David Johansen Quotes

If you don't know the blues... there's no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll or any other form of popular music.

The blues is the foundation, and it's got to carry the top. The other part of the scene, the rock 'n' roll and the jazz, are the walls of the blues.

So, maybe you don't see blues so much in Styx's music but it is definitely part of Tommy's early music.

Guys like me and Ray Charles, when we was coming up through our days, country music and soul music was just a very thin line between the two.

I like pop music. I consider rock 'n' roll to be a branch of pop music.

You don't have to play the blues to play rock 'n' roll, but that's where, somewhere along the line, your influences came from. I mean, I don't care where you got it from. If you got it from Eric Clapton, he got it from the blues.

You literally cannot deny the fact that rock and roll was born because of blues, and blues is black man's music.

Blues is the first step to get to jazz.

I mean, rock 'n' roll is based on the blues, whether people want to know that or not.

I think we as a band, as individuals, understand that all popular music stems from blues and jazz and even pop, but rock 'n' roll especially comes from blues. What we're trying to do is play rock 'n' roll, but other people call it different things.

My mom listened to the Beatles and Elvis, a lot of different types of music.

People like Howlin' Wolf, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, John Lee Hooker, Nina Simone, Captain Beefheart - all of these artists were what I grew up listening to every day of my life. And there's a very healthy music scene in the west country of England, where I grew up.

We had a really vast music collection and I was raised around rock'n'roll, it's just the way it was.

I don't know any Beatles songs. My dad never listened to Elvis or Sting or Bowie. Any band name that's on a t-shirt, I probably won't know their music, like AC/DC or whatever. I don't know what that is. As a kid, I would sing along to artists like Tania Maria.

It was the early days of Rock 'n' Roll in this country. We were all struggling to learn music, it might be Country, Jazz, Classical, Blues or even Rock 'n' Roll.

I learned jazz; that comes from blues. I learned rock; that comes from blues. I learned pop; that comes from blues. Even dance, that comes from blues, with the answer-and-response.

I wanna show that gospel, country, blues, rhythm and blues, jazz, rock 'n' roll are all just really one thing. Those are the American music and that is the American culture.

Popular music has always been rooted in the blues, whether it's Adele or Led Zeppelin or Sam Cooke. It's just the beat that changes.

I didn't really grow up listening to blues, because I grew up in the Northwest. It wasn't really the center for blues.

It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives its most distinctive character.

I have to admit, I do not listen to much rock music.

Gospel was the root of everything in my house, so there's a touch of that in everything that I do. If soul counts as a genre, I would also say that's the common thread throughout everything I do. There's rock and soul influence, too. The pop element comes at the very end and making the song catchy so people will remember it.

I grew up listening to everything. And rock and roll has always been a big, big part of it - as big a part of what I do as any other type of music.

I was born at the beginning of rock and roll. I got to experience the entire evolution of popular rock and roll music even before it started.

I don't listen to a ton of rock music.