Words matter. These are the best Rolling Stones Quotes from famous people such as P. J. Harvey, George Ezra, Benmont Tench, Charlie Watts, Britt Daniel, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
People like Howlin’ Wolf, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, John Lee Hooker, Nina Simone, Captain Beefheart – all of these artists were what I grew up listening to every day of my life. And there’s a very healthy music scene in the west country of England, where I grew up.
When I was growing up, my brother liked the Beatles, and I liked the Rolling Stones. I think if I were a girl, Keith would be the one I fancied.
I got to play on a couple of records with the Rolling Stones, and that was really special to me.
It doesn’t really change, actually. I think The Rolling Stones have gotten a lot better. An awful lot better, I think. A lot of people don’t, but I think they have, and to me that’s gratifying. It’s worth it.
I love bands that can collaborate, and I feel like the Rolling Stones wouldn’t be nearly as great as they are if it wasn’t for them having a real group.
Rolling Stones, Beatles, we gave them all the break they were looking for. All they needed was a good opening act, and we went out there and performed as well as we could… over 15,000 kids chanting.
Adam Levine and I remade the Rolling Stones’ classic Wild Horses, and it is right up my alley, that whole style. It has a style of its own but still stays very true to the classic arrangement, and I love it.
The only criterion we used in doing cover material was we wanted to do songs that we wished bands would play when we went out. We were doing Yardbirds and Rolling Stones cover songs-which is not any big deal, but where we were from, all we were getting were Top 40 bands.
I believe the Rolling Stones wanted to play in Golden Gate Park.
The Rolling Stones are violence. Their music penetrates the raw nerve endings of their listeners and finds its way into the groove marked ‘release of frustration.’
Musicians of any era – whether it be The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Rage Against the Machine, or, of course, Madonna – will inspire fashion. And we, in turn, will inspire them.
If you look at Keith Richards’ hands, from the Rolling Stones, they’re these gnarled, arthritic – it looks like people beat his hands with clubs. It’s amazing there’s so much character in his hands.
If you’re the Rolling Stones, you can sing ‘Start Me Up’ for 35 years, and people still cheer.
If you ask me who the members of the Rolling Stones or Led Zep or the Clash were, I’d be able to tell you every member. But I couldn’t name a single member of Arctic Monkeys.
I loved the Rolling Stones. I heard a little bit of country music creeping around the edges of some of their songs. Being a Mississippi kid, I could feel they had done their homework, even when I was a little boy. I could feel the Delta blues influence in a lot of their work.
The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Barbra Streisand, Bruce Springsteen, these are just some of the people who threatened to sue if we used their songs.
The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Phil Spector. Those were my idols.
You’ve got the sun, you’ve got the moon, and you’ve got the Rolling Stones.
I never tried to emulate The Beatles, and I never really wanted to be like The Rolling Stones. I never really felt that I had the look or the demeanor of veteran musicians.
I think that I identify with Philadelphia for a lot of reasons. Without even thinking about it, I called myself ‘Philly’s Constant Hitmaker’ when I first got a MySpace, before I had any real hits. It was kind of just a funny slogan, basically lifted from the Rolling Stones’ first album, ‘England’s Newest Hit Makers.’
I really felt like we were gonna be The Rolling Stones of heavy metal, and we could have been.
When I’m 80 and sitting in a rocking chair listening to the Rolling Stones, there is absolutely no way I’m going to feel old or forget my younger days.
These days, the Rolling Stones still have an edge, but that fangs-out ferocity has mellowed considerably.
I can put a hip-hop beat to reggae. That is, I can have real reggae in the drums and in the rhythm, and on top of it I can put The Rolling Stones’ feeling, anyone’s feeling on top. Nobody has ever done this before, man.
The only band that we have never played with but have always wanted to is the Rolling Stones.
If you look in my CD case, you’ll see it’s Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, now I can’t think of anyone else, but all that stuff.
The very first concert I ever went to on my own was actually Rory Gallagher. In a one-month period in 1973 or ’74, I saw him, Thin Lizzy and the Rolling Stones. I wasn’t really a big Rory Gallagher fan, but I thought his guitar playing was fabulous. But Thin Lizzy, they were fabulous.
