Henry Rollins Quotes

Fifty years from now, people will still be listening to Led Zeppelin. They won't even remember me.

For a long time, I thought when you do a box set, you're giving up; you're saying, 'OK, I don't have anything left.' But now I've listened to some of the old stuff I haven't heard in 20 to 40 years with fresh ears. It's like, 'Oh yeah, I can see where people might want to to hear some of this stuff that didn't make it onto the records.'

There's always people saying that rock is dead, rock is over. People are always out to kill rock and roll.

Classic Rock radio gave us our longevity.

Metallica is going to be one of those bands you look back on in the year 2008, that people will still listen to the way I still listen to Zeppelin and Sabbath albums.

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.

In the high-stakes and elitist world of music collecting and fandom, we operate from an ab ovo perspective. The seed, the first incarnation - that is the most pure, the most lauded. Minutemen trumps Firehose, Throwing Muses beats Belly, Joy Division over New Order, Operation Ivy ruled Rancid, Undertones instead of That Petrol Emotion.

I don't think country music needs saving from anything.

'When I'm Sixty-Four' hasn't worn well, but George Harrison's 'Within You Without You' is awesome.

I love listening to old records. Stuff from the '70s, even disco and funk records and a lot of early rock albums - what's great about those recordings is that you can actually hear the true tones of the drums themselves.

It's always so rewarding, gratifying to me, as an artist and a writer, to see how this music gets more important for a lot of people as time goes by. And it's not just nostalgia. It's a feeling of it's really relevant to their lives, even though it's 20 or 25 years old or more.

I believe it is our responsibility to make sure that Tupac's entire body of work is made available for his fans.

At the 'L.A. Times,' I always wanted to write about artists I thought were meaningful. So I interviewed Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, U2, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Eminem, White Stripes. And I could understand how almost everybody I interviewed had a sense of artistry.

I love listening to Led Zeppelin and classic rock albums from the Seventies. They're just so brilliant because they breathe.

If you're only a fan of the old music, that music's gonna wind up sounding even older.

A classic song is timeless. You'll never outlive a classic song. I'll never put The Beatles 'In My Life' on one day and say, 'That doesnt move me any more.'

If it hadn't been for record people like Ralph Peer, the Chess brothers, and Alan Lomax, then life would've been unbelievably dull, and I would've been sacking groceries somewhere and probably, at this point, running a little 7-Eleven down by the airport.

Though rock is not the force that it once was in America, it still has a loyal fan base that always seems to continue regardless of what popular culture deems as the 'cool thing.'

I don't mind talking about the Dixie Chicks, because I feel like it's still alive and kicking.

Some Lynyrd Skynyrd songs are literally the backdrop of America. Songs like 'Simple Man' and 'Free Bird' and 'Alabama.' I wasn't prepared for how emotional the crowd gets during the songs.

I just don't want any songs to go unheard.

Everybody is always raving about the Rolling Stones, saying, 'The Stones this, and the Stones that.' I've never cared for the Stones. They never had anything to offer me musically, especially in the drumming department.

Old-school rock bands, and blues bands, too, are kind of a dying breed.

Doing the classics is always nice because it's a part of the archive, and that's what people love to hear, and I don't mind that.

There's too many favorite songs, so I'll just say right now my favorite song of all time is 'Poison' by Bert Jansch.