The Band Quotes

#1. I was a pretty lousy bass player. But the band I was in couldn't find a bass player in our small town and it was more important to have a bass than keyboards, so that's what I did.

Anne Boleyn

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

Levon Helm

#3. I'd like to live off the band, but if not, I'll just retire to Mexico or Yugoslavia with a few hundred dollars, grow potatoes, and learn the history of rock through back issues of Creem magazine.

Kurt Cobain

#4. I've been through this fame thing before, when the band was big in '80, '81.

John Lurie

#5. We [My Chemical Romance] didn't push ourselves to that next level. I think we purposefully held ourselves back, feeling like maybe in order to advance, we need to regress. There was definitely a sense of fear within the band about taking that next step.

Gerard Way

#6. I slowly started to drift back into music again. I finally got the call from John ... about getting the band back together again. It was so out of the blue. I almost thought that the moment had passed.

Roger Andrew Taylor

#7. And I've played piano since I was little, so I was originally the piano player in the band.

Caroline Corr

#8. And the White Album is important to me for different reasons. One - I had left the band on the White Album.

Ringo Starr

#9. I was the drummer in a band called Hemsworth for a brief stint, too - it was not very great. I didn't even write the songs, but the band was named after me.

Ryan Hemsworth

#10. I think most people start rock bands in their early twenties or teens, but I was almost thirty at the time when the band started really doing anything and it took another several years before people started caring about us.

Matt Berninger

#11. People like to let loose at rock concerts and it gives them an excuse to do it in a way that is not destructive to others and not really destructive to the band.

James Young

#12. The teenage lead singer counted off, and the band launched into a hot version of "Ooh, My Head," the old Ritchie Valens song - and not really so old in the summer of '61, although Valens had been dead for almost two years.

Stephen King

#13. I'm not an endings person. I don't do endings. There may have been people in the band who wanted this to be an ending from time to time, but me and Amy don't really do endings. You cannot escape from us. Once we're friends with you, that's it.

Torquil Campbell

#14. I do a lot of curiosity buying; I buy it if I like the album cover, I buy it if I like the name of the band, anything that sparks my imagination.

Bruce Springsteen

#15. But I was not in the band, because I suffer from the kind of tone deafness that is generally associated with actual deafness

John Green

#16. But if I was still trying to be in Guns N' Roses while I wasn't in the band ... I wouldn't want to maintain an image like that.

Slash

#17. The biggest problem in rock journalism is that often the writer's main motivation is to become friends with the band. They're not really journalists; they're people who want to be involved in rock and roll.

Chuck Klosterman

#18. When I was in high school I wanted to be in the most underground band ever so we didn't have a name, songs, no one could play or sing anything and I didn't tell the other members they were in the band.

Christy Leigh Stewart

#19. The band broke up because I couldn't bear Rotten anymore because he was an embarrassment with his silly hats and his, like, shabby, dirty, nasty looking appearance.

Sid Vicious

#20. I don't think when I'm doing music. Things just happen. I've even taken my clothes off while performing. But then I'm so shy that I can't even take my clothes off in the dressing room, even though it's just the other guys in the band in here with me. It's really weird.

Daron Malakian

#21. Even though there's reasons to try things that may or may not work, it's still a real intimate way to finish the song with everybody right there in the band just locked in.

Stevie Ray Vaughan

#22. The top of the band would be happiness, contentment and peace of mind.

Frederick Lenz

#23. I thought if I lost the band, I was dead. If I didn't stick with the Who, I would be a sheet metal worker for the rest of my life.

Roger Daltrey

#24. Personally, I'd rather shove a cactus up my ass, but apparently that option isn't on the table, so I might as well just rip the Band-Aid off now and get it over with.

Katja Millay

#25. When you're a solo artist and you have a band on tour you have to pay the band some salary. You don't realise the expenses, the way they add up SO quickly. But thank god I'm not a money person. So it doesn't really bug me at all, I mean it's more comical to me ...

Marnie Stern

#26. I was trying to take the band in a direction that I thought was appropriate, and Roth was trying to take the band in more of a Las Vegas direction. And there he is.

