If things are going slow, I'm itchy.

If you give it good concentration, good energy, good heart and good performance, the song will play you.

Drums just always sounded like the most fun part of that good music for me.

The Band never really played big concert tours. We never sold millions and millions of albums.

I was in high school, trying to get out of high school. The only thing slowing me up was grades.

I never subscribe to the stay-at-home policy. I'm not sick of the road or sick of eating in good restaurants around the country. I like to travel.

I've had all the lessons I could get. I've learned from everybody I've ever met.

The way to do it is to put as much life into the song as I can. You can either get it to breathe or you can't.

Good times don't last long sometimes.

I like to get within handshaking distance of the crowd. If it happens, they know it, we know it, and that's all we came here for.

The Jungle Bush Beaters didn't last too long as a group, but we had a pretty good time while we did.

The rock star stuff never came up for us. The Band was never attacked by groupies before, during or after any show that we ever played.

Well, somebody's got to sing. They won't hire you unless you sing.

Don't we all want what's best for each other?

A friend of mine took me to Memphis advised me that I should get in the musicians' union. He gave me a set of drums and said, Stay on the job, son.

I love horns, and the bigger the band, the better it sounds to my ear.

Most of our stuff was trial and error. You live with a tape recorder, you turn it on, you play the song and you listen to it.

Forever Young, by Dylan, is one of my favorite songs.

With horns and a full rhythm section, the drums always looked like the best seat in the house.

We all love musical architecture; there's no doubt about that.

Lord, when the song wants to pick up and go a little faster towards the end, it's hard for me to resist.

If you pour some music on whatever's wrong, it'll sure help out.

By the time The Band did The Last Waltz, the chemistry had changed, and it wasn't a thrill anymore to live that studio kind of life.

I like walking on the edge.

There were no rules, other than that the song should sound good and be fun to play.

When the second record came out, they started calling it The Band. I voted to call it The Crackers. I'm no fool.

My dad and I played music. He teaches me a song or two every time I'm home.

Drums usually seem to tune themselves.

I don't fool with a lot of things that I can't have fun with. There's not much reward in that.

If things are going slow, I'm itchy.

I played some Yamaha drums that I like a lot. And I like the Yamaha people a lot too. They've been really nice to me and The Band.

Anytime I switch to another instrument, I immediately turn it into another kind of drum so that I can understand it better.

The crowd is just as important as the group. It takes everything to make it work.

Conway Twitty was always our local hero while I was growing up. He had a series of good bands. I wanted to sit in, if Conway would let me. And he did a couple of times.

If you feel like you're getting into a rut with a song, a night off usually fixes it.

We're all dealt with the same hand here, so to speak. I feel like I've had it a lot better than most people. I've had the opportunity to travel and play music all my life.

You can either make it come around or you can't. By the time we would be ready to record a song, we would know for sure that it was the best way we could do it.

Dad and mom would have preferred that I be a doctor, a lawyer, a scientist, or a great humanitarian.

I don't think I'm a millionaire, but I'm comfortable.

I've always thought it was easier for girls to sing harmonies because their voices can go to that higher plane so much more easy than a male voice.

With horns and a full rhythm section the drums always looked like the best seat in the house.

We need to keep examining evilness. For instance, I'm totally against the fact that Osama bin Laden was shot. I think that he should have been put on trial and exposed as that human being he was. I think he should've been standing mentally naked in front of the rest of us and stand to justice for what he did.

Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.

The universal human laws - need, love for the beloved, fear, hunger, periodic exaltation, the kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of hunger/fear/pain - are constant, predictable, reliable, universal, and are merely ornamented with the details of local culture.

Upper class to me means you are either born into wealth or you're Royalty.

Being strong can be also feminine. I don't think feminine equals being weak. Being strong is very sexy.

People come out of the mid-west and go to the Ivy League. I kind of reversed the direction.

America is still mostly xenophobic and racist. That's the nature of America, I think.

Cultivating more leaders who reflect our heterogeneous society depends on universities' transparent use of race as one of many factors in an admissions process that is accessible to all.