Musical Past Quotes

I got a poster from Columbia Records, and there's Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, Ellington, Count Basie - everybody in that poster has died, I'm the only one left. And great players like Paul Desmond and Gerry Mulligan, it's hard to believe they're gone because we were all so close. But I believe in the future and the tradition will go on.

Back in the Eighties, I used to write ballads on my acoustic guitar, so it seems very natural to me to go back to a little singing.

I don't listen to my old stuff very often at all.

I was an alto and was in a lot of choirs growing up.

When I was a young man, I was a baritone, very far from possessing the whole range of the tenor then.

I don't know if they were all functioning, but I did play in a bunch of bands.

This is my seventh decade... and every once in a while I get a hankering to re-visit these songs again... songs with which I have had a great relationship.

I'm not a 'practicing' musician anymore. I played bass and guitar. I still pick up a guitar around the house every once in awhile.

I started playing violin when I was about five years old and I learned to read a little bit of music, but that's all been long, long forgotten! I actually quit violin to teach myself guitar and just went from there.

I know every note in every song, the whole history of it, even parts that were there and are gone.

I wasn't in a lot of rock and roll bands. I was in jug bands and things when I was in school.

Because usually in the past when I was in a big band, that was all I did.

It was part of a financial situation. I could only afford records in thrift stores. Then you could find wonderful things, but now everything is a collectible. I like the recycling idea --using the stuff that people don't want anymore, and make new music out of it. There was an element of looking back and listening to your parents' records and doing something with that stuff. Sort of acknowledging the past while rejecting it at the same time.

I've known Chicago for 50 years; we used to play shows at the Avalon Ballroom.

Years and years ago, I sang at a blues bar with a band behind me. It was with my friend, my guitar teacher at the time. I took some sporadic lessons.

We were at our best when we were playing in the dance halls of Liverpool and Hamburg. The world never saw that.

So don't get me wrong, I love my songs, and I still love hearing them. That's history, baby.

Well, a sort of epiphany: I was in a great band. And it's very cool to be at 53 and realise that when you were a kid you were in a great band.

I think of the Replacements only when they're brought up to me. For two years, I'm at home, they don't really cross my mind. I still hear them on the radio. I'm not ashamed of anything we did.

I used to play drums when I was a kid, play the trombone.

I was in a lot of bands growing up.

I used to be a great blues singer.

I've been singing since I was nine or ten.

I hung out with Merle Haggard on his bus, which sort of freaks me out. It was him and his wife. We played with Merle in Oklahoma City. I'm from Arizona, and we talked about Arizona, and he remembered playing for two dollars a day down there at a bar.

I knew the guys in the Allman Brothers way back in the day, before they were famous.