All the time I was playing the flute, the lines, the solos, the riffs, the construction, were based on my guitar skills. I did not play the flute to exploit its natural faculties, but I used it as a surrogate guitar.
I started playing the guitar when we started filming the pilot to 'Lost in Space,' which was way back in December of 1964, and there's a little bit in the pilot that was used in the first season where Will Robinson is sitting around some bad foam rubber rock playing and singing 'Greensleeves.'
Everybody would grab a guitar and listen to somebody else and call themselves a folk singer. When they didn't know no more songs, they'd run out of them.
I'm an old-fashioned folk singer. I stand in front of an audience with a guitar and a barstool.
Some people are drawn naturally - there are natural guitarists, and there are natural piano players, and I think guitar implies travel, a sort of footloose gypsy existence. You grab your bag and you go to the next town.
'Aqualung' marks the point at which I had the confidence as a songwriter and as a guitar player to actually pick up and play the guitar and be at the forefront of the band. It's also the album on which I began to address religious issues in my music, and I think that happened simply because the time was right for it.
The music I was really listening to in 1968 was James Brown, the great guitar player Jimi Hendrix, and a new group... Sly and the Family Stone, led by Sly Stewart from San Francisco.
I tend to be freer on the piano. I never took guitar lessons, so my reach exceeds my grasp - what I hear in my head I don't always know how to play. But I love to play over something else. I'm not a self-starter. I get kind of bored with the same three folk chords that I know.
I just always wanted to play guitar. I though that was, like, really dope. And then in high school, I learned how to play trumpet and, like, French horn because if the instrument's right in front of me, I'm going to just teach myself.
The first song on my first album is not a song - it's a guitar solo! It's called 'Frenzy,' and it's pretty much nonstop maniacal guitar playing. I had just turned 19, and I had some serious muscle then.
I worked at a vintage guitar store, and the owner had ties with a lot of Japanese manufacturers and U.S. manufacturers that were beginning to pop up. So I was ordering parts and screwing them together and contacting local luthiers to finish and do frets and things, and I had put together two guitars, a red one and a black one.
I destroyed a lot of guitars trying to get them to do what I wanted, but I learned something from every guitar I tore apart, and discovered even more things. Things like if the string is not straight from the bridge saddle to the nut, you're going to have friction.
People have always been resistant to change. If you go back to the 17th, 18th century, playing guitar was frowned upon. When rock n' roll first started, no one took it seriously.
You can tune your guitar funky, and something's gonna come out. There's no secret to it - either you got it, or you don't.
A guitar can be so human, so sorrowful, so angry, and I wanted to figure out how to achieve that vibe without having to actually use guitars, because 'Badlands' is a very futuristic record - and making it that in an era of futuristic music is a really hard thing to do!
I'm pretty basic as far as technique is concerned. I don't use many gadgets, and I like the sound my guitar makes, anyway.
There are early videos of me at three years old with a tiny guitar trying to sing 'Friends in Low Places' by Garth Brooks.
You don't start to play your guitar thinking you're going to be running an organisation that will maybe generate millions.
I worked with George Harrison - who was the reason I started playing guitar.
I dreamed of having a Gibson. I had a cheap Kent - you know, a Japanese guitar - and then a Kanora, a Japanese guitar. I borrowed a friend's Harmony for years. To have a Gibson was really, really my dream as a kid.
