A Quote by Donovan

My father was a part of that generation, and my mother, too - the late-'30s, early-'40s big-band generation. Frank Sinatra, Art Blakey, Gene Krupa, Billie Holiday - all that stuff was in my background.
Gene Krupa was my big hero, and I used to play on my mother's flour cans and sugar cans with the kitchen knives, listening to the big bands on my dad's records. Gene Krupa and Harry James.
I want people to feel what it was like in the '40s. That's when popular music in the United States was so beautiful. Frank Sinatra, the Pied Pipers, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Tommy Dorsey, Billie Holiday. That's when popular music had deeper values, to me. This was music that was selling millions of records.
Any given generation gives the next generation advice that the given generation should have been given by the previous generation but now it's too late.
Intimate singing had a wonderful style in the '30s and '40s. It came out of Broadway and the jazz of Louis Armstrong and Billie Holliday. But Sinatra created the best romantic era that we've ever had.
I've been touching instruments since the day I was born. My mother is Brazilian, and she listens to Brazilian music. My father was a musician, and I've seen pictures of him when he was in a band playing guitar and piano. He loved country music, Frank Sinatra, and stuff like that.
I'm awful at karaoke, but if I did have to sing, I'd go for my favourite Frank Sinatra song 'I've Got You Under My Skin.' The fact I love Frank is my grandfather's doing: he drummed it into me from a very early age that Frank Sinatra is God.
I couldn't get away from the gramophone. It was the only thing that I ever really liked, and I was singing along by the time I was five years old - to the Modernaires and Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole.
My parents were into 40s big band stuff, and my father was a great dancer to that kind of thing. But rock 'n' roll? No. I wanted a guitar, but my mother didn't really want me to have one. At some point I played a violin, but I didn't last long at that.
I think at one time every drummer wanted to play like Krupa or wanted to win a Gene Krupa drum contest. This is the big inspiration for drummers and naturally it has to be the same way for me.
New gene pools are generated in every generation, and evolution takes place because the successful individuals produced by these gene pools give rise to the next generation.
My favorite decade of cinema would be kind of the '40s, yeah. I like things in the '30s, but you know, the sound recording in the '30s wasn't very good. But for some reason the movies in the '40s have the best personalities: Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper, Betty Grable, Gene Tierney, and all those people. For some reason, I seem to gravitate more toward the '40s, and I don't necessarily know why. I just love the people.
My generation those who were students in the late 60s was always, in the words of the Who, talking about our generation. That's what we thought of ourselves, as the most important thing since sliced bread. And the "we" that we meant was really the Western Europeans and American generation. And as I think back I suppose I have a sense of guilt on behalf of my generation, a sense that we were terribly provincial and didn't understand the really important stuff that was going on in Eastern Europe.
My father was second-generation Chinese-American, born in 1923 in California. My mother emigrated to the States from China when she was in her early twenties, in part to escape the political turmoil in China.
Frank Sinatra discovered me at a nightclub called P.J.'s in Hollywood. It was 1962. He used to come in there a lot with all his big star friends. I was so nervous to see him. I've only had one idol in my life, and that was Frank Sinatra.
Musically, swing pretty much dominated in the '30s. And into the late '30s, swing is beginning to change over to bebop in the early '40s, which is exactly when this new science of theoretical physics, particularly theoretical atomic physics, was really coming to the fore.
I don't think for this generation, but for my generation and my father's generation, men had difficulty in accessing emotion and then being able to talk about it.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!