Quote

Sly Stone doesn't make good albums: only good records. His style is so infinite and revolves around so many crucial aspects that it has only come together perfectly on a handful of his singles.

Jon Landau

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Jon Landau
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: May 14
Composer
Journalist
Music Critic
Record Producer
Talent Manager
the United States of America
Many
Aspect
Singles
Make
Infinite
Handful
Good
Records
Aspects
Style
Crucial
Doesn
Stone
Around
Perfectly
Together
Albums
Revolves
Come
Stones
Sly

More quotes by Jon Landau

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I saw my rock'n'roll past flash before my eyes. And I saw something else: I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen. And on a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time.
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Often, equipment can as easily function as a security blanket for musicians unwilling or unable to risk anything personal in the studio. Whether one catches the feeling on a record is a subjective matter. How can you be sure? The machinery can hold out the promise of at least mechanical perfection.
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In the end, the sign of Aretha Franklin's artistry is that she always leaves her mark - first, on the music, then on us.
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Since her landmark 'Tapestry,' Carole King has both oversimplified and over elaborated that masterful album's style until her music has become something more overtly but less effectively personal.
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It didn't matter that Charlie Chaplin may not have been a great director or a great anything else. He made great movies.
Jon Landau
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Atlantic's Jerry Wexler believes first-rate records are made by first-rate voices. He certainly has worked with enough of them: Clyde McPhatter, Joe Turner, La Vern Baker, Ray Charles, Otis Redding, Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin.
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As a performing group, the Beatles began by playing old rock favorites, for dancing, to tough audiences in Liverpool and Hamburg. When they began writing seriously, they discovered that they couldn't compose in the early American rock tradition.
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The only criticism heard with any frequency of Elton John's first American album, 'Elton John,' was that the production was too grandiose. The melodies were superb, and lyrics frequently very good, and the performances flawless.
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While the Beatles always had George Martin around to clean up their act, the Rolling Stones had Andrew Loog Oldham to coarsen theirs.
Jon Landau
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Bob Dylan was the source of pop music's unpredictability in the Sixties. Never as big a record-seller as commonly imagined, his importance was first aesthetic and social, and then as an influence.
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Carole King's second album, 'Tapestry,' has fulfilled the promise of her first and confirmed the fact that she is one of the most creative figures in all of pop music. It is an album of surpassing personal-intimacy and musical accomplishment and a work infused with a sense of artistic purpose. It is also easy to listen to and easy to enjoy.
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The title song of David Bowie's 'Young Americans' is one of his handful of classics, a bizarre mixture of social comment, run-on lyric style, English pop and American soul.
Jon Landau
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The Rolling Stones are violence. Their music penetrates the raw nerve endings of their listeners and finds its way into the groove marked 'release of frustration.'
Jon Landau
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The Rolling Stones are constantly changing, but beneath the changes they remain the most formal of rock bands. Their successive releases have been continuous extensions of their approach, not radical redefinitions, as has so often been the case with the Beatles.
Jon Landau
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Bob Dylan may be the Charlie Chaplin of rock n' roll. Both men are regarded as geniuses by their entire audience. Both were proclaimed revolutionaries for their early work and subjected to exhaustive attack when later works were thought to be inferior. Both developed their art without so much as a nodding glance toward their peers.
Jon Landau
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Everyone eventually winds up writing about themselves - the problem is finding the best way to go about it. To write about oneself literally, in the first person, presumes a more interesting personal life and philosophy than most rock lyricists possess. John Lennon was good for one great album based on musical direct address, 'Plastic Ono Band.
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The Beatles never sounded intimidated by their idols. They never interpreted old rock they simply played it as well and as joyfully as they knew how. On 'Rock 'n' Roll,' John Lennon does nothing but interpret old rock.
Jon Landau
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My ambition was to be a record producer, and I had started doing that in the late '60s with my work with the MC5 and my friend Livingston Taylor.
Jon Landau
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Joni Mitchell seems destined to remain in a state of permanent dissatisfaction - always knowing what she would like to do, always more depressed when it's done.
Jon Landau
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There is something complete about Stevie Wonder, and one senses that he is not only exceptionally important today, but will continue to be for as long as he chooses.
Jon Landau