I've never been too impressed.---Dylan via @Rocknrolltweets

Well, I've been to the mountain,
And I've been in the wind,
I've been in and out of happiness,
I have dined with kings,
I've been offered wings
And I've never been too impressed.

Little Wing-- Jimi Hendricks

"Little Wing is like one of these beautiful girls that come around sometimes ... you play your gig; it's the same thing as the olden days, and these beautiful girls come around.. you do actually fall in love with them because that's the only love you can have. It's not always the physical thing of "Oh, there's one over there ...", it's not one of those scenes. They actually tell you something. They release different things inside themselves ... "Little Wing" was a very sweet girl that came around that gave me her whole life and more if I wanted it ... " - Jimi Hendrix

Like cloak and dagger..

Like cloak and dagger
I put the word out on the waterfront
We were living hard
Living fast
Outrunning ghosts
From the past--Robbie Robertson

Etta James and Jimi Hendrix --Nashville

Even as hillbilly music became central to Nashville’s identity and music commerce, a string of clubs on Jefferson Street played host to electrifying rhythm and blues. It’s where Jimi Hendrix cut his teeth and where Etta James Rocked The House on her famous 1964 live recording from the New Era Club. Meanwhile white and black met in Printer’s Alley, where Music Row studio musicians gathered at day’s end to play jazz and rock and roll.

Valhalla, I am coming!

We come from the land of the ice and snow,
From the midnight sun where the hot springs blow.
The hammer of the gods will drive our ships to new lands,
To fight the horde, singing and crying: Valhalla, I am coming! --Led Zeppelin

The Changing of The Guards

Gentlemen, he said I don't need your organization, I've shined your shoes
I've moved your mountains and marked your cards
But Eden is burning either brace yourself for elimination
Or else your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards.--Dylan

Lou Reed...

In the late '70s I started to search for the perfect sound - whatever that might be, before that I was mainly interested in drugs, insanity and the rock'n'roll lifestyle.
Lou Reed

Ry Cooder on Bill Clinton

'Yeah, Clinton did good,' he says. 'But he also ushered in the era of Nafta, the North American Free Trade Area, which made Juarez, Mexico, the murder capital of the world, with women raped for their pay cheques. That was another nail in the coffin of workers' lives

Do you Fear Death?--Jim Morrison

People fear death even more than pain. It's strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. Yeah, I guess it is a friend.
Jim Morrison

Expose Yourself to Your Deepest Fear--Jim Morrison

Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free. --
Jim Morrison

Avoiding A Life of Sorrow and Despair:

Kris Kristofferson has stated that he was greatly influenced by the poet William Blake while at Oxford, who had proclaimed that if one has a God-given creative talent then one should use it, or else reap sorrow and despair.

Mose Allison and Gatemouth Brown

I'm a big fan of Mose Allison. He and Gatemouth Brown were two of my biggest influences. --J.J. Cale

J.J. Cale

Singer/songwriter J.J. Cale's songs have been covered by artists ranging from Johnny Cash to Captain Beefheart. But his trademark sinuous, bluesy guitar lines and mumbly, near-whispered vocals have been popularized by Dire Straits and Eric Clapton; the latter's versions of "After Midnight" and "Cocaine" have become radio hits.

What to do if you are depressed? -- Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin

On the power of music, told to The Scotsman in 2010: “If I ever really felt depressed, I would just start putting on all my old records that I played as a kid, because the whole thing that really lifted me then still lifted me during those other times. It was good medicine for me, and it still does that for me when I put something on. Isn’t it wonderful that we’ve got all that good medicine? I think it’s got to be all part of our DNA, this mass communication through music. That’s what it is. It’s got to be, hasn’t it? Music is the one thing that has been consistently there for me. It hasn’t let me down.”

Live as me.

