It’s so funny: whenever there’s a new technology introduced, there’s always this fear it’s going to end entertainment as we know it. When records came around, they were going to be the end of live music. Nobody would ever want to go see live music again.
The people who were in college in the ’50s were my first real audience, and their kids, the people who found my records in the cabinet during their ‘Mad ‘magazine years picked me up also.
Well, it’s been an interesting career. Since I last appeared on ‘Top Of The Pops,’ I’ve been doing about 150 live shows every year. The live shows have always been well received and they consistently worked, it’s just the records that haven’t been very good.
Either you write songs or you don’t. And if you do write songs like I do, I think there’s a natural desire to want to make records.
I get off on hearing other people’s voices. I like voices: they’re my favourite things on records.
I think records and music are more appropriate and more respectful of the human soul than the churches are. And more respectful of the needs of humans to communicate with the aspects of themselves that are neglected by language.
In the nineties I was doing those Blues Bureau records, but over the past two years, I have really gone back to my Christian roots and have been born again.
I don’t linger on the fact that Dawn Fraser was a great swimmer 40 years ago. That was in the past. I did break 41 world records, but I don’t live on that today.
The weather records of the U.S.A. are the best kept and most accessible in the world, thanks to consistent government/military taxpayer support. There are longer European data sets, but the U.S.A. data is enough to forecast major extreme events.
In the beginning, I wanted to be successful. I wanted to make and have hit records.
I consider myself a songwriter before anything else. The fact that I have been able to write both of my records and establishing myself as a songwriter is super-important to me. Some people have that gift, where they can take on anything and make people believe it. I like to do a song from personal experience.
Stevie Wonder doing ‘We Can Work It Out’ by the Beatles is one of my favorite records of all time.
I belonged to the Columbia Record Club, and that’s where my records came from. For some reason, I was in the ‘jazz’ category. I got Benny Goodman records and Miles Davis, J.J. Johnson and Kai Winding, and that kind of stuff. I really was not a jazz guy at all, but I knew some of those names.
I wanna buy vinyl and I want to listen to records on it. I want to put on ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ in the dining room while I’m eating pasta or whatever. You know what I mean.
In the late ’70s, I had a band – the David Johansen band, for lack of a better name – and I started collecting, not records, but tapes from people I knew who had jump-blues records.
My only expenses are probably guitar strings and records.
Nowadays people sell millions of records that can’t sing.
The argument we always used to use was that keeping records in the catalog was good for people that were coming new to the music, but I think that was talking over a ten year or fifteen year time span.
When I’m done with something, I’m done. I don’t go back and listen to and pine for my old albums, or the Lollapalooza days, or ‘Psalm 69’ selling millions of records. Maybe I’m really just getting old and mellow.
I’m always amazed to hear of air crash victims so badly mutilated that they have to be identified by their dental records. What I can’t understand is, if they don’t know who you are, how do they know who your dentist is?
Sometimes you make a record that is what you want to hear. I’ve made a couple of those, idealized creations of what I wanted to hear. Then there are records that are what you feel.
There are so many things to think about when you make an album. Like, who am I trying to impress? Am I going to get respect, critical acclaim? Or am I going to sell lots of records?
They say I spend too much money, so they take it and put it away for me. What do I spend it on? Oh, old records and presents and things.
The records that I grew up listening to had feel, and the drummers that inspired me – like Stewart Copeland, Neil Peart, Phil Collins and Roger Taylor – all had their own voice and individual style.
I wasn’t aware that Track Records were interested in the Bonzos.
There’s not a whole lot of media interest in me other than just the records that I make.
The London games mark the 24th anniversary of my winning two golds and setting the world record in the heptathlon. Someone is going to want it; records are made to be broken – it’s only a matter of time. I hope mine will outlive me.
Champagne Jerry records are definitely, in one way, on the very far end of the weird spectrum of rap music, then, in another way, very far on the weird punk spectrum.
I like clever songs. I like songs that make people think and I try to have substance in all my records, even with ‘Sweet Dreams’ how it was a club record and it was up tempo, but it was melodic and it was, like, lyrical.
I live on a ranch in Texas and do my own thing. And I don’t care what anyone has to say about it. My joke is that the only people I’m trying to please are myself and my fans, because they’re the ones buying my records. And I have the best, most loyal fan base ever.
I didn’t need to depend on the record company to publish my records.
Your voice is vibrant for only a certain part of your life. There are some records I’ve always wanted to make, and I don’t know if I want to waste this time beating on the door of the charts.
I always thought records were there to be broken.
I think it’s ridiculous to try to sell records to teenagers, because teenagers don’t buy my records. And there ain’t that many teenagers out there in the marketplace.
I realized that, for me, great records always moved me with the lyrics and the melodies. And so I said, ‘I think I can do it now,’ ’cause I found a team of people who understand I didn’t want a record that was ‘drop it, pop it, shake it’ just ’cause I can dance.
There is nothing like a Bach fugue to remove me from a discordant moment… only Bach hold up fresh and strong after repeated playing. I can always return to Bach when the other records weary me.
When I was growing up, albums were my closest friends, as sad as that may sound – Joy Division’s ‘Closer,’ or Echo and the Bunnymen’s ‘Heaven Up Here’… I had a more intimate relationship with those records than I did with most of the people in my life.
I’ve been there and done all that, sold millions of records, and that doesn’t bring you peace.
I’ve sold my records outta shopping carts on the street.
Some records are going to be bigger than others. You’re always going to be compared to your biggest record.
I’ve done that kind of stuff in records, where you start going back and you want to just redo everything, destroy everything, because you think it all sucks and you can do it better.
I love the idea of making records that people can use, records that have a sense of utility.
When I make records, I never listen to stuff after it’s done. Ever.
It’s a weird thing when you make records. You try to hear it before you make it, so you walk into the studio with this idea of what you expect to happen, and that usually changes. That usually turns into something else, and that’s a good thing.
Our attitude is that we want to cross over. You can’t go on making records just for your own hometown.
So I played the acoustic guitar and harmonica and stomped my foot and I think I was right in assuming that Greenwich Village would be the best place to perform my own material and possibly get some attention, move on to making records and all.
I can’t stand making records.
When someone picks up one of my songs and records it, I’m a flattered man, it’s a blessing to me.
You don’t always have to have a record out. I’m not a sausage factory, you know, turning out records every year.
I work hard every day to try to help my team. I try to have fun too – because football is still fun – and scoring goals, breaking records, that’s what drives me.
Wynton told us that Miles sold out, just wanted to make more money, just wanted to sell more records. I don’t believe that Miles sold out but I’m not in a position to say.
Most people learn to improvise on their own, listening to records, endless hours of noodling on their instrument in the bedroom with all their spare time. That’s traditionally how people learn.
Anybody who says they don’t want to be seen on a show which has millions of people watching it at one time when they’re in the business of selling records is a bit silly.
In the ’80s, the way radio was programmed, if you didn’t have a hit record you weren’t going to be able to make any more records. That was it, period.
I want to start a Dunkin’ Donuts in Los Angeles. I already have the perfect location picked out. It would be the old Tower Records buildings on Sunset.
When I was a kid, I had some Charles Lloyd records.
That Mississippi sound, that Delta sound is in them old records. You can hear it all the way through.
Playing Etta James in the movie ‘Cadillac Records’ really changed me. It was a darker character, and I realized that if anything is too comfortable, I want to run from it. It’s no fun being safe.
