A Quote by Michael McDonald

My first rock band was called Mike and the Majestics. I was about twelve, and my older sister Kathy was the manager. There were three of us: me and a friend on guitars and a drummer. We were young, but we played for a lot of fraternity parties, plugging both guitars and a microphone into one little amplifier.
I grew up playing the saxophone. I joined the jazz band in high school, but somewhere along the way I realized the guys who strummed acoustic guitars at parties were the ones who got the attention. So I asked a friend to show me a few chords, and when I moved to L.A. I spent a lot of time practicing my guitar.
My friend Fred Coury, the drummer in '80s rock band Cinderella, told me that in the rock world, you're either still there, or you're struggling to get back to where you were.
When I first played the guitar without plugging it into an amplifier, the people at Fender were blown away. They couldn't believe the sound. I said, 'See, gentlemen, the world is no longer flat.'
The electric guitar meant that you could have a band with a drummer and a couple of guitars. And that put a lot of horn players out of work.
I love guitars, and guitars love me, but sometimes they need new homes where they can live to rock another day.
We were called 'Three Men Who, When Standing Side by Side, Have a Wingspan of Over Twelve Feet.' We had that name for a week or so. We were also called 'Are You My Mother?' for awhile. We went through a lot of really dumb band names - almost as dumb as Fountains of Wayne.
The guys that I played with, Hollis Dixon and the Keynotes - just about all the great musicians from Muscle Shoals.We played fraternity parties and kids' dances. They were called "lead outs" for kids in high school. We played wherever we could - in the down time when you weren't recording, people had to make money.
I played piano in a covers band, but that didn't especially help with girls. There is never a piano around after the shows. Guys with the guitars were the ones who got lucky.
People were watching the TV set, and they said three rock-and-rollers died - Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, The Big Bopper, including the pilot. I walked out of the hotel. I got on the bus alone. Their clothes were hanging on the racks, their guitars on the seats.
Mike Elizondo had an incredible array of guitars in the studio, but they were all right-handed.
My older sister encouraged me from early on and bought me one of the first guitars I had. She listened to all of the crappy songs that I wrote when I was 8 years old and encouraged me to keep doing it.
My older sister was at the cusp of new wave, and I had older brothers from my father's first marriage who were rock 'n' roll guys, so I was exposed to a lot of popular culture.
I've had three wives and three guitars. I still play the guitars.
Amplification of guitars revolutionized the popular music scene. Youngsters look for quick fame and big money with amplified guitars and working with rock groups.
That's the first band I ever played in that was working and I was getting paid for it. I was 12. The other guys were a lot older than me.
I think that breaking into the mainstream - it was just the right cycle of music for us in Blink-182. People were kind of over the boy-band, pop-princess, manufactured sensibility, and were excited for guitars and angst and energy and enthusiasm, which is our thing.
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