John Landis Quotes

Anytime something makes money, no matter how outré, it's instantly mainstream. A good example is rock 'n' roll. When rock 'n' roll was first played to a wide audience it was considered the devil's music.

Remember when you used to watch TV in the Sixties and you'd see Perry Como in a cashmere sweater? That's what rock 'n' roll is becoming. It's your parents' music.

Never hate a song that's sold a half million copies.

The pop world has really opened its doors.

I don't do something because I think it will sell 30 million albums. I couldn't care less. If it sells one, it sells one.

I remember when metal was something you really had to search out, and now I hear it on car commercials.

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.

Rock became an incredible commercial success, people just became bored with serious music, and it was forgotten.

Anyway, Cat Stevens is never going to make much money out of us.

If I'd just been interested in record sales, I would have taken one of the deals I was offered after 'Soapstar Superstar,' made a quick covers album and probably had some success for five minutes. I decided that wasn't for me.

I would urge all bands that say they only care about credibility and don't care about money to send Gene Simmons every dollar that they don't want. I'd be happy to take it off them.

I remember Mitch Miller saying every week, This rock and roll stuff will never last. But one doesn't like to bring that up to Mitch.

We're not making records for the fun of it; we're in it to make money.

I don't think you're selling out by allowing the masses to love your art. The only curse is that, when you get so big, sometimes people forget to look at the music.

I think that's one of the beautiful things about this genre is that everyone who's in it isn't in it to make a million bucks and be popular, because that's not always our M.O. Really, I think the last time that rock was truly in the mainstream was probably a point in time in the '90s when there was a lot of alternative that was on the pop charts.

It seemed record companies wanted bands to be creative because they didn't know how to manufacture underground music. We could do our own thing and go at our own pace. But that changed when major labels started wanting bands that would sell 7 million records.

Commercial record has never interested me. It's amazing I was in a band like The Police that had such phenomenal commercial success. Part of what made The Police what it was was that we didn't all come in with obvious mainstream musical tastes. We were a rock band and somehow we had to make rock music, but it was informed by a lot of things outside of the mainstream for sure.

I used to enjoy all the white bands when I was a kid listening to the radio. But the record companies, they take music and label it - like, they say "rock". Because the white singers can't sound like James Brown, they call him "soul". They've been doing that for years. That's the prejudice crap.

When I was a kid, the people of my generation didn't want to be writers, they wanted to be rock stars. Rock and roll was not just entertainment, it was the center of people's lives. When I was young, it was exciting and interesting.

It was '86. We were a big enough name and we had enough cache that MTV wanted to play us, so, along with Michael Jackson and Madonna, they played our upside-down, black-and-white, backward, single unedited footage of a rock quarry with orange letters over the top of it and called it art.

You can fool some of the people part of the time in a rock and roll song, fifty million Elvis Presley fans can't be all wrong.

This is serious business, sex, violence, and rock and roll.

I was in rock music in London when it was the height of Brit pop, with The Kinks revival and Suede and Blur and Oasis, and all of those really great bands that were of a certain style. If I'd really been smart and commercially minded, I would have just got myself a blazer and some Stay Press and some Fred Perry tops, and just gone out and tried to do it like everyone else. Instead, I did this ridiculous thing of trying to do this music.

I have grown into a Bestsellasaurus Rex - a big, stumbling book-beast that is loved when it shits money and hated when it tramples houses... I started out as a storyteller; along the way I became an economic force.

The Beatles were just a band that made it very, very big, that's all.