Eddie Van Halen

#27. I'd say we do reach somewhat of a younger audience, but I think for the most part that younger audience is picking our music up from a brother or sister or even parent, who is turning them onto the band.

Alex Lifeson

#28. I like myself. I think I'm cool. But I think when you're in a band you take on a role within the band, and I think people over the course of years can identify those roles as almost being bigger than just the individual. I don't know. It's kind of hard to talk about.

Stone Gossard

#29. We can finally start translating the book," Cate said. "At least, I think we can."

"A rousing call, not dissimilar from the band of brothers speech in Henry V." [reply from Noah]

Nina Post

#30. To do a musical takes a tremendous amount of energy because you have to act and sing at the same time. And everything has to be precise. Because you can't forget the lyrics because the band keeps playing, you know, and you're under a certain amount of pressure.

Alan Alda

#31. For bighorns, topography is memory, enhanced by acute vision. They can anticipate the land's every contour
when to leap, where to climb, when to turn, which footholds will support their muscular bodies. To survive, this is what the band would have to do: make this perfect match of flesh to earth.

Ellen Meloy

#32. I like to think about stringing songs together like a string of pearls, or a string of beads, but ultimately it has to be stuff that really works with the band, and gives a spin to the older material.

Emmylou Harris

#33. And then we came here for three weeks of band rehearsal with [music consultant/member of the band "Sloan"] Chris Murphy. And I grew up in Toronto during Sloan's heyday, so like I was like "Oh my god!" And so that was pretty cool.

Alison Pill

#34. Now, the band that inspired that great saying, "Stop The Music!!"

Henny Youngman

#35. Michael Sunday and I are the original members of the band. We first did it just for charities and benefit concerts. It was very ad-hoc, and before we knew it, we were really a band. We went through several drummers and guitarists before we were happy with the line up.

Peter Tork

#36. Mischievous smile. I remember reading about Calvin Klein's daughter. Every time she pulled down a lover's pants, she was confronted by her father's name on the band of his underwear. A total sex killer.

David Cronenberg

#37. Being a professional musician doesn't mean you spend 12 hours a day playing music. It means you spend up to 12 hours a day taking care of business, dealing with litigation, with the various characters who've stolen your interests, or fending off hostile lawsuits from former members of the band.

Robert Fripp

#38. This is for you. A mage named Randal told me to give it to the Band if you ever came back. 'It surmounts evil,' he told me, 'keeps doom at bay.'

Janet Morris

#39. The E Street band casts a pretty wide net. Our influences go all the way back to the early primitive garage music, and also, we've had everything in the band from jazz players to Kansas City trumpet players to Nils Lofgren, one of the great rock guitarists in the world.

Bruce Springsteen

#40. 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.

Maynard James Keenan

#41. I'm a full member of Cheap Trick in all respects. Solely as an accommodation to some of the band members, I reluctantly agreed to take a temporary hiatus from touring.

Bun E. Carlos

#42. Yeah, yeah I think that's one of the biggest misconceptions towards the band. The biggest one is that we're Satan worshippers, but next to that just the fact that we're normal.

Tom Araya

#43. There were some situations where I was giving up everything I had for the band and I just expected everybody else to feel the same way. I realized I was just kidding myself.

Jerry Only

#44. My mother would take the Band-Aid off, clean the wound, and say, "Things that are covered don't heal well." Mother was right. Things that are covered do not heal well.

T.D. Jakes

#45. The only things Mick and I disagree about is the band, the music and what we do.

Keith Richards

#46. If I weren't in the band, I would be a fan.

Rick Nielsen

#47. Within the space of a few shows you can hear the band morph between their various identities as savvy arena rockers, intense starship pilots, vaudeville nostalgists, modest American folkies, boundary-dissolving improvisers, roots-conscious spiritualists, and mind-fucking pranksters.

Richard Gehr

#48. He had found the band of jackals he needed. But as Jack McCall rode through the center of town, he experienced the terrifying certainty that a man faces when he's about to make his own name famous. He lacked both a hero's calm and a coward's resolve to survive at any price.

