Leon Russell Quotes
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My whole family's been involved with music, and it's been so since the minstrel days.
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I belonged to the Columbia Record Club, and that's where my records came from. For some reason, I was in the 'jazz' category. I got Benny Goodman records and Miles Davis, J.J. Johnson and Kai Winding, and that kind of stuff. I really was not a jazz guy at all, but I knew some of those names.
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I'm just concerned with going about my business and making the records I want to make.
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When I was born, I had a birth injury in my second and third vertebrae. It gave me what they called spastic paralysis, which is actually cerebral palsy.
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Watching yourself on film, if you've never watched yourself on film before, you want to go crawl into bed and stay there for a week.
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The Pentecostals had horns, drums, guitars, huge choirs, and screaming and dancing and all kinds of stuff. That was for me.
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I started writing rather late in the game. I was fascinated about the story about how Bob Dylan, for 'Nashville Skyline,' wrote between takes. So I'd try to sing new songs off the top of my head. I had rather less than spectacular success on that. But a lot of my songs were done that way.
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I had two parts of my body: my left side, which was strong and somewhat dumb, and the other side was weak and hard to control but perhaps smarter. It gave me a very strong sense of the duality of the plane that we live in.
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I'm kind of the Forrest Gump of rock n' roll.
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I have damaged nerve endings on the right side, so my piano style comes from designing stuff I can play with my right hand. And some of it effectively mimics classical stuff.
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I am not aware of my public image or what people think of me. I don't evaluate myself that way.
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I often haven't heard the music since I've recorded it. I don't listen to it. When I do hear it, like at someone's house, I'll listen. I'm probably the most pleased with the stuff I did with New Grass Revival.
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I don't think there's any danger of me playing Indian music. However, I did a song of George Harrison's 'Beware of Darkness' that was kind of like that. That was an illusion. I was playing that on a thumbtack piano, and Jim Gordon was playing tablas. He's an amazing player. That was as close to India as I ever got.
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It's like, baseball is a very good game, but it's very difficult to explain to somebody, if you stop and think about it. I just feel my life is like that.
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All my writing takes place during the recording of the master tapes. I never do have songs when I start up an album. I actually write them while I record.
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I played on a few Frank Sinatra sessions.
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The first canon of my religion is that you shouldn't try to convince anybody to believe like you do.
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Songwriting was very tough for me... I would go in and sit and hope for inspiration to come, and it was rarely forthcoming.
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I started playing in nightclubs when I was about 14 in Oklahoma.
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Sometimes one misses the sign posts as you're going down the road. They aren't as obvious as they become when you get to the end of the road, so to speak.
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I think probably my main advice to new artists is if you want to be in the music business, you need to be dang serious about it because it's a rough business.
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I used to play on Phil Spector's records, and he liked to use three pianists.
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I studied classical music for a long time, maybe 10 years, and I realized finally I was never going to have the hands to play that stuff.
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My feet are giving out on me. But I have a wheelchair that folds out on my tour bus. I've also got this little tricycle, so if I want to go someplace, I get those out.