“If your playing basic music, its just rock.”

They’re drinkin’ home brew from a wooden cup. The folks were dancin’ there got all shook up.

If the people in the audience are talking, you’re being ignored. If the people are gazing at you, you’ve got something they want to hear.

A contract is an ask game, and if it asks for an hour, and I submit to an hour, then it’s an hour. When I look at a contract, I look at the obligation – where, when, how long, the compensation. If I agree to it, that’s the way it is. I have an obligation. They have an obligation.

Rock is my child and my grandfather.

You don’t just go to the studio and say, ‘I’m going to write a hit.’ It becomes a hit when people like your compositions.

Rock ‘n’ roll accepted me and paid me, even though I loved the big bands I went that way because I wanted a home of my own. I had a family. I had to raise them. Let’s don’t leave out the economics. No way.

Maybellene, why can’t you be true?

The Big Band Era is my era. People say, ‘Where did you get your style from?’ I did the Big Band Era on guitar. That’s the best way I could explain it.

Looking hard for a drive in, searching for a corner cafe, where the hamburgers sizzle on an open grill night and day.

Music is an important part of our culture and record stores play a vital part in keeping the power of music alive.

All in all it was my intention to hold both the black and the white clientele by voicing the different kinds of songs in their customary tongues.

I grew up thinking art was pictures until I got into music and found I was an artist and didn’t paint.

My music is simple stuff. Anybody can sit down, look at a set of symbols and produce sounds the music represents.

Everything I wrote about wasn’t about me, but about the people listening.

I think I see her, please let me off this bus. Nadine, honey, is that you?

Up come a flat top, he was movin’ up with me.

Practice. I used to sit on the edge of my bed with a six-pack of Tuborg. My brother would go out to party and get laid, come home at 3am., and I would still be playing with myself.

Hail, hail rock and roll / Deliver me from the days of old.

Every time you pick up your guitar to play, play as if it’s the last time.

The music scene as I look at it today is a little different from when I was growing up. The percentages are roughly the same – 95 percent rubbish, 5 percent pure.

Its neither politics or religion. Music is the universal love language.

Some musicians, man, you hear the note almost before they hit it. Jimi, Coltrane and Charlie Parker were like that.

For me there is something primitively soothing about this music, and it went straight to my nervous system, making me feel ten feet tall.

If somebody’s going to represent our music live, I’d like to see it represented with excellence and spectacularly and with really great musicianship.