Les Paul

I gave up the guitar in 1965. Didn’t want to see a guitar. I’d go out and get drunk. When I came out of the heart surgery, the doc said, “Promise me you’ll work hard.” I said, “I thought working hard is what got me here.” He said, “No, working is what will keep you alive.”

A guitar is something you can hold and love and it’s never going to bug you. But here’s the secret about the guitar – it’s defiant. It will never let you conquer it. The more you get involved with it, the more you realize how little you know.

Paint pictures with sound. First, find your white-the deepest, roundest sound you can play on the guitar. Then, find your black-which is the most extreme tonal difference from white you can play. Now, just pick the note where you’ve got white, pick it where you’ve got black, and then find all those colors in between. Get those colors down, and you’ll be able to express almost any emotion on the guitar.?

We go in there and we work on altering those ideas and in many cases go in different directions.

The guitar is just a wonderful instrument. It’s everything: a bartender, a psychiatrist, a housewife. It’s everything, but it’s elusive.

It’s not jazz as we know jazz here in America.

Breathe…. breathe a lot!

The thing I always default to is that I’ll always be here to write songs.

I don’t know what they’re thinking about. Just because someone says, ‘I like what you do’ or something: They might like it today and tomorrow they might not. I’ve had that experience with record companies.

End phrases where you feel they should end. Don’t look for resolutions you don’t feel because the books call for them.

Playing is my way of thinking, talking, communicating.

My music is the spiritual expression of what I am: my faith, my knowledge, my being.

I hate to think of Jazz as black and white, something political.

How are you going to know what’s new to play if you haven’t listened to everything that’s old?

So much of Jazz doesn’t have an audience other than music students or musicians.

Most of the soloists at Birdland had to wait for Parker’s next record in order to find out what to play next. What will they do now?

I keep these songs in my head until I get behind the microphone. I never spend more than 30 or 40 minutes singing the vocal or it will sound mechanical. There are always mistakes, but it’s about feeling more than being perfect.

The real innovators did their innovating by just being themselves.

I’ve always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

It’s a matter of who would be right for each song. Mickey Hart for ‘All We Need is An Island’ – he’s the only guy I know who has Tahitian drums and every kind of drum on the planet.

If I’m not saying it in four choruses or less, then I’m not saying it.