Robert Quine Quotes (24 Quotes)

To me, the positive thing about it was we were pulling out these old influences like the Velvet Underground and the Stooges that were gone.

It was just like Howlin' Wolf. Once you arrive at the point that you understand it, the emotional factor is darker than some of the saddest blues stuff.

Even by the time I was four or five, I had Gene Autry records.

Reading music is something that's inherently hateful to me. It makes music like mathematics.

From '69 til '76, I never played in public. I would play by myself at home.

The Stones were nasty and ugly and doing songs I was familiar with.

I started off with the really funky stuff like Ramsey Lewis, Milt Jackson, Kenny Burrell.

After I exhausted the blues thing, I got into jazz.

But I don't have the discipline to play jazz myself. At the time though, I was stupid enough to think I could be a jazz musician.

I quit the tax job then and decided that I was going to play in a band. I answered ads in the Village Voice and went through two days of auditioning for bands.

Meanwhile after failing the bar twice, I knew some people in New York and moved here in August '71.

I was 12 in '55 when rock and roll hit. It just completely transformed me.

I never really followed grunge.

I had been brainwashed by my parents and society that to be a musician was unacceptable but by then I finally decided to at least give it a try.

I had a band in St. Louis. By then, things that influenced me were the first Stones albums, the first Byrds albums, later the Velvet Underground.

By then I was in Brooklyn and drank my way through that summer. I stopped when I got sick of that and got a job at the Strand bookstore, which was a little better than the tax job.

By '65, I worked myself into hearing a little better and I was up to Jimmy Raney. I had a pretty good ear for it but I've never been able to play it.

I saw Suicide in '74 and it was pretty horrifying.

My playing started to develop through the Miles Davis stuff I was listening to.

I think Blank Generation holds up pretty well. You listen to that with headphones and there's a lot going on there with the guitars- it's the product of a lot of fighting.

I was coerced into taking piano lessons in the early '50s. It was a quite unpleasant experience.

By many peoples' standards, my playing is very primitive but by punk standards, I'm a virtuoso.

I took guitar lessons in '58. To find someone to teach you to play rock and roll then was rough. I had to figure it out on my own.

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.