I've seen a lot of people getting into Jazzmasters because of me, and, well, people don't know what they're in for. I mean if you're looking for endless sustain, you're going to have to get it out of your hands (laughs). Because a saxophonist gets it out of his breath. You've got to work for it on the guitar - it means you have to pull it out of yourself, otherwise, what are you doing? You end up playing a lot of noise or scale exercises.
I never liked mellow sounding guitar.
The song Venus de Milo, the whole subject of it is Love is a drug.
All the Frank O'Hara types seem to have very little sound stuff going... it's so chatty or something.
You know, there is something I'm looking for when I'm writing. But I couldn't tell you what that is.
I'd never assume an audience was anything but totally receptive and perfect. Seriously, it seems to me that's the only circumstance you can work under. Otherwise, speaking for myself, you may as well be in the advertising business.
I think almost every woman artist I've ever met has this ideal of being in a partnership working situation with a man, that men don't seem to share. They seem to want this ideal thing, that we'll always be together and work together.
I like thinking of myself as invisible. I find it a very advantageous way to live. Unfortunately, its not the way the music business works. If you don't create some kind of public image, it gets created for you.
I always hated jazz guitar. I loved jazz saxophone but I hated jazz guitar. If I would buy an organ trio record I would make sure I'd buy one that did not have a guitar player on it. The sound was awful!
Emily Dickinson has great sound and sense.
I really don't have that much interest in stardom.
I wonder what all those Chinese poets sound like in Chinese. I like their distilled quality.
When somebody turned me on to a Coltrane record around seventh grade, I took up saxophone.
I can't presume to speak for the others, but I never felt anything negative from anyone when I was onstage with Television. When I played rhythm behind Lloyd, the only thing that concerned me was to push him as hard as I could so that he'd go beyond what he was capable of and come up with something new, and vice versa. That's the only thing that mattered.
Well, I worked in a sheet metal factory once and scarred my wrist from the cuts. I found a sympathetic psychiatrist who told the draft board I was insane. We used the scars as proof of a suicide attempt.
I write a lot of more instrumental music than I do vocal music. It's because I come out of a background of playing piano and then playing sax for a number of years. I kind of got into rock backwards. A lot of guys go into rock and then get sick of it and then go into something else. I came the other way, so I've always just had a lot more stuff lying around.
I don't see us as a big media gimmick band. We don't have a cultivated appearance or anything like Kiss.
With my records, it's just a matter of trying to create something fresh for myself in a very finite context, which is the pop song. I don't know anything about the people who buy my records, and what, if anything, they get out of them.
Yeah, I'd say there's probably about a couple of hundred people I admire - but that has nothing to do with what a person does themselves. That's why I never mention these things. You can read a detective novel you really like, but it had no bearing on what you do yourself, you just think, "God, how this guy wove this together!" Or you get into the energy of it. Or you see a poem which makes a great statement about sentiment, but it's not sentimental.
The Beat thing happened when I was younger. I used to run away from home, inspired by the Beats, like in '64 and '65.
What's really fun is to write under different names.
I'm kind of proud of that little record! I mean I've heard about a million other records that have come out since then by all these groups around here and there and I really like 'Little Johnny Jewel'.
My non-career. My excuse for a career? Honestly, I never think about the word 'career.' I've had managers, the minute they say it to me, they look at me and just roll their eyes.
I grew up taking piano lessons and liking Wagner when I was in second grade.
The whole reputation of being a rock guitar player, I could really care less about it. Still, when I hear new groups today I do occasionally hear something where I think... ahh, I've heard that lick before.
