Growing up I used to love bands like Free and ELO and the Rolling Stones. When Robert Plant got in touch it made perfect sense to me.
Mick Jagger has been an idol of mine since I was 10 years old. Through his music, he has taught me so much about rock n' roll, but also about the blues and about the experience of live music, going to several Rolling Stones shows, growing up.
I first went on the road with the Rolling Stones in the year of our Lord, 1969. But my grandfather gave me away to a drummer when I was 15 years old.
The Rolling Stones are constantly changing, but beneath the changes they remain the most formal of rock bands. Their successive releases have been continuous extensions of their approach, not radical redefinitions, as has so often been the case with the Beatles.
I've been ripping the Rolling Stones off with every song I write in some form or another.
In June 1972, I went with friends to see the Rolling Stones at the Los Angeles Forum. After the concert, as we crossed through the parking lot, a guy in a brown Mercedes stopped in the middle of the street and got out. He came up to me and asked if I had ever modeled.
While the Beatles always had George Martin around to clean up their act, the Rolling Stones had Andrew Loog Oldham to coarsen theirs.
When we were trying to get 'Jersey Boys' off the ground, I'd get, 'The Four Seasons? Who's going to care? There's the Beatles, there's the Rolling Stones.' But people know those stories. Here was a story no one knew.
There's a lot of bands that get to a certain level, and it just stops. They scrap it. Compare this to, say, The Rolling Stones or The Who, where they just continued on forever and are still playing, or they quit after 20 years.
Growing up in the Libya of the 1970s, I remember the prevalence of local bands who were as much influenced by Arabic musical traditions as by the Rolling Stones or the Beatles. But the project of 'Arabisation' soon got to them, too, and western musical instruments were declared forbidden as 'instruments of imperialism.'
I've grown up with my parents' music tastes, listening to Fleetwood Mac and the Rolling Stones.
The Rolling Stones seemed very loose and wild, but when you read about them, you realize that everything they did is very deliberate.
When punk came along, I found my generation's music. I grew up listening to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd, 'cause that was what got played in the house. But when I first saw the Stranglers, I thought, 'This is it.'
You know, Rolling Stones songs all sound kind of the same.
When I'm 80 and sitting in a rocking chair listening to the Rolling Stones, there is absolutely no way I'm going to feel old or forget my younger days.
All of the Rolling Stones' children are my children's best friends.
I love bands that can collaborate, and I feel like the Rolling Stones wouldn't be nearly as great as they are if it wasn't for them having a real group.
The most successful people I've worked with, like the Rolling Stones - people of a different, kind of legendary caliber - have such great, warm energy.
I started off as a bar band. We played ZZ Top, Bob Seger, Waylon Jennings, the Rolling Stones - everything and anything people wanted to hear. You're not really selling yourself back then; you're selling beer.
The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Phil Spector. Those were my idols.
The Rolling Stones have been the best of all possible worlds: they have the lack of pretension and sentimentality associated with the blues, the rawness and toughness of hard rock, and the depth which always makes you feel that they are in the midst of saying something. They have never impressed me as being kitsch.
These days, the Rolling Stones still have an edge, but that fangs-out ferocity has mellowed considerably.
The great music for so many artists - the Beatles, the Rolling Stones - was always at the moment when they were closest to pop. It would be easy for U2 to go off and have a concept album, but I want us to stay in the pop fray.
I grew up loving classic rock music - The Beatles, The Rolling Stones - and then one day I heard 'Baby One More Time' on the radio and I thought 'What is this?' I was eight and it changed my life.
I don't find imitating other people's music easy at all. I remember being fifth in line for a Rolling Stones tour, early '90s, when Bill Wyman left, and I was hoping against hope that I wouldn't get the call to audition. I wouldn't be able to play a Stones song if you put a gun to my head.
When I think of Mick Jagger still singing that he can't get any satisfaction in over forty years of being in the Rolling Stones, I have to conclude that he's either lying or not all that bright.
