Robert Hilburn Quotes

I had this image before Boy George, before the Beatles, before the Rolling Stones.

It's always Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Tom Waits for me - the big three.

I would say, from an all-around point of view, Bruce Springsteen is one of the two great poet lords of America, Bob Dylan, coming out of the music world, the two of them.

There's so many influential albums my parents would put on. Like the first album I ever heard was 'Help!' by the Beatles and from there I just loved rock music.

In 1952, Muddy cut the song 'Rollin' Stone.' It was a nationwide success, and the song echoes down through rock n' roll history. Bob Dylan cut a tribute by the same name, an English band decided to call themselves the Rolling Stones, and the magazine that first embraced music as a serious cultural phenomenon was itself called 'Rolling Stone.'

In 1974, when I started working with the material that became 'Horses,' a lot of our great voices had died. We'd lost Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, and people like Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

One month I'll be completely obsessed with Bob Dylan and the next Arcade Fire. I like early Elton John and David Bowie, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. I listen to a lot of American bands. But I like listening to new bands, too.

One of the first bands to break out of Seattle was Heart.

Growing up in Hitchin was comfortable and easy enough. My parents had some great records - and some not-so-great ones - and that's where I got introduced to Motown and the Stones and Springsteen.

You could live in Winnipeg a thousand years and not meet Ringo, Paul McCartney, or Bob Dylan.

I was a huge Beatles fan. The Stones, Dylan. Later on, I got into Stevie Wonder, and Bill Withers - he's one of my heroes. Al Green, too.

For me, Memphis has always been a city that holds a great deal of meaning and also leads me to a lot of thinking. Besides Sun Studio, which helped put rock n' roll on the map all over the world, the legendary Stax Studio also called Memphis home.

Bob Dylan did the first really long record - Like A Rolling Stone - I think it was four minutes.

The Beach Boys already had about four or five albums under our belt when these newcomers, The Beatles, took the U.S. by storm in early 1964.

I am a child of the '70s, so I love classic rock - Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Van Morrison, and I also love Coldplay.

The Stones were a big influence on me and the Beatles, obviously.

When I grew up, my dad listened to all that stuff - Neil Young. Floyd. The Doors. The Beatles. Stones. So even now, to this day, it's the music I listen to a lot of the time.

When I was in high school in the '50s, all pop music - Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard - was aimed at teenagers. I loved that stuff.

Don't get me wrong, The Beatles are one of our all-time favourite bands, but there's a lot more we were influenced by.

The Seventies was a golden era. Back then we had some incredible talent with bands like the Undertones, the Rolling Stones and artists like Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney.

The Beatles are the classical music of rock n' roll. And rock n' roll is far more widespread than classical will ever be.

We loved Neil Young and all the music he's given the world.

I love the Beatles, and when I was very young, I had young parents, so Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles constantly were big influences on my life.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is marketing. You've got a bunch of faceless people in a back room who trademark a name that sounds very official. Well, if you had thought of it first, you would have been the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Jimi Hendrix played loud and free, Sergeant Pepper was real to me.