Daniel Levitin Quotes

The more I got into playing guitar, the more I enjoyed music, and the broader my listening became. The instrument itself became important to me, and I started messing around with classical guitar and took classical lessons.

In early '57, I bought a Fender Telecaster.

In 1965, Gibson made the red one I use now, and a black one, which was the first black 335 they ever made.

Lots of people think it was Jimmy Page who had the first fuzzbox. It wasn't, No! it wasn't me either.

The first 12-string guitar I bought was probably around 1957.

The rock era, as I clock it, went from '65 to '94, from 'Like a Rolling Stone' to Kurt Cobain's death.

It is difficult to understand the fortunes of an instrument. There was music written for the guitar until the mid-19th century. Then the instrument declined in popularity.

The future of the guitar is every bit as important as its past.

The only thing I ever really wanted was a Strat .. I started playing guitar after seeing Jimi Hendrix on TV the day he died...then I got Deep Purples' Fireball album which was also a big influence .. I have a collection of more than 200 of them that includes Strats from every year since March 1954 - the first month the Strat was made

A Strat was a thing of wonder .. when I was 14 or 15, the Shadows were a big influence, and they had the first Strats that came to England. I like to play all kinds of guitars, but I wasn't getting the sound I really wanted until I got a Stratocaster

I just want to play like Jimi Hendrix. I love other forms of music and wish I could play classical piano, or saxophone like John Coltrane, but that will never happen. Because my nature is to play electric guitar really well and to emulate my heroes from the late 1960s.

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.

My first guitar was a Les Paul that I bought off a friend for 500 bucks. I worked a long time to save up enough money for it.

I know it is one of the most important instruments and inventions, the electric guitar, to me, since television or movies or anything like that.

Blues and jazz are such a root to music.

I've always loved that, on all the Dylan and Springsteen and Marley and Neil Young reissues that they've done: It's so cool to hear alternate versions and how the song started in their mind.

Jazz, and the history of jazz, is the history of America.

I'm a Telecaster connoisseur, and I love my Teles. I have one from almost every year since the very beginning, in 1950. I'm so obsessed with them.

I used to watch MTV when they played music, and discovered Robert Cray, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jeff Healey.

I did splash out on a 1964 Fender Jaguar guitar in L.A.

Music has become something different from the past, when it was one hundred per cent live. Throughout the twentieth century, it was recorded, and the medium adjusted.

I came through the bebop era, and to me that was enough.

My father played one of the first electric guitars in England. He built his own in 1940, because you couldn't buy them in those days. He used three telephone pickups under the strings, which gave chronic distortion on chords but was quite good on single notes.

If you really stop to think about it, the last really big guitar hero was Eddie Van Halen, and that was back in the '80s - early '80s, you know what I mean? That's a long time ago.

Rock 'n' roll guitar came from blues guitar. It was the blues guys who first turned the amp up and started whacking on the Stratocaster and a Les Paul. It wasn't the country guys and it wasn't the white guys; it was the Blues guys. That's where the real fire is in all of this rock and roll music.