John Paul Jones

Dog spelled backward is God. That’s pretty heavy.

I don’t want to sing anything that doesn’t come real.

Ah music… a magic beyond all we do here!

You can play a shoestring if you’re sincere.

I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer.

I asked my mother could I have an instrument. She said, ‘Well if you go out and save your money.’ So I went and got – I made me a shine box. I went out and started shining shoes, and I’d bring whatever I made.

We really never know what we’re gonna play when we get on stage.

Just give a drum roll, announce my name and I come out and sing. I have a contract that says I’m a singer. So I sing.

All the music that was ever heard came from the inner silence in every musician.

I don’t care for the music when they’re talking bad about women because I think women are God’s greatest gift to the planet – I just like music.

I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.

Just because I’m playing jazz I don’t forget about me. I play or write me the way I feel through jazz, or whatever. Music is, or was, a language of the emotions.

Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.

Nothing else will ever capture the democratic process in sound as perfectly as Jazz.

I never practice my guitar. From time to time I just open the case and throw in a piece of raw meat.