Rockabilly Quotes

I ain’t never had me a single round in a professional, boxin’ ring. I’m whatcha call a street fighter, a knuckle brawler. Knives, beer bottles, chairs, chains, rocks, sticks, tire irons, and even teeth. Ya name it. I’ve seen ‘em all. And I tell ya what. When it comes to fightin,’ the quickest way to double your money in a fight is to fold it over. That don’t mean ya give up or quit. It means ya work with whatcha got and whatcha know.

They call each other ‘E.’ Elvis picks wildflowers near the river and brings them to Emily. She explains half-rhymes to him. In heaven Emily wears her hair long, sports Levis and western blouses with rhinestones. Elvis is lean again, wears baggy trousers and T-shirts, a letterman’s jacket from Tupelo High. They take long walks and often hold hands. She prefers they remain just friends. Forever. Emily’s poems now contain naugahyde, Cadillacs, Electricity, jets, TV, Little Richard and Richard Nixon. The rock-a-billy rhythm makes her smile. Elvis likes himself with style. This afternoon he will play guitar and sing “I Taste A Liquor Never Brewed” to the tune of “Love Me Tender.” Emily will clap and harmonize. Alone in their cabins later, they’ll listen to the river and nap. They will not think of Amherst or Las Vegas. They know why God made them roommates. It’s because America was their hometown. It’s because God is a thing without feathers. It’s because God wears blue suede shoes.

I ain’t never had me a single round in a professional, boxin’ ring. I’m whatcha call a street fighter, a knuckle brawler. Knives, beer bottles, chairs, chains, rocks, sticks, tire irons, and even teeth. Ya name it. I’ve seen ‘em all. And I tell ya what. When it comes to fightin,’ the quickest way to double your money in a fight is to fold it over. That don’t mean ya give up or quit. It means ya work with whatcha got and whatcha know.

The heart of rock will always remain a primal world of action. The music revives itself over and over again in that form, primitive rockabilly, punk, hard soul and early rap. Integrating the world of thought and reflection with the world of primitive action is *not* a necessary skill for making great rock 'n' roll. Many of the music's most glorious moments feel as though they were birthed in an explosion of raw talent and creative instinct (some of them even were!). But ... if you want to burn bright, hard *and* long, you will need to depend on more than your initial instincts. You will need to develop some craft and a creative intelligence that will lead you *farther* when things get dicey. That's what'll help you make crucial sense and powerful music as time passes, giving you the skills that may also keep you alive, creatively and physically. The failure of so many of rock's artists to outlive their expiration date of a few years, make more than a few great albums and avoid treading water, or worse, I felt was due to the misfit nature of those drawn to the profession. These were strong, addictive personalities, fired by compulsion, narcissism, license, passion and an inbred entitlement, all slammed over a world of fear, hunger and insecurity. That's a Molotov cocktail of confusion that can leave you unable to make, or resistant to making, the lead of consciousness a life in the field demands. After first contact knocks you on your ass, you'd better have a plan, for some preparedness and personal development will be required if you expect to hang around any longer than your fifteen minutes. Now, some guys' five minutes are worth other guys' fifty years, and while burning out in one brilliant supernova will send record sales through the roof, leave you living fast, dying young, leaving a beautiful corpse, there *is* something to be said for living. Personally, I like my gods old, grizzled and *here*. I'll take Dylan; the pirate raiding party of the Stones; the hope-I-get-very-old-before-I-die, present live power of the Who; a fat, still-mesmerizing-until-his-death Brando—they all suit me over the alternative. I would've liked to have seen that last Michael Jackson show, a seventy-year-old Elvis reinventing and relishing in his talents, where Jimi Hendrix might've next taken the electric guitar, Keith Moon, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain and all the others whose untimely deaths and lost talents stole something from the music I love, living on, enjoying the blessings of their gifts and their audience's regard. Aging is scary but fascinating, and great talent morphs in strange and often enlightening ways. Plus, to those you've received so much from, so much joy, knowledge and inspiration, you wish life, happiness and peace. These aren't easy to come by.

Psychobilly itself is the bastard of all music genres, and a bastardisation of many

A school in the East Midlands, new term 1981-82. A new boy enters the class and is introduced by the teacher. He has spiky hair and wears a T-shirt, Doc Martens and tight denims with tiny turn-ups. He is instructed to sit [in] the nearest empty seat. The boy beside him has a flat-top and wears a tartan shirt, crepe shoes and loose denims with big turn-ups. As the latest addition to the class takes his seat he mutters to his new neighbour “Rockabilly bastard!” “Fucking Punk” replies his schoolmate, and they glare at each other menacingly. One year later they are wrecking wildly together at a Meteors gig – best of mates.

Many of the first generation of Psychobillies were often ignorant about the history of Rockabilly and gained their love of Rock’n’Roll not from lovingly collecting twenty-five year old 45’s tracked down in dusty American record stores but by watching ‘Grease’ and ‘Happy Days’ alongside seeing Matchbox and The Stray Cats on ‘Top Of The Pops’. This was a generation weaned on ‘The Wanderers’, ‘Lemon Popsicle’ and stacks of low-rent TV advertised Rock’n’Roll albums.... They may not have known who [1950s rockabilly-country singer] Narvel Felts and [1950s rockabilly artist] ‘Groovey’ Joe Poovey were but they sure as hell had heard of Darts and Showaddywaddy and they undoubtedly knew “who put the bomp in the bompshoobompshoobomp” never mind the fucking ramalamadingdong.

Rockabilly, the punk music of the 1950s, shared similarities with the punk music that emerged in 1976: primal energy, rebellion, basic instrumentation, and (often) basic musicianship.

