Quotes & Sayings About Music In The 60s

It's an often-asked question, 'Why did all these spotty white English boys suddenly start playing blues in the '60s?' It was recognized as this kind of vibrant music and when I first started playing in a blues band I just wanted to bring it to a wider public who hadn't really heard it. — Steve Winwood

In fact, a lot of critics seemed to consider R.E.M. the first American music since the '60s to break out on its own and develop a stand-alone sound. — Michael Stipe

I was born in the '60s and grew up in the '70s - not exactly the best decade for food in British history. It was horrendous. It was a time when, as a nation, we excelled in art and music and acting and photography and fashion - all creative skills ... all apart from cooking. — Heston Blumenthal

I like to shoot beautiful things. My two previous movies were one in the '60s, the other one in the '50s, and this one is in the '20s. This is a period that's very cinegenic. The cars, the props, the suits, the haircuts, the dresses, everything, and it gives you pleasure to compose frames with that material. The music, I really love jazz, so for me, when you have good materials and nice things, it's very pleasant. — Michel Hazanavicius

The '60s is one of my favourite eras in general. I love '60s music, and I've always wanted to do a period film. — Zoe Kravitz

When you look at what we can call the golden era of concept albums, which starts in the mid or late '60s and ends maybe in the early '80s, it's an interesting time for music. You see all these very established and popular acts and bands and artists that were somehow on the top of their game but really trying to experiment. — Thomas Bangalter

I seem to be stuck in the '60s, and my favorite music, cars, and women's fashion come from that era. And the sense of social rebellion. It was a good time for a lot of things. — Amber Heard

When I was a kid, a lot of my parents' friends were in the music business. In the late '60s and early '70s - all the way through the '70s, actually - a lot of the bands that were around had kids at a very young age. So they were all working on that concept way early on. And I figured if they can do it, I could do it, too. — Slash

Well, I don't think it ever did, but in the early '60s I got interested in folk music. — Warren Zevon

When we started in the early '60s, football had a little bit of a tradition. But, they didn't have a mythology. And NFL Films, through our music and our scripts and our photography, created a mythology for the sport. — Steve Sabol

I love that period, between the '20s and the '60s. I love doing period pieces, and those eras are my favorite period in time, music wise, and the elegance and the way of being. — Laz Alonso

The '60s were a time of great change in American music. — Alexandra Patsavas

I honed in on a great time, the Motown era, the '60s and '70s. That type of music has always been a staple in my life. — Raphael Saadiq

If you go to Japan, they're still buying vinyl, and they want the education. They know who's playing on what tracks from the '60s and the '70s - who the guitar player is, who the drummer is, who the producer was, what studio it was recorded in. That's how I grew up listening to music. We bought albums. We read the liner notes. It was important to know the whole history behind it. — Lenny Kravitz

I'm not just influenced by the '60s - it's who I am. I grew up with Allen Ginsberg and Che Guevara. I flirted with various forms of communism when it was way out of style. It was this really strange and creative time in music and culture, and it was fabulous. — Thom Mayne

I'm not quite sure. Probably because "Hanky Panky" and "I Think We're Alone Now" had more to do with it than anything else. For some reason, staccato eighth notes on a bass sounded like bubblegum. Basically, groups like the 1910 Fruitgum Co. took my early format and kind of perverted it, and made these mindless pre-fab hits over and over. In the 60s, anybody who was making commercial music, that is music that didn't have a political slant to it, or wasn't taking drugs, was bubblegum. And that term kind of hung on a lot of people back then, and it's unfortunate. — Tommy James

The greatest thing about doing this movie was that Chris and I both were involved in folk music in the '60s. I had a group, but I don't think it was at the same level as Chris, because he's an amazing musician. — Eugene Levy

I don't think '90s music was as significant as '60s music in terms of changing the world, but it was significant, and I think it was similarly disillusioning when you realize the mainstream just — Billy Corgan

In the '60s, people were still very protective of each field that they belonged to. Avant-garde artists didn't know about rock or pop or jazz. And the jazz people of course didn't want to know about any other music. They were all just kind of protecting their territory. — Yoko Ono

Someone like Jay-Z does have a timeless quality, but it's much different than ours. You can look back at something like "At the Hop" by Danny and the Juniors or the music that was on American Bandstand in the 1950s-'60s. — Chuck D

I just got into it like a lot of people through the rock 'n' roll bands in the late '60s that turned to country music, like The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, but particularly through The Byrds because of Gram Parsons, Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman (with their 1968 album Sweetheart of the Rodeo). They kind of introduced English kids to Merle Haggard and George Jones and the Louvins (brothers Charlie and Ira). — Elvis Costello

I fell into hip-hop right from the beginning. I was a teenager in the '60s, so I was putting all my pocket money into buying LPs. I followed the ascent of the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and Stevie Wonder. I followed popular music very closely, and I've never stopped. — Simon De Pury

I started in the music business I was first introduced to 1650 Broadway, uh, which was in reality where everything happened in the '60s. — Al Kooper

I came up in the '60s; that was a time when there was a revolution going on in music. Stravinsky had become a twelve-tone composer; even Aaron Copland was writing twelve-tone pieces at that time! — Paul Lansky

Music was such an important part of everyone's life in the '60s and '70s, but everywhere you played, the music was dreadful. — Peter Hook

There was so much great music around in the '60s, stuff like The Small Faces, but I also love The Jam. — Iwan Rheon

Music that was made in the 60s and 70s did come from a really soulful place. The seed for the songs written in the 90s were planted in those songs, even though they were samples. — M.I.A.

