Michael Steele Quotes

1. There's sexism in the music business. Tons of it.  

2. It's the little things that are really neat. The big stuff doesn't feel like anything. It's hard to explain. Someone'll say you're number one and it's a thrill, but what do you do with that? I mean, you're happy and everything, but - I don't know…

3. (on Joni Mitchell) She was very non-threatening to men because she was sitting there being pretty and playing pretty songs...

4. We kind of had a sort of musical schizophrenia thing happening where there were like the singles that lots of people knew and then there was just the album stuff that the fans knew, and it was kind of a different band represented in the singles and in the album stuff.

5. They weren't writing their own songs and they weren't playing. There was Janis Joplin - but look what happened to her. It was all very controlled back then in the '60s. Like whatever happened to all those female Motown singers? They're all, like, in run-down motels somewhere. 

6. If you can survive success, you can survive anything.

7. And you say "hero" not "heroine". That's interesting because these were the first real strong women. There was Patti Smith who really didn't care if middle-aged ladies would see her picture on the cover of Rolling Stone and say: "Ugh, that doesn't look like a nice girl." And I remember the first time I heard Chrissie Hynde on the radio I just went: "Woah, what is this?" It was the first time that a woman had done that kind of rock posturing without it sounding totally fake. It was like hearing Mick Jagger or something and I just went: "Thank God, somebody finally *did* it!"

8. It was like being a surfer. A wave came up and you had to ride it for as along as you could and then you wiped out and you got maytagged, as we say on the west coast.

9. We were just in this sort of hit machine. The producer knew that this was going to be his shot and so we were sacrificed on the altar of his career. It became our success but it also contributed to our undoing, so it was kind of like a weird deal-with-the-devil thing, y'know? I think "Different Light" is a really good record. It was just…we kind of got lost in it.


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