Sometimes with labels you can start to be pushed in a certain direction. With self-releasing, the band always comes first and so does creativity. Sometimes it can get a little more muddled when you have more people that you’re trying to make money for.
Musicians Quotes
Frank Zappa’s house in the canyon, which I visited several times, looked exactly like a troll’s kingdom. Fuzzy haired women lounged in long antique dresses, and naked children ran to and fro while Frank sat behind piles of electronic equipment discussing his latest ideas for orchestrating satirical hippie rock music. Never a druggie, Frank openly […]
The most dangerous thing is improvising with a band and thinking, “Okay, now’s the time to play that diminished scale,” and somebody in the band is thinking, “Now’s the time to play a major chord.” Those kinds of accidents do happen.
For years I had something called Music On The Desert Road, which was a recording of all kinds of different ethnic musics from different places in the Middle East. I used to listen to that all the time – I liked that kind of melodic feel. I listened to Indian music, Ravi Shankar and so […]
A lot of people like Mozart were prodigies; they were writing brilliant works at very young ages. That’s probably what’s going to happen: some brilliant kid will come along and be popular. I can see a lone artist with a lot of tapes and electrical … like an extension of the Moog synthesizer — a […]
Elvis started white people to really sing rock ‘n’ roll.
I think that Elvis was more acceptable being white back in that period. I believe that if Elvis had been Black, he wouldn’t have been as big as he was. If I was white, do you know how huge I’d be? If I was white, I’d be able to sit on top of the White […]
When I first came along, I never heard of any rock ‘n’ roll. I only heard Elmore James, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Ruth Brown, and Roy Brown. Blues. Fats Domino at the time was playing nothing but low-down blues.
This is my biggest issue with Big Sean and John Legend…they on that train of like, trying to—they just went too easy. I changed both of these people’s lives and they’re about that, ‘Oh don’t pay attention, he’s a rapper, he’s this.’ And it’s like yeah I’m a rapper and obviously I’m a genius too, […]
When the Jackson 5 came to Motown I was fascinated at Michael’s ability to study my every move. He learned everything I knew and everybody else he was interested in, too.
