The song 'Hello There' was written because we never got a soundcheck. 'Hello There' was our soundcheck.

I never went to any high school dances or proms unless I was playing in them.

Duane Eddy is somebody I wanted to play like. I discovered him before The Beatles, and he totally got to me. He sent me a note back in 1977 and said that he really liked what Cheap Trick were doing. That's one of those 'Wow!' moments, you know?

I got to meet Keith Moon!

Every other year, I spend Thanksgiving in England with Dave Clark from the Dave Clark Five and a bunch of other people.

I was three years old, and I walked onstage during a performance that my father was a tenor in 'The Barber of Seville.' I walked out onstage, and people started laughing and clapping, and that was it. That was all it took. Laughing and clapping, I still enjoy today.

If we waited for a hit record to tour, we would never have toured.

Basically, I try to let the song dictate what guitar I use. If it's a really loud, crazy song, I'll pull out the cheapest, oldest guitar I own, one that feeds back easily. But most of the time, I just use whatever's around.

I like the guys in Cheap Trick. I like playing in it and the music we do.

When we toured with AC/DC, we always had to bring our A game. They really felt like our equals.

Playing it safe isn't fun; you have to take a chance.

Some bands, they're too snooty, or they think they're too this or that and wouldn't talk to us. And some other bands are afraid to talk to us.

We do try to be entertainers, but we're musicians first, and we try to showcase the music.

I've seen bands come out and begin their concerts with these long, slow, boring songs. Are they kidding, or what?

I got to work with John Lennon. That was pretty cool.

I like Harvey Mandel.

I always hated watching bands: the guy would break a string or be out of tune, and I have perfect pitch, so it would always tick me off when a guy is up there, and he'd break a string.

When a guitarist can evoke a certain mood through his playing, that's what's most important to me.

If you can say something special on the guitar, then you're going to perk my ears up. But if you're just gonna run through all the scales, then I can always find something else to listen to.

People used to trade their guitars to get new ones; I never traded anything.

I like 'Salty Dog' by Procol Harum.

Cheap Trick have always prided ourselves on being groundbreaking.

In 1977, I had Paul Rivera hotrod six Fender Deluxes for me. At that time, a lot of studio guys in L.A. were using those - not so much live guys but studio guys. They had terrific tone and great technique, and I was like, 'Well, I like having terrific tone even though I don't have any technique.'

Some people design buildings and aircraft carriers and cars - and I designed picks.

Hendrix was a different kind of guitar player. It was like, 'Holy cow, this guy can sing, he can play all this weird stuff... what is this?' It was a new kind of music.

I took one guitar lesson, and they wanted me to play 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' or 'Michael Row the Boat Ashore,' and that was the last guitar lesson that I ever took, so I taught myself what I wanted to know.

I was the Richard Gere non-lookalike in Illinois.

I never wanted to be Keith Richards or Jimmy Page.

I love guitars, and guitars love me, but sometimes they need new homes where they can live to rock another day.

I'm kind of a goony guy, a dweeb or a geek.

The way I look at it, I'm a songwriter that just happens to play guitar.

If you don't have a great chorus, write a good bridge first. I often do that and find I write good bridges.

Living someplace like L.A. seemed awful to me.

I just wanted to write about stuff that was happening in real life, and that's not just love songs about your girlfriend.

Presidents are always also storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies. And surprisingly enough, Richard Nixon, this awkward man who didn't even really like people, had not been so bad at this duty - at least in the first four years of his presidency.

My politics of optimism and hope still casts its lot with the Democrats - in the optimistic hope that the dying embers of its status as the party of our better angels, one that took risks for social justice, can still be fanned into a flame. But I'm an old man, born in 1969.

For a movement supposedly devoted to conserving the past, conservatives are oh-so-splendid at forgetting their own past.

Lyndon B. Johnson thought he'd have the boys home from Vietnam by Christmas - for four Christmases in a row (he never shifted course, and lost his presidency for it).

Black Fergusonians have shown that they will vote when they have something to vote for and know that their vote will count. Seventy-six percent of them turned out in November 2012, when Missouri was a key swing state for Barack Obama's reelection.

I look to historians for their power to illuminate not just the invisible lineaments of the present, but also that which is not present. What are the roads that were not taken that most shape our own time?

There's a lot of surplus rage from the '60s that was never really worked through publicly. I think a lot of that rage still exists, and I think you see that when John McCain runs a commercial that beats up on Hillary Clinton's earmark for a Woodstock museum.

Over fifteen years of studying the American Right professionally - especially in their communications with each other, in their own memos and media since the 1950s - I have yet to find a truly novel development, a real innovation, in far-right 'thought.'

For conservative leaders, making candidates pay them court, publicly and ostentatiously, is a colossal source of their symbolic power before their followers. It's kabuki theater, mostly.

In the rest of the industrialized world, your boss can't fire you unless he or she can give a good reason. In America, with certain exceptions, your boss can fire you for any reason at all or for no reason at all.

Fight injustice, that our children might be blessed.

I feel bound to respect Ronald Reagan, as every American should - not least because he chose a career of public service when he could have made a lot more money doing something else, and not least because he took genuine risks for peace.

When downed American pilots were first taken prisoner in North Vietnam in 1964, U.S. policy became pretty much to ignore them - part and parcel of President Lyndon B. Johnson's determination to keep the costs of his increasingly futile military escalation in Southeast Asia from the public.

Let there be a special place in Hell for pundits who make predictions.

I'm reverent toward my sources. History is a team sport, and references are how you support your teammates.

Political scientists have long argued that party identification is the best possible predictor of voting behavior and is remarkably sticky over time.