Rock Singers

"And Pontiff, pretty Pontiff Can anyone shake your hand? Or is it just that you like uniforms and someone kissing your hand"

"Jesse you say Common Ground Does that include the ?"

"First thing you learn is that you've always got to wait"

"There are problems in these times, but none of them are mine I'm beginning to see the light"

"An eye for an eye is elemental."

"I watched it for a little while, I like to watch things on TV"

"You made me forget myself; I thought I was someone else, someone good."

""Just watch," said Sheila, touching her finger to her head."

"The Rally Man's patter ran on through the dawn Until we said so long to his skull Shrill yell."

"When she turned blue, all the angels screamed."

"I'll be your mirror Reflect what you are In case you don't know"

"Candy says I've come to hate my body And all that it requires In this world . . . What do you think I'd see If I could walk away from me"

"Candy came from out on the Island In the backroom she was everybody's darlin' But she never lost her head Even when she was giving head She says, Hey babe Take a walk on the wild side"

"Life's like a mayonnaise soda And life's like space without room And life's like bacon and ice cream That's what life's like without you"

"And I feel just like Jesus' son"

"You can't depend on a beginning You can't depend on an end You can't depend on intelligence... You can only depend on one thing You need a busload of faith to get by... You can't depend on any churches Unless there's real estate you want to buy You can't depend on a lot of things You need a busload of faith to get by... You can depend on cruelty Crudity of thought and sound... You need a busload of faith to get by, ha"

"This room cost 2,000 dollars a month You can believe it man it's true Somewhere a landlord's laughing till he wets his pants No one here dreams of being a doctor or a lawyer or anything They dream of dealing on the dirty boulevard Give me your hungry, your tired your poor I'll piss on 'em That's what the Statue of Bigotry says Your poor huddled masses, let's club 'em to death And get it over with and just dump 'em on the boulevard"

"And Romeo had Juliette And Juliette had her Romeo I'll take Manhattan in a garbage bag With Latin written on it that says "it's hard to give a shit these days" Manhattan's sinking like a rock Into the filthy Hudson what a shock They wrote a book about it They said it was like ancient Rome"

"The news I feared the most, pales in comparison to the lump in my throat and the hollow in my stomach. Two kids have a chance meeting and 47 years later we fight and love the same way – losing either one is incomprehensible. No replacement value, no digital or virtual fill . . . broken now, for all time. Unlike so many with similar stories – we have the best of our fury laid out on vinyl, for the world to catch a glimpse. The laughs we shared just a few weeks ago, will forever remind me of all that was good between us. — John Cale about Reed's death"

"It always bothers me to see people writing 'RIP' when a person dies. It just feels so insincere and like a cop-out. To me, 'RIP' is the microwave dinner of posthumous honors."

"Of course. All the best people are."

"He's probably the single most untalented person I've heard in my life. He's a two-bit pretentious academic, and he can't play rock'n'roll, because he's a loser. And that's why he dresses up funny. He's not happy with himself, and I think he's right."

"This is the impossible level, boys. Impossible doesn't mean very difficult, very difficult is winning the Nobel Prize, impossible is eating the sun."

"Anyone that gets to side four is dumber than I am."

"Nothing beats 2 guitars, drum and bass."

"LR: "Are you political, Lou? Audience: "Yeah, are you?" LR:"Political about what? You give me an issue, I'll give you a tissue and you can wipe my ass with it.""

"Fuck Radio Ethiopia man, I'm Radio Brooklyn!"

"My week beats your year."

"Of course, it's her own sexuality that she's denying", he continued. Did I know that she'd been raped as a teenager in Berlin? I didn't. Nico was working as a temp for the U.S. Air Force. A black American Sergeant had raped not only her, but other girls under his employ. She'd kept quiet about it, but he was found out and court-marshalled. She had to testify for the prosecution at his trial. He was sentenced to death and shot. Nico was 15. "Not only does she have to carry the horror of the rape but the secret guilt of somehow being complicit, by her testimony, in his execution. Sex for Nico....is irrevocably associated with punishment."

"John Cale did a really interesting version of Heartbreak Hotel, in a minor key. It's incredibly suicidal. I mean you could never believe that that song could turn out to be such a downer as that... Nico did Deutschland Über Alles, which was very good... and she did The End by The Doors, which is the one they put on the album... Nico doing The End was so chilling, it really was. It was incredible. She invests it with so many levels of meaning I didn't hear in the Doors' one. She underplays it... there's just the harmonium, me playing synthesizer— almost doubling the harmonium part— and her singing... which is just like a rich, kind of non-specific miasma of sound..."

"With every moon it is as though you're getting closer to your soul And then you go alone and with no fear Then you will know That it was like this before we had to go And you will find that you were blind Until you saw these lights glowing in your nights."

