"The consolidation of the music business has made it difficult to encourage styles like the blues, all of which deserve to be celebrated as part of our most treasured national resources"
"I enjoy playing the band as the band. I 'be' the whole band and I'm playing the drums, I'm playing the guitar, I'm playing the saxophone. To me, the most wonderful thing about playing music is that"
"Some of the wise boys who say my music is loud, blatant and that's all should see the faces of the kids who have driven a hundred miles through the snow to see the band... to stand in front of the bandstand in an ecstasy all their own"
"Lovers of painting and lovers of music are people who openly display their preference like a delectable ailment that isolates them and makes them proud"
"The mountain music... is compelling music in its own right, harking back to a time when music was a part of everyday life and not something performed by celebrities"
"I'm not trying to stay in the same place and I'm not trying to compete with what's currently in fashion. That would be dishonest. But, at the same time, I'm different and the music reflects that to some degree"
"Whether you listen to a piece of music, or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug, or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own"
"Music is an art that expresses the inexpressible. It rises far above what words can mean or the intelligence define. Its domain is the imponderable and impalpable land of the unconscious"
"Drugs, sex, booze, all the stuff that we wanted to do. The problem was that we didn't want to learn the top 40 'cause most of the music was awful and we had this other idea about what we wanted to do"
"I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens"
"The movie business is very difficult but the music business is just impossible. So I'll play in bands and record and play songs with other people, but for me it's a form of expression that all I need is me. I don't need cameras or agents, I can just have a piano and sing and feel totally verified"
"I do music because I can just pick up my guitar and sing, and completely satisfy, instant gratification. I don't need a script, I don't people, I don't need anything, cameras, I just have myself and my guitar, or keyboard"
"The 1960s were big for folk music, and the Kingston Trio led the way. They were the ones who started it all. The music was fresh and alive. College kids loved it and their parents did, too"
"People often complain that music is too ambiguous, that what they should think when they hear it is so unclear, whereas everyone understands words. With me, it is exactly the opposite, and not only with regard to an entire speech but also with individual words"
"Describing Woodstock as the "big bang," I think that's a great way to describe it, because the important thing about it wasn't how many people were there or that it was a lot of truly wonderful music that got played"
"Half the time I feel like I'm appealing to the downer freaks out there. We start to play one downer record after another until I begin to get down myself. Give me something from 1960 or something; let me get up again. The music of today is for downer freaks, and I'm an upper"
"You know, and it really doesn't have a lot to do with the movie. That's the trick to doing a good musical is that, if you take that music number out, there's less to the movie there. You would miss it"
"Music and songs are written at different periods of time, at different times in your life. They reflect the feelings you have and to be honest, I quite like having positive emotions"
"I work on words quite separately to music. They're both ongoing, and I don't ever feel like I'm working in a cycle in that respect, because it's every day anyway, no matter what I'm doing. Then I get to a point when I've collected together enough words that seem like they want to be songs rather than poems, or sometimes not"
"I am quite certain in my heart of hearts that modern music and modern art is not a conspiracy, but is a form of truth and integrity for those who practise it honestly, decently and with all their being"
