Guitarists From The United States

"I'm the finger fucker."

"You know, I'm just gonna take your microphone, and stick in the microwave, and turn it on.*"

"Get it in ya! Chocolate milk, bitch!"

"Condoms are for sailors"

"I can suck my own!"

"I don't want you to get the wrong idea. Not all liberals smoke lettuce!"

"No man can eat 50 eggs!"

"I get mad when people are against pot."

"Tré Cool plays the drums in Green Day, and he snorts [he sniffs] donut sprinkles, and [wipes his nose] . . . oh, that's a sweet drain."

"Roll, roll, roll a joint, twist it at the ends [pause] Light it up and take a puff and pass it to your friends."

"I can count to four and repeat. I'm a drummer."

"Rock and roll outfits, commence!"

"Give me something to do to kill some time Take me to that place that I call home Take away the strains of being lonely Take me to the tracks at Christie Road."

"The people that you grew up and braved the trials of high school with will always hold a special place. Through all the BS of high school you hope that your friends had the time of their life, and that's what the song is talking about"

"Another turnin' point, a fork stuck in the road Time grabs you by the wrist, directs you where to go So make the best of this test, and don't ask why It's not a question, but a lesson learned in time It's somethin' unpredictable, but in the end is right I hope you had the time of your life"

"Chons, on rhythm guitar, had long black hair and blue eyes and was the first person I ever met who said she never ate meat, and when she told me that, I never ate it again either. Best thing that ever happened to me. All it took was the mere suggestion. Nobody else was vegetarian that I knew of, but I started to think of meat-eating as a very weird practice and secretly regarded meat-eaters with distaste, almost contempt. Why would anyone kill an animal if they didn’t need to? I learned to live and associate with “the majority,” but never respected them. I got used to having this lack of regard for 97 percent of the population."

"Everything in nature lives according to some order so it seems unlikely that humans live outside this system, even if they try to resist their instincts. That's how we can be sure we're not animals, this refusal to abide by what we know is good for us. If an animal's instinct tells him to avoid something he has no trouble keeping a wide berth. We, on the other hand, run in the direction of danger if it offers a thrill or satisfies a curiosity."

"Being vegetarian was to inform everything, the course of my destiny. I was baffled that the entire hippie nation hadn't become vegetarian en masse. It made no sense as eating meat went against the whole dialogue. Were the hippies just as hypocritical as the rest of them? I couldn't admit that but I understood why I loved songs like “The Loner” so much. I didn't want to be like the majority anyway. The majority were always wrong."

"It seemed like there was no control over it. I think certain things just popped. God was blessing us in telling us that certain things were going the way they were supposed to go."

"No. I know that's blasphemous when you are from Detroit."

"I wasn’t prepared. He had a big Mercedes, with a custom sound system, and he drove like hell through Nashville traffic, with Slim Harpo at defcon 1 volume."

"I would love to be Jack White — or maybe I want the peo­ple who like Jack White to also like me. But I”m the guy who writes beau­ti­ful music at 85 beat per minute."

"Jack is the showman—the brassy frontman and the snake-oil trader."

"I see him becoming one of the greatest record producers there is."

"I'm not saying I came up with anything [laughs]. It's like people thinking we would be more real if we went onstage in jeans and T-shirts. How ignorant is that, to think that because they don't wear a suit onstage that someone is giving you the real deal? People do come and see us and think, "Look at all these gimmicks." Go ahead, man. Go ahead and think that."

"I saw a review of our new album, and it said, "Every single component of the White Stripes is a gigantic lie." What does that mean? Have I sat down and said I was born in Mississippi? No. Did I say I grew up on a plantation and learned how to play guitar from a blind man? I never said anything like that. It's funny that people think me and Meg sit up late at night, in front of a gas lamp, and come up with these intricate lies to trick people."

"It'll sometimes hit me in the middle of a song, like, who do I think I am standing up here...playing."

"I tend to be that guy, you know? When me and four friends walk into a restaurant and nobody else talks to the host, I say, “Yeah, it’s a table for five.” I don’t want to be that guy; I wish someone else would say something. But it always ends up being me, and I hate what comes with that. There’s a lot of baggage—ego and narcissism—that comes with leadership. It’s difficult to cope with at times."

"Well that's a polite thing to say but that's fucking ridiculous."

"You can't do better than that."

"Is this some kind of fucking radio promotion? What the fuck is this? Let me just say that if whatever said radio station tries to blacklist us for my comments about their balloons, I would like them to know I want a written apology tomorrow for interrupting my song."

