underneath, it’s a neat bit of self-defense from a working musician who watched style get mistaken for pathology.

The repeated “and”s and “and stuff” matter. They mimic a rush of sensation, a casual overflow, the way counterculture aesthetics arrived not as a manifesto but as a tidal wave of choices. Redding isn’t romanticizing it; he’s making it sound almost inevitable, like everyone was “starting to” do it, a social contagion that’s also a liberation. Then comes the pivot: “some people thought we were crazy.” That “some people” is pointedly vague, a stand-in for parents, press, police, and the straight world that wanted to medicalize any refusal to look normal.

The punchline - “but we weren’t really crazy because we’re all still here!” - lands like a musician’s pragmatic punch-through-the-myth. He’s not arguing that the scene was harmless; he’s arguing that the label “crazy” was a way to dismiss experimentation and police gender and taste. Survival becomes the counterargument, the ultimate credential. Coming from the bassist in Jimi Hendrix’s orbit, it’s also bittersweet: the 60s sold madness as glamour, but the bodies were real. Redding’s insistence on being “still here” is both brag and quiet rebuttal to an era that loved the look of danger more than the cost.