Quotes by Robert Quine

• I started off with the really funky stuff like Ramsey Lewis, Milt Jackson, Kenny Burrell.
• My playing started to develop through the Miles Davis stuff I was listening to.
• Meanwhile after failing the bar twice, I knew some people in New York and moved here in August '71.
• It was just like Howlin' Wolf. Once you arrive at the point that you understand it, the emotional factor is darker than some of the saddest blues stuff.
• I was coerced into taking piano lessons in the early '50s. It was a quite unpleasant experience.
• I think Blank Generation holds up pretty well. You listen to that with headphones and there's a lot going on there with the guitars- it's the product of a lot of fighting.
• I saw Suicide in '74 and it was pretty horrifying.
• I really feel fortunate to have been around then because there have been good and bad years in rock but the best years were '55 to early '61. I got to see Buddy Holly and everybody else.
• I never really followed grunge.
• From '69 til '76, I never played in public. I would play by myself at home.
• Even by the time I was four or five, I had Gene Autry records.
• By then I was in Brooklyn and drank my way through that summer. I stopped when I got sick of that and got a job at the Strand bookstore, which was a little better than the tax job.
• By many peoples' standards, my playing is very primitive but by punk standards, I'm a virtuoso.
• After I exhausted the blues thing, I got into jazz.
• I was 12 in '55 when rock and roll hit. It just completely transformed me.
• I quit the tax job then and decided that I was going to play in a band. I answered ads in the Village Voice and went through two days of auditioning for bands.
• The Stones were nasty and ugly and doing songs I was familiar with.