I like all the kinds of music I’ve been into. I’m certainly not a purist in that I will only play country licks in a country song or blues licks in blues stuff.
In folk music, I’ve always been fond of the fragment. The song that has one verse. And you don’t know anything about the characters, you don’t know what they’re doing, but they’re doing something important. I love that. I’m really a sucker for that kind of song.
Now it has gotten a whole new leg. It has gotten a thing of being able to actually step in somebody’s reality and walk through it like they do, experience it the way they do, specifically.
Blah, blah, blah. What’s a crime? What’s criminality? What can you do, what can’t you do, and so forth. All these things are really confusing. A lot of it is really contradictory; it doesn’t really make sense.
To be alive in America is to hear all kinds of music constantly: radio, records, churches, cats on the street, everywhere music. And with records, the whole history of music is open to everyone who wants to hear it.
See, there’s only two theaters, man that are set up pretty groovy all around for music and for smooth stage changes, good lighting and all that – the Fillmore and The Capitol Theatre. And those are the only two in the whole country.
You have to be ready, and also you have to discard notions that are fondly held by a lot of musicians, about sequences and notes and about scales and musical systems as a whole. If you think of music as a language, the space part is where you throw out all the syntax.
