Sunday's Inspirational Quote

Yesterday we went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland—and yes, my car got us there and back again with nary a hiccup :). It was amazing. (The museum--not the car trip. That, thank God, was blessedly uneventful.) Because I am a writer, I could relate to a lot of what those musicians went through. Not all, but a lot, since writing is a solitary endeavor, and creating music is not—not if you want anybody to hear it. But the part about "I play music because I can't not play it," oh, yes, I could relate to that. How it rises up from the soul and just won't go away until it is released...

A familiar theme I read about over and over again.

What amazed me the most was how so many of them gave up everything for their art. And how many of them were social outcasts before they became rock stars. As Bono said at one point in a taped interview, something to the effect of, We’re just doing what we’d be doing anyway, what we’d be doing for free, but now we’re getting ridiculously overpaid for it. The stories were countless about people sleeping in their cars, facing eviction, and just scrambling to make ends meet so they could continue to play. So they could continue to grace us with their gifts of inner knowledge and self-expression.

For them, it was all about the music. For me, it’s all about the words. So it comes as no surprise that my favorite parts of the tour were the handwritten pages of lyrics for songs I’ve listened to through the years. To see them written on their legal pads and spiral notebook pages, scrawled all around the page, words scratched out, paragraphs scratched out, new words written in…alternate words listed to the side…to witness that creative process, to know that a song that touched millions of lives started as just scribblings on a piece of paper…I looked at those, and thought, “That’s how I start my books!” and was inspired.

So this morning I’ve found a few quotes from Hall of Fame Inductees you might enjoy. None truly captures what I want to say, but they’re all good in their own way.

Have a blessed week.

Rock and roll music, if you like it, if you feel it, you can't help but move to it. That's what happens to me. I can't help it.' Elvis Presley

Without a song, each day would be a century. Mahalia Jackson

I said, other people can write songs, let's see if I can. So the first 400 or 500 wound up on the floor somewhere. Then I wrote one called Melissa. Gregg Allman

Your success story is a bigger story than whatever you're trying to say on stage. Success makes life easier. It doesn't make living easier. Bruce Springsteen

It was my 16th birthday - my mom and dad gave me my Goya classical guitar that day. I sat down, wrote this song, and I just knew that that was the only thing I could ever really do - write songs and sing them to people. Stevie Nicks

When you sit down and think about what rock 'n' roll music really is, then you have to change that question. Played up-tempo, you call it rock 'n' roll; at a regular tempo, you call it rhythm and blues. Little Richard

If I hold back, I'm no good. I'm no good. I'd rather be good sometimes, than holding back all the time. Janis Joplin

I just managed to convince my grandmother that it was a worth while that was something to do, you know, and when I did finally get the guitar, it didn't seem that difficult to me, to be able to make a good noise out of it. Eric Clapton

I always believed in the music we did and that's why it was uncompromising. Jimmy Page

When I'm dead, I want to be remembered as a musician of some worth and substance. Freddie Mercury