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We never understood the concept of people going onstage and giving anything less than 100 percent. Maybe that's a blue-collar work ethic, but I call it just ethics.

Steven Van Zandt

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Steven Van Zandt
Age: 73
Born: 1950
Born: November 22
Composer
Disc Jockey
Guitarist
Musician
Screenwriter
Singer
Television Actor
Winthrop
Massachusetts
Little Steven
Miami Steve
Giving
Concepts
Going
Blue
Work
Understood
Collar
Never
Percent
Collars
People
Maybe
Ethic
Call
Onstage
Less
Concept
Anything
Ethics

More quotes by Steven Van Zandt

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You gotta love everything you do. You just gotta do it.
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The first rule of rock and roll is it's all about live. Then you have to learn a second craft, which is making records. It should go in that order.
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From the age of 14, 13, I guess I wanted to be a rock 'n' roll star. And that was it. I wanted to make a living playing rock 'n' roll, and it was a ridiculously impossible dream at that time. But it was kind of all I ever wanted to do. It's nice to do it.
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I have a bigger mission than any kind of specific politics, which is trying to restore the accessibility of rock 'n' roll.
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The British invasion was the most important event of my life. I was in New Jersey and the night I saw the Beatles changed everything. I had seen Elvis before and he had done nothing for me, but these guys were in a band.
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The quality of our lives is diminished every time we lose a great artist.
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I am interested in the interaction of a group of people who have a common goal, or a common obsession, each contributing something unique to make something greater than the sum of its parts. I don't know why, but from day one, that has interested me.
Steven Van Zandt
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I'm not pretending to be an academic, or to have this down to a science. It's strictly my taste. But there is a connection between everything I play and the sets I put together.
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I was in the back of the car with my girlfriend, the Rascals came on the radio and I realized their song was sexier than the sex I was trying to have.
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I know what it takes to make a band, how they should interact, what makes a record sound like it's a band - everything having to do with a band, I happen to be into.
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I think it's important that all 50 years of rock 'n' roll live in the same place, because it's all connected.
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I'd never go onstage in my life without fully intending to do the best show you've ever seen.
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Rock 'n' roll is a participatory sport. It ain't passive. It ain't TV. Go out there and rock 'n' roll and dance and have fun.
Steven Van Zandt
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Rock'n'roll as a genre is different from pop and hip hop: it is about bands, and that for me suggests brotherhood, family, friendship and community.
Steven Van Zandt
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I am a reformed Taoist, part-time Buddhist, Hindu, animist, pagan, Jewish mystic, and Christian. I always got along great with priests and rabbis and mullahs and gurus, even though I spend most of my life constructively criticizing them.
Steven Van Zandt
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It's become uncool to play other people's songs, and that's absurd. It has got to change. It's the reason why everything's so mediocre.
Steven Van Zandt
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Rock music had become my religion. Radio my church. And these DJs my priests, rabbis and gurus.
Steven Van Zandt
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Touch the earth, speak of love, walk on common ground.
Steven Van Zandt
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There is an established tradition of actors directing films that have a particular, personal meaning for them - Warren Beatty, Clint Eastwood, Kevin Costner, and most recently George Clooney to name a few. Remarkably, their films share an unusually high percentage of being very good.
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Half of the modern world goes back as far as Pearl Jam. The real historians go back to U2. But they need to go back further. They have to go back to the '50s and '60s, where things started. That's how you get to be your own personality, by studying the masters. Rock and roll was white kids trying to make black music and failing, gloriously!
Steven Van Zandt