Walter Hill

#49. So you wake up this morning and find you're president of the United States. Pretty cool, no? Helicopters and a 747 at your disposal; courtside seats at any NBA playoff game of your choice; everyone stands up and the band plays when you come into the room.

Jeff Greenfield

#50. Bass players are always the underdogs of the band, but I made sure that I was never viewed as one. I went out of my way to steal as much limelight as I could.

Peter Hook

#51. The couple of years before I was declared bankrupt were the roughest. The bank letters, the pressure, the stress was awful. You're in this twilight zone of not knowing where your life is going, and yet you're in Westlife. Everything was great with the band. I was earning money, and it looked good.

Shane Filan

#52. I'm still an angry dude. I'm just older. I still push the band to be heavy and dark-that's always been my role.

Kim Thayil

#53. Jefferson could strike up the band even when he was being lazy or fearful.

Richard Brookhiser

#54. Phil has always been a fighter. He was getting in fights all the time. I told him that if he ever hit me then I would leave the band. He wanted to find out if I was telling him the truth. He hit me so I left and that is how UFO split up.

Michael Schenker

#55. For me, it was a choice between band and drama - and I hated the band teacher.

Lucy Deakins

#56. It was about working with other musicians, but more than that it's about exploring musical areas that you could never do with the band you're in, in my case Judas Priest. You could tackle musical areas and lyrical areas that wouldn't be appropriate for Priest.

Glenn Tipton

#57. I want to protect the fans. I want to protect this music scene. We must protect the world before it gets any worse. And I can only do that through the band, the GazettE"
-Reita

Reita

#58. There were so many specific things from high school jazz band that I remembered: the conductor searching out people who were out of tune, or stopping and starting me for hours in front of the band as they watched.

Damien Chazelle

#59. Try to remember that even if they deliver the wrong cake, the limo driver is a no-show, there's a monsoon, and the band plays music you hate, you will still have just married the person of your dreams!!!
Isn't that what the whole thing is really about?

Liz Long

#60. This is the band I always wanted to be in.

Phil Anselmo

#61. Our studio is kind of built into our home, so it's a place you can ramble, and we can do a pretty good recording here. The band is really comfortable her.

Chris Frantz

#62. The potential audience seems to be dwindling in the states. I was kind of embarrassed for the band because of the size of the audience.

Brian May

#63. Things have gone beyond my wildest expectations and dreams, and I feel like I've been given so many blessings in my life, between my friendship with the guys in the band, our wonderful audience, being able to play this music, and then my family.

Trey Anastasio

#64. Even the two times that I left, I never really felt like I left the band. It's very bizarre. It's like there's sort of an umbilical cord that stretches between us spiritually.

Rick Wakeman

#65. My love for the band is still there. It hasn't changed, maybe that's why it's so painful these days.

Roger Daltrey

#66. There's always some promoter having an '80s night, saying, We'll supply the band. All you can drink.

Nik Kershaw

#67. Bass guitar is the engine of the band.

Suzi Quatro

#68. Some of the wise boys who say my music is loud, blatant and that's all should see the faces of the kids who have driven a hundred miles through the snow to see the band ... to stand in front of the bandstand in an ecstasy all their own.

Stan Kenton

#69. Bun E.'s a member of the band, but he's not touring, and he's not recording ... We've had our differences, but we're all settled up now, and hopefully we can forget about that era. These decisions that Cheap Trick makes, Bun E. is part of.

Robin Zander

#70. I hope that the next time you go to a concert, the band doesn't play the song you wanna hear! And instead, they just play songs off their new album!

Amy Schumer

#71. If you're the singer in the band, you always get more attention than anyone else.

Mick Jagger

#72. We should have gone over years before that. I always wanted to and I think most of the band did.

Roy Wood

#73. How do you possibly say that a cover band is better than the band that created and wrote the material? It's absurd.

Eddie Trunk

#74. You should be loud enough to be heard, but not overshadow the soloist or the other members of the rhythm section. Finding this volume balance is critical for a good feeling in the band. Creating bass lines

Sher Music

#75. I love to dance and I'd love to be saying goodbye to my friends while the band was playing and they were dancing ... I want them to remember I was a dancing man in my day.

