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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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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
Change
Reason
Everything
Uncool
Play
Mediocre
People
Absurd
Songs
Song
Become
More quotes by Steven Van Zandt
The simple fact is we do not live in a democracy. Certainly not the kind our Founding Fathers intended. We live in a corporate dictatorship represented by, and beholden to, no single human being you can reason with or hold responsible for anything.
Steven Van Zandt
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.
Steven Van Zandt
I'd never go onstage in my life without fully intending to do the best show you've ever seen.
Steven Van Zandt
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
Like most people, I've always felt using words like 'best' when applied to art is a fun way for critics to stay busy at the end of the year, and I guess a good way to help get ratings for awards shows, which is fine.
Steven Van Zandt
The quality of our lives is diminished every time we lose a great artist. It's a different world without Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Curtis Mayfield, Brian Jones and the rest.
Steven Van Zandt
You gotta love everything you do. You just gotta do it.
Steven Van Zandt
I have a bigger mission than any kind of specific politics, which is trying to restore the accessibility of rock 'n' roll.
Steven Van Zandt
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
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
Touch the earth, speak of love, walk on common ground.
Steven Van Zandt
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.
Steven Van Zandt
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
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.
Steven Van Zandt
First of all, just because the Tea Party people appear to be generally uneducated, ignorant about the political process, ignorant about economics, confused about their own platform from the beginning, and indelicate when it comes to the craft of diplomacy, doesn't mean they're wrong.
Steven Van Zandt
I think it's important that all 50 years of rock 'n' roll live in the same place, because it's all connected.
Steven Van Zandt
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.
Steven Van Zandt
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.
Steven Van Zandt
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
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