"He came your way And when he had to go There were roses growing in the snow Silently you'll go to the shadow of your soul And you know that it was like this before we had to go You will never see these lights Glowing in your nights Until you feel this way."

"Banish the faceless reward your graceBanish the faceless reward your grace."

"Often the adolescent plagueReward your graceConfuse your hunger capture the fake..."

"You are beautiful and you are alone."

"Cease to know or to tellOr to see or to be your ownHave someone else's will as your ownHave someone else's will as your own."

"I don't have a sense of time. Time is timeless to me, and I'm not in a hurry to get older. I mean, if I were worried about time, all the time, it would be terrible."

"Jim Morrison tells me that people are looking at the streets while I am looking at the moon. I do not feel connected enough [with the issues] to throw stones at a policeman. I want to throw stones at the whole world."

"I think he was the first man I met who was not afraid of me in some way. We were very similar, like brother and sister. Our spirits are similar. We were the same height and the same age, almost … He was well read and he introduced me to William Blake and also the English Romantic poets who came after him. Jim liked Shelley. I preferred Coleridge. In fact, he is my favoured poet of all time. Did you know they were all drug addicts? Coleridge was addicted to opium. It is better to be addicted to opium than to be addicted to money."

"You could say it like was like a fairy tale at the time; Andy would be the good fairy, and Jim would play the giant, Brian would be the witch, Paul McCartney would be the frog who turns into a prince, no, it would have to be the other way round. Well, it didn't seem like a fairy tale at the time. It was a lot of hassle. But I learned a lot of things, and I began to compose my own songs."

"I have a habit of leaving places at the wrong time, just when something big may have happened for me."

"I would say the time has not yet come. I rebel against the present, whenever it is, because I have not seen any change, other than oppositions grow stronger. I would be a communist if it was more anarchist. Otherwise, I see only everything as an absurdity, so I can laugh and cry. I have lived in a continuation, from birth and growing towards death in a chain that cannot end. I don't see this decade then that decade. The same things happen in different guises. I am bohemian but at one time you would call me a hippie or a punk. I remain a bohemian whatever you call me. So maybe I am locked in the fifties. But I have never desired to grow up from my world as a child, which is when things are most clear and utopian. They are clear because you are at the center and you see all around you. When you get older you lose your sight … I lost something of my childishness when people around me start dying. Four of my family died within a year."

"A piece of art is not a loaf of bread. When someone steals a loaf of bread from the store, that's it. The loaf of bread is gone. When someone downloads a piece of music, it's just data until the listener puts that music back together with their own ears, their mind, their subjective experience. How they perceive your work changes your work."

"'... I remember seeing an early R.E.M. gig at the Hammersmith Odeon. I went backstage and they were all very warm and welcoming, apart from Michael Stipe who just sat in the corner with his back to me. Then he went on for the encore and did an a cappella version of [Syd's] 'Black Globe', which might have been his way of saying, "Syd was all right but you're an arsehole."'*"

""He was firstly an artist and secondly a musician. If ever he was asked what he did, the reaction would always be 'I'm an artist', never 'I'm a musician.' *"

"If you had said to a young Syd, ‘Look, this is your bargain in life, you know, you’re going to do this fantastic stuff, but it won’t be forever, it’ll be this short period. There’s the dotted line, are you going to sign for this?’ I suspect, maybe, a lot of people would sign for that, for making their mark."

"Well, he's schizophrenic. And has been since 1968."

"It's sad that these people think he's such a wonderful subject, that he's a living legend when, in fact, there is this poor sad man who can't deal with life or himself. He's got uncontrollable things in him that he can't deal with and people think it's a marvellous, wonderful, romantic thing. It's just a sad, sad thing, a very nice and talented person who's just disintegrated."

"Syd was so beautiful with his violet eyes. I only sort of lay beside him, nothing more could be accomplished. Then he had a breakdown and was gone. He hardly spoke. He would just tolerate me because I was so overpowered, so in awe that I didn't really speak either. I only hung around him for two or three weeks just before he flipped and was virtually removed from the group. I knew Syd was wonderful because he wrote such wonderful songs. He didn't have to speak because the fact that he couldn't speak made him who he was: this person who wrote these mysterious songs. I just liked looking at him: he was very pretty. A lot of the time with pop stars, when they open their mouths, it was all completely ruined anyway. So it was perfect that he was like that. My first pop star and it was just wonderful that he didn't speak."

"Their choice of material was always very much to do with what they were thinking as architecture students. Rather unexciting people, I would've thought, primarily. I mean, anybody walking into an art school like that would've been tricked--maybe they were working their entry into an art school."