Benjamin Spock

#76. When I joined the band, being that I was going to take this up as a profession, I realized that there were no two finer guitar players in the world that I'd rather play with.

Michael Davis

#77. With me and Bill ... I think we started out with $15 apiece and split the other $20 between the band.

Bobby Hatfield

#78. I'm excited by the band [White Stripes]. It really excites me. But it wouldn't excite me if there weren't those limitations, if we weren't living in that box, if we weren't trapped. Once that goes away, then I'll know that it's not worth doing it any more.

Jack White

#79. Music expresses what cannot be put into words I like to think, and I think the band makes a good go at it.

Steven Tyler

#80. My world was a community ballet school, a marching band, my two sisters and my girlfriends. I played saxophone in the band and was a bit nerdy.

Jennifer Garner

#81. I think Everclear is a weird combination of a singer-songwriter and a hard-rock band. That's why some people really dig the band, and some don't.

Art Alexakis

#82. Faced with a brass band that was positioned to drown out free speech, Russian activists reacted to the potential confrontation with lemons. With activists eating lemons or pretending to, involuntary saliva reaction of the band made it impossible for them to interrupt.

Masha Gessen

#83. I met Scott Stapp when the band was first coming up, great guy. I haven't seen him for years, but a great guy.

Billy Corgan

#84. I told Jerome I will ring Egg every day because he's my pal and not because I want him back in the band to write our second album. - Clipper

Jamie Scallion

#85. The band is just fantastic,
that is really what I think,
Oh, and by the way,
which one's Pink?

Pink Floyd

#86. My life has been a poor attempt to imitate the man, I'm just a living legacy to the leader of the band.

Dan Fogelberg

#87. How we sound was always the intention of how the band should sound. It has nothing with other options or going in a different direction. This has been the Evergreen Terrace sound all along and always will be.

Josh James

#88. Wine maketh the band quivering, the eye watery, the night unquiet, lewd dreams, a stinking breath in the morning, and an utter forgetfulness of all things.

Pliny The Elder

#89. The Band is probably the ultimate example of people taking all kinds of music, from gospel to blues to mountain music to folk music to on and on and on and on and putting them all in this big pot and mixing up a new gumbo.

Robbie Robertson

#90. We used to really feel like the band was our family.

Chris Frantz

#91. The band has always stayed close to its fans and not sold out. That's a very rare thing. I can see how rare that is having been outside of the band for eight years. Maiden has integrity. I think people appreciate that.

Adrian Smith

#92. We never had a girl in the band. Why? Certainly there's some rippin' female players in our kind of music. We have no objection to it. It'd be wonderful.

Ketch Secor

#93. I was the Head Boy of East High School in 1999. I represent 303 - the area code, not the band - Mile High, until I die. I'm 31, a comedian; I juggle, but I don't glove it. I think waxed mustaches run a very thin line between hipster and 1800s barkeep.

T. J. Miller

#94. The ensemble playing is as clean as a whistle. The band plays in tune and with dynamics. Also, there is some fine arranging and orchestrating going on here, and the soloists perform at top level.

Horace Silver

#95. When I joined the band I was coming largely from an improvising background, and the idea of a fluid rhythm that was really coherent attracted me.

John Dieterich

#96. He said, 'Jasmine actually seemed like part of the band tonight.'" A smile twitched his lips. "Then he questioned his sanity.

Tara Kelly

#97. I'm a single girl. I like to have a good time. I just sleep with the guys in the band all the time because it's easier.

Lady Gaga

#98. the clang of the band, letting loose, rang out like a brass kettle rolling downstairs,

Gustave Flaubert

#99. I've heard the band is supposed to be out of this world, Miss Vicks was saying.

Kathryn Davis

#100. Okay, lesson on Tate and music. If fans do anything less than carve the band's name into their skin, then the band isn't worth listening to. Any music that involves more than jumping around and banging your head is about as exciting as Kenny G to her.

Penelope Douglas