Sixties Music Quotes

By the eighties, a lot of radio stations had started playing "Sixties" music. They called it "Classic Rock," because they knew we'd be upset if they came right out and called it what it is, namely "middle-aged-person nostalgia music.

Bob Dylan was the source of pop music's unpredictability in the Sixties. Never as big a record-seller as commonly imagined, his importance was first aesthetic and social, and then as an influence.

My parents raised me on Spooky Tooth and The Band, Derek and the Dominoes, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, all that stuff. Rock n' roll was just in my subconscious.

We got £25 a week in the early Sixties when we were first with Brian Epstein, when we played the clubs.

I listened to oldies radio stations as a kid; lots of Kinks and Beatles and '50s hits.

It was always the singer that was the front man, but Mike stood there and played piano and keyboards. He had a great voice and he was the Sixties' Rod Stewart, and he contributed a tremendous amount to the Dave Clark Five.

It wasn't until 1963 that you would really want to listen to any kind of English music.

Music was so important to the culture when I was growing up in the Sixties and Seventies. We just expected that Bob Dylan was going to make a great record, and it was normal. It was like, 'Okay, here's another great record by Bob Dylan; here's another great record by Led Zeppelin.'

I think The Doors are one of the classic groups, and I think we're all tempted to feel like the time in which we grew up was somehow special, but I really do believe that there were two golden eras in music: The Forties and Fifties of big band, jazz and swing, and the Sixties and Seventies of rock. To me, they're really unparalleled.

The whole British music scene of the mid-sixties had a pretty profound effect on me.

I mean people have compared us to like the Grateful Dead and all these like psychedelic sixties bands.

England was always very special. It was so important because the reason Benny and I started writing was the Beatles. During the Sixties, England was everything. To be number one in England was more important than being number one in America because England set the tone.

It was such an amazing time for music in the Sixties. When popular music hit me, it was like magic was in the air.

I began writing with Mike Pinder and eventually we went on to form a new band called The M&B, which later became The Moody Blues, what I would call a progressive blues band.