Quotes about band
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John Dankworth photo

“Forget the word youth – this is one of the best bands you'll ever hear.”

John Dankworth (1927–2010) British musician

Of the National Youth Jazz Orchestra Guardian, 18 Feb 2010 http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2010/feb/18/letter-john-dankworth-obituary

Bert McCracken photo
Paul Simon photo
Robert Fulghum photo
Robert Seymour Bridges photo

“I will not let thee go.
I hold thee by too many bands:
Thou sayest farewell, and lo!
I have thee by the hands,
And will not let thee go.”

Robert Seymour Bridges (1844–1930) British writer

I Will Not Let Thee Go http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=6639&poem=30254, st. 7.
Poetry

Joe Hill photo

“There is pow'r, there is pow'r
In a band of workingmen.
When they stand hand in hand,
That's a pow'r, that's a pow'r
That must rule in every land —
One Industrial Union Grand.”

Joe Hill (1879–1915) Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World

"There is power in a Union" http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/There_Is_Power_in_a_Union (1913)

Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon photo

“The natural leaning of our minds is in favour of prisoners; and in the mild manner in which the laws of this country are executed, it has rather been a subject of complaint by some that the Judges have given way too easily to mere formal objections on behalf of prisoners, and have been too ready on slight grounds to make favourable representations of their cases. Lord Hale himself, one of the greatest and best men who ever sat in judgment, considered this extreme facility as a great blemish, owing to which more offenders escaped than by the manifestation of their innocence." We must, however, take care not to carry this disposition too far, lest we loosen the bands of society, which is kept together by the hope of reward, and the fear of punishment. It has been always considered, that the Judges in our foreign possessions abroad were not bound by the rules of proceeding in our Courts here. Their laws are often altogether distinct from our own. Such is the case in India and other places. On appeals to the Privy Council from our colonies, no formal objections are attended to, if the substance of the matter or the corpus delicti sufficiently appear to enable them to get at the truth and justice of the case.”

Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon (1732–1802) British Baron

King v. Suddis (1800), 1 East, 314. Lord Kenyon is later reported to have written, "I once before had occasion to refer to the opinion of a most eminent Judge, who was a great Crown lawyer, upon the subject, I mean Lord Hale; who even in his time lamented the too great strictness which had been required in indictments, and which had grown to be a blemish and inconvenience in the law; and observed that more offenders escaped by the over easy ear given to exceptions in indictments than by their own innocence". King v. Airey (c. 1800), 2 East, 34.

Jack White photo

“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 (1975) American musician and record producer

Perry, Andrew (13 November 2004). "What's eating Jack?" http://observer.guardian.co.uk/omm/story/0,,1347715,00.html, The Observer. (accessed October 22, 2014)
2010

Brian Viglione photo
Neil Young photo
Chris Rea photo
Antoine Augustin Cournot photo
A. R. Rahman photo
Ian McCulloch photo
Roger Manganelli photo
Andrew Sega photo

“I have a love for cheesy music. I don't want to list any bands and embarrass myself; D”

Andrew Sega (1975) musician from America

Andrew Sega Shrine interview, 2011

John Dankworth photo
Johnny Marr photo
River Phoenix photo
Marilyn Manson photo

“The whole concept of this band is to present the ugly truth about society – warts and all, and let the chips fall where they may.”

Marilyn Manson (1969) American rock musician and actor

As quoted in Huh (October 1996).
1990s

Harry Chapin photo

“I'm in the Dance Band on the Titanic
Singing "Nearer my God to thee"
and the icebergs on the starboard bow
Won't you dance with me?”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

Dance Band On the Titanic
Song lyrics, Dance Band on the Titanic (1977)