I'd love to live in Ireland but I'd like to live as me, not what someone thinks I am. People don't understand - I lived there before I was famous.
Van Morrison

Blonde on Blonde

On its release, Blonde on Blonde was not short of critics who argued the album was a major work. To accompany the songbook of Blonde on Blonde, Paul Nelson wrote an introduction stating, "The very title suggests the singularity and the duality we expect from Dylan. For Dylan’s music of illusion and delusion—with the tramp as explorer and the clown as happy victim, where the greatest crimes are lifelessness and the inability to see oneself as a circus performer in the show of life—has always carried within it its own inherent tensions...Dylan in the end truly UNDERSTANDS situations, and once one truly understands anything, there can no longer be anger, no longer be moralizing, but only humor and compassion, only pity."


For Mike Marqusee, Dylan had succeeded in combining traditional blues material with modernist literary techniques: "[Dylan] took inherited idioms and boosted them into a modernist stratosphere. 'Pledging My Time' and 'Obviously 5 Believers' adhered to blues patterns that were venerable when Dylan first encountered them in the mid-fifties (both begin with the ritual Delta invocation of "early in the mornin"). Yet like 'Visions of Johanna' or 'Memphis Blues Again', these songs are beyond category. They are allusive, repetitive, jaggedly abstract compositions that defy reduction."

Corroncho project

Between 2003 and 2008 Phil Manzanera collaborated with Colombian artist/sculptor Lucho Brieva on the Corroncho project. The project sprang from a Spanish version of the track Complicada, written by Brieva's wife Chrissie Hynde. The resulting album comprises a set of songs about two corroncho characters (corroncho being the pejorative name given by people from Bogota to fellow Colombians from the Caribbean Coast, particularly Barranquilla. The album includes the musical styles of salsa, cumbia, pop music, ballads and chillout and has guest appearances from Robert Wyatt, Paul Thompson, Enrique Bunbury, Chrissie Hynde, Annie Lennox, Quimi Portet, Gilad Atzmon, and one of Cuba’s top pianists Aldo Lopez Gavilan.

Bowie on Religion

"I'm in awe of the universe, but I don't necessarily believe there's an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance. The incense is powerful and provocative, whether Buddhist or Catholic."[

Marijuana and Peter Tosh-- Eric Clapton

"Je ne pouvais vraiment pas tenir le rythme de leur consommation de ganja, qui était énorme. Si j'avais essayé de fumer autant ou aussi souvent, je serais tombé dans les pommes ou j'aurais eu des hallucinations. On travaillait aux Dynamic Sound Studios à Kingston. Des gens y entraient et sortaient sans arrêt, tirant sur d'énormes joints en forme de trompette, au point qu'il y avait tant de fumée dans la salle que je ne voyais pas qui était là ou pas. On composait deux chansons avec Peter Tosh qui, affalé sur une chaise, avait l'air inconscient la plupart du temps. Puis, soudain, il se levait et interprétait brillamment son rythme reggae à la pédale wah-wah, le temps d'une piste, puis retombait dans sa transe à la seconde où on s'arrêtait.” --Eric Clapton

We always did feel the same We just saw it from a different point of view ...

All the people we used to know
They're an illusion to me now
Some are mathematicians
Some are carpenter's wives
Don't know how it all got started
I don't what they're doing with their lives
But me I'm still on the road
Heading for another joint
We always did feel the same
We just saw it from a different point of view
Tangled up in Blue.

True love they have been without it..

How all my fathers, they’ve gone down
True love they’ve been without it
But all their daughters put me down
’Cause I don’t think about it--Dylan

Make Your Own Dream

“Make your own dream.

That's the Beatles' story, isn't it? That's Yoko's story, that's what I'm saying now. Produce your own dream. If you want to save Peru, go save Peru. It's quite possible to do anything, but not to put it on the leaders and the parking meters. Don't expect Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan or John Lennon or Yoko Ono or Bob Dylan or Jesus Christ to come and do it for you. You have to do it yourself.

That's what the great masters and mistresses have been saying ever since time began. They can point the way, leave signposts and little instructions in various books that are now called holy and worshipped for the cover of the book and not for what it says, but the instructions are all there for all to see, have always been and always will be.

