But then there was Hendrix, man. Jimi was really the last cat to freak me. Jimi was playing all the stuff I had in my head. I couldn't believe it, when I first heard him. Man, no one can ever do what he did with a guitar. No one can ever take his place.
We are trying to prove that the blues lives on forever and anybody in this place can sing the blues.
I was a kid that grew up listening to The Beatles and The Stones and Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, and I wanted all of that in there. But at the same time, a large part of my playing is Tony Iommi and Billy Gibbons. I'm just a sum total of all of the guitar players that I think were really cool.
Some songs are just going to be acoustic with just maybe some light background stuff going on and maybe violin or something like that. Or sax - I mean, I'm definitely having some sax. That's just what I love. It's going to be jazz-rock stuff. That's what I'm aiming for.
Not to be mean about it, but some great rock and rollers, like Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry, are pretty one-dimensional.
You've heard me call myself a bluesman and a blues singer. I call myself a blues singer, but you ain't never heard me call myself a blues guitar man. Well, that's because there's been so many can do it better'n I can, play the blues better'n me. I think a lot of them have told me things, taught me things.
I was playing with Chuck Berry, who sounded like an English teacher. Did you ever listen to his records? He pronounces every word.
I rejected most of the folk I was exposed to in the Seventies. I came around later to Tom Waits, some parts of Jim Croce, and a lot of Cat Stevens.
I've listened to blues my whole life. I know it, I play it, I understand it.
Brian Jones was a big friend of mine.
I think what I always want whenever I'm recording is to have even just 2 percent of what the Alabama Shakes have, Brittany Howard.
I found The Doors, and thank God I found The Doors because it inspired me to do Strange Music, and it saved my life.
I want to play Keith Richards.
I do not claim any of the creation of the blues, although I have written many of them even before Mr. Handy had any blues published. I heard them when I was knee-high to a duck.
As far as people, I've always loved Tony Iommi's sound, just the grittiness that was in that era of metal where it wasn't too fuzzy, and you could still hear the guitar and the fingers, but it still had this chunky, meat-and-potatoes sound to it.
The early Stones were adolescent rockers. They were self-conscious in an obvious and unpretentious way. And they were committed to a musical style that needed no justification because it came so naturally to them. As they grew musically the mere repetition of old rock and blues tunes became increasingly less satisfying.
I discovered the same thing Gram Parsons did, that soul music and country music are practically identical. Based off of the same chord structures, and the songs are of heartache and loss. The main connection is they both came up in church.
I believe in blues, and I believe that it's been misrepresented.
Ever since I was a little kid and first heard Jimmy Reed's 'Honey, Don't Let Me Go,' the blues has been in my blood.
I'm a real Otis Redding fan, and I just think he sounds so good. He sounds like he's always at the end of a long day, and he just won't give up. I just love his wearied devotion - that beautiful, beautiful, weathered sound.
Well, I don't know how they define that. But they have this Texas blues thing blown kinda out of proportion. I am a Long John Hunter blues, before and after, that's what I am.
I'm not a super blues player, but I was exposed to the Texas blues sound while I was growing up, and that definitely rubbed off on me.
To me, true rock 'n' roll has a lot of bottom in it.
I haven't lost my blues roots.
John Fahey, thought during his lifetime to be possibly more than a little crazy, was the author of some thirty albums of gnomically introverted droning guitar instrumentals, which I listened to heavily in my teens and twenties; I even produced an hour or so of banjo music in an imitative John Fahey style.
