Rockabilly Quotations

I guess my favorite artists are The White Stripes or Tom Waits. The more theatrical the music is, the more I get into it. I also like the quieter folk music, that kind of old-school rockabilly or country. I'm not really picky when it comes to music, as long as it's honest.

If you ask me, rockabilly has had a raw deal for far too long. People never shunned the blues or jazz the way they do rockabilly. But it's the original punk-rock, and it changed the way people looked at music for ever.

I was born in San Francisco. I was raised in Oakland, so I'm, like, super Bay Area born, and, you know, it's just really multicultural up there, and there's a lot of subcultures just from, like, anything, like from rockabilly to, like, crazy punk scenes to, you know, a huge rap scene, and there's just all kinds of things you can do out there.

I obviously had my reggae, but I got quite into rockabilly when I was a kid, because I was trying to find something that represented me as a white person.

For every rockabilly festival staged here, there are 10 held overseas.

I'm not God's gift to rockabilly. There's great players out there, and some of them deserve a lot more than they've gotten.

For me, rockabilly is very, very exciting music. It's electric and kind of wild, you know? It's 'make your hairs stand up on the back of your neck' kind of music.

I called it Rockabilly 'cause I was rocking the strums, which you're not supposed to do.

We weren't afraid to mix some crazy styles into the standard rockabilly look. We also took a lot of different musical influences that were part of that era.

Everybody told me that if I insisted on doing rockabilly music, I'd never have a chance of selling any records. In fact, I lost count of how many people told me to ditch it all together, in favour, I guess, of sounding like everybody else.

When I was a kid, I found out about Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent through the Beatles and the Stones doing covers of rockabilly songs,

I didn't like the '50s, you know. I appreciate Elvis, but I'm not a big fan. I'm not a rockabilly fan. And the '60s and early '70s were, to me, the greatest times to live.

Rockabilly is really part of our background, ... It's a cousin to the blues and country. And it's that important.

The big thing that I wanted to do was touch on the very start of rock and roll, I loved this moment in rockabilly music. I loved the idea of people making music because they loved music and not because they saw the video or how to market themselves. A very big point for me in this movie is that John didn't arrive at Sun as the man in black. He didn't already know his marketing angle. He didn't have it worked out. He was just trying to be heard and however that would work or not work was fine, but he just needed to be heard. What was magic to me about that moment in time was that it was a moment before the term 'rock and roll star' existed.

I wanted to keep it authentic, ... I even went as far as copying the original drum parts. I felt that was an overlooked part of those recordings. Now when people play rockabilly they ignore the little fills and tricks they used.

I never really did rockabilly exactly like they did it in the '50s, ... We always kind of updated it. But I didn't need to go blasting crazy, wild guitar solos around this stuff. I tried to keep it authentic.