Rock Singers

"Ain't no angel gonna greet me. It's just you and I my friend. My clothes don't fit me no more. I walked a thousand miles Just to slip this skin."

"I was bruised and battered and I couldn't tell What I felt. I was unrecognizable to myself. I saw my reflection in a window I didn't know My own face. Oh brother are you gonna leave me? Wastin' away On the streets of Philadelphia."

"You ride in a limousine the first time, it’s a big thrill but after that it’s just a stupid car."

"The first day I can remember looking into a mirror and being able to stand what I saw was the day I had a guitar in my hand."

"There ain't a note that I play on stage that can’t be traced back directly to my mother and father."

"In the third grade a nun stuffed me in a garbage can under her desk because she said that’s where I belonged."

"At this point, I don’t need my records to be Number One or sell as many as this person or that person. That’s not fundamentally important — I don’t believe that sustains you."

"I have the feeling that the night you look at your audience and don't see yourself, and the night the audience looks at you and doesn't see themselves reflected in you, it's all over."

"I don’t think anybody truly knows where we’re going from here yet. It depends on too many unknowns. We don’t know where the COVID virus is going to take us. We don’t know where Black Lives Matter is going to take us right now. Do we get a real practical conversation going about race and policing and ultimately about the economic inequality that’s been a stain on our social contract? And of course, nobody knows where our next election is going to take us. I believe that our current president is a threat to our democracy. He simply makes any kind of reform that much harder. I don’t know if our democracy could stand another four years of his custodianship. These are all existential threats to our democracy and our American way of life."

"The country we carry in our hearts is waiting. And together, we can move America towards her deepest ideals. And besides, we had a sax player in the House. We need a guitar player in the White House."

"We're here to re-dedicate you to The Power, The Passion, The Mystery, and The Ministry of Rock and Roll."

"Your success story is a bigger story than whatever you’re trying to say on stage... Success makes life easier. It doesn’t make living easier."

"I think what's happening now is people want to forget. There was Vietnam, there was Watergate, there was Iran – we were beaten, we were hustled, and then we were humiliated. And I think people got a need to feel good about the country they live in. But what's happening, I think, is that that need – which is a good thing – is gettin' manipulated and exploited. And you see the Reagan reelection ads on TV – you know: "It's morning in America." And you say, well, it's not morning in Pittsburgh. It's not morning above 125th Street in New York. It's midnight, and, like, there's a bad moon risin'. And that's why when Reagan mentioned my name in New Jersey, I felt it was another manipulation, and I had to disassociate myself from the president's kind words."

"Music was my way of keeping people from looking through and around me. I wanted the heavies to know I was around."

"This music is forever for me. It's the stage thing, that rush moment that you live for. It never lasts, but that's what you live for."

"I was appalled that the San Francisco ethic didn't mushroom and envelope the whole world into this loving community of acid freaks. I was very naive."

"A startling presence, both vocally and visually... Off the cuff, like the whole '60's were off the cuff. An Oscar Wilde in drag who combined insight and sarcasm that was sometimes light, sometimes dark. A provocateur."

"If you remember the Sixties, you weren't there."

"Janis knew more than I did about "how it was", but she lacked enough armor for the inevitable hassles. She was open and spontaneous enough to get her heart trampled with a regularity that took me thirty years to experience or understand. On the various occasions when we were together, she seemed to be holding in something she thought I might not want to hear, like older people do when they hear kids they love saying with absolute youthful confidence, "Oh, that'll never happen to me." Sometimes you know you can't tell them how it is, they have to find out for themselves. Janis felt like an old soul, a wisecracking grandmother whom everybody loved to visit. When I was with her, I often felt like a part of her distant family, a young upstart relative who was still too full of her own sophistry to hear wisdom. Did we compliment each other? Yes, but not often enough."

"Loss either teaches you to persist in the face of suffering, or hardens you into a bitter cynic. Sometimes, it does a little of both."

"Man is the only animal that knows he's going to die, so we invent a heaven to keep from going crazy. Most people are hypnotized by organized religion from childhood."

"The wiser you get on the inside, the uglier you get on the outside. The world's great gurus have beautiful things to say but they generally look like shit."

"The first words I ever heard the alcohol rehab counselor say were 'Good morning, assholes!' With that, I liked him right away."

"Jim Morrison was a well-built boy, larger than average, and young enough to maintain the engorged silent connection right through the residue of chemicals."

"I've enjoyed the accommodations offered by police departments from Florida to Hawaii. Any time I saw a badge, something in me would snap."

"In Germany I ingested the entire contents of the hotel mini-bar before a show and stuck my fingers in this guy's nostrils because I thought they would fit."

"When logic and proportion Have fallen softly dead And the White Knight is talking backwards And the Red Queen's "off with her head!" Remember what the dormouse said: "Feed your head! Feed your head!""

"When the men on the chessboard Get up and tell you where to go And you've just had some kind of mushroom And your mind is moving low. Go ask Alice I think she'll know."

"And if you go chasing rabbits And you know you're going to fall, Tell 'em a hookah smoking caterpillar Has given you the call. Call Alice When she was just small"

"One pill makes you larger And one pill makes you small, And the ones that mother gives you Don't do anything at all. Go ask Alice When she's ten feet tall."

"But we all do sort of the same thing and that is rearrange what you thought was real, and, uh, they remind you of the beauty of very simple things. You forget, because you're so busy going from A to Z, that there's, uh, 24 letters in between."

"She's more even -[daughter China] - I think it jumps generations. You get a screwball in one, and then the next one is straight, then you get a screwball. My grandmother was goofy, my mother was straight."

"It was the first time many of the bands had met and saw each other perform, so we were all really marveling at each other. It was just one good group of people after another. And different kinds of music — from Jimi Hendrix to Ravi Shankar, The Mamas and the Papas to The Who. They had a backstage area where there was food being served 24 hours a day, so everybody was wandering around meeting each other. It was just amazing."

"Singer Janis Joplin, who in 1968 was screeching out her voice with a California group called , said that she was not a hippie, because hippies believed in trying to make the world better. Instead she said she was a : "Beatniks believe things aren't going to get better and say, 'The hell with it,' stay stoned, and have a good time.""

"Wow, that's heavy."

"I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel You were famous, your heart was a legend You told me again you preferred handsome men But for me you'd make an exception. And clenching your fist for the ones like us Who are oppressed by the figures of beauty You fixed yourself, you said, "Well never mind, We are ugly but we have the music.""

"Ah but you got away, didn't you babe You just turned your back on the crowd You got away, I never once heard you say I need you, I don't need you I need you, I don't need you And all of that jiving around."

"Ah, but you got away, didn't you baby You just threw it all to the ground You got away, they can’t pay you now For making your sweet little sound, can they? Making your sweet little sound on the jukebox Making your sweet little sound on the jukebox Making your sweet little sound on the radio Making your sweet little sound."

"I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel You were talking so brave and so sweet Giving me head on an unmade bed While the limousines wait in the street. And those were the reasons and that was New York. I was running for the money and the flesh. I was running for the money and the flesh That was called love, for the workers in song And it still is for those of us left."

"Work me Lord, work me Lord. Please don't you leave me, I feel so useless down here With no one to love Though I've looked everywhere And I can't find me anybody to love, To feel my care."

"Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose, Nothing don’t mean nothing honey if it ain’t free... And feeling good was easy, lord, when he sang the blues. You know feeling good was good enough for me, Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee."

"You know you got it if it makes you feel good."

"Well, I’m gonna show you, baby, that a woman can be tough. I want you to come on, come on, come on, come on and take it, Take another little piece of my heart now, baby!"

"Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz? My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends"

"Oh yeah, make up your mind, honey, You're playing with me, hey hey hey, Make up your mind, darling, You're playing with me, come on now! Now either be my loving man, I said-a let me honey, let me be, yeah!"

"Please don'tcha do it to me babe, no! Please don'tcha do it to me baby, Either take this love I offer Or honey let me be."

"You know that I need a man, honey Lord, You know that I need a man, But when I ask you to you just tell me That maybe you can."

"You say that it's over baby, Lord, You say that it's over now, But still you hang around me, come on, Won't you move over."

"An’ I don’t want much outa life, I never wanted a mansion in the south. I just-a want to find someone sincere Who’d treat me like he talks, One good man."

"One good man, Oh ain’t much, honey ain’t much, It’s only everything..."