There was a time in America not long ago when rock ‘n’ roll was called race music, and white kids who wanted to go see Chuck Berry were completely forbidden.
I don’t mind trying it out and making sure something seems to work well.
The people who don’t know so much about me regard me more sexually.
I’m regarded quite asexually by a lot of people. And the people that understand me the best are nearer to what I understand about me.
I’m quite certain that the audience that I’ve got for my stuff don’t listen to the lyrics.
I’m wary of the word glam because I think that became the all-inclusive term with for any bloke with lipstick on, which is fine, you know, and that’s what it is when it comes down to the public level.
Trying to tart the rock business up a bit is getting nearer to what the kids themselves are like, because what I find, if you want to talk in the terms of rock, a lot depends on sensationalism and the kids are a lot more sensational than the stars themselves.
I didn’t say that wearing a glamorization of the rock artist was any truer from the other thing.
Some of us, I think, us small, pompous arty ones probably read too much George Steiner and kind of got the idea that we were entering to this kind of post-culture age and that we’d better do something postmodernist – quickly, before somebody else did.
TV has eaten up everything else, and Warhol films are all that are left, which is fabulous. Pork could become the next I Love Lucy, the great American domestic comedy. It’s about how people really live, not like Lucy, who never touched dishwater. It’s about people living and hustling to survive.
Sexuality and where it is going is an extraordinary question, for I don’t see it going anywhere. It is with me, and that’s it.
The public, obviously, they takes things in a very simplest fashion and so they should. That’s why we have such wonderful television.
The media is either our salvation or our death.
The younger people get into the lyrics in a different way; there’s much more of a tactile understanding, which is the way I prefer it.
It would be positively boring if minds were in tune.
I’m rather kind of old school, thinking that when an artist does his work it’s no longer his.
You should turn around at the end of the day and say I really like that piece of work, or that piece of work sucked. Not, was that popular or wasn’t it popular?
Songwriting as an art is a bit archaic now. Just writing a song is not good enough.
I don’t like talk and I don’t like talkers. Like Ma Barker. That’s what she always said, ‘Ma Barker doesn’t like talk and she doesn’t like talkers.’ She just sat there with her gun.
I usually don’t agree with what I say very much. I’m an awful liar.
I went to a middle-class school, but my background is working class. I got the best of both worlds, I saw both classes, so I have a pretty fair idea of how people live and why they do it.