Think about the number of people who do film music, make records and have a Native American heritage - and I may be the only one on the list.
The Band is probably the ultimate example of people taking all kinds of music, from gospel to blues to mountain music to folk music to on and on and on and on and putting them all in this big pot and mixing up a new gumbo.
It's easy to be a genius in your twenties. In your forties, it's difficult.
I come from a family who prided themselves, both sides, on memory. And I was told growing up, constantly, that I was born with a really good memory.
When I was younger, I thought I was too young to really be personal. I thought that what I was feeling and thinking might be half-baked.
Music should never be harmless.
Some bands today have the experience of really working together and honing their craft. And other bands are very much like, 'I just got a guitar for Christmas, let's start a band.' And you can hear the difference.
When you look at that period when Warhol and the Velvets and the Stones were doing things, it was this intersection of art and music. And then it went away.
My thirst for knowledge and experience comes from the idea that once you learned something, it was time to learn something else. I missed out on a formal educational process, so I'm making up for that.
Working on 'The Last Waltz' introduced me to Martin Scorsese, and I had been a movie bug since I was a young kid.
I've always been in love with that Delta-flavored music... the music that came from Mississippi and Memphis and, especially, New Orleans. When I was 14, I was in a wanna-be New Orleans band in Toronto.
One of the greatest live recordings, I think, in the history of the world is Ray Charles in Atlanta... And they didn't even have a big mobile recording thing set up. The word on the street was they only had like two microphones, one for the band and one for him. Perfect recordings. I think it's mono.
I wanted to develop a guitar style where phrases and lines get there just in the nick of time, like with Curtis Mayfield and Steve Cropper. Subtleties mean so much, and there is a stunning beauty in them.
By the time I was 13, I was the only one in London, Ontario, who knew how to play rock n' roll.
I saw Ray Charles at Massey Hall.
My mother was a Mohawk, born and raised on a reservation, and when I was a kid, she would take me there to visit her relatives.
It's a bit of a sore spot, the Thanksgiving in Indian country.
I always like to keep one hand in the tepee and the other hand in the synagogue. Wouldn't it be great if there was a combination of the two? You could go to synagogue, and it would be really hot in there.
I love traditional music. But in any culture around the world, there is the historic and cultural music and everything that's been passed down and passed down, and hopefully you take that, and then you take it, you know, the next distance, and then somebody else takes it the next distance.
The native music of North America, the original-roots music of this country, is also the underworld music of this country.
