If a song’s about something I’ve experienced or that could’ve happened to me it’s good. But if it’s alien to me, I couldn’t lend anything to it. Because that’s what soul is all about.
~Aretha Franklin
I Say A Little Prayer – “The Cliff Richard Show” 1970:
The world is full of musicians who can play great, and you wouldn’t cross the road to see them. It’s people who have this indefinable attitude that are the good ones.
~Nick Lowe
As long as my body holds out, I’ll be grooving when I’m 70, and not some sort of horrible spectacle.
~Nick Lowe
As the leader of the seminal pub rockers Brinsley Schwarz, a producer, and a solo artist, Nick Lowe held considerable influence over the development of punk rock. With the Brinsleys, Lowe began a back-to-basics movement that flowered into punk rock in the late ’70s. As the house producer for Stiff, he recorded many seminal records by the likes of the Damned, Elvis Costello, and the Pretenders. His rough, ragged production style earned him the nickname “Basher” and also established the amateurish, D.I.Y. aesthetics of punk. Despite his massive influence on punk rock, Lowe was never really a punk rocker. ..
~Stephen Thomas Erlewine (allmusic.com)
Live BBC 4 Sessions 2007 concert (59min)
00:19 Heart
03:45 What’s Skakin’ On The Hill
07:16 Without Love
09:55 Lately I’ve Let Things Slide
13:16 Has She Got A Friend?
16:05 I Trained Her To Love Me
20:23 Indian Queens
24:21 Cruel To Be Kind
27:47 You Inspire Me
31:15 Introducing The Horns
31:52 Long Limbed Girl
34:55 Hope For Us All
38:56 The Other Side Of The Coin
42:15 Shting-Shtang
45:08 The Man In Love
47:22 (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding
51:40 I Knew The Bride
56:00 The Beast In Me
“Of course that was my idol, Son House. I think he did a lot for the Mississippi slide down there.”
~Muddy Waters
–
“People keep asking me where the blues started and all I can say is that when I was a boy we always was singing in the fields. Not real singing, you know, just hollerin’, but we made up our songs about things that was happening to us at the time, and I think that’s where the blues started.”
~Son House (1965)
“I’m trying to define the relationship between man and the universe,….. often it’s between man and man, or man and woman, or man and the cosmos. Whatever song comes through the door I’m happy with.… I’m lucky just to play the guitar and sing.”
~TVZ (on the purpose behind his songwriting)
“Figures like Townes Van Zandt remind us that the wandering bard, that American archetype, is still very much with us—and his music will live long after the voices that declare it in or out of fashion have been stilled or forgotten.”
~Robert Palmer (New York Times/Deep Blues/++)
“I lived in Fort Worth till I was 8, Midland till 9, Billings, Montana, till 12, Boulder, Colorado till 14, Chicago till 15 … Houston till I was 21. And then I started traveling.”
~TVZ (to Contemporary Musicians (CM) in 1992)
First of all, you have to understand that I’m like anybody else. When I hear my voice on a record I absolutely loathe my voice. I cannot stand my voice.
~Roger Daltrey
He almost invented the pseudo-messianic role taken up later by Jim Morrison and Robert Plant.
~Pete Townshend
“When I first started I never meant to make money. My only thought was to make a living singing, but all of a sudden I was getting $1500 a night. And if you take a 19-year-old boy and put him in those circumstances…it was a bad scene, it shouldn’t have happened on that first record. I didn’t know how to handle a hit: I was only a child, a boy.”
~Gene Vincent in 1969
Gene Vincent only had one really big hit, “Be-Bop-a-Lula,” which epitomized rockabilly at its prime in 1956 with its sharp guitar breaks, spare snare drums, fluttering echo, and Vincent’s breathless, sexy vocals. Yet his place as one of the great early rock & roll singers is secure, backed up by a wealth of fine smaller hits and non-hits that rate among the best rockabilly of all time.
~Richie Unterberger (allmusic.com)
