For a long time, I couldn't actually deal with playing concerts, it was a totally alien concept to me, 'cos I was used to playing in clubs and dance halls.

[Jazz musicians] couldn't cut rock. I had to be more limited and specific about what I was doing.

[Jean-Paul] Sartre was a throwback to the existential period. I'm not really so much into that these days. I went through a period of going over things and looking at them again to see what they were. But I'm into psychiatry type things. I'm into philosophy. I'm into that sort of thing.

You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.

[Rock 'n' roll] music started out with some cat banging a log with a couple of pieces of stick. He sent a message across a river and although the cat on the other side receiving the message didn't know the exact words, he did understand basically something about what was being communicated.

There's no man alive who has any answers. We all know that. It's like the guru trip. All a guru can do is direct you to something that you probably already know about yourself, something you might want to followup on. Apply the same thing to music and records. You might get something from a particular record that hits a nerve and something inside you. But that's your vision of it.

There was a conflict - the actual putting together of the reality of the situation didn't seem to gel. I'd been doing kind of a slow ballad type of thing on records, but when it came to performing, I felt I was limiting myself.