Richie Havens Quotes

When I first started drumming, when I was 14 or 15, I started writing songs. I wrote for a couple of years, but when we started 'Radiohead' it became very apparent quite quickly that I just wanted to concentrate on the drumming.

Just blow in it and sound bad for about a year and then make it sound a little bit better, and you get a little band together, and then you get a few jobs. You take four guys that sound half bad, but if they're 25 percent each, they can give 100 percent, you know?

The Pleasure Seekers eventually turned into Cradle, when we started writing our own material. My younger sister Nancy was brought in as singer and I kind of stepped aside as main lead singer and concentrated on my instrument.

The Fat Mattress consisted of people I'd played with before joining the 'Experience and it was put together as a song writing situation.

I've been invited to do a trio with a fantastic jazz guitarist and a harmonica player.

When we first met, I was trying to put a band together. I asked around at school for other guys who wanted to play in a band. Someone told me about a juvenile delinquent they knew who played bongos.

So now, thirty years, forty years later, I mean, I could find a whole orchestra of a thousand to put these things together in New York City alone. In those days, if I could scrape up twenty musicians to do this it was something extraordinary.

It was actually my partner, Bernard Edwards, who helped me develop my sort of funky jazz style.

In my last band, Soundgarden, I had a couple of different drummers sit in on some stuff and it was fun for me to kind of take a break and watch the band.

I did some stage when I was a kid, around 16 or so. I was living in Melbourne and had a band. I was quite young. We weren't very good. Then I found a band in Perth. We played around for three years. We're in the 'History of Rock'N'Roll,' a book about Perth music.

As a result, I had to get my own playground which was my band Colours. This band lasted for about eight years and then the air was out of it and it was time to finish.

The first album, for better or for worse, was done over from the ages of 17-22, with a couple of different producers. Some of it was recorded in an old swimming pool, some of it was recorded in a synagogue - it kind of was all over the place.

I went from wanting to be a Beatle to becoming a 'widdly-widdly' guitar player.

Everybody besides my piano player has been with me since the very first day. We were a four-piece band for a solid two years. It was me playing acoustic and rhythm electric guitar, a bass player, a drummer and a lead guitar player. For a couple of years, we sounded like the Foo Fighters.

The first album I ever bought was Santana's 'Abraxas.' Obviously, I was a huge fan of Carlos because he had the unique guitar sound, and he had incorporated a lot of the percussion and really, really fun rhythmic bass lines in there, too.

Basically, a band's first record is them coming together and really learning everything, and then, after they're on the road and really become a unit, the next record slams.

By the time Sonic Youth formed in 1981, my musical tastes had left the Dead behind, but I was always very proud of the fact that we had three different singers singing individually from different points of view, like the Dead.

In high school no guys wanted to be in a band with me unless I was going to play bass or play grindcore or be in a scream-o band, so it was fun to finally have that experience of having my songs backed by a drummer and a bassist who were just as excited about it as I was.

The good thing is that there is a constant need for innovation, which is important in the evolution of music and sound.

I was really good friends with Matthew Ashman, the guitarist in Bow Wow Wow. He died, unfortunately. He was one of my best friends during my sort of punk period.

I dream of starting a three-man country trio called the Chixie Dicks.

As with any art, you create it [drumming] out of something that isn't there. It's very architectural. It's the architecture of whatever piece of music I'm playing. I think the whole idea of drumming is to allow other people around you to more easily express themselves.

I'd like to have James Brown as my singer. I already have the best drummer, Tommy Clufetos. I've jammed a bunch with John Entwistle, and it was like a musical orgy. That guy is a living, breathing, grunting rhythm. For horns, let's go with the Stax/Volt guys, and I'm going to have Steve Cropper on standby just in case I want a rhythm guitarist.

Caitlin Cary and I were always talking about X when we talked about whiskeytown, before it became an actual band. We like the concept of there being no real front person in X, yet this kind of switch up of vocals and really their sheer power, and their ability to sort of bastardise punk rock and midwetsren rock and even country into their own sound.

Freddie Green has been my right arm for thirty years. And if he leaves the band one day, I'll probably leave with him.