The Beatles and the Stones had Elvis and Hollywood, but when it came to my generation America meant Richard Nixon and Vietnam.
I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one’s own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.
The Beatles and The Stones were basically inspired by American Rhythm and Blues.
I was a pop-music junkie. My parents were into Frank Sinatra and Doris Day. They weren’t too excited when I had Aretha or the Stones pumping.
The Stones always tried to do the odd smaller gig when they could.
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.
The stones in your driveway may have come from the slaves who spend all day breaking rocks because it’s cheaper for the company to get them from India, where the labor is free. We are all connected. And we all have human value. That’s what my work is about.
It’s very schizophrenic because I like a lot of very straight pop, like Small Faces, Stones, Kinks; and on the other hand, I like a lot of avant garde things.
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.
When I think of Mick Jagger still singing that he can’t get any satisfaction in over forty years of being in the Rolling Stones, I have to conclude that he’s either lying or not all that bright.
As a kid, I loved classical music. Composers like Beethoven were like rock stars to me. Then there were the real rock stars: The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and Bob Dylan.
There are two kinds of stones, as everyone knows, one of which rolls.
I remember the evacuee children from towns and cities throwing stones at the farm animals. When we explained that if you did that you wouldn’t have any milk, meat or eggs, they soon learned to respect the animals.
Back when I was working with the Stones and with Joe Cocker and Neil Young and Neil Diamond and all of those – ‘the boys,’ I call them – it was fun.
Some days are diamonds. Some days are stones. Sometimes you have a couple of stones in a row.
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.
Without stones there is no arch.
We object not to the narration of the deeds of our unregenerate condition, but to the mode in which it is too often done. Let sin have its monument, but let it be a heap of stones cast by the hands of execration – not a mausoleum erected by the hands of affection.
I was in several bands before I joined Judas Priest. Being in those early unknown bands were the stepping stones, really, so I learned a lot in those short few years jumping from one band to another.
Multicolored stones and paintings, walkways, and theaters are useless in a city unless it also contains wisdom and law. Such things are the subject of wisdom and law, not equivalent to them.
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 ends all things: birds, trees, flowers, mountain tops, and business; it grinds stones to sand, and as terrible as it is, and it’s the most beautiful thing we have in our lives – time.
We idolized the Beatles, except for those of us who idolized the Rolling Stones, who in those days still had many of their original teeth.
When I was a kid, we didn’t have any blues stations. I never heard Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters or any of those people until the Stones had come along, and I took it upon myself to find out who these people were that they were covering.
There’s a process: you audition, you get rejected, occasionally you get jobs, and it’s exciting, but it’s all little stepping stones.
That’s what music has always been to me: a feel. I’ve listened to the Stones many times and it still makes me have that feeling of joy every time. They are still around and put on a really exciting show. We also give it 120 percent.
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.
