“Playing guitar was one of my childhood hobbies, and I had played a little at school and at camp.”

I can’t make you love me, if you don’t.

I have a soft side that I like people to see. I’m not mean. That’s just football. That’s just the way you’ve got to go. You can’t go into a game that is that violent and be soft. You can’t be that way.

The fact is that this conversation is going on at every level at every age, we’re all going, “God, what a jerk I’ve been,” “How could I have married that guy?” or “How could I have done this or that?” With time, this is the gift of being older, that you get to look back and say, “It wasn’t all about them.”

We did a two month tour with Taj Mahal that was really healing and cathartic and a good distraction after my brother passed away. Then I knew I wanted to take a year off, and it was really nice to have that chance to fall apart.

It can unite kids and musicians, everybody, whether they’re leftist or rightist, or radical, or Republican, because energy is energy. But in fact, it is a real political struggle – it shows people that it’s big business against the people.

If you don’t think drugs have done good things for us, then take all of your records, tapes and CD’s and burn them.

Really important issues are getting lost, so I can say I’m glad to be a citizen of the planet and do my part.

Remember that time you tried to hump the bridge?

I didn’t have the time to literally write and draw the strip at the same time.

Hey Susie Derkins, is that your face, or is a ‘possum stuck in your collar?

You don’t have to look a certain way to have a hit record.

We just magically thought this was all going to happen: we were going to have clean food, and organic this, and conscious that, and it just didn’t happen.

We can live in fear or act out of hope.

The connection between toxicity and cancer and safe air and water and food, all of that was important all along, as were women’s and human rights issues, but the nuke issue and the safe energy movement became really important to me in the mid-’70s.

I’ve been lucky enough that I can gather all sorts of experiences and find inspiration by traveling around and by spending time with people I admire.

How I measure success is getting to make another record and being able to the come back to the same town and play again cause you sold out the last time.

It doesn’t really matter what chords I play, what words I say or time of day it is, as it’s only a Northern Song.

Give me a guitar and I’ll play; give me a stage and I’ll perform; give me an auditorium and I’ll fill it.

The stainless-steel frets were a major breakthrough, because of the amount of playing and bending that I do. I have to get my guitars refretted every couple of months.

I am, and always will be, a blues guitarist.

The first guitar I ever had was a gut-string Spanish guitar, and I couldn’t really get the hang of it. I was only 13, and I talked my grandparents into buying it for me. I tried and tried and tried, but got nowhere with it.

There’s such a wealth of arts and styles within the guitar… flamenco, jazz, rock, blues. You name it, it’s there. In the early days my dream was to fuse all those styles. Now composing has become just as important.

The blues appealed to me, but so did rock. The early rockabilly guitarists like Cliff Gallup and Scotty Moore were just as important to me as the blues guitarists.

I’m a bad guitar tuner. I have to pay somebody to tune my guitars.