Roger Manganelli photo
Bono photo
Josh Homme photo
James Madison photo

“You will find an allusion to some mysterious cause for a phenomenon in Stocks. It is surmised that the deferred debt is to be taken up at the next session, and some anticipated provision made for it. This may either be an invention of those who wish to sell, or it may be a reality imparted in confidence to the purchasers or smelt out by their sagacity. I have had a hint that something is intended and has dropt from 1 which has led to this speculation. I am unwilling to credit the fact, untill I have further evidence, which I am in a train of getting if it exists. It is said that packet boats & expresses are again sent from this place to the Southern States, to buy up the paper of all sorts which has risen in the market here. These & other abuses make it a problem whether the system of the old paper under a bad Government, or of the new under a good one, be chargeable with the greater substantial injustice. The true difference seems to be that by the former the few were the victims to the many; by the latter the many to the few. It seems agreed on all hands now that the bank is a certain & gratuitous augmentation of the capitals subscribed, in a proportion of not less than 40 or 50 [per cent] and if the deferred debt should be immediately provided for in favor of the purchasers of it in the deferred shape, & since the unanimous vote that no change [should] be made in the funding system, my imagination will not attempt to set bounds to the daring depravity of the times. The stock-jobbers will become the pretorian band of the Government, at once its tool & its tyrant; bribed by its largesses, & overawing it by clamours & combinations. Nothing new from abroad. I shall not be in [Philadelphia] till the close of the Week.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Letter to Thomas Jefferson (8 August 1791)
1790s

Joe Satriani photo
Mike Watt photo
Sawao Yamanaka photo
Pete Doherty photo

“It's not people in bands, is it? Why do people who take drugs, why are they in bands? 'Cos they're trying to prove themselves. To make themselves blank and numb and not able to communicate with other people.”

Pete Doherty (1979) English musician, writer, actor, poet and artist

October 2002, NME (New Musical Express); when asked why people in bands take drugs
Drugs

David Gilmour photo

“The band? It's over. Reunited because of the good cause (Live 8), to get over the bad relationship, and not to have regrets.”

David Gilmour (1946) guitarist, singer, best known as a member of Pink Floyd

Ruling out the possibility of a permanent reunion of Pink Floyd in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica (February 2006)

Ben Gibbard photo
David Bowie photo

“Making love with his ego Ziggy sucked up into his mind
Like a leper messiah.
When the kids had killed the man I had to break up the band.”

David Bowie (1947–2016) British musician, actor, record producer and arranger

Ziggy Stardust
Song lyrics, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972)

Joe Trohman photo
Alexander Woollcott photo
Hunter S. Thompson photo
Brian Wilson photo
Edgar Froese photo
L. Ron Hubbard photo
Todd Snider photo
Bert McCracken photo
Robert Smith (musician) photo
Pete Doherty photo
Henri-Frédéric Amiel photo
Reince Priebus photo
Pete Doherty photo
Hayley Jensen photo
Joe Trohman photo

“We mean a lot to each other as musicians and people, but sometimes we start believing what people write about us: The band is just one guy or two guys. That can be harsh for the soul.”

Joe Trohman (1984) American musician

On the lack of attention he and Andy Hurley get
My Heart Will Always Be The B-Side To My Tongue (2004), Rolling Stone Interview

Chris Cornell photo

“The rest of the band [Soundgarden] thought it was silly of the press to concentrate on the beefcake when I was writing songs, singing, and playing guitar for the band. Even now, some people will stick a paragraph about my hair in the body of a review.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Interview with Details Magazine, December 1996 https://pitchfork.com/features/article/10081-chris-cornell-searching-for-solitude/,
Soundgarden Era

Ian McCulloch photo
Chris Cornell photo
David Morrison photo

“When I had a big band in the late 1960s, though, Warne and I were working quite a lot together. Warne would be turning time around, and dealing with cross-the-bar structures, and starting phrases in odd places—his intuition was really far out! He was one of the greatest players ever.”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

As quoted in Lee Konitz: Conversations on the Improviser's Art https://books.google.com/books?id=pc4CsgVHLw0C&pg=PA65&dq=%22When+I+had+a+big+band+in+the+late+1960s,+though%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CBoQ6AEwAGoVChMIhfLixv_OxwIVBTU-Ch1hfAOh#v=onepage&q=%22When%20I%20had%20a%20big%20band%20in%20the%20late%201960s%2C%20though%22&f=false

Bono photo
David Berg photo
Ernest Hemingway photo
Allen C. Guelzo photo
Calvin Coolidge photo

