Rock Music Quotes

“Play it fuckin' loud!”
― Bob Dylan

“Some guy said to me: Don't you think you're too old to sing rock n' roll?

I said: You'd better check with Mick Jagger.”
― Cher

“If Music is a Place -- then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.”
― Vera Nazarian

“Give the People what they want - and they'll get what they deserve.”
― The Kinks

“Girls have got balls. They're just a little higher up, that's all.”
― Joan Jett

“The hippies wanted peace and love. We wanted Ferraris, blondes and switchblades.”
― Alice Cooper

“Drinking beer is easy. Trashing your hotel room is easy. But being a Christian, that's a tough call. That's real rebellion.”
― Alice Cooper

“We believed anything worth doing was worth over-doing”
― Steven Tyler

“The lions of hard rock, guys like Robert Plant, Roger Daltrey, Brian Johnson, Rob Halford, these monsters feel completely timeless, iconic, eternal. They simply shall not, will not, do not die. It's almost impossible to imagine a musical world without Robert Plant. No metal fan of any stripe can imagine a day when, say, Iron Maiden shuts it all down because Bruce Dickinson turned 85 and suddenly can't remember the lyrics to "Hallowed Be Thy Name." Metal revels in the raw energy and unchecked phantasmagorical ridiculousness of youth. It is all fire and testosterone and rebellious fantasy. It doesn't go well with reality.

So it is for hard rock and a guy like Dio, an elfin titan with an undying love for lasers and sorcery, dragons and kings. The man wrote some terribly corny metal songs, but he sang every one with a ferocity and love and total honesty. He also wrote some of the finest hard rock melodies of all time, sang them with a precision and love unmatched by any hard rock singer since. It's a rare thing to give metal some heartfelt props. It is time. Raise your devil horns and salute.”
― Mark Morford

“I was ten when I heard the music that ended the first phase of my life and cast me hurtling towards a new horizon. Drenched to the skin, I stood on Dunoon’s pier peering seawards through diagonal rain, looking for the ferry that would take me home. There, on the everwet west coast of Scotland, I heard it: like sonic scalpels, the sounds of electric guitars sliced through the dreich weather. My body hairs pricked up like antennae. To my young ears these amplified guitars sounded angelic, for surely no man-made instrument could produce that tone. The singer couldn't be human. His voice was too clean, too pure, too resonant, as though a robot larynx were piping words through vocal chords of polished silver. The overall effect was intoxicating - a storm of drums, earthquake bass, razor-sharp guitar riffs, and soaring vocals of astonishing clarity. I knew that I was hearing the future.”
― Mark Rice, Metallic Dreams

“You should have felt the buzz the moment all five of us got together in the same room for the first time again. We all started laughin'—it was like the five years had never passed. We knew we'd made the right move.”
― Steven Tyler

“Things began to go wrong when I was seventeen. My band’s twenty-year-old lead guitarist earned seven years in jail for a drug-fuelled spree of violence. The other band members were quick to let go of their musical dreams, but I never did. They did the ‘mature’ thing: after writing off the band as a teenage fantasy, they got real jobs and made some money. They called it growing up. I called it giving up.”
― Mark Rice, Metallic Dreams

“Ronnie James Dio died the other day, quietly succumbed to a relatively sudden onset of stomach cancer and up and left the planet in a blaze of stage fire, dragonsmoke and general metal awesomeness. Maybe you heard.”
― Mark Morford

“RJD was pretty much heavy metal personified, a tiny 5-foot-4-inch sorcerer with a mangy mane, demonic eyes and sly grin, all coupled to a simply huge, operatic voice, a diminutive powerhouse who prowled the stage like a feline elf and who was, it turns out, also finely intelligent and well spoken, an actual gentleman in a genre known all too well for its bombastic, monosyllabic doltbuckets. A rare thing indeed.”
― Mark Morford

“I'm sure that if Plato hadn't been against music with a strong sexual beat, Bloom would have kept quiet about rock-and-roll.”
― E.D. Hirsch

“Of the myriad impressive notables related to Dio's passing, perhaps foremost is the fact the man was 67 years old and was still making quality hard rock records, still touring with a new (old) version of Black Sabbath, still singing his absolute heart out about dragons and rainbows, making the infamous devil horns hand gesture he swiped from his Italian grandmother and which has since became the universal, undeniable, completely badass symbol for true metal across all galaxies everywhere, and for which Dio deserves to be ensconced in the heavens forevermore.”
― Mark Morford

