If you can’t play the blues… you might as well hang it up.
Most people say, ‘Well, Earl, you sing the blues,’ or however they want to categorize it. I just sing songs.
My mum’s family would all get together, with guitars, harmonica, mandolins and upright bass and play old blues and folk songs. That was normal to me.
The blues, the way it’s interpreted, is always a product of your environment, and so it’s almost like food. You know, it’s like you use the ingredients, and you use your life experiences that you have.
Elvis might have compromised his musical style a bit towards the end, but that doesn’t mean that artists from the rock n’ roll/folk-roots culture – of which he was not really a part – shouldn’t get better as they get older, like the great jazz or blues artists.
Whenever I was in the dressing room on my own, I’d start playing blues to myself. One night, Bob Daisley, the bass player, came in and said, ‘You know, Gary, you should make a blues album next. It might be the biggest thing you ever did.’ I laughed. He laughed, too. But I did, and he was right, and it was.
I was part of that whole early Moody Blues transitioning from a sort of R&B-blues band to being more progressive.
It was so much fun to do, play the blues and then play a Monkees’ set on the same night.
I’m also a blues musician, and all blues artists can trace their pain to the slavery fields of the Mississippi Delta.
Ever since I was a little kid and first heard Jimmy Reed’s ‘Honey, Don’t Let Me Go,’ the blues has been in my blood.
Years and years ago, I sang at a blues bar with a band behind me. It was with my friend, my guitar teacher at the time. I took some sporadic lessons.
When I got out of high school, I was in a blues band. It was the kind of music I was interested in, and listening to, mostly because it was becoming a vehicle for a generation of guitarists – like Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton. Mike Bloomfield. And that’s what I wanted to be, principally: a guitar player.
I was listening to a lot of bebop. And to Miles Davis. Everyone thinks I was just in the folk world in 1966, but in 1963 and 1964, I was absorbing enormous amounts of music, from baroque to jazz to blues to Indian music.
I’ve been playing electric guitar since I was 11, and I love the blues.
The instrumental stuff is a good challenge, and it keeps my fingers athletically tuned, but I’m totally happy to bang away on some chords, sing some harmonies and play some wailing blues solos after the second chorus.
The one thing the blues don’t get is the backing and pushing of TV and radio like a lot of this garbage you hears. They choke stuff down people’s throat so they got no choice but to listen to it.
I’ve always loved the blues, John Lee Hooker, Janis Joplin, Hendrix.
I’m very fortunate that I really like acting, but it’s not all I want to do. I love to sing. I love blues. I love jazz.
The Ramones are not an oldies group; they are not a glitter group. They don’t play boogie music, and they don’t play the blues.
I just like the blues better than rock ‘n’ roll.
Life is relationships and what we’re trying to do together. And please, that’s what people have been singing about forever. That’s what the blues is all about – the good, the bad, the fun, all of it – that lies there in between a man and a woman.
I never listen to Led Zeppelin. But, I mean, I don’t think Robert Plant or Jimmy Page listen to Led Zeppelin, either. We all probably obsessed over the same old blues records growing up.
I’m trained in classical music, and my favourites have always been rock n’ roll and blues, but I’ve grown up with different kinds of music around me because of my parents.
If you’re an impressionistic painter and you want to paint expressionism, you’ve got to change. You’ve got to figure out a way to do it and do it. If you’ve been playing jazz all your life and you want to start to play rock n’ roll, blues, then do it.
I’ve listened to blues my whole life. I know it, I play it, I understand it.
My folks have played everything from rock, disco, pop, funk, and blues. My dad has always brought and played different genres like jazz, classical, and Latin. With all this in my pocket, I feel I have a taste of everything for my influences.
For a musician to be good, he has to have humanity and care about the other guy. And as for blues – in a sense, black people have kept this country alive and given us our entire musical heritage.
I did a lot of ‘NYPD Blues’ and ‘Law & Orders’ and a couple of other ones that were shot in New York earlier in my career.
When I was a small boy, 10, 11, 12, probably somewhere around there, when I first heard a blues song on the radio, it was a jolt of electricity. It grabbed me by the throat, it made me shiver. And I knew from that moment that this was for me and this would be with me for the rest of my life.
