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" Johnny Cash was a good man. He tried to live up to his faith. It was just difficult. "

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" John Cougar Mellencamp - I didn't like him in the beginning. I liked some of the stuff around the 'Scarecrow' period. I go back and forth on him all the time, but I think he's a good artist. I don't know if he's a great artist or not, but he rose above his original level of achievement. "

" With the Internet today, it is possible to do some mixed media things where you can write about an artist and link to a song or video by that artist. But that was unheard of in the years I was at the paper. "

" Growing up in the icy isolation of Hibbing, Minn., Dylan, who was still Robert Allen Zimmerman then, found comfort in the country, blues, and early rock 'n' roll that he heard at night on a Louisiana radio station whose signal came in strong and clear. "

" When I met Johnny Cash, I didn't know what to ask: where were you born, who was your favorite recording artist, what's your favorite color - I didn't know. "

" I was driving to school at Reseda High School - I was a junior, and it was early 1956. I had a '49 Ford. I was listening to the country station, and 'Folsom Prison Blues' comes on... It didn't sound like the stuff I was hearing on the pop stations. "

" I think there's a lot of writers who took rock music more seriously: Greil Marcus, Jon Landau. "

" As soon as I started working at the 'Los Angeles Times,' people warned me not to get too close to artists because it could make it difficult to review their work, and you can never really tell if the 'friendship' is genuine. "

" In 1980, after 10 years at 'The Times,' I was at a crossroads in my personal life. I loved my family, but I was also so obsessive about my work that I found myself devoting more and more time to it. I wanted to be everywhere there was a good story, and that meant I had to choose between that and being with the family on important days. "

" I didn't know if I should tell people that Johnny Cash had an affair with his sister-in-law while his wife was pregnant. How much does the public need to know about a performer? "

" Without people like Dylan and the Beatles and people like Paul Simon, I think rock n' roll would have died out like Dixieland jazz. "

" The first time I saw Pearl Jam, I thought Eddie Vedder had seen too many Jim Morrison videos, and I didn't like the music very much. But by the third album, I really liked them after all. "

" I'm guilty of being perceived as having narrow taste. I went after the artists that I thought were important - Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen and stuff. "

" Like David Bowie, Madonna visualizes music so that her best work seems equally designed with the stage or screen in mind - not just the jukebox. "

" When the Eagles were starting out in the early '70s, it would have been hard to imagine anyone in the fledgling, country-accented rock group someday seriously challenging the artistic punch of Neil Young or Joni Mitchell. "

" If you care about who I want to write about, I'll write about the people you want to read about. "

" You had to read what I wrote if you lived in L.A. in 1975 and cared about pop music. "

" I thought the message of the artist was more important than the writing style. I tried to be clear; I wanted everyone to be welcome. I think some of the more serious writers wrote to a more elite audience than that. They're the ones who were defining the seriousness of rock n' roll. "

" When I began to interview people from the '60s, my first question was always, 'What was your favorite record?' "

" The Internet has changed how young people listen to music. Television programs like 'American Idol' changed how people listen to music. It was no longer the songwriters that we celebrated; it was the singers. "

" Thanks to the arrival of such spirited and purposeful groups as X, the Blasters, R.E.M., and the Replacements, American rock has made a spectacular comeback. "

" The greatest impact of 'We Are the World' seems to have been the video, which lets us see the singers take their turns at the microphone without any sense of star ego. "

" I don't want to be the cranky old guy, but a lot of critics are too forgiving of mediocre artists. When you see these 'American Idol' people on the cover of 'Rolling Stone' being written about as serious artists, there's something wrong with that. You can erase them from the history of rock n' roll, and you wouldn't notice. "

" Courtney Love is so famous among journalists for her loquaciousness that the joke is that you don't have to worry about questions when you interview her - just be sure you have lots of tape. "

" David Bowie, who spent most of the '70s establishing himself as a master of psychological disguises, is spending the '80s trying to convince us that he's just a regular fella - or at least as close to one as a millionaire pop star can be. "

" To many, Courtney Love smells like rock hype. Reviewers may be excited about her, but the rock audience may be skeptical of the credentials of someone who is more famous for her interviews and her spouse than for her music. "

" Take any celebrity - all we really know is what they choose to tell us or what they show us in public. "

" When I was in high school in the '50s, all pop music - Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard - was aimed at teenagers. I loved that stuff. "

" At the 'L.A. Times,' I always wanted to write about artists I thought were meaningful. So I interviewed Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, U2, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Eminem, White Stripes. And I could understand how almost everybody I interviewed had a sense of artistry. "

" I don't understand why people take Beyonce so seriously. You don't feel like there's a living, breathing person. It's not flesh and blood. It's just flesh and flesh. "

" In the role of Ziggy Stardust, Bowie seemed in 1972 like a strange alien creature, not so much coming from another planet as from a future age. His purpose: to warn us about a dangerous society where values were to be turned inside out. "