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Quotes / Three Chords and the Truth

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One chord is fine. Two chords is pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz.

When you're drowning, you don't say "I would be incredibly pleased if someone would have the foresight to notice me drowning and come and help me," you just scream.

"Rock & Roll is 10 % technique and 90% attitude. You can do more with one note and the right attitude than you can with fifty notes and no attitude. It's your delivery, how you deliver the package."
Dickie Peterson

Making biscuits is like playing rock 'n roll. You only need three chords and a lot of volume.
Good Eats "The Dough Also Rises" (The three 'chords' being flour, fat, and moisture.)

Joey Ramone is, sadly, now gone,
With him the Ramones are also no more,
But while he was here, I’m glad that he taught me,
You dont need ten chords when you can do it with four.
Jay Pinkerton, Goodbye Poem to Joe Ramone

Phoebe: I'm here to invite you to be in our punk band.
Stevie: I dunno, Phoebe. I've never played punk.
Phoebe: Do you know three chords?
Stevie: I know 73 chords.
Phoebe: That's...um...24 and a third punk songs!

"Cecil Taylor, in A.B. Spellman's moving book Four Lives in the Bebop Business, once told a story about an experience he had in the mid-fifties, when almost every club owner, jazz writer, and listener in New York was turned off to his music because it was still so new and advanced that they could not begin to grasp it yet. Well, one night he was playing in one of these clubs when in walked this dude off the street with a double bass and asked if he could sit in. Why not, said Taylor, even though the cat seemed very freaked out. So they jammed, and it soon became apparent to Taylor that the man had never had any formal training on bass, knew almost nothing about it beyond the basic rudiments, and probably couldn't play one known song or chord progression. Nothing. The guy had just picked up the bass, decided he was going to play it, and a very short time later walked cold into a New York jazz club and bluffed his way onto the bandstand. He didn't even know how to hold the instrument, so he just explored as a child would, pursuing songs or evocative sounds through the tangles of his ignorance. And after a while, Taylor said, he began to hear something coming out, something deeply felt and almost but never quite controlled, veering between a brand new type of song which cannot be taught because it comes from an unschooled innocence which cuts across known systems, and chaos, which playing the player and spilling garble, sometimes begins to write its own songs. Something was beginning to take shape which, though erratic, was unique in all this world. Quite abruptly though, the man disappeared, most likely to freak himself into oblivion, because Taylor never saw or heard of him again. But he added that if the cat had kept on playing, he would have been one of the first great free bassists."
Lester Bangs, "Of Pop and Pies and Fun: A Program for Mass Liberation in the Form of a Stooges Review, or, Who's the Fool?"

"Just play one note," Sonic had advised us as we travelled down to the M1. "Keep it simple. One note. No fancy stuff." By "fancy stuff" he meant two notes.
Will Carruthers on playing in Spacemen 3


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