Unrequited Infatuations Quotes

“I don’t know why exactly, but I’m attracted to gaps and injustice and have a missionary conversion complex that refuses to tolerate the bland, the banal, and the boring. I have some bizarre flaw that wants the world to be perfect. And colorful. And interesting. And fun.”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir

“Who exactly are we, after all? What are we? We’re four things. We are our genetic makeup, our inclinations, talents, gifts. You can sing in tune or you can’t. We are our environment. You grow up in a loving environment or you don’t. We are our circumstances. You’re born rich in Chicago or poverty-stricken in Uganda. And we are our willpower.”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir

“He’d read Charles Brandt’s I Heard You Paint Houses three times.”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir

“And most profoundly I thank my wife, Maureen, for sticking with me after the fun-loving Rock and Roller she married turned into a boring workaholic and for tolerating my inability to stay in one place long enough to earn the respectable lifestyle she deserves as I continue my lifelong quest to break even or, at the very least, find a steady job.”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir

“Now, most of the government’s extensive criminal activity isn’t covered up at all. There’s not even an attempt to do so. The government brags openly about kidnapping kids and putting them in cages. The crimes, along with the ongoing murder count from COVID, are on the news every day. Politics suddenly became redundant.”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir

“I wrote and sang about politics in the ’80s because most of what was going on was hidden. The news didn’t dominate our lives like it does now. You could go months without even thinking about the government. Can you imagine such a thing? Meanwhile, Reagan and his henchmen were engaging in criminal activity that needed to be brought into the light of day.”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir

“Life requires constant vigilance against love of humanity turning into profound frustration, resentment, and disgust. In other words, let’s face it, most people are assholes. —GAUTAMA BUDDHA, THE FIFTH NOBLE TRUTH”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir

“The old Kings and the Princes so recently dethroned, Were prophets once upon a time, their words the law of the land, They used to look so regal in their psychedelic colors, There is no place for them now in the land of the bland… —“FACE OF GOD,” FROM BORN AGAIN SAVAGE”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir

“But how hip were David Chase and HBO for hiring someone with emphysema? Just hiring someone older was unusual. My brother Billy was in TV the whole first half of his life (he’s got a great book about it, Get in the Car, Jane!), and he was a big fan of older actors, but the networks always gave him a hard time about hiring them.”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir

“Folk music passes along stories and allegories. Blues talks about the conditions of life. Jazz operates through mostly wordless intellect. Soul is all about relationships. Rock has substance and the ability to communicate it worldwide. And that includes its greatest hybrid, Reggae. Bob Marley was the ultimate example. Got to be neck and neck with Muhammad Ali for most well-known human on the planet. Get Tim White’s book on Marley. Incredible. I mentioned it once earlier, but I want you to remember it.”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir

“A Mob guy sees ducks in his pool, and when they fly away he has a nervous breakdown that lands him in a psychiatrist’s office? That’s the premise of a hit show?”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir

“In the world of show business—no news is always bad news. —THE UNWRITTEN BOOK”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir

“(There’s more detail about this in Al Kooper’s great book, Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards.)”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir

“Iovine saw some action in the Salsa-meets-Disco world, but it wasn’t his thing. It was too late to learn Spanish. He was from Brooklyn. He was still working on English.”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir

“Finally, I saw that we had demystified one of our greatest forces, our Art, and specifically our Rock music. Art, like Religion, needs mystery. That is how we participate in it. But our society demystifying that mystery has the same effect as music Engineers separating the frequencies with pillows and rugs. The advent of MTV was the beginning of the end of Rock’s importance. The accessibility of videos diluted and in many cases eliminated the experience of seeing a live Rock band. It has also allowed Rock bands to exist without the essential prerequisite of being great live performers. The corporatization of Rock radio dealt another severely damaging, if not lethal, blow. As did consultants, whose only job was to homogenize and eliminate interesting, unique personality. As did lazy, ignorant, short-sighted record companies. The result, of course, was the waning of the Rock era and the rise of a Pop era that was more vapid, meaningless, superficial, emotionless, soulless, unmemorable, and disposable than any previous era in the history of music. Most importantly, now that Pop was big business, bottom-line corporate control took precedence over the Art.”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir

“A second principle was our changing relationship to time. It seemed like there just simply wasn’t enough of it anymore. This was true in the late ’80s, and it’s only gotten worse. Technology was supposed to give us more time, not less. But technology is being developed in ways that outpace the human mind. Information is great, but when we feel the need to know everything as quickly as possible, we can’t connect with any of it. We scratch the surface, hold nothing, and move on. Which inevitably leads to the key malady of the twenty-first century, time deficit disorder.”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir

