Michael Azerrad > Quotes

“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, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991

“Just as not all popular albums are wonderful, not all wonderful albums are popular.”
― Michael Azerrad

“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, 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, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

“Being a teen was a metaphorical state that could be prolonged indefinitely, a way of being in which one was unspoiled, blameless, enthusiastic, and sincere.”
― Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

“When I peeked out the window into the yard, there was Kurt with some kind of contraption on his head that resembled a tin-foil hat, sneaking around the yard followed by a half a dozen laughing toddlers. Kurt had that million-dollar grin on his face and I could tell he was definitely in nirvana. I guess you could say he was the Pied Piper of compassion.”
― Michael Azerrad, Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana

“When he met Kurt and Chris, he was a saute cook at a seafood restaurant on Bainbridge Island. By night, he partied with his friends, smoking pot, drinking, and doing the potent local acid, which many swear has fried the brains of an entire generation of Bainbridge Islanders.”
― Michael Azerrad, Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana

“They had the certain knowledge that they were the first American generation to have little hope of doing better than their parents, the generation that would suffer for the fiscal excesses of the Reagan eighties, that spent their entire sexual prime in the shadow of AIDS, that spent their childhoods having nightmares about nuclear war. They felt powerless to rescue an embattled environment and spent most of their lives with either Reagan or Bush in the White House, enduring a repressive sexual and cultural climate. And they felt helpless and inarticulate in the face of it all.”
― Michael Azerrad, Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana

“for instance. “When we say ‘World Domination,’ ” Pavitt explained, “we’re saying, ‘Fuck you, we’re from Seattle, and we don’t care if the media machines are in L.A., we’re going to create our own.”
― Michael Azerrad, 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, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

“you could perform together because you were coming from the same places in your heart. You may not make the same music, but you feel about music the same way.”
― Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

“To me, it was just a matter of, if you want to do something, the only thing that’s going to keep you from doing it is giving up,” Leary says. “Because we were proof of that. If you just don’t quit, you will succeed—that is the bottom line.”
― Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

“Says Sullivan, “Those guys used to get together in the van and put their hands all together and then Paul would say, ‘Where are we going?’ And the band would go, ‘To the middle!’ And he’d go, ‘Which middle?’ And they’d go, ‘The very middle!’ ” But it was all false modesty. The Replacements, it seemed, secretly believed in themselves and yet adopted a loser persona to insulate themselves against failure.”
― Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

“We don’t have to convince the world that we’re suffering to convince them that we’re artists,” Hart said, jabbing at Black Flag’s angst-ridden style. “There are those that choose to take that course. There’s nothing wrong with being happy.”
― Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

“Rock in general is about that emotional release,”
― Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

“He’d realized the importance of that, of making sure everybody was in on every decision and being on the same page aesthetically with him—and behind the sentiment of the song.”
― Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

“MacKaye never told anyone to get off the stage. Sometimes this encouraged a rapid and irreversible descent into chaos, but usually it just meant a steady stream of stage divers and kids who just wanted a few seconds of attention while they did some silly dance for their buddies. Anarchy, it seemed, could work.”
― Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

“constant friction between what you see, and what you want to achieve and things that you know are right. That rub is what creates the pain and the emotion and then there’s the hope that maybe you can overcome it, make it happen. It’s the same politically and personally—to me it’s all one issue because the same problems keep coming up over and over again—lack of commitment, lack of caring.”
― Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

“they wouldn’t do interviews with magazines they themselves wouldn’t read; they would play only all-ages shows and tickets would be $5.”
― Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

“We do want to provide a physical and emotional release, but we also want to create an atmosphere where people are encouraged to think for themselves rather than accept what they’ve been told.”
― Michael Azerrad, 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, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

“It’s just that when you’re playing in standard tuning all the time,” Moore explained, “you’re sounding pretty… standard.”
― Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

“believe in music in that way—if you want something to happen, you write a song about it.”
― Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

“Personal purifying is the beginning of everything,” MacKaye said. “Once you get your own shit together, once you get your own mind together, it makes life for you and the people around you so much more agreeable and understandable as opposed to constant fucking problems.”
― Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

“In retrospect, Hart believes that taking on so many responsibilities may have hurt the band in the long run. “The DIY thing, I don’t know, it’s like we handicapped ourselves in a lot of situations to maintain that,” he says. “There were things that, by all rights, we should have been able to let go of and oversee.”
― Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

“It certainly made for music that relied less on melody and conventional song structure and more on mood and texture.”
― Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

“says Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo. “People got this idea that ultimately what mattered was the quality of what you were doing and how much importance you gave to it, regardless of how widespread it became or how many records it sold.”
― Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

“that was the record that extended what so many people had felt and been a part of, and extended it to people who had never thought those thoughts before, or thought to be a part of something like that before.”
― Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

“The band members’ voracious appetites for all kinds of music and their enthusiasm for spreading the word about it was a big part of the networking process. “We were, on the one hand, trying to take it all in,” says guitarist Lee Ranaldo, “and on the other hand, using whatever position we had to reflect people back out to see a larger world.”
― Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

“You will do what looks good to you on paper / We will do what we must.”
― Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991