“Very well, the starting point would be that claim of Professor Quarrey’s, which had been in the news at the beginning of the year, that the country’s greatest export was noxious gas. And who would like to stir up the fuss again? Obviously, the Canadians, cramped into a narrow band to the north of their more powerful neighbors, growing daily angrier about the dirt that drifted to them on the wind, spoiling crops, causing chest diseases and soiling laundry hung out to dry. So she’d called the magazine Hemisphere in Toronto, and the editor had immediately offered ten thousand dollars for three articles.
Very conscious that all calls out of the country were apt to be monitored, she’d put the proposition to him in highly general terms: the risk of the Baltic going the same way as the Mediterranean, the danger of further dust-bowl like the Mekong Desert, the effects of bringing about climactic change. That was back in the news—the Russians had revised their plan to reverse the Yenisei and Ob. Moreover, there was the Danube problem, worse than the Rhine had ever been, and Welsh nationalists were sabotaging pipelines meant to carry “their” water into England, and the border war in West Pakistan had been dragging on so long most people seemed to have forgotten that it concerned a river.
And so on.
Almost as soon as she started digging, though, she thought she might never be able to stop. It was out of the question to cover the entire planet. Her pledged total of twelve thousand words would be exhausted by North American material alone.”

June “A PLACE TO STAND”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

Richard Leakey photo

“Rather than living as aggregations of families in nomadic bands, as modern hunter-gatherers do, the first humans probably lived like savanna baboons.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

The Origin of Humankind (1994)

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston photo

“I am far from wishing to treat lightly or inconsiderately the evils attendant upon a standing army. The history of those countries where standing armies have been allowed to usurp an ascendancy over the civil authorities, is a volume pregnant with instruction to every one. We may look at France, for instance, and derive a lesson of eternal importance. But when it is said, that in ancient Rome twelve thousand praetorian bands were potent enough to dispose of that empire according to their will and pleasure, it should be remembered that that was the result of a number of pre-disposing causes, which have no existence in England. Before the civil constitution of any country can be overturned by a standing army, the people of that country must be lamentably degenerate; they must be debased and enervated by all the worst excesses of an arbitrary and despotic government; their martial spirit must be extinguished; they must be brought to a state of political degradation, I may almost say of political emasculation, such as few countries experience that have once known the blessings of liberty.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Speech in the House of Commons (8 March 1816), quoted in George Henry Francis, Opinions and Policy of the Right Honourable Viscount Palmerston, G.C.B., M.P., &c. as Minister, Diplomatist, and Statesman, During More Than Forty Years of Public Life (London: Colburn and Co., 1852), p. 12.
1810s

David Cross photo

“It's hip to be square. Remember that shitty song by that shitty band 20 motherfuckin' years ago?”

David Cross (1964) American comedian, writer and actor

Shut Up, You Fucking Baby

The Edge photo
Tom DeLonge photo

“But really we wanted to do something that was more kind of different than what most punk rock bands are doing right now, where they are all dressing in black and acting pissed or sad or wearing make-up. Its just not what we are into.”

Tom DeLonge (1975) American rock musician

In interview for Absolutepunk.net http://www.absolutepunk.net/showthread.php?t=290928 about his band Angels and Airwaves. (January 2008).

Hugh Plat photo

“I dare boldly conclude that the most valiant armie of the best approved soldiers, (yea though consisting of lovers themselves, and that giving battaile in the presence of their Ladies and Mistresses) may easily even with a small band of ingenious scholars and Artists be utterly overthrown and vanquished.”

Hugh Plat (1552–1608) writer

Hugh Platt A new, cheape and delicate Fire of Cole-balles (1603); As cited in: Hugh Plat: Renaissance Man of Early Modern England http://bloggingtherenaissance.blogspot.nl/2006/06/hugh-plat-renaissance-man-of-early.html, at bloggingtherenaissance.blogspot.nl, June 2006.

Theodore Kaczynski photo
William Ewart Gladstone photo
George William Curtis photo
Lars Ulrich photo

“If there are people that are dumb enough to use Metallica to interrogate prisoners, you're forgetting about all the music that's to the left of us. I can name, you know, 30 Norwegian death metal bands that would make Metallica sound like Simon & Garfunkel.”

