Robert Quine Quotes

I was always fascinated with rock 'n' roll, or girls, or something like that when I was a kid.

When I heard Elvis and his 'Sun Sessions,' I went mad for it. I was about thirteen.

Rock 'n' roll is ridiculous. It's absurd. In the past, U2 was trying to duck that. Now we're wrapping our arms around it and giving it a great big kiss.

Youth is something very new: twenty years ago no one mentioned it.

The genius of rock music is that it matched the cultural hysteria around it.

Rock n' roll! It's the music of puberty.

Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.

Elvis was the only man from Northeast Mississippi who could shake his hips and still be loved by rednecks, cops, and hippies.

Sex and drugs and rock and roll.

The people who were in college in the '50s were my first real audience, and their kids, the people who found my records in the cabinet during their 'Mad 'magazine years picked me up also.

Rock n' roll is for the young idiots, not an old fart like me.

The music I listened to as a kid - the Stones, the Beatles - that was so rebellious at the time, it became mainstream.

From one generation to the next, The Beatles will remain the most important rock band of all time.

I was a hard rocker when I was in high school.

When you think about rock at its origin, and you think of the Beatles and millions of kids screaming as loud as they can and running as fast as they can towards the Beatles, there's no one who is that kind of lightning rod, who commands that kind of power and has that kind of creative magma.

The Beatles' story is all of our stories. It is about how the youth culture emerged, the drug culture emerged, how politics rose to the fore as a universal debate. It's about rebellion, it's about the growth of the British entertainment system, the growth of the rock n' roll entertainment system.

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 always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

I consider the electric guitar to be like a drum with strings. It became the drum of the Baby Boom generation. And the drum has always been the center of the tribe, a new electronic tribe.

Rock and roll and swing never quite mixed. Rock and roll came in and just blew everything out of the water. Big bands were dead.

Hip-hop kind of absorbed rock in terms of the attitude and the whole point of why rock was important music. Young people felt like rock music was theirs, from Elvis to the Beatles to the Ramones to Nirvana. This was theirs; it wasn't their parents'. I think hip-hop became the musical style that embraces that mentality.

Obviously, any living musician born after 1960 has been touched by rock and roll. It's the music of our time, and it's 'in the air,' as Steve Reich would say. My experience of it is just really direct because I'm actually playing in a collaborative band.

I think there are certain genres of music where people are allowed to go on, but there is something about rock and roll, I guess because it originally started out to be a teenage rebellion.

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.

The '50s was the golden age of music all over the world for some crazy, 'X-File'-like reason I can't quite understand.