Early Rock Quotes

I remember having a lot of Josh White albums. Johnny Cash. Elvis. I loved the Coasters.

'She's Dynamite' was a 100 years ago, and I recorded that song because the company thought that it was a great song and it was hot. That was the beginning of rock n' roll, and I guess they thought it would be a BB King version of rock n' roll.

In 1965, my father was just twirling the dial of the radio to find something that would make me go to sleep, and as soon as I heard rock and roll there was no stopping me. It was during the height of Beatlemania and the British invasion, but I gravitated toward the harder, heavier music going on then, you know, the early Rolling Stones, the good Rolling Stones, and Paul Revere and the Raiders, who don't get the credit they deserve for spearheading the American '60s garage sound.

When I heard Little Richard, I mean, it just set my world on fire.

I never liked jazz or anything else. Early rock n' roll - that was music to me. Everything else was boring.

The blues appealed to me, but so did rock. The early rockabilly guitarists like Cliff Gallup and Scotty Moore were just as important to me as the blues guitarists.

Buddy Holly and the early rock 'n' roll was no lighter than the way I play. It's very minimal.

With seven boys and one sister, there was always a lot of music in the house. A few of my brothers were playing instruments, so it was from hearing that, coupled with discovering early rock, which triggered me to pick up a guitar and try to pick out the notes.

Hearing a lot of early rock n' roll records from a very young age was a huge influence.

I met all my heroes on the oldies circuit: Gary U.S. Bonds, Lloyd Price, Little Richard.

Rock n' roll sounded like music from another planet. The first time around, we had people like Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis - all them people.

Jesse Stone did more to develop the basic rock-and-roll sound than anybody else.

I really feel fortunate to have been around then because there have been good and bad years in rock but the best years were '55 to early '61. I got to see Buddy Holly and everybody else.

It was Scotty Moore's guitar riff [in "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You"] when he was doing The Steve Allen Show that got me into rock music.

Between Alan Freed in Cleveland and Bob Horn and Lee Stewart in Philadelphia and George 'Hound Dog' Lorenz in Buffalo, they began to find out that white kids liked black music. It was a very significant period of time before I got there.

There wasn't really a lot of difference from a Mississippi perspective between what Elvis did on 'Mystery Train' or 'Milkcow Blues' or what Bill Monroe was playing or what Flatt and Scruggs was playing; it was rock 'n' roll to me.

Think back to the early rock n' roll records, and the average record length in the '50s - and well into the '60s - was two and a half minutes. It's very hard to put that much songwriting into two and a half minutes.

I was always drawn to the roots music, bluegrass, blues, early rock - Sun Records, Elvis [Presley]. And I still love that music to this day. Memphis never gets the credit. It's much more musically rich than Nashville ever will be. Nashville manufactured that hokey-hillbilly image way back.

I mean, I haven't been completely lacking in some enjoyment of Chuck Berry or Buddy Holly. But I just didn't pay attention to that period of music, obviously.

I loved rock and roll when that came in, Bill Haley, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, all those great records. So I begged my mom and dad for a guitar, which eventually they did get me for Christmas, but it went out of tune very quickly, and it hurt my fingers.

I grew up listening to a lot of that stuff, Motown and Stooges. But also early rock-and-roll like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley. I feel like as I grew older, I've been working with different musicians, people that have are constantly showing me different things.

We take a lot of inspiration from punk rock and early rock 'n' roll from the '50s and early '60s.

My influences were Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry.

Growing up, I never listened to English music. I was more into Motown, as well as early rock n' roll like Chuck Berry and Little Richard.