Drinking games were also part of the gig experience including a live favourite which would follow later in the band’s career, the infamous “Wheel of Misfortune,” a huge wheel to which punters were strapped to and spun after being fed a bucket of booze through a hose. This often resulted in the victim being left in an unconscious stupor or forced them to let go a multi-coloured fountain of puke. Snakebite [beer mixed with cider] was the supposed content of the bucket but many would shudder to think what foul potions were also added to the receptacle.

[a] brutal blend of Rockabilly & Punk

The modern rockabilly rebel is inevitably facing a tension between succumbing to the pull of the past—a kind of remembering—and a forgetting that the integrity of any embrace of the past is challenged as contrivance and dissimulation by the near-universal availability of the once-local, once-rebellious, and once-novel style.

What matters about Frank is the sense of freedom he brought to his music: a good-natured contempt for conventional patterns of life combined with a genius for transforming all that was smug and polite into absurdity. The result was a music of staggering weirdness, dimly anchored by the fatalism of the blues and powered by the pure delight of what was soon to be called rock ’n’ roll. Frank wasn’t sexy, like the rockabilly singers who were to make Sam Phillips’s fortune; he was more like a dirty old man. He was ribald, and he had a flair. “I am,” he growled in one of his numbers, “a howling tomcat.

We offer you can buy cheap prices in retro dresses like as underwear twin sets, pants lounge wear and different accessories shower caps, tops and wallet are available in Australia.

Liv applied cherry red lipstick in her rearview mirror with the precision of experience, her brand of war paint to give her confidence today.

It is thus inevitable that the New Man of rock ’n’ roll was incarnated in the mid-seventies in the figure of Bruce Springsteen, a singer-songwriter whose principal merit was that of showing us the entire DNA map of American music. There is not one paradigm of modern music that he did not bend to comply with his personal narrative urgency: rockabilly, soul, rhythm and blues, punk, folk, country, pop, jazz . . . Springsteen does not change popular music, he incessantly reworks it, keeping its roots alive.

Besides my looks, I was also concerned about my smell. I realized that I hadn’t showered in days. I had cleaned my clothes two nights ago. They didn’t smell clean anymore, but at least they weren’t filthy. But I had spent several hours yesterday sleeping in a jail cell, and jail cells aren’t known for cleanliness. My fears of stinking up this guy’s van disappeared when I realized that this couple was either a pair of hippies or rockabillies. They smelled of marijuana. That smell killed every other odor inside the van.

The Blasters proved to be the most prominent and popular of these acts by far. Originally a quartet, the band was bred in Downey, just down the freeway from East L.A. In their teens, brothers Phil and Dave Alvin were bitten by the blues bug; they became habitués of the L.A. club the Ash Grove, where many of the best-known folk and electric blues performers played, and they sought out the local musicians who could teach them their craft, learning firsthand from such icons as Big Joe Turner, T-Bone Walker, and Little Richard’s saxophonist Lee Allen (who would ultimately join the band in the ’80s). But the Blasters’ style was multidimensional: they could play R&B, they loved country music, and they were also dyed-in-the-wool rockabilly fans who were initially embraced by the music’s fervent L.A. cultists. Their debut album, 1980’s American Music, was recorded in a Van Nuys garage by the Milan, Italy–born rockabilly fanatic Rockin’ Ronnie Weiser, and released on his indie label Rollin’ Rock Records, which also issued LPs by such first-generation rockabilly elders as Gene Vincent, Mac Curtis, Jackie Waukeen Cochran, and Ray Campi. By virtue of Phil Alvin’s powerful, unmannered singing and Dave Alvin’s adept guitar playing and original songwriting, the Blasters swiftly rose to the top of a pack of greasy local bands that also included Levi and the Rockats (a unit fronted by English singer Levi Dexter) and the Rockabilly Rebels (who frequently backed Ray Campi). Los Lobos were early Blasters fans, and often listened to American Music in their van on the way to their own (still acoustic) gigs. Rosas says, “We loved their first record, man. We used to play the shit out of that record. Dave [Hidalgo] was the one who got a copy of it, and he put it on cassette.

The band could not have known that the Alvin brothers were already well aware of Los Lobos, and had been for more than five years, for they had seen the band’s TV debut on La Cultura in 1975. “The first time we had ever heard of them,” says Dave Alvin, “Phil and I were at home, and we watched a thing on the local PBS station, channel 28. It was a half-hour documentary on this band from East L.A. that played traditional acoustic Mexican music from all of the various states.” Phil Alvin adds that the Lobos’ example in fact had an impact on the genre-defying way in which the Blasters conceived of their own music: “I remember watching it and really being just impressed, particularly about the way they talked about Mexican music and the variety of it. When we went down to Rockin’ Ronnie’s and he kept pressuring us to say we played rockabilly and stuff like that, I remember thinking of those guys when I [told him]

Besides opening for such punk and roots attractions as the Blasters and the Plugz, they were billed with rockabilly performers like Rip Masters, James Intveld, and the Rebel Rockers, and with such other East L.A. invaders as Los Illegals and the Brat. They also made their first trip out of town as a rock group, traveling to Austin, Texas, for shows with Joe “King” Carrasco and Rank & File, the L.A./ Texas combine that would soon release their debut album on Slash; the latter, a country-skewed “cowpunk” group, featured brothers Chip and Tony Kinman of the early L.A. punk band the Dils and Alejandro Escovedo, formerly the guitarist for the San Francisco punk act the Nuns.

Rock & roll music is a derivative of rockabilly music; rockabilly music is Bill Monroe and the blues tied together. That’s it.

rockabilly, solos, which used very few notes, mainly double stops (that is two notes at once) and were primarily