"'I'm excited by the band [White Stripes]. It really excites me. But it wouldn't excite me if there weren't those limitations, if we weren't living in that box, if we weren't trapped. Once that goes away, then I'll know that it's not worth doing it any more.'"

"At times, we [the White Stripes] almost ignore our own music. If we have the stage, we've gotta play Son House's music, because there's nobody to keep it alive. We don't wanna be known as the band that's conducting music instruction class. But that's all everyone talks about - why MTV's not good, why radio's not good. And the answer is really because whatever you want to call it - blues, country, folk - isn't around any more. That's why everyone's so mad, and I'm tired of it being my job to bring it back."

"Every time there's a list of the 100 greatest records of all time, all those albums were recorded in two days. Hardly any of them took a year, I'll tell you. In this day and age, I think it's important that people know that."

"I have three dads: my biological father, God and Bob Dylan."

"I love him (Josh Homme) too much, and you can't hurt someone that you love that much ... unless you're family."

"I feel it, you felt it—we're all struggling with the trouble that this industry is in right now. And it's not about sales; it's about beauty and romance and a relationship to art that's turning invisible, and it's affecting people's perception of music. It's affecting whether they think of it as a viable art, because it's so fucking disposable. It's not about being modern or retro or a Luddite or being hopeful or pessimistic about the future; it's about clinging on to what makes sense of our lives, and what give our lives value, and what gives us a commonality and a feeling of belonging."

"Frank Sinatra was dignified. We don't have a Frank Sinatra, or a Patti Page nowadays. What do we have? Ashlee Simpson instead of Patti Page! I mean, look at those people - like Paris Hilton! Who are all these skanks, man? Little girls are looking up to these girls, and it's so gross. Those girls have no dignity at all, and parents are letting their kids dress up like those skanks. But what else have they got? What are the other choices? Somebody had the nerve to ask me if I wanted to play guitar on Lindsay Lohan's album! She's another one of those 16-year-old actresses, and she's making an album! Like, 'NO!' Ha ha ha!"

"It is the pursuit of happiness that brings us happiness, and not the happiness achieved."

"I'm always surprised when anything about the band connects. But I love the fact that it's hard for people to understand. We've said before that it's always been a great thing to get certain people to go away thinking, 'Oh dear, she can't play the drums!' 'Fine, if you think it's all a gimmick, go away!' It weeds out people who wouldn't care anyway."

"MR. KUNSTLER: Now, Mr. Ochs, have you ever been associated with what is called the Youth International Party, or, as we will say, the Yippies? THE WITNESS: Yes. I helped design the party, formulate the idea of what Yippie was going to be, in the early part of 1968. MR. KUNSTLER: Can you indicate to the Court and jury what Yippie was going to be, what its purpose was for its formation? THE WITNESS: The idea of Yippie was to be a form of theater politics, theatrically dealing with what seemed to be an increasingly absurd world and trying to deal with it in other than just on a straight moral level. They wanted to be able to act out fantasies in the street to communicate their feelings to the public."

"He was kind of forbidden fruit in a way. Everybody thinks of the '60s as being nothing but radicals and hippies and crazy people, but when you were going to school, people discouraged you from listening to people like Phil Ochs or Bob Dylan, or reading Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg... He was seen as this of radical which is really kind of funny. When you look back, his message was so humanistic, how could it possibly have seemed so radical? He was singing for equality and freedom and the end of war."

"Phil believed strongly that one could change events, or change people's perception, through a well-crafted song."

"That was really Phil's strong point. The big rally. He was a topical singer. He sang a lot of songs about the news of the day. When he performed in that kind of venue, he was at his absolute best."

"We got our heads bashed in Chicago; we saw students shot to death at Kent State; we had people stabbed to death at the Rolling Stones' Altamont concert — what do we have to believe in anymore? Unfortunately, for Phil Ochs, he couldn't give an answer. He lost his faith."

"I just can't keep up with Phil. And he's getting better and better and better."

"Unlike some other protesters, his attacks aren't safe and generalised. He chooses his targets well, and he hits them hard."

"God isn't dead — he's just missing in action."

"America is two Mack trucks colliding on a superhighway because all the drivers are on amphetamines."

"And if there's any hope for America, it lies in a revolution, and if there's any hope for a revolution in America, it lies in getting Elvis Presley to become Che Guevara."