When I was making my first record there would be something that would come out that would inspire you, you know? You'd see someone on TV or on the radio.
I was doing a late-night round as a milkman in 1978 when I heard a radio DJ announce that he was leaving. I marched straight to the radio station and told them I could do better. For some reason, they gave me a go.
I was mugged when I was 12. I had a portable radio, and I ran into this building and these two guys came in and hit me, busted me up and took the radio. After that I was very paranoid and I started taking kung fu and karate. But I didn't want to fight.
I don't listen to the radio too much, but usually I listen to Stanley Brothers and Ralph Stanley more than I do anybody!
And in an era where radio stations that are inclined to play Styx music are your classic rock stations and the stations that play current music look at us as dinosaurs - the only way we could reach people with our new music, generally, is to perform live.
Postwar America was a very buttoned-up nation. Radio shows were run by censors, Presidents wore hats, ladies wore girdles. We came straight out of the blue - nobody was expecting anything like Martin and Lewis. A sexy guy and a monkey is how some people saw us.
To be successful in talk radio, you have to have a conservative audience as well. Not enough liberals listen to it.
No band on 21st-century radio has mined pre-grunge hair-metal's sleaze like L.A.'s Buckcherry. So it makes poetic sense that they'd spend their sixth album tallying all seven deadly sins.
When I was very small, maybe 8 years old, we had a big radio that stood on four legs, and it had a cross piece underneath it, and I used to take a pillow and crawl under the radio.
Mobile communications had been around for a long time, but always as a limited market, constrained by the radio spectrum.
Before the show, there's about two or two and a half hours of meet and greets with radio stations, promoters, people who I need to see and thank and talk to to make sure they remember me. And then, I get - out of all that day of talking and smiling and shaking hands and getting photos, I get to sing for two hours.
Television really has been my vehicle. I don't get played on the radio much, so I've relied on TV a lot.
My inner rock chick has always been there. I grew up listening to a lot of rock music through my sisters, who were teenagers while I was young, so they had control of the radio.
When the first album came out and I heard 'Do It Again' on the radio, that was the greatest thing that had ever happened. After that, it was all downhill.
Back in the day, the album was king in many ways. And, of course, we were very tied in with the birth of FM/college radio in the States, and what we were doing suited the format of those young radio stations.
Right before I decided to come out, I went on a spiritual retreat called 'Changing the Inner Dialogue of Your Subconscious Mind.' I'd never been to anything like it before, and all my friends were taking bets on how long I'd last with no TV, no radio, no phone. But for me that was the beginning of paying attention to all the little things.
I try never to focus on the radio, just find great songs, find emotion and just write the best songs you can. I think when you get fixated on trying to do something too accurate, it becomes more washed out and less what you intended it to be. So I think each time the challenge for me is to try and reinvent a little bit.
I did not grow up in a cosmopolitan environment. I grew up in a little town in the middle of nowhere, pre-Internet, pre-college radio.
The first memory I have was my sisters dancing to the radio when they played records by Benny Goodman and Harry James and of the sort. But the record that got me was a record by Derek Sampson, who was a young guy, called 'Boogie Express,' and it was boogie-woogie. Really, it was on fire, and that got me.
There are some commercial artists that have number one after number one, and you go to their show, and the show's one-note. Yeah, they're all hit songs. But there's no emotion, because they're the same kind of hit songs, because they're what works at radio. That kills live shows for me.
The new Zune may not be an iPod killer, but it does offer a clean interface, great industrial design, HD radio, and a subscription model for music, making it significantly less expensive for big users.
I liked back in the sixties where you'd turn on the radio and go 'Oh that's Hendrix, that's Creedence Clearwater, that's The Doors, there's The Grass Roots, The Monkees, there's Big Brother.' You could just instantly hear it and tell. But in the eighties and nineties there's no way you could do that.
Radio, which was a much better medium than television will ever be, was easy and pleasant to listen to. Your mind filled automatically with images.
Talk radio has made an enormous run around establishment media. But the Internet is making an end run around talk radio. Suddenly we're faced with an information age.
We hadn't heard anything about registering to vote because when you see this flat land in here, when the people would get out of the fields, if they had a radio, they'd be too tired to play it. So we didn't know what was going on in the rest of the state, even, much less in other places.
Some people buy records just to dance to 'em. Some people buy records to listen to the radio. And there's people that buy records 'cause they listen to every song.
It's so hard to pick a 'single.' I always want it to be whatever my favorite tune is, but often the record company and the person whose job it is to take it to radio have different ideas.
With rap, you go in the studio, you make music, you put the music out, then all of a sudden, you're a star: you have a big record on the radio, and you're on stage, and you've never done it before. Let's say your first show is 'Summer Jam,' and you're in front of 60,000 people, and you've never played an arena, ever. You're gonna suck.
I'm a big fan of martial arts films, novels and radio programs.
Wednesday is always a ramp-up day during Super Bowl week. This is the day that players who didn't make the big game always appear or arrive in the Super Bowl city to hawk their wares or promote a sponsor, so that's why NFL Network always holds the bulk of their coverage from Radio Row at the Super Bowl Media Center.
I feel like I was writing as I was learning to talk. Writing was always a go-to form of communication. And I knew I could sing from being in tune with the radio.
I've made club songs, and I've made radio songs, and I've made the car songs.
Orson Welles's second 'I-did-it' should show once and for all that film making, radio and the stage are three different guys better kept separated. 'The Magnificent Ambersons' is one of those versions of the richest family in town during the good old days.
When I'm in the car and somebody comes on the radio singing the high notes, I try to sing along.
I had five singles that did not work on country radio, and I still had fans that showed up to the shows.
My dad was in radio; he was a broadcaster, and it was in the family. He hosted kind of a game show at one point on TV; he was the original host of 'Good Day New York,' and he hosted the Jerry Lewis telethon for 15 years.