If the Rolling Stones are playing a concert across town, that’s not my audience anyways. But I do find that there’s a lot of people coming back around to see me again.
It’s true that when I was younger and I first got interested in music, I used to read books about the Stones and the Beatles and how they listened to Muddy Waters and people like that when they were starting out, who are much less well known now than the Rolling Stones. The Stones really changed blues.
I started off as a bar band. We played ZZ Top, Bob Seger, Waylon Jennings, the Rolling Stones – everything and anything people wanted to hear. You’re not really selling yourself back then; you’re selling beer.
While the Beatles always had George Martin around to clean up their act, the Rolling Stones had Andrew Loog Oldham to coarsen theirs.
In the late 1960s, English artists like the Rolling Stones and Joe Cocker began recording in the States, and at that point, they realised, ‘We can get real African-American voices on our records; we don’t have to pretend any more.’
Dave Matthews, Tim McGraw, U2, The Rolling Stones – there are a lot of artists selling out stadiums around the world that we work with regularly. And end up making most of our money with those artists.
The more parents hate the music, the more their children will like it. It had been true with Elvis, and it had been true with the Rolling Stones. ‘Straight Outta Compton’ was music that parents could loathe with a passion. I knew we had a massive hit.
The Rolling Stones… The Rolling Stones have a reflection to my music; I wouldn’t deny it. I think that’s honest.
I’ve been ripping the Rolling Stones off with every song I write in some form or another.
We listened to a lot of Rolling Stones and Beatles records when we were recording. They were really good at not playing loud, but generating really big sounds out of everything.
The Rolling Stones have been the best of all possible worlds: they have the lack of pretension and sentimentality associated with the blues, the rawness and toughness of hard rock, and the depth which always makes you feel that they are in the midst of saying something. They have never impressed me as being kitsch.
Everybody is always raving about the Rolling Stones, saying, ‘The Stones this, and the Stones that.’ I’ve never cared for the Stones. They never had anything to offer me musically, especially in the drumming department.
When you grow up in Atlanta, joining Lynyrd Skynyrd is like joining the Rolling Stones.
I don’t find imitating other people’s music easy at all. I remember being fifth in line for a Rolling Stones tour, early ’90s, when Bill Wyman left, and I was hoping against hope that I wouldn’t get the call to audition. I wouldn’t be able to play a Stones song if you put a gun to my head.
In June 1972, I went with friends to see the Rolling Stones at the Los Angeles Forum. After the concert, as we crossed through the parking lot, a guy in a brown Mercedes stopped in the middle of the street and got out. He came up to me and asked if I had ever modeled.
When you see U2 or the Rolling Stones, after years of knowing each other, they don’t have to look at each other to connect.
I achieved everything I wanted to achieve by being in the Rolling Stones and making records.
I went to go see the Rolling Stones in the park, and they were awful: completely out of tune. Jagger wore a frock.
N.W.A had something in common with the Rolling Stones and MC5 and groups like that: the voice of rebellion. It’s rebellion against your parents. It’s rebellion against the system. It’s rebellion against society.
I am a child of the ’70s, so I love classic rock – Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Van Morrison, and I also love Coldplay.
I like the Rolling Stones for karaoke. ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ is a great one.
I’ve never tried to achieve anything. I achieved everything I wanted to achieve by being in the Rolling Stones and making records.
When I came back to New York, it was such a joke because I was always referred to as the pure young poet who wasn’t in it for what he could get out of it. And all of a sudden, the pure young poet comes back… and I’m hanging out with the Rolling Stones.
I always use the Rolling Stones as the whipping boy for this, but they still play old songs as 90% of their set, and we would die if that were the case.
I’ve grown up with my parents’ music tastes, listening to Fleetwood Mac and the Rolling Stones.
I learned to play piano in a rock n’ roll context or band context from country records – you know, Floyd Cramer – and from the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Stax. And none of those are keyboard records.
We say, ‘Wow, look at Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. Their clothes were always so cool.’ Maybe not Mick Jagger when he wore Spandex in the ’80s.
If somebody says, ‘Do you remember the first time you heard a Rolling Stones song?’ if you say you do, you’re crazy. You’ve just always heard them. You might remember the first time it impacted you, but the first time you heard one, you were in a cradle.
