Jon Landau Quotes

I have my own biography of Gram Parsons - I don't want to be part of somebody else's.

If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music and of aviation.

I think everyone mentions Bob Dylan, but he's someone I just admire so much as a songwriter. I think people write songs, and then there's Bob Dylan songs. He's one step ahead of just everybody else.

I'm a huge Springsteen fan, and yet if either he or Bob Dylan had to be erased from the world's hard drive, I would save Bob Dylan's work for sure - he's the greater talent, and by leaps and bounds and skyscrapers and rocket blasts. But Bob Dylan is an alien to his public.

Everything about Hank Williams interests me. His music, his life. His death. His impact.

Townes Van Zandt ranks alongside Kris Kristofferson and Bob Dylan. He inspired so many songwriters to shoot for something that's timeless.

Music was so important to the culture when I was growing up in the Sixties and Seventies. We just expected that Bob Dylan was going to make a great record, and it was normal. It was like, 'Okay, here's another great record by Bob Dylan; here's another great record by Led Zeppelin.'

To be in one band that changed the world musically is pretty good, but to be in two bands that changed the world musically, that's amazing.

No, I don't think rock 'n' roll will ever fade.

I am not immune to the lure of a signed record, flier or set list. The fact that your music heroes potentially had, in their own hands, the record you now have in yours is kind of cool. When the musician has departed, it can give the thing a unique power.

I am convinced that 100 years from now, people will talk about Elliott Carter as one of the most important figures in the second half of 20th-century music.

I named my son after Randy Rhoads - Rhoads Morello.

As a kid, looking at Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, New Edition, the Temptations, Motown, people who I felt were huge artists, they made me wanna do something.

Every once in awhile, the world will push up an Elvis Presley or a Beatles. But that's really outside the realm of show business.

George Martin recorded a lot of my stuff before the Beatles, so I observed their meteoric rise.

Elvis Presley was the big bang. He was the most influential single figure in the history of American pop culture. He changed the way we looked, thought, dressed, held a guitar. He didn't invent rock & roll, but he defined it in a way that everyone who followed him owes him a debt.

I think Bob Dylan showed us that songs can rise to the level of literature, and he proved it over and over again. That's why they keep trying to get him a Nobel Prize for literature: because there is no Nobel Prize for songwriting.

I consciously did not want to put a sub-Mr. Bungle band on the map. I don't think the world needs that.

All composers who came after were influenced by Beethoven, even during his lifetime, both by his personality and by his music. He was a father figure for generations.

You can never criticize a monumental musician like Jon Lord or Richie Blackmore, or the part they played in the group, but life goes on.

At the 'L.A. Times,' I always wanted to write about artists I thought were meaningful. So I interviewed Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, U2, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Eminem, White Stripes. And I could understand how almost everybody I interviewed had a sense of artistry.

I don't know if anybody will ever be as good as Hendrix again.

I've been promoting the idea of a Jimmie Rodgers documentary for years.

I've grown up on Bob Dylan and all that, but there was a certain standard set up by people before 1955.

You need to put yourself in the way of the music that stood the test of time. You're doing yourself an incredible disservice not be interested in the width and breadth of it.