Every other guitar player was just copying other guitarists. From the time I was 13 up until 18, I practiced at least eight hours a day, every day. My health suffered for it – I was losing sleep and not eating properly. Yevgeny Yevtushenko Read Quote
You cannot be worrying about what other people think. You have to be sure that what you do is what you love to do, because if you love it, maybe another hundred thousand people might love it, too. Some other people might not like it, but it doesn’t matter, because you have to express what you want to express. You only live once. Yevgeny Yevtushenko Read Quote
I’d love to perform in India, but I don’t book the gigs. It’s one of the few places I haven’t played. One of the Indian instruments that I love is the sitar. I played it on some of my songs, including ‘Pyramid of Cheops’ and ‘Crucify.’ Yevgeny Yevtushenko Read Quote
What I’ve done from the very beginning is play everything with extreme accuracy. I never said to myself, ‘Okay, if I put my fingers this way, it’s gonna result in this.’ I’ve never taken a lesson. My way of playing the guitar was a fresh approach to the instrument. Yevgeny Yevtushenko Read Quote
I grew up in a family that was very musical, learned the blues and everything like that. And I became a little bit frustrated with the simplicity of rock n’ roll and blues. I started listening to a lot of classical music – mainly Bach, Vivaldi. Yevgeny Yevtushenko Read Quote
I wanted to learn how to play guitar so I could smash it up and burn it. I was only a little kid, so that was my incentive. Yevgeny Yevtushenko Read Quote
A lot of people probably get the idea that I’m this extremely calculated kind of guy, and in a lot of ways, I am. But when it comes to music or artistic expression, I’m very uncalculated and do things very spontaneous. If I didn’t do that, I wouldn’t want to do this anymore. I can’t just play the same thing over and over; it would drive me crazy. Yevgeny Yevtushenko Read Quote
Steeler was a good start for my career. They didn’t play anything dangerous – everything was formulaic – but I played all this crazy stuff on top of it, and that turned out to be an interesting combination. But by the time ‘Steeler’ came out, I was already out of the band. Yevgeny Yevtushenko Read Quote
I emigrated to the U.S. on February 3, 1983, when I was 19 years old. I joined Steeler right away and recorded the album the following month. I’d been playing in bands in Sweden since the age of 11, but ‘Steeler’ was my first album. Yevgeny Yevtushenko Read Quote
When Alcatrazz played in Japan in early ’84, the record label offered me the opportunity to do a solo album while continuing to play in the band. I wanted the whole album to have vocals, but the record company didn’t want that. Initially, the album was released solely in Japan. Yevgeny Yevtushenko Read Quote
