When I came back to California in the early '60s I was hanging out with Jimmy Bowen, Phil Spector, and I wanted to be a record producer and work with other artists.

One of the first groups we signed was the Fifth Dimension.

The first time I went to New York, I met Alan Freed.

I got to see all these incredible blues players, like Jimmy Reed.

I'd gone through periods where I didn't work live performances for probably seven or eight months at a time.

The web site and the Internet are a whole new ball game.

After that initial success, every chance we got we'd hire that remote recording truck and just record stuff at the Whisky because it was so inexpensive.

I was working at this club in downtown L.A. from four to eight at night, just Eddie Rubin, the drummer, and I.

I think my favorite album was probably Realization.

My first really good guitar was a Gibson J-45.

What I really remember is that people camped out everywhere, and the fact everybody expected it might turn into a big nightmare with all sorts of hassles because back in those days everybody was smoking pot and taking acid.

I loved playing and I was actually working two jobs.

Alan's publishing company was in the Brill Building, and of course, the Brill Building was where all the songwriters hung out because that's where all the publishers were.

About two months into the Whisky, I borrowed some money and rented a remote recording truck.

The first amp I had back in the '50s was a small Fender.

I learned some chords and I started watching anybody I could, once I really got into it.

Guys like Otis Blackwell and Bobby Darin, and all the guys who were writing songs for Elvis at the time, just hanging around, writing songs, talking about music.

I've got a Fender Concert amp from the '60s, the one Joe Osborn used. He played his bass through it.

Even Woodstock turned out to be a disaster. Everybody was stuck in the mud and people got sick.

Jack and I usually get together and sit around in the afternoons and start throwing ideas around.

But I always loved songs with great lyrics.

One thing will lead to another and somebody will come up with a riff or a line or something we build from.

In early '57, I bought a Fender Telecaster.

I think after 1970 or so, after I sold Soul City, I took off for awhile and didn't do too many gigs.

In 1965, Gibson made the red one I use now, and a black one, which was the first black 335 they ever made.

When I came back to California in the early '60s I was hanging out with Jimmy Bowen, Phil Spector, and I wanted to be a record producer and work with other artists.

I accepted an offer to do a concert for the reopening of the Mall of Memphis.

But I found a lot of artists at the Cedar Bar were difficult for me to talk to.

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.

I got to sit down with people who I admired, and have conversations with some of the greatest thinkers and artists and performers. It's a huge privilege for me to be a journalist.

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

David Cronenberg knows what we actors do as artists.

The truth is, we haven't really figured out yet how artists are going to thrive in modern mass societies. We're all experiments.

Many of the artists who have represented Negro life have seen only the comic, ludicrous side of it, and have lacked sympathy with and appreciation for the warm big heart that dwells within such a rough exterior.

A great thing happening now in art is that artists are using the figure, the body, clothing, life.

The number of contemporary artists who appeal to me is infinitesimal.

I have to plead basic ignorance of most new jazz artists here.

Music is art, art is life, and we are who we are, and all of these aforementioned women, unless they should choose not to, will be performing well into the next many decades because they are great artists.

Because when the film was first mooted, the Beatles didn't like the idea at all. In fact they wouldn't have any part in it. And when Brian had committed them, it was part of a deal he did with United Artists, I think.

Artists are like everybody else.

When artists make art, they shouldn't question whether it is permissible to do one thing or another.

My proudest achievement has been the success of the shows and artists I have been involved with, because they were made in Britain.

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

I didn't want to save art - I respected the older artists too much to think art needed saving. But I knew it was finished, even though, at that time, I didn't know what I would do.

Music is more emotional than prose, more revolutionary than poetry. I'm not saying I've got the answers, just a of questions that I don't hear other artists asking.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

I've never understood why artists, who so often condescend to the cliches of their own culture, are so eager to embrace the cliches of cultures they know nothing about.

I want to run for the Senate from Tennessee. Not now, but when I'm 50, when music dies down a little bit. I know lots of artists and actors have those delusions of grandeur, but ever since I was a kid, it's been of interest to me.

Let's look at people as artists and try to support them; just because Picasso painted a couple of bad paintings, that's no reason to say he's a lousy painter.