Wayne Kramer Quotes

When we first met, I was trying to put a band together. I asked around at school for other guys who wanted to play in a band. Someone told me about a juvenile delinquent they knew who played bongos. I thought 'any good band needs a bongo player.' I met this kid Fred Smith and he was real interested in music and a good looking kid, a tough kid, knew how to fight, popular, very funny, bright. He really said he wanted to learn how to play the guitar. His father was from the South and most Southern homes have a guitar laying around. My step-father was from the South so we had a guitar laying around and music was part of the day-to-day routine. 
Wayne Kramer

When we first started playing in the early days, none of us really had any idea about writing our own songs yet. We were struggling how to learn our instruments and play songs to be able to perform for people. We gravitated to a certain kind of material, like the music of Chuck Berry and instrumental records and certain records that had a... what we'd call... 'high energy'. We later became articulate enough to define it as music that was real visceral. It was about a lot of heat and energy, like the music of James Brown, black gospel music. Not what we were hearing on the radio but you had to search it out. It created kind of a problem in the early days because if you didn't play the kind of music that they were playing on the radio, you couldn't work. 
Wayne Kramer