There's nothing new under the sun. All the roads lead to Rome. And people cannot provide it for you. I can't wake you up. You can wake you up. I can't cure you. You can cure you.”
― John Lennon

Highway 61- Let Him Call it what he wants too..,

While Dylan was growing up in the 1950s, before the construction of the interstate highway system, Highway 61 stretched from Duluth, where he was born, through Minneapolis, where he went to college, down to the Mississippi delta. Along the way, the highway passed close to the birthplaces and homes of Southern music greats such as Muddy Waters, Son House, Elvis Presley, and Charley Patton. The "empress of the blues", Bessie Smith, met her death in an automobile accident on Highway 61, and blues legend Robert Johnson was said to have sold his soul to the devil at the highway's crossroads with Highway 49. The highway was also the subject of several classic blues recordings, notably Roosevelt Sykes' "Highway 61 Blues" (1932) and Mississippi Fred McDowell's "61 Highway" (1964).

For most of its nearly 1,700 miles (2,700 km), Highway 61 runs parallel to the Mississippi River, which provided a migratory route from the 1920s through the 1950s for African Americans leaving the Deep South for better economic prospects. With them, they brought their music. As Dylan's biographer Robert Shelton commented, "Jazz came up the river. Blues came up the river. A lot of great basic American culture came right up that highway and up that river."

Dylan told Shelton that he had to overcome considerable resistance at Columbia Records, to give his album the title, "I wanted to call that album Highway 61 Revisited. Nobody understood it. I had to go up the fucking ladder until finally the word came down and said: 'Let him call it what he wants to call it'."

No Time...

No time to choose when the truth must die
No time to lose or say goodbye
No time to prepare for the victim that’s there
No time to suffer or blink
And no time to think
--Bob Dylan

You Fight for the Thrown ....

Loneliness, tenderness, high society, notoriety
You fight for the throne and you travel alone
Unknown as you slowly sink
And there’s no time to think
--Bob Dylan

Suicide

You may not have heard of American duo Suicide, but you will have heard of the groups they influenced. Depeche Mode, New Order, Moby, Radiohead - almost every techno or industrial act, or rock band that uses synthesisers, has cited Suicide as an influence.

Suicide's Martín Rev on God...

"I distrust the name ‘God' but, yes, I do believe in a higher power," he says. He adds that he shares the rationalist stance of Spinoza, the 17th-century Jewish philosopher and "pantheist theologian". "God is in all of us," he says, before deciding: "There is an immense power. There has to be."

The Bravest Man in Rock--Lead Vocalist of Suicide

And their confrontational performances, which often resulted in orgies of violence and destruction, led Joe Strummer, frontman of The Clash, to call vocalist Alan Vega "one of the bravest men I have ever seen on a stage".

U2--Breathe Now

We are people borne of sound
The songs are in our eyes
Gonna wear them like a crown
Walk out, into the sunburst street
Sing your heart out, sing my heart out
I've found grace inside a sound
I found grace, it's all that I found
And I can breathe
Breathe Now

Blues and Jazz Legends on Beale Street

In 1909, W. C. Handy wrote "Mr. Crump" as a campaign song for political machine leader E. H. Crump. The song was later renamed "The Memphis Blues". Handy also wrote a song called "Beale Street Blues" in 1916 which influenced the change of the street's name from Beale Avenue to Beale Street. From the 1920s to the 1940s, Louis Armstrong, Muddy Waters, Albert King, Memphis Minnie, B. B. King, Rufus Thomas, Rosco Gordon and other blues and jazz legends played on Beale Street and helped develop the style known as Memphis Blues. As a young man, B.B. King was billed as "the Beale Street Blues Boy".

Beale Street

In the early 1900s, Beale Street was filled with clubs, restaurants and shops, many of them owned by African-Americans. In 1889, NAACP co-founder Ida B. Wells was a co-owner and editor of an anti-segregationist paper called Free Speech based on Beale. Beale Street Baptist Church, Tennessee's oldest surviving African American Church edifice built in 1864, was also important in the early civil rights movement in Memphis.

