“But between sets I’d sneak over to the black places to hear blues musicians. It got to the point where I was making my living at white clubs and having my fun at the other places.”

I’ve put my life back together, but it’s all a growing process and that’s neat, too, because if you stop growing, what good is it musically? So that is what I am looking forward to – growing. In some ways, I felt stagnant in my life and it showed.

Even though there’s reasons to try things that may or may not work, it’s still a real intimate way to finish the song with everybody right there in the band just locked in.

I actually wanted to be a drummer, but I didn’t have any drums.

The whole deal is when you walk onstage, you’re up there bigger than life. People idolize you.

You know, right now, the most important thing in my life is to make sure you understand that, first of all, I thank God I’m alive today, and I mean that. You see, I spent too many years of my life thinking that the big party was the whole thing.

That’s how it happens, livin life by the drop.

It is the human things that make life good, the unexpected kindness, the friendly note, the bracing word, the neighbour’s extra loaf of bread she leaves at our back door.

The problem with taking amps to a shop is that they come back sounding like another amp.

What I am trying to get across to you; is please take of yourselves and those that you love; because that is what we are hear for, that’s all we got, and that is all we can take with us. Are you with me?

Looking back in front of me, in the mirror a grin. Through eyes of love I see, I’m only looking at a friend.

I use heavy strings, tune low, play hard, and floor it. Floor it. That’s technical talk.

All the Strats have personalities of their own and feel completely different.

The way people come into your life when you need them, it’s wonderful and it happens in so many ways. It’s like having an angel. Somebody comes along and helps you get right.

After I changed the string we picked up right where we left off – and punched back in at the same time. I don’t know if this has ever been done before. The engineer sort of looked at us weird, but we got it on the first take.

Some of us can be examples about going ahead and growing, and some of us, unfortunately, don’t make it there, and end up being examples because they had to die. I hit rock bottom, but thank God my bottom wasn’t death.

I was walking around trying to act cool, like I had no fear at all. But I was afraid, afraid that somebody would find out just how scared I was. Now I’m finally realizing that fear is the opposite of love.

He who seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity.

And I ask why am I black, they say I was born in sin, and shamed inequity. One of the main songs we used to sing in church makes me sick, ‘love wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.

We knew that in the end what they were clashing over was us, what to do with the blacks, and whether or not to start treating us as human beings.

Discrimination based on skin color, sexual orientation,& gender needs to stop. We’re all humans at the end of the day.

Oppression is wrong. Species don’t matter.

Dr. Martin Luther King is not a black hero. He is an American hero.

For today’s generation of blacks to act as if their struggle compares to that of two generations ago insults and diminishes that generation’s struggle.

The myth of the strong black woman is the other side of the coin of the myth of the beautiful dumb blonde.