The invention of Bob Dylan with his guitar belongs in its way to the same kind of tradition of something meant to be heard, as the songs of Homer.
For us Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp is bigger than the music. It is very much an experience that brings a lot of skills and discoveries about yourself together. In that respect, it also enables you to learn that being in a band is a lot tougher than sitting around and playing guitar in your bedroom.
In my early days, I never used finger vibrato at all. I originally carved my reputation as one of the 'fast' guitar players.
I used to cut guitars out of a piece of cardboard to copy the Strat look. I used a backwards tennis racket for a while and graduated to the cardboard cutout.
I'm a guitar player. Actually, I think of myself as a songwriter/rhythm-guitar player.
When I pick up the guitar, it's a melody, and that's what drives the lyrics. It's bits and pieces of truth, but it is storytelling.
Anything that broadens your musicality always moves the way you write drum or guitar parts.
I get to play a scorching lead guitar, and there's not much that's more fun than that.
It is dishonest the way that people suddenly think they've found guitars, and wear their guitar as a badge.
So many bands are like, 'I'm real because I'm dirty.' If you have money for guitars, you can afford soap.
In the last couple of years I've been picking up my guitar again.
My voice is my improvisational instrument, the melody instrument. The guitar is harmonic structure. I'm not a good enough guitarist to improvise on it.
Somebody's going to wake up and their job in life is going to be to make guitars. There are a lot of good, talented people.
I didn't come in and say: "I'm a singer." I came into the band as a second guitar player and a vocalist, but not the songwriter. I had been writing poetry for years, so I sort of had the nature of the words. I felt like no one else could sing my lyrics, so I took a crack at it.
1962 to 1965, where suddenly the guitar became this icon of youth culture all over the world, thanks mostly to the Beatles. Add to that, that I saw A Hard Day's Night 12 or 13 times, and that the guitar was the one instrument that my parents absolutely refused to let in the house. So you add it up and see that irresistible forces led me to the guitar.
I was staying with my sister and messing around with the guitar every day for my own amusement. Then she took me around and introduced me to Muddy Waters, Jimmy Rogers, Little Walter, and the first time I saw that onstage, it inspired me to play. I thought that was the world.
I can't use logic concerning my feelings, my feelings demand musical notes, violins, guitar solos, the stomping of feet, poetic language, metaphors, poetic lines about birds or deserts or tree-crowded forests.
I used to play a few instruments including guitar and snare drums, but I think a musical background is an important part of a career. If you start out playing instruments you create a better instinct and feeling for music.
At one point [Cardew] taught himself to play guitar simply in order to take part in the performance in a composition by Boulez, which is a little like saying he learned Danish to read Kiekegaard.
I play the guitar. I taught myself how to play the guitar, which was a bad decision... because I didn't know how to play it, so I was a shitty teacher. I would never have went to me.
Joao Gilberto on guitar could read a newspaper and sound good.
I play piano and trumpet. I studied classical guitar.
I've always thought that the act of playing the guitar was the act of trying to make a point of playing the guitar.
Guitar is great for a certain thing, but a piano is so much more expansive.
When we moved back to the US, folk music was all the rage. So I traded in my banjo for a guitar.
