“I’m used to music as a tool, taking the various elements and then making something completely new out of them. And writing film music is the perfect opportunity to do that, because you can look at the film and then just let your imagination soar.”
“I always thought East L.A. music was so dreamy and languid and kinda greasy.”
“Travelling is hard. I’m no traveller. I hate flying, and I hate hotels.”
“I’ve been wanting an ice cream truck forever.”
“I’m a man of peace.”
“Uncle Dave Macon was a great balladeer and banjo player from the early part of the 19th century… He would take a social problem or something that he was looking at and make up a clever little song about it, you know, in a language everyone understood, a man of the people.”
“Music creates complicity, and then you feel less isolated.”
“I’ve done a fair amount of commercials. I did a bunch of Champion spark plug ads and Levi’s and Molson Beer. You wouldn’t know it. But some of it’s damn good.”
“The blues is so expressive – nostalgic but not sentimental, mournful but not pathetic, so humble and close to the earth. It’s a nuance-filled thing.”
“American global economic imperialism is a fact. It’s a known fact. It’s a simple fact.”
“Music is all starting to sound alike in the modern era. Afro-pop sounds exactly like L.A. pop – there’s no difference, no ambience, no real resonance.”
“That’s what records do: represent a compressed, heightened version of the sound. Because of the compression of the tubes and microphones and the wax, it’s magic!”
“It’s good to see more young people playing instruments.”
“I didn’t come from a very rigid background, where there’s a clan or a tribe or a religion.”
“If something grooves and you like the sound, then that’s all you need.”
“If every song is in the past tense, that’s a drag, so you have to predict the future.”
“Chavez Ravine is the dawn of Chicano consciousness.”
“People have all sorts of expectations which you can’t meet. Me, I’m so reclusive I stay away from such things as much as I can. I never go anywhere.”
“When the real world intrudes on your musical fantasies, I get put out.”
“Music is fragile: people die, and it’s forgotten.”
“It all started back in ’69 when I worked with Jack Nitzche on ‘Performance.’ That was my first experience of doing soundtracks, and I’ve enjoyed doing them ever since.”
“I toured around for years, but the road was always a drag for me. I never made a dime. In fact, I lost a lot of money – it was horrible.”
“What kills music in films is when it’s done as performance, drawing attention to the fact that someone’s in the background playing it.”
“I’ve listened to blues my whole life. I know it, I play it, I understand it.”
“I’ve tended to look at my albums as research and development. I was just trying to get someplace new on each one.”
“I’m not interested in making folkloric records, but I like to push the traditional format around so that familiar patterns get knocked on the head.”
“It’s tremendously expensive to make a record on the basis of writing checks.”
“I like the idea that something happens to everybody who comes to L.A. – whether they are Mexican, Irish, black, or hillbillies. You come here, and you leave all your traditions behind. And since there’s no traditions here, you just make one up.”
“I think I’m more relaxed; I think I’m more philosophical. I don’t get worried as much as I used to about things.”
“Film work is a job I like to do because I really love to solve problems.”
“You can play as good as you want, but you have to sing from a place of living.”
“With country, it’s hard to penetrate the thick layers of commercialism that have been applied like shellac coatings over the real thing.”
“A microphone has a certain range. It’s not as good as your ears, but it will capture an enclosed space, the harmonic content in a room. Nice old tube mikes do that pretty well. And that’s a good sound.”
“After all is said and done and institutions fail, people still have some ability to care for each other.”
“Politics runs on power and money and on ignorance.”
“People who aren’t as interested in recorded music as they used to be will say, ‘Oh, ‘Buena Vista?’ Loved it.’ And I’ll say, ‘Well, how about any of my other recent records. I’ve been doing some pretty good ones. You like those?’ And they go, ‘Huh?’”
“When I was little, 4 or 5 years old, the first guitar I had was given to me by a blacklisted violinist – a lefty, commie guy, pinko man.”
“The Woody Guthrie ‘Dust Bowl’ tunes were really fascinating.”
“R&B and all that stuff was always very spare and spontaneous. Nobody made those records under solid gold situations. It was just in and out, and you didn’t labor over the thing. I like music like that.”
“I can’t help what people write or think. If somebody thinks I’m a serious archivist, they’re wrong. That’s been a problem. It’s a shame people take that attitude, because it affects how they listen to the music. It’s a big mistake to treat any pop music that way.”
“I think all the music I do, which ties together, as far as I’m concerned, is fun and entertaining.”
“Being the front guy is a hard job.”
“The thing I always found about the gospel music was that it reached further into your being if you like, your mind. It takes hold of you – especially if you sing it and play it.”
“Having my son on drums has made a huge difference. I can’t stress this strongly enough, in terms of the groove space and style that Joachim gave me to instinctively play what I felt in a more free way, rather than feeling constricted. That’s true on record and on stage.”
“All I know is, I play the guitar, beat it out, and sing a song that has some damn resonance that we feel as musicians. We send it out and people get it, and that’s a good thing.”
“People respond to any good you can do in music.”
“I went on tour with Ricky Skaggs and his wife, Sharon White, and the White Family in 2015. It was fantastic. They’re all the greatest singers of that country stuff, traditional country up into bluegrass.”
“I didn’t want tunes that preach heaven: you know, life on Earth is bad and heaven is the only hope we have. I don’t quite care for that. I mean, when people sing that stuff, it’s good when they do it, but I didn’t want to do it.”
“I give up on pop music. As far as a commercial entity, as far as pop music goes, I quit; I absolutely throw in the towel. I can’t handle it. I can’t do it. I can’t be what they need you to be.”