Son House

It is difficult to describe the transformation that took place as this smiling, friendly man hunched over his guitar and launched himself, bodily it seemed, into his music. The blues possessed him like a 'lowdown shaking chill' and the spellbound audience saw the very incarnation of the blues as, head thrown back, he hollered and groaned the disturbing lyrics and flailed the guitar, snapping the strings back against the fingerboard to accentuate the agonized rhythm. Son's music is the centre of the blues experience and when he performs it is a corporeal thing, audience and singer become as one.--Hall

Bob Dylan on Elvis Presley

Presley's first, historical recordings took place at Sun Records, a small independent label run by Sam Phillips in Memphis, Tennessee. The historical significance of these first Presley recordings and their impact on future musical artists is well exemplified by the actions of legendary musical artist Bob Dylan, who is said to have gone to Sun Records and kissed the "x" where Elvis had stood to record his first recordings. Further stated by Dylan: "I thank God for Elvis Presley".

Billy Preston

Alongside Tony Sheridan, Billy Preston was the only other musician to be credited on a Beatles recording: the artists on the number-one hit "Get Back" are given as "The Beatles with Billy Preston

East-West, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band

Going on to call the Butterfield Blues Band "one of the greatest bands of the rock era", Marsh concludes that "With 'East-West', above any other extended piece of the mid-Sixties, a rock band finally achieved a version of the musical freedom that free jazz had found a few years earlier."

No Sense of Time

Style of songwriting: "What's different about it is that there's a code in the lyrics, and there's also no sense of time. There's no respect for it. You've got yesterday, today and tomorrow all in the same room, and there's very little you can't imagine not happening"
--Bob Dylan

The "Immigrant Song"

"Immigrant Song" was written during Led Zeppelin's tour of Iceland, Bath and Germany in mid-1970. The opening date of this tour took place in Reykjavík, Iceland, which inspired Plant to write the song. As he explained:

We weren't being pompous ... We did come from the land of the ice and snow. We were guests of the Icelandic Government on a cultural mission. We were invited to play a concert in Reykjavik and the day before we arrived all the civil servants went on strike and the gig was going to be cancelled. The university prepared a concert hall for us and it was phenomenal. The response from the kids was remarkable and we had a great time. "Immigrant Song" was about that trip and it was the opening track on the album that was intended to be incredibly different.

Dylan's Street Legal and Christian Intent

Themes of note are the subtly religious and somewhat apocalyptic overtones found throughout, especially in "Changing of the Guards", "No Time to Think" and "Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)". Although the Bible (both Old and New Testaments) had always influenced Dylan's work, the proximity of this album to the beginning of his gospel tour (early 1979) raises the possibility that some songs may have been written with more Christian intent than previous ones.

You Press Your Luck

You press your luck, and you don't care.--Westerberg

Burden of Originality

The burden of originality is one that most people don't want to accept. They'd rather sit in front of the TV and let that tell them what they're supposed to like, what they're supposed to buy, and what they're supposed to laugh at.--Marilyn Manson

The Sixties--John Lennon

“Now in the sixties we were naive, like children. Everybody went back to their rooms and said, 'We didn't get a wonderful world of just flowers and peace and happy chocolate, and it won't be just pretty and beautiful all the time,' and just like babies everyone went back to their rooms and sulked. 'We're going to stay in our rooms and play rock and roll and not do anything else, because the world's a horrible place, because it didn't give us everything we cried for.' Right?”

John Lennon quotes (English Singer, Songwriter and Political activist, member of the "Beatles", 1940-1980)

Seven More Days...with Ron Wood...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1y1ywp6IGrc

Lounge Computing and Rock N Roll Tweets...

The pocket computer is changing the value of our lifestyle. You Rock N Roll from anywhere and Tweet your favorite song from anywhere on the planet.-@RockNRollTweets

Oh Sister Lyrics.....

We grew up together
From the cradle to the grave
We died and were reborn
And then mysteriously saved.