87 Quotes by Jon Landau

Sly Stone doesn’t make good albums: only good records. His style is so infinite and revolves around so many crucial aspects that it has only come together perfectly on a handful of his singles.

On first listening, Joni Mitchell’s ‘Court And Spark,’ the first truly great pop album of 1974, sounds surprisingly light; by the third or fourth listening, it reveals its underlying tensions.

The only criticism heard with any frequency of Elton John’s first American album, ‘Elton John,’ was that the production was too grandiose. The melodies were superb, and lyrics frequently very good, and the performances flawless.

The Rolling Stones are violence. Their music penetrates the raw nerve endings of their listeners and finds its way into the groove marked ‘release of frustration.’

As long as Elton John can bring forth one performance per album on the order of ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight,’ the chance remains that he will become something more than the great entertainer he already is and go on to make a lasting contribution to rock.

In the end, the sign of Aretha Franklin’s artistry is that she always leaves her mark – first, on the music, then on us.

James Taylor is the kind of person I always thought the word ‘folksinger’ referred to. He writes and sings songs that are reflections of his own life, and performs in them in his own style. All of his performances are marked by an eloquent simplicity.

My ambition was to be a record producer, and I had started doing that in the late ’60s with my work with the MC5 and my friend Livingston Taylor.

The Faces do not, as some have recently alleged, play badly. They are more than competent, especially at creating a mid-Sixties Rolling Stones-styled groove, as their excellent version of ‘Memphis’ proves.