Roger Steffens > Quotes

“Jimi on the box, thirty stories up, everything immediate, yet distanced. Jimi's chords locked in aerial dogfights, gliding, riding, sliding, hiding, belligerent bursts, hallucinogenic, a head-warping face-wiping mind melt, chords live dive bombers screaming in for the kill, scintillating, serrated chords shot through with arc-light shrieks of staccato mayhem, as immediate and horrific as the firefight racketing away this very second below our red and puffy eyes; chords that hang in the air like the retinal reflection of an eerie afterburn, the stars displaced and the smell of a world that burned. Overhead, night birds flying, Huey, Apache, Chinook, whooshing with murderous potential. And over everything - every apocalyptic bang, boom, and rattle - Jimi, bleating like Braxton and bonding with the bombast.”
― Roger Steffens

“Peter Tosh came through a few months later, saying grudgingly that at least Bob’s death would make room for other artists to be noticed—a belligerent stance that cost him the support of many of his fans. But he had a very warm and humorous side to him too, and over the next seven years we grew close and I interviewed him several times for Reggae Beat”
― Roger Steffens, So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley