Rock Singers

"Honey, I love to go to parties, And I like to have a good time, But if it gets too pale after a while Honey and I start looking to find One good man."

"Oh! But it don't make no difference, babe, hey, And I know that I could always try. Theres a fire inside everyone of us, You'd better need it now, I got to hold it, yeah, I better use it till the day I die."

"Don't expect any answers, dear, For I know that they don't come with age, no, no. Well, ain't never gonna love you any better, babe. And I'm never gonna love you right, So you'd better take it now, and right now."

"Aww, but it don't make no difference, baby, no, no, And I know that I could always try. It don't make no difference, baby, yeah, I better hold it now, I better need it, yeah, Im gonna use it till the day I die, whoa."

"Dawn has come at last, Twenty-five years, honey just in one night, oh yeah. Well, Im twenty-five years older now So I know we can't be right And Im no better, baby, And I cant help you no more Than I did when just a girl."

"Time keeps movin' on, Friends they turn away. I keep movin' on But I never found out why I keep pushing so hard the dream, I keep tryin to make it right Through another lonely day, whoaa."

"Tomorrow never happens. It's all the same fucking day, man."

"Fourteen heart attacks and he had to die in my week. In MY week."

"To sing blues, you've got to be able to, ... be willing to, feel things."

"Music’s for grooving man, and music’s not for puttin’ yourself through bad changes, y’know? I mean, you don’t have to go take anybody’s shit, man, just to like music, y’know what I mean? You don’t. So... so if you’re getting’ more shit than you deserve, you know what to do about it man. Y’know, it’s just music. Music’s... music's s’posed to be different than that."

"You know why we're stuck with the myth that only black people have soul? Because white people don't let themselves feel things."

""Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose" is as good an epitaph for the counterculture as any; we'll never know how-or if-Janis meant to go on from there. Janis Joplin's death, like that of a fighter in the ring, was not exactly an accident. Yet it's too easy to label it either suicide or murder, though it involved elements of both. Call it rather an inherent risk of the game she was playing, a game whose often frivolous rules both hid and revealed a deadly serious struggle. The form that struggle took was incomplete, shortsighted, egotistical, self-destructive. But survivors who give in to the temptation to feel superior to all that are in the end no better than those who romanticize it. Janis was not so much a victim as a casualty. The difference matters."

"Here's a wish for a runaway girl; Here's a prayer for honky-tonk Pearl — Hope she finds someplace outta this world Where she feels at home."

"A banker's daughter or a runaway girl, A little lady or a honky-tonk Pearl Has to find someplace in this world Where she feels at home. A banker's daughter is so hard to deceive A little lady is so hard to please Honky-tonk Pearl wears her heart on her sleeve, And her heart will not grow cold."

"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."

"And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again (yes), And then he asked me would I (yes, yes). I put my arms around him (yes), And drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts, And his heart was going like mad. Yes, I said yes, I will, yes."

"Ooh, little boy, in between changing fathers. Little girl has to live without Mother. They don't understand why they seem not to need them, Although all they need is a loving hand."

"It's the way that you kiss, the way that you give back, The way you love me like this -- look at the beauty of that. These are the tangled words of our love, that we both do untie -- Same old ways, same old spice, same old paradise."

"You entered my aura and fell into my arms. I just wrapped around you like a snake that's been charmed."

"Your hair shines like gold, says my child. You are pretty old, says my child. And I think to myself how I used to be. There's another wrinkle that I see. Then he takes my hand and smiles at me."

"I feel the need to be naked with you. Take off my pants, my shirt, my socks and my shoes. I need to be naked with you."

"That's right, The Mascara Snake. Fast and bulbous! Also, a tin teardrop!"

"[Beefheart] used to say, "You think you got a hard job, man? I gotta sing to that shit!""

"I've written every drum bit I ever done, every note. I played the drums. I played the guitar. I played the piano. I wanted it exactly the way I wanted. Exactly. Any composer I would think would want it that way, and I don't deviate at all. Don't you think that somebody like Stravinsky, for instance, don't you think that it would have annoyed him if someone bent a note the wrong way?"

"You look dandy in the sky but you don’t scare me Cause I got you here in my eye In this lifetime you got my human gets me blues"

"Pena Her little head clinking Like a barrel of red velvet balls Full past noise Treats filled her eyes Turning them yellow like enamel coated tacks Soft like butter hard not to pour"

"A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous. Got me?"

"It’s in my blood. My great-grandfather made wine and it’s a tradition I want to pass on to my son."

"For the music, it’s not about the individual — so the more you let the music speak for yourself, the more powerful the music will be."

"You can grow grapes in almost any part of the world. You just have to develop your palate enough to realize wine is an expression of the place where you make it. You don't have to take over the world; just be an artist and express your area."

"I think there’s a reason why wine figures into so many religions. There’s something transcendent about it. It’s sort of the way that music is more than the sum of its parts. You have all these elements that make up the terroir that wine can communicate."

"Tool is not Slayer. I went to art school. I spent three years in the military. There's more to me than throwing devil horns."

"The army influences everything I do. Certainly it teaches you discipline, which is a necessary element of development. I think there's more of a collaborative understanding in the band because of that."

"Every now and then, you get people who tend to forget what this country is about, which is a melting pot of races and cultures and freedom of speech."

"It's the role of us to run our government, the government by the people, for the people, and I don't think our government is listening to the people. It's our role as patriots to question them, because we elected them. And if they're not fairly and accurately representing us, it's the job of the people, the patriots, to take their country back."

"You really should be able to feel the higher power of music and be moved by it, rather than listening to me waffle on and having to explain it."

"It's a purging of sorts. Like, when you're all done doing your laundry and it's fresh and bright, but washing the clothes, you wouldn't want to get in while it's spinning around."

"One of my biggest heroes in music has been David Bowie. He's said, `I'm going to be a painter now, or I'm going to do some films,' and his audience is very forgiving, because they understand him as an artist. Whether you agree or like the result, you respect that he's expressing his artistic feelings."

"The process that we go through in recording with Tool is very organic, but at the same time it is very thought out. There is a very left-brain process of dissecting what we're doing and drawing from source material; it's very research oriented and esoteric."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."