Words matter. These are the best Dusty Hill Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I’d go over to friends’ houses and ask them to put on some Howlin’ Wolf, and they wouldn’t know what I was talking about. Then, when they would come over to my house, I’d play them some blues. Their parents wouldn’t let them come back. The blues were still called ‘race records’ back then.
I love recording and I love everything – videos, everything like that – but playing live is what does it for me.
A long time ago, you couldn’t say what you mean in blues. You had to disguise it, and that’s where the double entendres and humour comes from and that’s where we come from.
Every album has its own character.
Our live shows are a visual as well as a musical experience.
Listen to really old blues guys and how they weren’t allowed to sing about what they meant; they alluded to things. I find that style amusing, and I think it’s a little harder to write.
I like the cold.
When I was younger, I’d listen to a song and take it literally. I’d think, Boy, what a drag. How horrible, he must be really bummin’.
In any relationship you have times where it gets tedious. But that becomes a strength. That you are able to hang around someone even when they get on your nerves.
It’s always important for us to record, so if we’re not performing live, that’s what we’re doing.
We record a lot of our shows, we record our soundchecks.
I mean, rock ‘n’ roll is based on the blues, whether people want to know that or not.
We got word that Mick Jagger heard our first album and liked it. And he wanted us to open for the Stones in Hawaii. That just blew us away. But the next thing I heard was that Stevie Wonder opened for them here in the States and actually got booed at one show. So I was scared to death.
When we did ‘Eliminator,’ at the time, it was experimental for us. It obviously turned out real successful, but at the time, we caught crap about it from some of our old fans. They thought we were deserting our roots or our old style or whatever.
I mean, I get all the gratification in the world from doing a show. It’s a great feeling.
We can’t figure out why any time we play in the East, the critics either ignore us or write a pretty bad review of the show.
Selling a million records used to be a big deal. I guess it’s not anymore.
Yeah, playing live for me is the essence of what we do.
We all like each other. I know people ask us that, and I hate to disappoint them, but we get along great and we enjoy playing with one another, and what can I say? I’m as surprised as anyone else.
Every album is unto itself, so whatever sounds we need to come up with, like way back when, we needed horns. So we invented the Lone Wolf Horns, and we learned how to play horns.
Being a three piece, maybe it’s easier. You only have two other guys, musically, and everything else to contend with and work with.
My major influences were primarily guitar players and bands; I started playing bass by accident.
I think environment is more important to us than even equipment and the studio.
I have no hobbies, other than I travel a little and shoot skeet once in a while. I don’t even hunt anymore.
They say you look ten pounds heavier on TV, but it makes your beard look longer.
In each city there are different favorites. Whatever we do, we’ll come off the stage and somebody will ask how come we didn’t do ‘Pearl Necklace.’ At the next town, it’s something else we didn’t do that they wanted to hear.
The women really seemed to like ‘Rough Boy.’
If we found an ashtray in the studio, we’d try to play it and find a part for it in a song.
You know how a dog and his owner start to look alike after a while? Well, that’s like me and Billy.
I love the beards and the cars and the girls and the different guitars, but I’m not at all caught up in the image thing.
You don’t have to play the blues to play rock ‘n’ roll, but that’s where, somewhere along the line, your influences came from. I mean, I don’t care where you got it from. If you got it from Eric Clapton, he got it from the blues.
Usually we’re always working on something with this band a tour, making an album or a video or whatever. I don’t have any desire to do anything outside this band, except play a movie part or something.
People got to know us from hearing us live because there wasn’t much publicity or radio airplay for a long time.
I’m living proof that Hepatitis C can be contained and that ZZ Top cannot.
Country music, like rock or blues, can move over into a lot of different areas.
Today, there’s so many different types of music out there that it’s difficult to keep up. Things do change; it’s only natural.
The audience loves us! They buy out all our shows and really enjoy themselves but the press keeps right on bombin’ us. We thought at first it was because our music was too Texan, maybe too different for East coast people to relate to. But anyone can relate to bein’ drunk or missin’ your woman.
We wrote ‘Tush’ at a soundcheck in Alabama in about six or eight minutes.
I just love the idea of taking an elevator down to the stage, like Elvis did.
People are all the time telling me stories: they named their son after me, or more than likely their dog. Or they got a tattoo.
Even if I were to retire, I wouldn’t shave. Everyone I know, including my wife, has never seen me without it.
Legs’ wouldn’t be ‘Legs’ unless it had that driving synth bass.
Somehow it seems more clever to refer to something instead of saying it.
Billy’s an interesting guy. He’s got a lot of varied interests.
We got pretty techno on ‘Eliminator’ and ‘Afterburner,’ which I enjoyed. I think they’re good albums, but we wanted to start using the techno element a little more sparingly.
It was the beginning of our second career. We certainly had a full career – 15 years at it – before it came out, but ‘Eliminator’ had a tremendous impact on us and the people who listen to us.
We live for our concerts. We like a live appearance more than anything else about this business and it bothers us when we put so much into it and the critics bomb us.
They sent us the script of ‘Back to the Future III’ and we wrote ‘Doubleback’ for it.
Vegas to me is a place like Hollywood or New York where you can walk around and people recognize you but it’s like, hey, that’s cool, and then we go on with our lives.
We’re serious musicians. And we dont want our shows to be circuses.