The Beatles and The Stones were basically inspired by American Rhythm and Blues.
I could fall asleep at 10:30 watching ‘Hill Street Blues.’ I might wake up at 1 A.M. and have a riff in my head.
I have a gajillion headbands – yellows, pinks, reds, blues. I’m obsessed.
I have a lot of friends who are involved in everything from Americana to blues to R&B to pop to country.
Lonnie Donegan and the folk movement were responsible for a lot of the spread of the blues in England. The group Them with Van Morrison was a big influence on me, too, as were The Stones; The Yardbirds, John Mayall, and the other British blues pioneers.
Y’know, you can sit in a room, practise all day, learn your scales and blaze blues riffs: it’s easy to hide behind that. But I think with the slide, it’s a little bit tougher.
I toured around the country and met all these Broadway producers who put me in all these Neil Simon plays like ‘Brighton Beach Memoirs’ and ‘Biloxi Blues.’
Music is in Mississippi’s DNA, whether it’s the blues, country music, folk, or rock ‘n’ roll. It’s not just a source of cultural pride, but also a strong contributor to our economy.
‘Blues Clues’ has been incredibly good to me, and I’ve been working so hard on it for so long that I take it very personally. I wouldn’t want to do anything to jeopardize what so many kids love. So there’s a lot of responsibility there.
I was never really that interested in the punk movement. I was a blues guy: I liked Motown, James Brown.
I wanted to be a blues guitar player. And a singer. And a songwriter. Not a shock jock.
Jazz took too much discipline. You have to come in at the right place, which is different than me singing the blues, where I can sing, ‘Oh, baby,’ if there’s a pause in the melody. With jazz, you better leave that space open, or put in something real cool.
Blues is a tonic for whatever ails you. I could play the blues and then not be blue anymore.
You ask any Olympian what the year after the Olympics is like – you always get the Olympic blues.
My musical taste has always been wide. I started out as a folky before I moved on to blues and soul.
I moved from Chicago to New York in 1984 for ‘Biloxi Blues.’ In 1989, my wife and our then-baby daughter moved to Los Angeles to try to get in television.
The blues needs to be everything to you, otherwise it’s not going to come across. That’s what I think.
I had an invitation to contribute a track to a Robert Johnson tribute album, and it was the first time I’d done anything like that in my life. I was not brought up with the blues or anything like that, and I really, really enjoyed it.
I’m not really a country singer, although I did make a couple albums and love its simple, straight-from-the-heart approach, but I have always sung a lot of jazz, show tunes, pop tunes, gospel and blues.
It was stumbling on to really the bible of the blues, you know, and a very powerful drug to be introduced to us and I absorbed it totally, and it changed my complete outlook on music.
When The Who first started, we were playing blues, and I dug the blues and I knew what I was supposed to be playing, but I couldn’t play it. I couldn’t get it out. I knew what I had to play; it was in my head. I could hear the notes in my head, but I couldn’t get them out on the guitar.
I love Bach cello suites, I love punk music, I love old blues, negro spiritual quartets, Muddy Waters’ ‘You Need Love.’ There is a simplicity but also a bite that connects all that music, from the growl in the cello to the timbre in Muddy’s voice.
My early influences were the Shadows, who were an English instrumental band. They basically got me into playing and later on I got into blues and jazz players. I liked Clapton when he was with John Mayall. I really liked that period.
I believe that blues and jazz are the two uniquely American contributions into music.
Country music originates with the colloquial, rural aspects of white America. It’s really, truly, rural white America’s blues.
My guitar heroes are Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck and people like that – so I’ve tried to make an album of Robert Johnson covers that, well, while not totally faithful for blues purists, is faithful for people like me that grew up with the ’60s and the electric blues-rock versions of Johnson’s songs.
God, I’m just a fat bald guy, 60 years old, singing the blues, you know?
Rock ‘n’ roll guitar came from blues guitar. It was the blues guys who first turned the amp up and started whacking on the Stratocaster and a Les Paul. It wasn’t the country guys and it wasn’t the white guys; it was the Blues guys. That’s where the real fire is in all of this rock and roll music.
