Action's year in quotes

Guitarist Elvin Bishop

“It’s a small percentage of people who insist their music has a deep connection to life. To most people, music is just some little fashion thing like hairstyle and clothes. You know ‘Dancing with the Stars’ and ‘American Idol’ and shit like that. It’s some little fashionable thing to talk about.”

Funk saxophonist Maceo Parker

“The first thing James Brown ever said to me is ‘Do you play baritone sax?’ I’m thinking the only way I can answer the question is yes or no, and if I say no it’s the end of the conversation and he would turn around and walk away. ... So I say, ‘Ahh, yes sir.’ Then he said, ‘Do you own a baritone sax?’ And again I go, ‘Ahh, yes sir.’ So he says, ‘I tell you what. If you can get a baritone sax then you can have a job.’ He knew I was lying, but he took me

anyway.”

Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay on her first meeting Elvis Presley at Muscle Shoals Studios

He was the most gorgeous creature I’d ever laid my eyes on. He was very trim and healthy, and he was gorgeous.”

Mary Wilson of the Supremes

“The Beatles were accepted here, we were accepted in Europe. It was the same thing. During that time it was either The Beatles or the Supremes. They’d have a No. 1; we’d have a No. 2. We’d have a No. 1; they’d have a No. 2. It was a battle the entire time. For us, it wasn’t competitive between the groups. It was just the music. It was never like we’ve got to catch up with The Beatles or they’d say we’ve got to catch up to Motown. It was never that type of competitiveness.”

Bluesman Taj Mahal

“The English Invasion? The Americans would take their blues watered down. The British went straight over the heads of the Elvis syndrome, you know, ‘Here I’m a white boy playing black music — everybody should be looking at me.’ They just went over that and said, ‘Yeah but what about the guys who actually put that stuff together? How about going to his door and learning that, and then turning around and saying this is where I got it.’ … I really appreciated that. I thought it was really good that Americans got a wake-up on their own music. It just kept pouring out of there. Those guys heard it for the music; not for the politics, not for the racial issues. None of that. They went pure music, pure genius. You could see what kind of music scene they built out of it. A huge one.”

Danny Hutton, lead singer, Three Dog Night

“People forget, in late ’68 and ’69 when you would go to a state like Texas and go down the street, people would get angry at you. Forget about the racial thing, you’d hear ‘Are you a boy or a girl?’ And then having a black (drummer) and you go into a club at night. It was very hostile.”

Boogie-woogie pianist Marcia Ball

“I remember hearing The Beatles, and I remember some people didn’t like them, but I did. ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ — I just loved the beat and what they brought to us. It was a striking thing. And the fact that they brought the blues back to America. That affected people all the way down the line.”

Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits

I’d go out for drinks with John Lennon. ... I acted like an adult, even though I was a kid, so you could get away with much more stuff. They were all impressed that I could drink like that. I think all young kids can drink well. Nowadays I don’t drink at all. I used my lifetime allowance by the end of my teenage years.”

Creedence Clearwater Revival drummer Doug Clifford

“I remember Woodstock. We were not altered. We used music to get ourselves off. That way we were always in tune and knew what we were doing. We were different from most of our peers at that time.”

Soul singer Curtis Salgado on liver cancer

I drank my share and I used drugs my share, and even though I’m clean and sober, I’ll have 20 years in October. No nothing. Twenty years of clean and sober, and alcohol and drugs still took me. People don’t realize that what they do young is going to catch up to their body later on. Your body remembers.”

Blues guitarist Tommy Castro

“I visited him in the hospital in Omaha. He was waiting for a liver. He just kicked death’s ass and said, ‘No way man, I’m not ready.’ Whenever I get whiny, I think about Curtis (Salgado) and a couple of other friends and what they’ve been through and I shut the f--- up.”

Cracker songwriter and guitarist Johnny Hickman

“Most people are smart enough to know when either David (Lowery) or I are

playing a role in a song. Obviously, I’m not going to go into a church and shoot everyone, but I’ll write a song about it as if I were. Like Johnny Cash. I don’t think he ever shot a man in Reno, but I’d like to hear him sing it. You can’t be afraid to go all the way into a character. You can’t be timid about going all in musically.”

Sammy Hagar, “the Red Rocker”

“When I didn’t have a car and there was nothing else to do I thought, ‘Yeah, I’ll be a boxer.’ I was into it. But as soon as I got a car, I thought ‘I ain’t gonna drive down to a damn gym. If this car works out I’m going to find a girl and take her down to the boonies and park, man.’ ”

Eddie Montgomery, Montgomery Gentry

“One thing that I hate to hear about a new artist is they’ll come up and you ask them who are you, and they’ll go ‘We’ll be anything that you want me to be as long as you sign me.’ That’s not what made Charlie Daniels, Waylon and Willie, Merle Haggard, Lynyrd Skynyrd or the Allman Brothers — just being who the label head wanted them to be. That’s not it. What made them was who the hell they were.”

Rich Williams, guitarist, Kansas

We just did a a show in Sofia, Bulgaria. We had no idea what to expect. It was 4,000-seat concert hall, sold out in 15 minutes. The whole place was singing along. To play that song in a part of the world you’ve never been to and hear them singing along, and you can hear the accent. What else in life could give me that?

So do I get tired of playing ‘Dust in the Wind?’ F--- no.”