“Some people have career plans, long-range career plans. I don’t know anything about that. I’m no good at it.”
“I always like spoken word records.”
“You go through these phases. That’s how life is. Over the long term, you just can’t do one thing. I saw that back in the Sixties when I was getting started.”
“’Geronimo’ was a huge amount of work. That involved 80-piece orchestras and Indians and Tuvans and all kinds of crazy people on that thing. That’s a real circus, that score.”
“I’m sort of an osmotic fellow.”
“I don’t understand the public, but I do believe the public is oversold and underrated every day. Give the people something interesting, something to chew on, I say.”
“I keep my mind on track, and I don’t get mad, and I don’t get frustrated. Well, I do… but creative work, it’s a way of controlling all that.”
“To me, the Internet is a big scam.”
“The ’50s was the golden age of music all over the world for some crazy, ‘X-File’-like reason I can’t quite understand.”
“’Buena Vista Social Club’ is a great song and a difficult tune to play.”
“I’m a great lover of ballads.”
“If you’re taught to hate and fear a people or a country, and it works, it’s because of your ignorance of that country. You have no contact with it, nor do you know what you’re hating and fearing.”
“Beautiful tunes are all very good and fine, and great musicians are always great, but that alone isn’t enough. Most folks, when they see movies or hear records, need something that they find pulls them in, draws them in, and appeals to them beyond just the notes.”
“I just feel that music is a great life because it’s very rewarding. It’s a gratification. You do this for yourself, and you also do this for other people.”
“You have to be able to improvise and respond to what’s going on around you. Then you might get a good piece of work done.”
“I always think you should push your envelope every chance you get.”
“To me, the essence of the music is the most important thing.”
“Musicians understand each other through means other that speaking.”
“Santa Monica, where I have always lived, is not a town where you will find storefront Church of God in Christ churches. So, the whole idea of gospel quartet singing is something I never knew existed until I began to hear it on record.”
“If it hadn’t been for record people like Ralph Peer, the Chess brothers, and Alan Lomax, then life would’ve been unbelievably dull, and I would’ve been sacking groceries somewhere and probably, at this point, running a little 7-Eleven down by the airport.”
“The ocean is very comfortable. I could never live inland.”
“I love listening to gospel records.”
“Promoters don’t book you ’cause they like you; they do it ’cause there’s good business to be done.”
“It’s crazy to make records nobody buys. It’s just a waste of time.”
“People who get together, regardless of other structures, will find something in common. They are bound to. That was the Pete Seeger let’s-all-sing theory.”
“I like classical music. I especially like the French composers: Ravel in particular. Debussy. That’s so soothing in a nervous world.”
“Country hillbilly music I love. Always have.”
“Nat King Cole – I listen to him a lot.”
“The story of American pop music is the story of failure. The blues, country music, it’s not the story of success. People don’t win; they lose.”
“If you’re white working with non-white people, you will be branded as a colonialist by some people, regardless of your efforts or intentions.”
“The world will always love Cuban music, however it changes.”
“When I made the first album, I was 24, and at that age, you have nothing to say. I just played the music I loved and tried to do it justice.”
“Critics don’t sell records, unfortunately. No one reads what they write anyway.”
“On any given day, if I play the guitar, I can put myself somewhere. I always thought, ‘This is the way you go.’ It’s like a magic carpet, see?”
“I always have felt that most people don’t have the first idea about what musicians, in the traditional sense – I don’t mean in the modern media fake way, but traditionally – what they went through, what their lives were like.”
“Everyone thought my first album would be instrumental, but I didn’t want to do it – it took me eight months to make.”
“I hate films. Films make me sick now, and if something makes me sick, I always back off.”
“I got a reputation for being ‘eclectic’ or some damn thing like that, but to me, the different kinds of music I play are all the same stuff – good time music – and it is the only stuff I can do.”
“How many BMWs do you need? How many Rolex watches you gonna wear in your lifetime, for crying out loud? What is it about that kind of desire? I don’t understand it.”
“Sure, immigrants will do work that no-one else will do. There was even a movie about it – ‘A Day Without Mexicans.’”
“I had a lot of luck in meeting great musicians who were kind enough to show me things.”
“I wanted to be a car pinstriper, but there was nobody to teach me how to do it. So I said, ‘Music’s good too. I’ll do that maybe, since I can’t work out how to do this pinstriping.’”
“The Delmore Brothers is hit music – very, very popular – and it still retains that rural flavor and simplicity. I always think of it as family music, really, because families sang it.”
“I always loved country gospel from back when I was a teenager in high school and started listening to bluegrass quite a lot.”
“I used to sneak gospel tunes into my old records, just as kind of a personal thing.”
“Who does this, at age 71, try to put a tour together from scratch? I have to say it’s scary at times. But I like a challenge ’cause it keeps you on your toes.”
“I don’t like being watched, and I don’t like being an entertainer.”
“People who love the applause should have it, but I don’t care for it.”
“The biggest inspiration I had was to take norteno soul music and fuse it with Mexican music. It was my great big idea to do that.”
“Music is a treasure hunt. You dig and dig, and sometimes you find something.”
“Back in the early ’70s, when Susie and I were first married, we had a little house that we rented, and we used to have parties. People would come, and they wouldn’t leave. I used to get so tired. I’d put on the Stanley Brothers, ‘Songs for the Good People,’ and the house would clear in five minutes. It was not liked; it was alien. It was weird.”
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