Creativity Quote by Robin Trower

Robin Trower’s line lands like a road-tested verdict, not a grand theory: America, for all its chaos, still knows how to show up for guitar music. Coming from a British musician whose career was forged in the long afterglow of late-60s rock, “The States” functions as both shorthand and myth. It’s not just a place; it’s a circuit of clubs, festivals, radio formats, and legacy-tour economics that kept many UK blues-rock players solvent long after the zeitgeist moved on.

The phrasing matters. “Still” implies a quiet surprise and a comparison stretching back decades, a nod to the shifting cultural center of rock: from counterculture fuel to niche devotion. “By far” is the musician’s exaggeration, but it’s also a protective certainty. Artists say it when they’re tired of polite applause, half-full rooms, and audiences that treat live music like background. The subtext is transactional in the best sense: American crowds are loud, responsive, and emotionally legible. They clap, they shout, they buy merch. They validate the labor.

There’s a bigger cultural tell here, too. In the UK, rock can be canonized into museum culture; in parts of the US, it stays participatory, less about critical permission and more about communal release. Trower isn’t praising American taste as “better.” He’s praising its behavior: the audience as co-performer, the room as amplifier, the night as proof the old machinery still sparks.