We thought that using rap would draw a parallel with the protest music from the 60s and 70s that we found through the research for animadoc. When we thought about rap, Emicida immediately came to mind and we decided to call him to create this song bring the audience back to earth and put their feet on the ground. Emicida's song is the only one that has lyrics in actual understandable Portuguese. — Alex Abreu

When I was a kid growing up in the '60s, music was an outlet for enlightenment, frustration, rebellion. It was more about individualism. Today it's just like a big business. — Joey Ramone

Music was transmitted over the airwaves in the '60s - for free, even - astonishingly enough without Bit Torrent. — Andrew Rosenthal

I grew up in the church, with traditional hymns, but at the same time I was beginning to listen to pop music, the mid-60s, The Beatles, which had just as much influence on me as those hymns did. Then the hippy stuff like Pink Floyd started to raise questions about how I lived my life and the world in which I lived. — Alan Green

When punk and new wave styles exploded in the late '70s, some established artists were nimble enough to respond to the changes around them. Some grumbled, "What am I supposed to do, forget how to play?", and continued to ride their dinosaurs into extinction, but others willingly adapted to the streamlining and back-to-basics urges of the times, without giving up all they had learned. Former Genesis singer Peter Gabriel, for example, or former Yes keyboardist Trevor Horn, continued to produce vital, influential music through the '80s and '90s. Ian Anderson has continued to lead Jethro Tull out of the '60s and '70s and quietly through the decades, making high quality music and finding a large enough audience to continue recording and touring worldwide. — Neil Peart

The '60s was a magical time in the music business. So much creativity and talent. I think a lot of it came from the fact that we had grown up before rock n' roll. We listened to all the great songwriters and big bands, songs with great lyrics and melodies. I think that really influenced everybody. — Frankie Valli

I am continually influenced by the feeling that music culture captured in the late 60s - for my generation, it was a time to rebel, against our parents, against everything. — Renzo Rosso

They use all of the music that I did in the '50s, '60s and the '70s behind people like Tupac and LL Cool J. I'm into all that stuff. — Donald Byrd

Nothing has really changed. We had bootleg albums in the '60s and today we have Internet file sharing. They just found a better way to do it
get music for free. What's great about today is an artist has an opportunity to go direct to their audience without dealing with a middleman. People can go directly to the web for CDs, DVDs and downloads. I think that's the best thing that's happened, that people's music is being flashed around the world. — Richie Havens

There were so many great music and political scenes going on in the late '60s in Cambridge. The ratio of guys to girls at Harvard was four to one, so all of those things were playing in my mind. — Bonnie Raitt

The '60s in London obviously brought about the explosion of music, the 'Beatles' especially, and then the 'Rolling Stones' and other forms of music, and then fashion and photography and films - kitchen-sink dramas we called them at that time, which was our 'nouvelle vague' in Britain, films that talk about real life. — Charlotte Rampling

Making music on TV used to be as common as commercials. In the '60s and '70s, prime time was stuffed with variety shows headlined by such major and treasured talents as Carol Burnett, Red Skelton, the Smothers Brothers and Richard Pryor, who had a very brief comedy-variety hour on NBC that was censored literally to death. — Tom Shales

In the early 60s, folk music seemed to be very popular. In the early 70s, people like James Taylor, John Denver, Jim Croce and Cat Stevens brought back the interest in acoustic music. Today, we don't hear anything. — Paul Stookey

I come from a time when pop music was the coin of the cultural realm and in a certain way was the only coin of the realm; movies didn't matter as much, and not TV - it was all about pop music. In the era when I started - which was the early '60s - it was all about singles leading to albums. — Fred Seibert

But in those days - in the mid-'50s, early '60s - there was less than 300 radio stations that were playing country music and a lot of that wasn't full time. — Mel Tillis

In 1965, my father was just twirling the dial of the radio to find something that would make me go to sleep, and as soon as I heard rock and roll there was no stopping me. It was during the height of Beatlemania and the British invasion, but I gravitated toward the harder, heavier music going on then, you know, the early Rolling Stones, the good Rolling Stones, and Paul Revere and the Raiders, who don't get the credit they deserve for spearheading the American '60s garage sound. — Jello Biafra

It was around that time, early 60s. There were like three kindred spirits in New Jersey. I had two friends who played folk music, old-time music and bluegrass and we started a little band called the Garret Mountain Boys. — David Grisman

Music has always been in my family, but it was mainly keyboards. I learned to play classical piano, but when I first heard the amazing bass guitar of James Jamerson, who played on all the big Motown hits of the '60s and '70s, I knew bass guitar was my instrument. — Suzi Quatro

The moment artists can just do what they love to do then music will go right back to where it used to be. I mean back in the '60s and '70s and '80s, that's what it was. — Akon

I lived in Italy for a number of years and I was really digging around trying to get my hands dirty, trying to learn about Italian music. And what I ended up gravitating towards was this stuff from the '50s and '60s and maybe early '70s, where there were these incredibly talented pop singers that weren't using pop bands. — Mike Patton

When we bemoan the lost golden age of music, it's worth remembering that mainstream radio listeners of the '60s and '70s, particularly in Canada, missed out on an outpouring of brilliant R&B music. — Dan Hill

When I was a kid in the mid-'60s, I was what's known as a moddie boy, a prototype skinhead. You all had your hair like a crew cut, cropped, with suits or Levis with red suspenders, sometimes Doc Martens. It was a thriving soul music, Motown and ska scene; we used to dance to Prince Buster and the Skatalites. — Graham Parker