Steve Miller

“My advice to new artists is to forget about all of this and take acting and dancing lessons and become a video star.”

“Journey was a jazzy jam band when they first started. They were very out there.”

“Growing up, I was always around adult musicians who played for their entire lives. So that's what I wanted to do, and I always had that in mind.”

“We'll go out and we'll be playing in front of 15,000 people and say, 'Hey, we're going to do three new songs from something we just recorded' and 5,000 people get up and go get a hot dog and a beer and they don't come back until they hear the opening strings of 'The Joker' or 'Fly Like an Eagle.'”

“Actually, I have my moments, but I don't consider myself a grumpy guy.”

“Vinyl's like a really juicy steak compared to like a kind of tough steak or something. It's really good. And once you listen to vinyl and get a chance to hear it, I think anyone will enjoy it more than they will digital.”

“If there were 3,000 people in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the musical education would be so much better than this little elite thing.”

“Is there one blues guy who was the most sophisticated and influential, like Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong in jazz? Was it Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Lightnin' Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, Robert Johnson, or all of them? I think you have to pick all of them.”

“Generally what you see happen is these talented kids make a great album, but they don't have a chance unless they have someone working with them who has integrity. They get thrown out by MTV and radio in six weeks, and they don't get any time to grow.”

“Dealing with Jazz at Lincoln Center and its board of directors, who are so great, and then seeing how these Rock Hall guys operate, it's like: 'Really?' It seems like they're total amateurs when it comes to doing shows and contracts.”

“For guitar players especially, blues is the foundation of rock and roll. You take country music and rock and roll and jazz and you mix it together, and that's my basic makeup.”

“My plan is to keep playing until I fall over.”

“Growing up in Dallas, my first influences on the guitar were T-Bone Walker and Les Paul. T-Bone taught me how to play lead guitar behind my head and do the splits in 1951 when I was nine.”

“There aren't that many people that cover my music. It's kind of hard to cover. Everybody always has their own spin. The only guy who didn't, I think, was Seal. It just sounded like a bad version of 'Fly Like an Eagle.'”

“Very rarely can you bring someone new into a band and have them just fit perfectly, right away.”

“I've recorded lots of projects, but just haven't bothered to release them.”

“Just trying to make my music as good as possible and to keep performing and just keep moving.”

“By 1949 I knew all the studio tricks.”

“It's not always about huge giant commercial success. It's about art.”

“Record companies, they're just like lemmings.”