Michael Azerrad · 522 pages
Rating: (11.4K votes)
“Rock'n'roll is a teenage sport, meant to be played by teenagers of all ages--they could be 15, 25 or 35. It all boils down to whether they've got the love in their hearts, that beautiful teenage spirit... -Calvin Johnson”
― Michael Azerrad, quote from Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991
“Los Angeles wasn’t a sun-splashed utopia anymore—it was an alienated, smog-choked sprawl rife with racial and class tensions, recession, and stifling boredom.”
― Michael Azerrad, quote from Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991
“Music can inspire people to wake up and say, ‘Somebody’s lying.’ This is the point I’d like to make with my music,” Watt told Rolling Stone in 1985. “Make you think about what’s expected of you, of your friends. What’s expected of you by your boss. Challenge those expectations. And your own expectations. Man, you should challenge your own ideas about the world every day.”
― Michael Azerrad, quote from Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991
“Boon and Watt had the bad—or perhaps good—fortune to come of age during one of rock’s most abject periods. “That Seventies stuff, the Journey, Boston, Foreigner stuff, it was lame,” Watt says. “If it weren’t for those type of bands we never would have had the nerve to be a band. But I guess you need bad things to make good things. It’s like with farming—if you want to grow a good crop, you need a lot of manure.”
― Michael Azerrad, quote from Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991
“I’m not religious about God,” Boon agreed, “I’m religious about Man.” “We believe in average guys,” said Watt. “What happens is, the system makes them all fuckheads.” “And I want to try to snap them out of that,” said Boon. “That’s why I write these songs, OK?”
― Michael Azerrad, quote from Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991
“Hate is a lack of imagination.”
― Graham Greene, quote from The Power and the Glory
“The Jackal was perfectly aware that in 1963 General de Gaulle was not only the President of France; he was also the most closely and skilfully guarded figure in the Western world. To assassinate him, as was later proved, was considerably more difficult than to kill President John F. Kennedy of the United States. Although the English killer did not know it, French security experts who had through American courtesy been given an opportunity to study the precautions taken to guard the life of President Kennedy had returned somewhat disdainful of those precautions as exercised by the American Secret Service. The French experts rejection of the American methods was later justified when in November 1963 John Kennedy was killed in Dallas by a half-crazed and security-slack amateur while Charles de Gaulle lived on, to retire in peace and eventually to die in his own home.”
― Frederick Forsyth, quote from The Day of the Jackal
“All my life I have studies the peculiar powers of music. It has a force of its own that few would deny.”
― Katherine Neville, quote from The Eight
“We train in strategy, geography, horsemanship, weaponry, that sort of thing. We study great battles in history and analyze the outcome. The”
― Cinda Williams Chima, quote from The Demon King
“You bet they did. Dellray was there. You should've seen him. He ordered every other case put on hold and said if metallurgy report wasn't in your hands ASAP there'd be one mean mother——you get the picture——reaming their——you get the rest of the picture.”
― Jeffery Deaver, quote from The Bone Collector
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