“Metal is made up of many silly cliches, and Dio's songs rarely shied away from a good cheeseball lyric about medieval knights and crystal balls. But the amazing thing is, Dio the man never succumbed to the typical ravages of drugs, booze or hideous all-body tattoos. He never gained 75 pounds later in life or lost most of his voice through merciless shredding and ended it all playing county fairs for 19 drunk dudes in a barn before collapsing in a heap in a motel room in Jersey. There's a lesson in there somewhere. Or everywhere.”
― Mark Morford

“We were orphans before we were ever the sons of these songs.”
― The Gaslight Anthem , Orphans

“The bravest thing David Bowie ever did was to go on stage after Queen at Live Aid.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Janie sped away in her convertible. Her car’s speakers blasted AC/DC’s Highway to Hell for good measure. She smiled as she mouthed the lyrics, ironically feeling like she was escaping hell.”
― Pinar Tarhan, A Change Would Do You Good

“Til there was Rock
You only had God.

- Sweet Head”
― David Bowie, David Bowie: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars - Off the Record

“The Dead Rock Star's Bar by Stewart Stafford

I went for a drink in The Dead Rock Star's Bar,
Phil Lynott was drinking whiskey in the jar,
Jimi Hendrix was rocking the place,
Elvis Presley was stuffing his face,
Sid Vicious was grumpy and gruff,
Freddie Mercury strutted his stuff,
Marvin Gaye had plenty of soul,
Lennon and Cobain compared bullet holes,
Jim Morrison declared he was The Lizard King
Buddy Holly sported an aeroplane wing,
Such an array of talent leaves one's mouth agape,
But they're all still alive on CD and tape,
Wherever you live, you don't have to travel far,
To have a damn good time at The Dead Rock Star's Bar.

© Stewart Stafford, 1996. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Normal consumers declare rock to be dead whenever they personally stop listening to it (or at least to new iterations of it), which typically happens about two years after they graduate from college.”
― Chuck Klosterman, But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past

“Rock is not dead, but it is The Walking Dead, with a few groups still trying to survive in a zombie apocalypse of musicians or fringe and splintered groups.”
― Michael P. Naughton

“Despite the promises of utopian hedonism, many youth and middle-aged adults quickly enticed by these did not escape from their addictions easily, if at all. And, to the shock of their fans, the lives of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and numerous other acid trippin' rock musicians also ended quickly like the closing blues beats from one of their most popular songs. Even Max Yasgur himself died just 19 months after the Woodstock Festival of a heart attack at the age of 53.”
― Philip Alajajian, The 1960's Social Movements - Pathways to the Final Apostasy

“Epic, adult and widescreen in its ambitions, the beefed-up Comeback version of 'Let Yourself Go' sounded almost violent in its execution, with Elvis's raw and desperate vocals every match for the gargantuan, aggressive horns and percussion that dominated the mix. A big, sweaty, dusty monster of a take towered over the Culver City version, and perfectly captured the tumultuous social and political strife of its era in dissonant musical form. This new version of 'Let Yourself Go' was unfailingly magnificent in its vision.”
― Mark Duffett, Counting Down Elvis: His 100 Finest Songs

“Just try to find an uncompelling photo of Fleetwood Mac taken at any point between 1975 and 1987. I've spent hours scouring Google Images in search of a single Fleetwood Mac band photo to which I am not sexually attracted, and failed every time.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“Brian May's Red Special guitar is as big a Queen icon as the crest Freddie Mercury designed for the band. It is the Stradivarius of Rock, and Brian is a virtuoso in the classical mold.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Într-adevăr, un concert Sfinx și el [Dan Andrei Aldea] erau ceva extraterestru, era... vizibil; mama, care nu era cu rockul, zicea: «Uite, băiatul ăsta e mai altfel.» Adică era extraterestru.”
― Mike Godoroja

“One of the many musical distinctions of my lifetime that used to seem important and now is completely forgotten is the difference between “alternative” and “indie” rock.”
― Steven Hyden, Long Road: Pearl Jam and the Soundtrack of a Generation