Gibson ES 125 was a real instrument, this was in 1956. I started learning; I had a vision of a sound.

The principle is competing against yourself. It's about self-improvement, about being better than you were the day before.

The end is here, and you don't want be here. You are the best in the world at something, and you know you are not going to be that great at anything else.

My dad, like any coach, has always stressed the fundamentals. He taught me responsibility, accountability, and the importance of hard work.

If I wasn't so lazy, or if I had a roadie, I'd have a line of guitars on stage. I'd have a lap steel and a nylon string up there, but who wants to keep up with all that?

I did admire the comments and the music of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. And that didn't fly too well in the Deep South. It was not quite redneck enough.

I saw all that [white trash] growing up in Alabama and Georgia. I had a group of country cousins and we'd go visit them when I was a kid. They lived on a red dirt Georgia back road, in a shack, with twelve kids. Farmers. No electricity, they had a well on their back porch, but they had nothing, yet they were the happiest, freest people I'd ever met. I loved to visit them. Great sense of humor, and they kept up with all the latest music, country, rockabilly, that stuff. Great food they grew in the fields and canned. Happy people.