Guitarists From The United States

"TO ARMS! TO ARMS! Hooray! That's great! Two legs ain't bad unless there's a crate. They ship the parts to mama for souvenirs: two ears -- Get Down!"

"You can't run a country by a book of religion. Not by a heap or a lump or a smidgen. Of foolish rules of ancient date. Designed to make you all feel great. While you fold, spindle and mutilate.Those unbelievers from a neighboring state."

"Whoever we are, wherever we're from We shoulda noticed by now, our behavior is dumb.And if our chances expect to improve. It's gonna take a lot more, than trying to remove the other race.Or the other whatever, from the face of the planet altogether."

"Beauty is a pair of shoes that makes you wanna die."

"I have an important message to deliver to all the cute people all over the world. If you're out there and you're cute, maybe you're beautiful. I just want to tell you somethin' — there's more of us UGLY MOTHERFUCKERS than you are, hey-y, so watch out."

"I don't do drugs, nor have I ever believed in them. Am I a creative person? Then why do people think in order to be creative one must do drugs? Actually, I think people take them as an excuse to screw up in public, y'know, spill things or get silly. Drugs have slowed down civilization because we have to wait for people to get off their high before we can resume. They are the millstone around society's neck."

"I love the guitar, always have. I can relate to it a lot better than a saxophone."

"Music is the only religion that delivers the goods. All music is good. It fulfills a social function. It's like wallpaper to your lifestyle. It defines what you are."

"There isn’t anything weird about my music. Weird is a skeleton in the closet, wearing a rubber mask with warts all over its nose, and all that kind of shit. That’s not what I do. The thing that makes my music unusual is that people only hear one kind of music all the time over the radio. It’s wallpaper to their lives. Audile wallpaper. There’s one acceptable beat and there are three acceptable chord progressions. There are five acceptable words: baby, love, tears, yat yat. Just because I don’t deal in those terms doesn’t mean I’m weird. So tell these people: I ain’t weird; I’m rational. I’m a person who can choose to write stuff like that, or choose to write stuff that includes all the notes on the piano played at once, followed by a cement truck driving over the piano, followed by a small atomic explosion. Nothing weird about that as long as you do it in a meaningful way."

"Most people don’t think I’m rational. They’re too busy featuring their hurt. They find it irrational not to feature your hurt. That’s how fucked up they are."

"I think the music of the Fifties is really good. I suspect it’s much better musically than much of what’s available now. Not in terms of production, but in terms of content. One good believable song about some guy’s girlfriend and how they broke up — a sincere one — is better than twenty albums of English rock that’s ever been produced."

"Everything on this planet has something to do with music. Music functions in the realm of sculptured air. Polluted as our atmosphere might be, air is the thing that makes music work. Since all other things that occur in the sound domain are transmitted to the ear through that swirling mass, depending on how wide you want to make your definition, you could perceive quite a bit of human experience in terms of music."

"The richest people in the world aren’t particularly smart or happy. And the happiest people in the world aren’t particularly smart or rich.… That leaves me making music. But we can’t talk about that."

"The U.S. is a mere pup tent of a civilization. We’ve got two hundred years of stupidity behind us and we think we’re right up there with everyone else who’s been doing it for thousands of years."

"The cool-person syndrome is peculiarly American. Part of that has to do with the way the educational business is run in the U.S. It’s not based on how much you can teach your child: it’s based on how much money the suppliers of basic materials can make off your child. Somewhere along the line most people pick up the desire to be a cool person, which is just another way to make them buy things. Once you’ve decided that you need to be a cool person, it makes you a possible victim of anyone whose products are the equivalent of bottled smoke. Somebody tells you to buy this particularly useless item and you’ll be a cool person. No matter how stupid it seems, you have to buy it. Pet Rocks. Pringle’s potato chips. whatever it is — the newest, the latest. Since the cool-person thing is something you learn in school, and since the school business is pretty suspicious and definitely tied up with the government, it makes you wonder whether or not the desire to be cool is part of a government plot to make you buy stupid things."

