Pete Hamill Quotes

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.'

I wrote the music column in my high school newspaper.

Probably having fallen in love with music and movies at a young age and then first learning about writing by kind of following the path of writers like Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs and being a rock journalist.

I've built my whole life around loving music. I'm a writer for 'Rolling Stone,' so I am constantly searching for new bands and soaking up new sounds.

When the Doors became huge, what nascent rock intelligentsia existed at the time adored them.

I've been a fan of Metallica and friends with those guys for a long time and that was just great - half Alice In Chains and half Metallica playing together.

We're real people and we're a band that's been playing on the scene for a long time. We've made a lot of friends, and one enemy we've always had was the NME. They've always basically slated us and they've basically never ever written about the music.

The thing I like about 'Nashville,' it just happens to be about musicians, and all the music is practical, meaning it's performed at a concert or during a rehearsal.

Every music journalist I've ever met has been stunningly beautiful.

A lot of music fans are still interested in insightful perspectives on music - maybe even more interested than ever, since everyone needs help making sense of the incredible variety of sounds that have sprung up in the wake of the Internet revolution. There's a lot of room for unique, qualified voices who can provide good reads.

I preferred MTV as it used to be when it was about the music - I don't like it that now they just have reality shows. Reality TV rots people's brains.

It may be that my most helpful contributions to music aren't my compact discs but my articles about other great singers of the past for American Heritage magazine.

I think there are just a million interviews in anthologies with famous musicians that are about the music, and they're really boring to read.

I'm completely absorbed by Peter Guralnick's definitive, two-part biography of Elvis Presley: 'Last Train To Memphis' and 'Careless Love.' Meticulously researched, this is a compelling mix of history, myth-busting, and, of course, some timeless music.

Sometimes people talk about music, whether blogs or magazines, in a strange way where it doesn't seem like they're actually listening to it.

I like the Foo Fighters a lot - apart from them being friends of mine as well. They're definitely a fantastic live act to see: so much energy and possibly even bigger in Europe than they are in the U.S., and that's great.

My mother, Minuetta Kessler, was a concert pianist and composer who performed at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall.

You know I take music seriously, right? So I expect journalists to take being a journalist seriously.

I couldn't imagine what it's like to be a journalist talking about music. You're left with empty descriptions; you probably have to make up a sort of weird cocktail of band influences and references to other music to get your point across.

I'm very much interested in music specifically and wanted to make a film about it, but not in an atmosphere of censorship.

There are so many things that are misunderstood or not recognized about my father's music because they've been filtered by people who work for magazines like Rolling Stone.

I'm always very careful to make the distinction between music criticism and music journalism. A lot of people don't. But criticism doesn't require reporting. You can write criticism at home in your underwear. On the other hand, journalism takes legwork - you have to get out there and see things and talk to people.

The problem was the journalists who also did not understand much of my music, but they wrote about it. I think you fell into the usual trap laid out by parts of the press and other writers: that the poor musician has always to fight the evil companies and managers.

In the mid-2000s, I kind of accidentally became a music editor.

I've had the privilege of meeting and/or interviewing most of the top metal and hard rock artists at various points in my career and sharing their stories and music with millions of fans on air through TV and radio.