A Quote by George Clinton
Even though I loved the Fifties doo-wop, you couldn't hold on to it. You had to change, or you was gon' be antique real quick, like the Ink Spots. And then we were at Motown and you had the Rolling Stones, simple rock & roll became the new thing.
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'Doo-wop' is a very special word for me. Because I grew up listening to my dad who, as a Fifties rock & roll head, loved doo-wop music.
I was born in 1963. So the '70s were my teenage years. As a teenager, I was into rock and roll - Bowie, Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, even more progressive music like Genesis, and I was into a lot of British rock and roll. But I loved also American rock and roll. CCR, Jimmie Hendrix, The Doors, Patty Smith, and Bob Dylan.
As a kid, I loved classical music. Composers like Beethoven were like rock stars to me. Then there were the real rock stars: The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and Bob Dylan.
The Rolling Stones are truly the greatest rock and roll band in the world and always will be. The last too. Everything that came after them, metal, rap, punk, new wave, pop-rock, you name it... you can trace it all back to the Rolling Stones. They were the first and the last and no one's ever done it better.
Doo-wop is the true music to me, man. Doo-wop was what nurtured me and grew me into who I am, and I guess even when I was in school, the teacher probably thought I had ADD or something every day, because I'd be beating on the desks, singing like the Flamingos or the Spaniels or Clyde McPhatter or somebody.
Rock and roll's relatively new, in the sense of the Fifties, Sixties, right? They invented the first sort of rock stars, and they took it to excess, and then the excess became bitter, tormented. Then it became okay to succeed.
I'm a fan of all music, and probably my first - well, not the very first music I listened to, but back in the late fifties, when I first started hearing rock & roll, it was definitely tinged with doo wop and also Elvis and all those great songs.
My father's a musician and my mother's a singer. My dad's originally from Brooklyn and he was a Latin percussionist so I've always had instruments around the house. He used to have a show like a 1950s rock and roll show with Little Richard music. They would do doo-wop songs and stuff like that.
I was singing doo-wop on the corner under the streetlight with four other guys when it wasn't called doo-wop. We just got together and sang, so that music is inside of me. It's a lot of stuff that has been rolling around in here and becoming this compost and has made me who I am as a singer.
I did have my beginnings in doo-wop music; I had a group called the Tokens in Brooklyn. They went on, of course, to do 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' and a lot of other great things. I went on as a soloist. But I still love doo-wop music.
The first time I recorded without Allen Toussaint, I wanted to do doo-wop. Everything I've done since then has got some kind of doo-wop essence in it.
Did you come of age in those sweet summers of the early nineteen-sixties, when the airwaves were full of rock and roll's doo-wop promise of joy and the nation was full of J.F.K.'s eloquent promise of a New Frontier? I did. Life seemed to be laid out before us like a banquet; everything was for the taking, especially hearts.
Stonehenge had an aura but it was also just stone. Then in the sixties, it became a great hedonistic, hippie, druid, rock-n-roll party site. There are amazing pictures of people up on the stones going wild and that's the image I recreated for my model of the project: full access to everyone. I even invented a Stonehenge soccer team that uses spaces between the stones as goals.
I used to listen to so much doo-wop, and I've talked a lot about gospel music, but I realised a lot of that language came from doo-wop music. You know, "I Asked the Lord Above," "Heaven Sent Me an Angel." That's rock-'n-roll, and that's where a lot of this language is coming from. Also, I've said before that as soon as you start having a conversation with Jesus in a song you know you're dealing with issues of morality and how fragile it is to be human. It's a shortcut to putting those ideas across.
My father hated rock and roll - hated it. My first real argument with my father was over the Rolling Stones. And he never, ever liked rock and roll. He just liked me.
I've been into every doo-wop there is. I think I went to the university of doo-wop-ology.
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