If you’re an American kid, you can’t help but be influenced by Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and the Rolling Stones because they’re always on the radio.
My first real business was bootlegging T-shirts – I was just a dumb kid. You go to a concert and pay $25 for a cotton T-shirt that says ‘Rolling Stones,’ ‘Lollapalooza,’ or whatever. On the outside they’re 10 or 15 bucks. We were the guys selling them for 10 or 15 bucks.
Growing up in the Libya of the 1970s, I remember the prevalence of local bands who were as much influenced by Arabic musical traditions as by the Rolling Stones or the Beatles. But the project of ‘Arabisation’ soon got to them, too, and western musical instruments were declared forbidden as ‘instruments of imperialism.’
The Rolling Stones are much more accomplished than Jefferson Airplane, who are more like tribal people. That is, they present something which exists: The music and the hippie.
I want to live with a monk… and the Rolling Stones.
We wanted to be America’s Rolling Stones, to be the biggest band over here.
I love those Keith Richards solo records, but it’s not the Rolling Stones.
The Rolling Stones seemed very loose and wild, but when you read about them, you realize that everything they did is very deliberate.
I know Mick Jagger wouldn’t tour without Keith Richards and call it the Rolling Stones.
The only difference between The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Aerosmith, and Chubby Checker is that they get their music played on the radio.
The Rolling Stones set the bar to where I look to as a band. But I don’t envision myself touring in the way they do. My knees won’t hold out.
I went on tour with the Rolling Stones in 1972 for two or three cities. And in 1975, I was the tour photographer for the Rolling Stones. I hung onto my camera for dear life. Because it scared the hell out of me.
In grade one and two, I was definitely into heavy metal and Satanic rock music, bands that had attributes that were quote-unquote ‘Satanic,’ even things like the Rolling Stones with ‘Their Satanic Majesties Request’ and ‘Sympathy for the Devil,’ but also like Motley Crue and Kiss and Alice Cooper.
I love everything from The Rolling Stones to Run-DMC to Nina Simone.
The Rolling Stones are constantly changing, but beneath the changes they remain the most formal of rock bands. Their successive releases have been continuous extensions of their approach, not radical redefinitions, as has so often been the case with the Beatles.
I’ve been meaning to write about the Rolling Stones, but I am the furthest thing from a hipster rock journalist.
My musical influence is really from my father. He was a DJ in college. My parents met at New York University. So he listened to, you know, Motown, and he listened to Bob Dylan. He listened to Grateful Dead and Rolling Stones, but he also listened to reggae music. And he collected vinyl.
Quite a few of The Rolling Stones records have had a great honesty about them. In fact, I would put them side-by-side with a ‘Treasury of Folk Music’ collection, containing all the prison songs, the farm and road-gang songs that were recorded on the spot in the Deep South.
Elvis Presley, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie and The Sex Pistols may come and go, but rebellion remains a key part of the rock n’ roll experience. However, that rebellion – the outgrowth of a youthful search for independence and identity – doesn’t always take the same form.
There’s a lot of bands that get to a certain level, and it just stops. They scrap it. Compare this to, say, The Rolling Stones or The Who, where they just continued on forever and are still playing, or they quit after 20 years.
Both the Beatles and The Rolling Stones broke on the music scene the summer I was in England. I can vividly remember hearing ‘She Loves You’ in August 1963.
The Seventies was a golden era. Back then we had some incredible talent with bands like the Undertones, the Rolling Stones and artists like Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney.
Even though I loved the Fifties doo-wop, you couldn’t hold on to it. You had to change, or you was gon’ be antique real quick, like the Ink Spots. And then we were at Motown and you had the Rolling Stones, simple rock & roll became the new thing.
There are some Rolling Stones songs that are just stunners.
Were the Rolling Stones good looking? Well, Jagger was, but the rest of the dudes? Maybe not so much.
I’m not into that Keith Richard trip of having all those guitars in different tunings. I never liked the Rolling Stones much anyway.
I have my granddad’s record collection, which I treasure, and my father’s – Rolling Stones to Sidney Bechet.
I never, ever wanted to be the Rolling Stones. Bless their hearts, but I don’t necessarily want to go on doing the same old thing for the next 10, 20 years… I could see how easy it is to get into that rut, the whole touring mindset.
