A Quote by Steve Miller

From a small child to right now - I mean, when I was five years old, Red Norville, Tal Farlow, Charles Mingus, Les Paul, Mary Ford, people like that were coming over to my house. So I was around professional adult mature musicians who had had big careers.
I come from a big family of musicians, so I was lucky enough to grow up with guitars all around the house. Even though I didn't really know much at the time, my brother had a Les Paul Goldtop, and my dad always had this Fender or some bizarre Pedulla-Orsini guitar.
I tended to lean towards the guys who both sang and played, such as Ricky Skaggs, Vince Gill, Steve Wariner... And at the other end of the spectrum, I had Eric Clapton in a rock and blues sense, jazz guys such as Tal Farlow and Les Paul... Then Chet Atkins-type stuff.
In my day, the only people who achieved real independence were my father, Mary Pickford and Charles Chaplin, who, with D. W. Griffith, formed United Artists. Other than that, everybody belonged to the big studios. They had no say in their own careers.
Coming up the ranks, I've got to see those who were sons of professional wrestlers get in the ring when they were five years old. I would wrestle around with them. Guys like The Rock and Randy Orton.
I was a very, very old child. Sometimes you meet a child who seems more like an adult. I think I was that type of child because I had a nearly fatal kidney disease when I was 9 years old.
I don't speak French, but I took it for five years growing up. So, if I were in a situation where I had to be, like, 'Excuse me, pineapple dog house red, what time is it library?' - no problem.
Dimitri: "Rose, I'm seven years older than you. In ten years, that won't mean so much, but for now, it's huge. I'm an adult. You're a child.โ€ Rose: "You didn't seem to think I was a child when you were all over me.โ€ - Rose Hathaway & Dimitri Belikov (Vampire Academy)
I used a fifties Les Paul custom on most of the stuff. I also used a Strat, a newer Strat. I had a million guitars in there but I used the Strat & the Les Paul in just about everything. There were a lot of different amp choices, I was working with a pro tools plug-in which is like an amplifier stimulator. The possibilities with something like that are just endless.
I would urge a young player to listen to Charlie Christians' sense of time ... I'll never forget listening to my father (Bucky Pizzarelli) and Tal Farlow playing Christians' 'Solo Flight' backstage at a gig... that's when it hit me how big of an effect Christian had on jazz guitar. 'Solo Flight' was like the gospel.
When I was 5 years old, we had nothing in the village. One day, in front of my house, some soldiers in a big Cadillac started to do a picnic. I looked at them like they were coming from the moon. I remember they gave me a box of rice pudding - that, for me, was the American Dream.
People said Mitt Romney had crowds, but the truth is he had one crowd, one big crowd the last day. We've had crowds for five months. I mean, from the beginning. And now they're bigger than ever before. I think it makes a big difference.
I couldn't not play a Les Paul guitar. Les always used to point to my Strat and say, 'Why do you have that piece of crap around your neck?' I'd say, 'Yours are too heavy. I had to drill holes in it.'
I'm 67 years old now. I've had a lot of good teachers over the years; and they have been very, very different from one another. They all had passion for what they were doing, but their styles were unique to them as individuals.
I grew up with all these old jazz guys in the '70s in L.A., and they grew up idolizing Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Lester Young - all of these incredible musicians.
It was tragic every single time my mom told me we were moving. I would always envy my friends who had grown up in the same house their entire life, and they had markings on the wall of 'me at five years old' and all that. It made me so sad. I wished I'd had that.
We grew up with musicians coming over jamming. We had tons of instruments. So holidays were always like, 50 people would come over, and there would be a jam session with everyone playing jazz.
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