Lars Ulrich (1963) Danish musician

Said upon discovering that, during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, uncooperative prisoners were exposed to the Metallica song "Enter Sandman" for extended periods by American interrogators.
Source: [Maddow, Rachel, Rachel Maddow, Lars Ulrich, Metallica's Lars Ulrich joins Maddow, The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, April 27, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuNfAFOv2F4&t=6m19s, April 18, 2015]

KT Tunstall photo

“I went down to London with the idea that I was going to do vocals over this crazy, crazy trip-hop digital beat. Within two or three months, I heard Hunky Dory by David Bowie and that changed me in one way, and I realized what I actually wanted was to have an E Street Band — individuals, not session musicians.”

KT Tunstall (1975) Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist

Barnes & Noble Interview with David Sprague (February 2006) http://web.archive.org/web/20070506185456/http://music.barnesandnoble.com/features/interview.asp?NID=1011932&z=y.

Grace Slick photo
Patrick Rothfuss photo

“On his first hand he wore rings of stone,
Iron, Amber, Wood and Bone.
There were rings unseen on his second hand,
One was blood in a flowing band,
One was air all whisper thin,
And the ring of ice had a flaw within.
Full faintly shone the ring of flame,
And the final ring was without name.”

A poem from the second book of the The Kingkiller Chronicle, quoted in an interview at Fantasymundo (1 August 2009) http://www.fantasymundo.com/articulos/2207/fantasymundo_entrevista_patrick_rothfuss_nombre_viento
The Wise Man's Fear (2011)

Joe Trohman photo
Sarah Dessen photo
David Draiman photo
Rudy Rucker photo
Roger Manganelli photo

“Women are still a relative rarity in rock bands, and studies of women's experiences with pop and rock music have indicated that girls are socialized to pop and rock music differently from boys: boys and young men tend to learn songs by ear and talk about popular music's technical aspects, while girls and young women tend to focus on lyrics rather than on equipment and instrumentation, and to resist learning songs by ear. Miki Bernyi's experience testifies to the truthfulness of those findings:”

'Girls don't have the patience to spend six years learning someone else's music. Me and Emma [Anderson] can't jam because we only know how to play our own songs. Jamming's more of a boy's thing....I think that women play more imaginatively because they learn to play while they're writing songs, instead of waiting to be technically good first.'
Quoted in Evans, 1994, p. 44.

Willie Nelson photo
Joe Trohman photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Andreas Heldal-Lund photo
Shingai Shoniwa photo

“I think of the Ramones when I think of music that can save your life, but I’m not so sure about a band like Fall Out Boy who appears to make music in vein or that, at least, doesn’t sound like something they would die for.”

Shingai Shoniwa (1981) British musician

When asked: Is music more of a product today, or seen as something that can save your life? http://www.popmatters.com/pm/features/article/33984/one-of-those-bands-an-interview-with-the-noisettes/

Bruce Springsteen photo

“As a teenager I had already arranged pieces for the school band in exchange for music lessons. I also played cello, clarinet, and some other instruments regularly. Thanks to that experience, as an arranger I was able to understand the specific sound and tuning of an instrument and to work intuitively.”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

As quoted in "Clare Fischer: The Best Kept Secret in Jazz" http://www.artistinterviews.eu/?page_id=5&parent_id=22/ by Maarten De Haan, in Artist Interview (1998)

John Jay photo
Stevie Nicks photo
Sid Vicious photo

“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 (1957–1979) English bassist and vocalist

On leaving the Sex Pistols; reported in Julien Temple, The Filth and the Fury: The Sex Pistols (2000), p. 207.

Chris Cornell photo
Donald J. Trump photo
Linda McQuaig photo
Robert Smith (musician) photo
Kathy Griffin photo

“So, Hanson, which one of you boys is coming home with me tonight? (greeting the band Hanson)”

Kathy Griffin (1960) American actress and comedian

Kathy Griffin: Hot Cup Of Talk http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0234018/ (1998)
Hot Cup Of Talk (1998)

Winston S. Churchill photo

“In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort rise the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all of them, have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxemburg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognisable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill ‘Bolshevism versus Zionism; a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people’ in Illustrated Daily Herald, 8 February 1920.
Early career years (1898–1929)