Bun E. Carlos Quotes

A performance is only as good as the audience you are playing to. A lot of times you feed off of the audience, and we always try to give them all we've got and sometimes you don't get a lot back, but we've never been dead whenever we've performed.

When we leave the play saying how spectacular the sets or costumes were, or how interesting the ideas, it means we had a bad time.

I can go out raw with nothing, and my fans would still be happy, but I feel that I owe it to them to give them almost like a Broadway musical at this point in my life. I have to give them something more, so I do have to think of different ways to do it.

Most of the time - at the Grammys for example - a DJ will perform with just their hands in the air because they can't do anything and that makes it a little awkward, I think.

When it is good, theatre takes a lot of beating both to watch and perform.

I've always been one for show business. I like performing, and I used to get criticized for having production value. But now it's all that! People need to get what they pay for! Otherwise, just listen to recorded music.

You have to assume that you're talking to the most intelligent, tuned-in audience you could ever get. That's the way you're going to get the best out of people. Whether they know you or not shouldn't matter for comedy. They should get to know you pretty quickly. and they should be having a good time pretty quickly.

And I try to give the best bang for the buck. I love performing more than anything else.

The young people look great on television. They're youthful and have a lot of zip and energy, but when you see them live, they can only do about 20 minutes because they haven't got the training to hold an audience for an hour and a half or so.

Many, many years ago, I was one of the few conductors who talked to the audience and now a lot of classical conductors have figured it out... otherwise, you just get the back of someone's head playing music you could hear on a CD. It's not enough anymore.

You can feel whether an audience is tightened up and pulled back. Of course the opposite is an audience like we've been having in LA, which is fabulous.

We played it as long as we could play it on that CD and I think it might be 50 minutes, maybe. What you have to do is play a couple of songs and then get off the stage because everything that trails it sounds stupid.

I added and deleted according to the audiences' response to different gestures, and chose songs to build an act that would constantly stimulate my audience.

If you like it live, you know that you're probably going to like the record, usually.

I love every aspect of live performance and putting our shows together and approaching it from the standpoint of, 'What would we want to see if we were a fan sitting in the audience?'

Who can deny that it was a pleasure to watch Rob Van Dam interact with the audience and tear the house down for 30 minutes a night.

It's awesome to play 1 1/2 -hour shows because it's so much fun, and we enjoy every single minute of it.

I've seen bands come out and begin their concerts with these long, slow, boring songs. Are they kidding, or what?

Any audience, as a rule, goes for a fast number.

There's something mystical and wonderful about being in the room with the actual live performer s on stage that works. In film, it doesn't work so you're dependent on a great director to keep the thing moving along.

You can't control the audience. When you're on the air and they're not coming to the party, it's time to shut down the party.

If you look at the Karamazov Brothers on TV, they're really small and the heart is taken out of their act. That's true for most variety acts. I'm an exception. When the camera comes in close and looks at those soap bubbles, you can really see what bubbles do.

I'd rather be entertained and go to a show and watch a drummer and have somebody that makes me actually smile. So I don't judge drummers based on their technical ability; I judge them based on the overall package and what they bring to the music they're part of.

Once I reached my 40s, I thought to myself that if I'm going to play live now, I need to really mean this. I can't go out and be a little bit, for one moment slovenly in my choices as a performer. I mean, these people have paid a lot of money to be here, they've been through the nightmare of getting here, starving themselves waiting for us to get on stage, so I'm going to give them what they came here for.

"Cannonball Adderley said, 'First 20 minutes we'll jazz out, then the last hour it's gonna be songs that people paid to see.' Which is why he was driving a Rolls-Royce."