I sat through Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rolling Stones like three times at the Skyway when it came out.
The most successful people I’ve worked with, like the Rolling Stones – people of a different, kind of legendary caliber – have such great, warm energy.
Wu-Tang is looked at like the Rolling Stones of hip-hop.
I love OneRepublic, The Script, All Time Low. I love pretty much every genre. I love the Rolling Stones and Elvis.
You can put the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the same category, but the types of music, the colors each band evokes, are completely different. It’s the same with Mozart and Beethoven – they express two very different aspects of music.
I was a big fan of the Rain Parade, Green on Red, X, the Rolling Stones.
I think between The Beach Boys, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and innumerable acts after that… rock music became a huge economic force.
I don’t really have a lot of hip-hop and all of that, so I have a lot of John Lennon. That’s one that I really like, and The Clash, the Rolling Stones, groups that I think are kind of timeless.
Plenty of people detested Michael Jackson before his death wiped away the world’s collective memory. Timberlake was originally dismissed as just another boy-bander. Legions have joined in a ‘Hate Anne Hathaway’ movement. Elvis, the Rolling Stones, Kristen Bell, even Mozart had haters.
I got an opportunity to be on a tribute to the Rolling Stones in the late ’90s and did a rockin’ version of ‘Paint It Black’ – that’s probably the biggest stretch of anything that I’ve personally done. I listen to a lot of different kinds of music, but I understand where my parameters are.
I first went on the road with the Rolling Stones in the year of our Lord, 1969. But my grandfather gave me away to a drummer when I was 15 years old.
As a writer, I’ve always been the sum total of my influences, and those are all over the spectrum: Rachmaninov, the Who, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Lesley Gore, Burt Bacharach and Leonard Bernstein, the Rolling Stones and the Small Faces.
Growing up, as much as country was a big influence in my life, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles and Led Zeppelin were such a close second. My first concert ever was the Rolling Stones in Denver. I snuck a camera backstage and filmed Mick Jagger during sound-check.
I’ve done the Rolling Stones eating each other.
What an incredible honor for us to share the stage with real life rock n’ roll icons, the Rolling Stones. There are a lot of bucket list moments that you dream up as a performing musician, and this is a pretty wild one to actually have come true. You, in fact, can get some satisfaction!
From folk to tribal to Cab Calloway, Cole Porter, Gershwin to the Rolling Stones, whose first record was all covers, to country-western, bebop, blues, and even the referencing in classic hip hop to cliched love ballads of the ’80s or whatever – that is kinda gone, and that’s just terrifying to me.
I have been a gigantic Rolling Stones fan since approximately the Spanish-American War.
The signing of the Sex Pistols was a turning point for Virgin. It put the company on the map and, over the years, attracted bands such as Genesis, the Rolling Stones, Lenny Kravitz, and Janet Jackson. It also attracted Culture Club, who were ground-breaking.
Growing up I used to love bands like Free and ELO and the Rolling Stones. When Robert Plant got in touch it made perfect sense to me.
The great music for so many artists – the Beatles, the Rolling Stones – was always at the moment when they were closest to pop. It would be easy for U2 to go off and have a concept album, but I want us to stay in the pop fray.
We don’t want to be Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones. That type of thing wasn’t what we were after. It was most important for each of us to be equal in input and output – each of us has to pull the same amount, musically, in composition and in every sense of being in the band.
Those folks at Death Row were the Rolling Stones of their time.
I grew up loving classic rock music – The Beatles, The Rolling Stones – and then one day I heard ‘Baby One More Time’ on the radio and I thought ‘What is this?’ I was eight and it changed my life.
We didn’t go for music that sounded like blues, or jazz, or rock, or Led Zeppelin, or Rolling Stones. We didn’t want to be like any of the other bands.
We wanted Nike to be the world’s best sports and fitness company. Once you say that, you have a focus. You don’t end up making wing tips or sponsoring the next Rolling Stones world tour.
You know, Rolling Stones songs all sound kind of the same.
The Rolling Stones were one of the best bands ever, and ‘Sticky Fingers’ is one of the best rock albums I’ve ever heard.
It’s like this – these five members have been influenced of course by other groups, because that’s where this generation’s groups came from – an environment like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, and The Who. People like that.
