My training as an engineer has enabled me to design the stuff, but the reason I do it is not to make music but for the opportunity to work with musicians.
We never thought we were musicians. We just thought we were in a band.
I think we musicians are emissaries. Every time we go before the public, we’re there to make converts.
We need to take music out of the ivory tower – both for musicians and for the public. Otherwise, classical music will not survive the 21st century.
People think it comes easy to us because we are from a family full of musicians, but I feel it’s all about talent.
And I think musicians can better run this state than politicians. And, hell, beauticians can better run the state than politicians.
There is no roles. No one is keeping any roles. The drummer is also answering everybody and everything. So it is a constant conversation and communication between musicians on an extremely high level with extremely valuable material, motifs, and melodies.
I have a lot of successful musician pals, and as I get older, I find that I’m lucky to be a writer. I have great anonymity compared to musicians who sell the same number of records as I do books.
Musicians are always gigging and never have a chance to stop for a minute.
You know, my sister sings, my brother plays drums in my band. My whole family is a bunch of musicians.
Groups are corporations now. They have pension plans. Musicians have saw the daylight.
I have never been one for musicians. I know girls are supposed to go crazy for frontmen who close their eyes when they sing and nod their heads when the drums kick in, but I’m like Shania Twain with that stuff: That don’t impress me much. I’ll take wit and brains over the ability to carry a tune any day.
In 1972, I got my first electric bass and started playing the kind of instrument I play now. I found that the majority of musicians couldn’t bear that. They are not used to listening to the bass because they think the bass is in the background to support them.
Music truly heals, and I am so grateful to have learned that through Musicians on Call.
Liverpool was an industrial town, a poor town. The people fought hard for what they wanted to achieve and there was a hunger there, and that hunger has remained with the musicians.
If our history can challenge the next wave of musicians to keep moving and changing, to keep spiritually hungry and horny, that’s what it’s all about.
We always feel pretty creative as far as writing songs. We write them together; we just get in a room, or on occasion in Flea’s garage. We just sort of improvise, like jazz musicians.
The Internet has definitely opened doors and leveled the playing field for musicians.
Newspapers and magazines didn’t want pictures of musicians behaving badly back then. Now, because of the Internet, that’s all the media wants.
Actors want to be musicians, and musicians want to be baseball players.
You can never rely on musicians. I quit high school at one point to make a go of it with this band and we kept breaking up. So I went back to school.
It keeps me in touch with younger musicians who are constantly saying, ‘Have you heard this new artist, or this new guitar player?’ It keeps you reaching.
It was physically difficult, adjusting to wheelchair life, but I remember a great relief and happiness that I was finally getting somewhere, finding musicians to work with that were sympathetic.
Musicians playing together, it’s a conversation, and ideally I want our conversation to be really intriguing and interesting and beautiful.
The thing about a band is, it’s not so much how good the musicians are – it’s the blend of personalities and characters. It’s the human chemistry that makes up a good team.
I can’t fathom writers married to writers and musicians married to musicians. There’s your enemy in bed beside you.
Out of doing all that experimentation with sound I decided I wanted to do it with live musicians. To take repetition, take music fragments and make it live. Musicians would be able to play it and create this kind of abstract fabric of sound.
The true beauty of music is that it connects people. It carries a message, and we, the musicians, are the messengers.
Today jazz is still very much alive. Everywhere I go there’s a new generation of musicians.
Country music’s always had the best musicians in any format of music, and I always gravitated toward that, stuff that was musically interesting.
Passionate musicians only come from passionate five-year-olds.
I always think of it in terms of music. You’re not always going to be a huge rock star in music, but musicians can play until the day they die. With sports, it’s different. You can’t always do it until the very end, and that’s a hard reality of sports.
To be honest, I would probably rather spend, like, a month in prison than spend a month rehearsing with some musicians, metalheads. I pick prison over that, really. And I say that knowing well what prison is like, so don’t get me wrong here. Prison sucks big time.
It costs a lot of money to make an album in a studio in New York with a producer and musicians. I have to pay a publicist every month. I have to pay for mastering, production, the manufacturing of the discs. Then, to promote an album properly, you have to spend a lot of money.
I guess the majority of people who want to ban certain musicians are the ones who are so proud of everything America stands for.
In my eyes, I think it’s important that if you’re doing something you’re proud of and that is genuine and authentic, you have a responsibility to bring that to as many people as possible, just for the sheer reason that there are musicians out there who are manufacturing emotions that aren’t genuine.
I think that what trips up a lot of great musicians is that they become involved with too many things that aren’t where their strengths lie.
Music and philanthropy have a long, benevolent relationship with one another. Record bins are rife with charity singles, and concert history is filled with benefit shows for every imaginable cause. Musicians like to give back.
I always dream about other musicians. And they’re never interested in hanging out with us. It’s like being at school and the bigger boys don’t want to play with you!
I don’t have to compete in the charts. I can just be myself as a musician, a songwriter and play with the musicians that I really love.
My older brother and myself always played together in bands, but we never knew we would be professional musicians.
The beauty of recording in L.A. is that most of the musicians that are on the record live here, so it was easy to get world class artists like Rick Braun to swing by and play a little trumpet, Everette Harp on sax, guitarist Paul Jackson.
The Musicians Hall of Fame is chosen by thousands of your peers. So it’s the real thing.
Since I was 18, I’ve been under orders from magazines and newspapers – chiefly The New York Times and Rolling Stone – to step into the lives of musicians, actors, and artists, and somehow find out who they really are underneath the mask they present to the public. But I didn’t always succeed.
I don’t think people go to musicians for their political points of view. I think your political point of view is circumstances and then how you were nurtured and brought up.
Well that’s probably what’ll end up happening: a load of really good musicians who can’t afford to be in bands, who have to have day jobs, you know what I mean? And then that’s when you start losing a lot of the live touring bands.
I have volunteered for Musicians on Call for the past 12 years because of the incredible one-on-one experiences in hospital rooms when no one other than the patient and I would remember the love that was exchanged.
A lot of people think that punk rock musicians don’t know what they’re doing.
My brother had a house in Paris. To it came many Western classical musicians. These musicians all made the same point: ‘Indian music,’ they said, ‘is beautiful when we hear it with the dancers. On its own, it is repetitious and monotonous.’
I’m big fans of all those musicians, B.B. King, Mick Jagger – they’re all on my iPod.
I’ve made money, and I’ve been ripped off. I’ve had creative freedom, and I’ve been pressured to make hits. I have dealt with diva behavior from crazy musicians, and I have seen genius records by wonderful artists get completely ignored. I love music. I always will.
It’s always great playing with other musicians. It’s also a great situation where I’m the older guy, I’ve influenced generations of guitar players.
A lot of young musicians get the money at the wrong time. They get it for something they don’t feel great about, and it’ll make you feel so bad it’ll destroy you and kill you.
At all times, musicians are replaceable. Friends are not.
Not with the Rochester Philharmonic, but I formed my own orchestra, made up of musicians from the Eastman School, where I’m on the faculty now, direct the Jazz Ensemble and teach improvisation classes.
The Doors were never that good as musicians.
With El Sistema, you can create orchestras everywhere; then they can decide whether they want to become professional musicians. The aim is not only to create musicians, but to create people.
You listen to Bob Dylan and you can’t help but think of the 60s, it’s very relational and if artists are true artists and not just mere musicians they need to be truthful because the music doesn’t come from them it comes from the universe and it’s to be shared. At best, we’re skilled presenters, and I say that at best.
