Rock & Roll is the physical thing that just comes out of you .. the other stuff you have to sit down and learn .. once you learn scales and chord progressions, you can make up your own versions

I mean, what 16-year-old is going to listen to Doc Watson?

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.

I didn't want to take the guitar solos down note-for-note, but more or less use them as a map, and keep all the hooks from the guitar playing, and let myself come through.

With the Stray Cats at least, we really took the music somewhere else. First, we wrote our own songs. That's a real weak point in modern classics if you do rockabilly or blues.

I thought it would be cool to take flat-picking and put it in overdrive. I thought it would bend the ear.

Elvis is not so difficult as Johnny Cash because his voice is so distinctive. If you try to copy Johnny Cash, it's just going to sound dumb.