I would go back to the past and watch one of the early Beatles shows, because they were such a massive part of cultural history. As a younger person, you feel you missed out on that.
Anyone who knows the history of the Pete Best Band or the Combo, we were on the verge of breaking in in America. In the mid-'60s, I had great songwriters; we wrote some great stuff.
The Beatles are here, and if you could see me my hand is on the ceiling. Styx is here, and my hand is in the basement.
I met The Beatles and Stones at the same time, because Michael Cooper was doing several of their album covers.
You know, Glen Campbell sang with the group right before I joined the group.
When I joined Small Faces, we occasionally would bump into The Who. And Keith Moon and I became firm pals.
It's hard to describe how bloody awful music was, how desperately bad it was, how our 1960s heroes had become boring and useless. Not only were they bad - they were badly dressed.
I do a cover of a Velvet Underground song, and they were one of the most important bands, for me.
In 1962, I wrote a series about 42nd Street called 'Welcome to Lostville.' One result was that the young Bob Dylan read it and invited me to his first concert at Town Hall; the result was a kind of friendship that years later led to my liner notes for 'Blood on the Tracks.'
In 1965, Gibson made the red one I use now, and a black one, which was the first black 335 they ever made.
The second half of the '60s really was a kind of learning period, in terms of writing, for me.
You would probably think that rock music is an urban phenomena, but the main reason for doing it in '68 was so that we could play music very loud any time of the day or night without getting complaints from the neighbours.
All of us '60s pop stars came from old cities which had a jazz club, a folk club, a coffee house, and an art school.
It's much easier for me to say that, the kind of music I didn't listen to was pretty much that. I mean everything, from jazz to classical to popular. And Tibetan horns were a great part of it in 1966, '67.
There's a lot of unreleased blues stuff I did with the Apollo Theater musicians, and there was of experimenting going on for me in the mid-'60s in that studio, which I think frustrated Columbia.
Wherever I go, people still shout out: 'Hey, hey, we're The Monkees.' And I never tire of that.
Paul and I were friends, the Moody Blues toured with the Beatles on the second British tour. That developed into me working with Paul, whom I always admired.
Dave Van Ronk, for those who don't know him - probably most don't know - was a folk singer. He's kind of the biggest person on the scene in 1961 in the folk revival in Greenwich Village, biggest person on the scene until Bob Dylan showed up.
Having recorded his first album, 'Tapestry,' in 1969, in Berkeley, California, during the student riots, McLean, a native New Yorker, became a kind of weather vane for what he called the 'generation lost in space.'
Jim MacLaine was the hero of Ray Connolly's 1973 movie 'That'll Be the Day', about a young man turning his back on a university education at the turn of the '60s in order to try his hand in a rock n' roll band.
I was a big Who fan when I was 15, 16 years old, and I used to go watch them play at the Marquee Club in London as often as I could.
When the Doors became huge, what nascent rock intelligentsia existed at the time adored them.
I went to see John Mayall at the Marquee, with Peter Green on guitar, and that was a particularly good gig.
Nobody can compare themselves to what The Beatles went through. It was wild.
Jacksonville back in the 1960s was kind of a redneck town. There were only two or three places where you could play our kind of hard rock - or 'hippie music' as it was called back then. You had to go to Georgia or some place else.