"I can’t talk to you about music because you don’t know anything about music. I can talk to you about politics or sociology and all that peripheral stuff, but I can’t talk to you about music. There’s not enough information in common that I could say to you so you’d be able to understand. Besides, the people who read OUI don’t give a fuck about music anyway."

"People have preposterous ideas about what those songs are about and what the music means. They start spouting all this shit that’s so far off the mark, it’s revolting. But if that’s how they derive pleasure, who am I to deprive them of it? Let ’em enjoy it. It’s there for their edification. But total comprehension is out of the question."

"So much gets lost in the translation. Even if you sat there listening to it with a microscope, there’s no way you’re gonna find out what it means."

"Just because somebody hears something you say, or reads something that you write, doesn’t mean you’ve reached them. With reading comprehension being what it is in the U. S., you can safely toss that one out the window. If you want to judge by the listening habits of people who buy records, the first thing they do is put it on and talk over it."

"If a person wants to write music and lyrics, he has a perfect right to express his views on a certain subject. I would feel wrong if I were to express anything that I didn’t believe in. I write what I like to write. Those who like to listen to it, listen to it. And the ones who don’t, watch football and drink beer, jog, go to discos and so forth. I never claimed to be a man for all seasons."

"And now here I stand, looking at your yellow railroad, in the ruins of your balcony"

"But to live outside the law, you must be honest."

"You say you love me and you're thinking of me, but you know you might be wrong."

"She takes just like a woman, yes she does She makes love just like a woman, yes she does And she aches just like a woman But she breaks just like a little girl."

"I asked the doctor if I could see you It's bad for your health, he said Well, I disobeyed his orders, I came to see you but I found him there instead Well, I don't mind him cheating on me but I sure wish he'd take that off his head Your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat"

"Well, I see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat Yes, I see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat Well, you must tell me, baby How your head feels under somethin' like that Under your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat"

"She is good to me And there's nothing she doesn't see She knows where I'd like to be But it doesn't matter"

"But these visions of Johanna, they make it all seem so cruel."

"Name me someone that's not a parasite and I'll go out and say a prayer for him."

"The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face."

"Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial. Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while But Mona Lisa must have had the highway blues You can tell by the way she smiles"

"He's sure got a lotta gall to be so useless and all"

"We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it."

"Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're trying to be so quiet?"

"You see, you're just like me. I hope you're satisfied."

"Your debutante just knows what you need, but I know what you want."

"The one was Texas medicine, the other was just a railroad gin. And, like a fool, I mixed them; and it strangled up my mind."

"And here I sit so patiently waiting to find out what price you have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice."

"Oh Mama, can this really be the end? To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again?"

"Somebody got lucky, but it was an accident."

"But I would not feel so all alone, everybody must get stoned!"

"Dylan: Well, no, it is to begin with. But then I always hear other instruments, how they should sound. The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up. That's my particular sound. I haven't been able to succeed in getting it all the time. Mostly, I've been driving at a combination of guitar, harmonica and organ, but now I find myself going into territory that has more percussion in it and [pause] rhythms of the soul."

"Ron Rosenbaum: When you hear your songs in your mind, it's not just you strumming alone, you mean?"

"And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot Fighting in the captain's tower While calypso singers laugh at them And fishermen hold flowers..."

"The Titanic sails at dawn"

"Anything I can sing, I call a song. Anything I can't sing, I call a poem."

"Now at midnight all the agents And the superhuman crew Come out and round up everyone That knows more than they do"

"Yes, I received your letter yesterday (About the time the door knob broke) When you asked how I was doing Was that some kind of joke? All these people that you mention Yes, I know them, they're quite lame I had to rearrange their faces And give them all another name Right now I can't read too good Don't send me no more letters no Not unless you mail them From Desolation Row"

"They're selling postcards of the hanging"

"I started out on burgundy but soon hit the harder stuff."