I'm a struggling guitar player.
When The Who first started, we were playing blues, and I dug the blues and I knew what I was supposed to be playing, but I couldn't play it. I couldn't get it out. I knew what I had to play; it was in my head. I could hear the notes in my head, but I couldn't get them out on the guitar.
'Are 'Friends' Electric?' was two songs: the verse part and the talking part. Two different songs I couldn't finish. One day I was playing the main verse part of 'Are 'Friends' Electric?' and after a few minutes I got frustrated, as normal, then started to play the other song, and realized they went together.
When I was a kid, my parents gave me piano lessons and guitar lessons for a while, but I was never very good at it. I have big, sort of awkward hands. It's hard to keep going when you don't get any better.
I tried when I was 13, when my grandparents gave me an acoustic guitar, and I tried for a year. It hurt so much to play. I mean, the fingertips hurt so much, I gave up.
Every once in awhile I'll call up Eddie (Van Halen) and ask, Found that fourth chord yet?
I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.
The only time I'm miserable is when I can't keep an instrument in tune.
When I was a kid, I wanted desperately to be a jazz musician. I would practice the trumpet for hours, but when I got braces, that messed up my ability to play, so all of a sudden I had all this free time.
I grew up in a family that was very musical, learned the blues and everything like that. And I became a little bit frustrated with the simplicity of rock n' roll and blues. I started listening to a lot of classical music - mainly Bach, Vivaldi.
To play music, you have to understand it. I didn't understand 'Topographic Oceans.' That's why I hardly played on it. It frustrated me no end - and playing the whole thing on tour, I got farther and farther away from it.
I wanted to play the drums, but I had no rhythm.
I bought a guitar CD-ROM because we had a new computer, but I had no attention span for that. I spent about three hours on it desperate to be brilliant. Eventually, I got some proper lessons.
The album 'Physicist,' I erased all the work that I had done halfway through. I think that's probably why that contributed to that album being sort of sub-par for me, just because by the time I had to go back and do it, I was just over it.
There's a lot of unreleased blues stuff I did with the Apollo Theater musicians, and there was of experimenting going on for me in the mid-'60s in that studio, which I think frustrated Columbia.
I was playing with George Harrison one time, and George loves takes. This song was up to Take 160. I said, 'George, do you want me to play the same thing or 160 different things?' It drove me crazy because, in general, I'm ready to play my part.
I'm very motivated by the occasional creative payoff that comes when something goes really well, be it a song, a recording or performance. The payoff is enormous - when you get it. Most of the time, though, I'm filled with self-loathing and general frustration at the limitations I have as a musician.
I can't play guitar, but I can sure make it howl.
I listen to all sorts of music, but I'm not musically talented. Everyone expects me to be a good singer or musician, but I really am terrible. I'm a great dancer, though.
Rafferty [Law] plays three or four instruments. He is very gifted. Whereas I pick instruments up and kind of stare at them and go, "I can't ever possibly play this." And I don't!
I have to work at tunes to get them to come out. Sometimes I'll sit there for four or five hours and get absolutely nothing.
I remember sobbing myself to sleep because I couldn't play an open G chord.
When you play the 12-string guitar, you spend half your life tuning the instrument and the other half playing it out of tune.
I remember one day sitting in the mirror with a saxophone, just looking at myself, being like, 'I can't do this; this is ridiculous.'
I would've loved to have been in a band, but sadly I just wasn't good enough.
