Creativity Quote by Jim Sullivan

There is a particular kind of flex in claiming you don’t remember being part of something other people still talk about. Jim Sullivan’s line lands because it’s not bragging in the usual key; it’s the shrug of a working musician whose life is made of takes, rooms, and anonymous excellence. The “DB sessions” (almost certainly shorthand for a specific set of recordings, the kind that become lore among collectors and credits obsessives) are framed as just another day at the office. Memory isn’t the point; output is.

The subtext is about how pop history gets manufactured after the fact. A session becomes “historic” only once someone else circles it with a red pen years later. Herbie Flowers functions here as the archivist-witness, the guy who remembers the personnel because in session culture, the receipts matter: who played, who showed up, who solved the problem in 20 minutes and moved on. Sullivan’s forgetfulness isn’t incompetence; it’s a comment on the grind. When your career is a long corridor of studios, tours, and last-minute calls, individual doors blur.

There’s also a quiet melancholy: credit and recognition arrive sideways, through reminders from peers, not through institutions designed to honor the labor. The line exposes the paradox of recorded music: performances can become permanent, even iconic, while the people making them experience the moment as disposable. It’s a portrait of craftsmanship under capitalism, where art is eternal and the artist is, too often, just on the clock.