“For me, that connection was revealed in the 1960s, which marked the birth of consciousness. Our minds expanded on a mass scale like never before. Civil rights for minorities, women’s rights, gay rights; a politically active youth movement; the belief that questioning your government was a patriotic responsibility; environmental awareness; expansion of Eastern thinking; the end of colonialism; psychoactive substances; and of course, the Renaissance in all the Arts. That consciousness was founded on a few basic spiritual principles. The first was our fundamental understanding of our relationship to the Earth, and the vast gap between Western and Semitic religious belief, on one side, and American Indian, African, and Asian belief, on the other. Genesis 1:28 says, “And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion.’” What “God” meant by “subdue” and “have dominion” can (and should) be debated, but Western religion took it to suggest man’s superiority over the Earth. Man the conqueror. The other tradition—American Indians, Africans, Asians—did not believe that humans were superior to the Earth; rather, they believed that they were meant to live in harmony with it. This difference affected how we viewed our most essential relationship and contributed to a fundamental sense of alienation. That alienation was the first component of our spiritual bankruptcy. That was the theme explored more deeply on Revolution, but it would overlap with this one.”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir

“I knew I’d never be more popular than I was at that moment. But it was somehow not real. I could not generate revenue. Fuck, I couldn’t even achieve my lifelong goal of breaking even!”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir

“His album that year was Sign O’ the Times. I took the fact that the gang in the title track was named the Disciples as a personal tribute. The tour behind that record was the best Rock show I’ve ever seen. I went three times, and it blew my mind every time. The production was the highest evolution of the live, physical part of our Artform I have ever seen. It was Prince’s vision, but his production designer, LeRoy Bennett, deserves much of the credit for pulling it off. It was Rock, it was Theater, it was Soul, it was Cinema, it was Jazz, it was Broadway. The stage metamorphized into different scenes and configurations right before your eyes, transforming itself into whatever emotional setting was appropriate for each song. On top of that, the music never stopped, for three solid hours. Prince wrote various pieces, or covered Jazz, as interstitial transitions for those moments when the stage was shifting or the musicians were changing clothes. At one point, he even had a craps game break out, which made me laugh—it brought me back to Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom and our onstage Monopoly games. They captured it pretty well on film, but it can’t compare. When you’re watching a movie, your mind is used to scene changes, different sets and lighting. Live, it’s something else. That kind of legerdemain before your eyes is mind-boggling.”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir

“Prince is the only exception I can think of. A true genius. I crossed paths with him often in 1987, as we both spent most of that year touring Europe. “You stole my coat idea back in 1978, didn’t you?” I said the first time I ran into him. He confessed with one of his sly smiles.”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir

“Very few senators had Bradley’s intellect, and it was obvious most were hearing about the subject for the first time. How could I tell? By the way I had to point out where South Africa was on the map! And that’s a country with two clues in its name!”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir

“I wanted to Produce Big Things! I was on the path to doing just that. I had produced a massive hit record, and life is all about the parlay. I could have followed that success with producing other major acts or getting any project I could dream up financed for the rest of my life. Now, my significant contribution would be diminished to irrelevancy.”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir

“Subterranean Homesick Blues” ushered in Dylan’s electric future. Johnny’s in the basement mixing up the medicine, I’m on the pavement thinking about the government… I consider those the two most important sentences in the history of Rock.”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir

“The Byrds didn’t like “Mr. Tambourine Man” and didn’t want to do it, so Dickson very cleverly invited Dylan to their rehearsal, forcing them to learn it to avoid being embarrassed. They played him their now-classic electric version of his “Mr. Tambourine Man.” As the story goes, after Dylan heard the Bach-meets-Beatles version, he said, “Hey, man! You can dance to that!” And history was made.”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir

“I might even have been financially secure enough to have kids of my own.”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir

“There are five ways an artist can make a cover song their own: change gender, genre, tempo, arrangement, and style. You don’t need all five. You only need one.”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir

“It’s where Tom Petty, not known for his wild and crazy sense of humor, delivered his most memorable punch line. The organizers told him that the Garden was Bruce’s home turf, so he shouldn’t be bothered if he heard the crowd booing. They were just saying “Bruce.” “What the fuck’s the difference?” Tom lovingly contributed to infamy.”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir

“We essentially do three things. We learn, we teach, we practice our craft. Any day we do all three of those things is a good day. —THE UNWRITTEN BOOK”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir

“Focus on the Craft, the Art takes care of itself. —THE UNWRITTEN BOOK”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir

“And then that dream disintegrated, with the assassination of one hero after another, the uprising of a frustrated black population (riots, they were called, but they were really a matter of a seventh of our population waiting for the Civil War to end—still are), and the systematic dismantling of activist groups working toward a more equitable society, from the American Indian Movement to the Young Lords to the Black Panthers.”
― Stevie Van Zandt, Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir