"I love the scope of the movie; there is something in David Lean that I like very much. He’s always of the macro worlds and the micro worlds; he didn’t only do it in Lawrence of Arabia, but repeated it in Dr. Zhivago and other movies. [In Lawrence of Arabia] he made a movie with enormous scope and events that were known in the world — the Turkish-British War, and at the time, the taking of Akaba — things that were very spectacular and very epic, but in reality he’s talking to us about the homosexuality of one of the characters and something really minimalistic and very precise. He gets into the soul of a man through this spectacular movie and this union of these two worlds. He did it again in Dr. Zhivago as I said before, because in a way he put together the entire Russian revolution, which is also very big, while in reality telling a love story. So this kind of union, joining, he does between the macro world and the micro world is something that I was always interested in, and he was a master of doing the type of job. It’s one of those movies that always remain in your mind. Also, he gave himself permission to do it in a way that probably no studio would buy in our day; just to see a man coming from five miles into the camera for two minutes and a half — no executive producer would allow that to happen! He gave himself permission to do that, and I had the luck of seeing a remastered version of Lawrence of Arabia in a theater in Spain 10 years ago, and it was magnificent because it gave you the possibility of thinking, which is unusual. We also have the performance of first time movie actor Peter O’Toole. That was the first movie that he did, which I didn’t know until I worked with Omar Sharif in a movie that I did years ago called 13th Warrior, and he told me that. At the time, he was a very prominent theater actor in London, but that was the first movie that he did. I will never forget those blue eyes on the big screen. Amazing!"

""This is by far the most important record for me. I heard it when I was 16. I was in a boarding school for boys, which was like a Victorian prison. One evening, I was told by the housemaster – who hated me – to take a phone call. It was my mum, who tells me that my dad was on the verge of dying and was having an operation that night. The operation may save him, but he is old and he might not wake up from the anaesthetic. I am told that I couldn't go home and that I just have to wait it out. At ten o'clock, the boarding school have 'lights out'. I am lying on my bed, in a state. I'm not going to be able to sleep, so I sneak through the corridors, down through the study to the one thing that redeems my life, which is the stereo system. Horses is there and I have no idea why I put it on. The first track I play ['Birdland'] is about a father dying, and a long, black funeral car and a boy standing watching. It is a nine-minute improvisational piece about Wilhelm Reich dying and his son, Peter, helping his father through the death process. This song shook me to the core, partly because it was improvised – it has no structure of verses or a chorus – and is just this rambling poem of desperation and longing. I think, from that moment on, I subconsciously knew I wanted to be a singer. I wanted to be somebody who could write a song that a boy or girl 5,000 miles away could hear and be moved so much that it would change his or her life. Therefore Horses became my template, probably by chance, because something so powerful happened to me on the night I first heard it. I then bought tickets to see her play and my parents banned me from going. I had to run away from home to go and see her show, and I was quite a good boy, so it was an unusual act for me. I had a couple of amazing things happen later in my life. Lenny Kaye, who had been a guitar player in her band, became the godfather to my eldest son. He also produced James' first record [Stutter]. Then, after Patti had been retired for a while, Lenny rang me from Detroit and told me that Patti was going to do her first gig in 15 years. He said that she might play for ten minutes or two hours. It was a wake as her husband and brother had just died. I flew to Detroit and I sat in front of her with about 150 people in a church, while she sang and read poetry, whilst crying, for three hours. It was her first gig in 15 years and afterwards I carried her guitar to the car and sat next to her and we talked. After that concert, I needed nothing more from Patti Smith. It had come the full circle of the apprentice sitting with his teacher. In fact, I did get more from her. She curated the Meltdown festival. She invited me to sing one night – it was a night of singing songs about lost children. I was the only man singing on that night. I sang with Tilda Swinton, Kristin Hersh of Throwing Muses, Tori Amos, Sinéad O'Connor, Yoko Ono, Marianne Faithfull and Patti Smith. It was one of the most incredible musical nights of my life. I got to play with the great icons of the last 20 years – the women who have changed what it is like to be a woman in rock & roll on every level. It was a great honour and quite awe-inspiring. It completed the completion. No other album comes close to Horses. I became a singer three years later because of Horses. It is why I write songs that are naked and that wish to reach out and change people's lives, rather than any of the other million reasons people become singers."

"Most people think that the concert at Altamont was the antithesis of Woodstock. But one of my students at UCSB recently commented that you could tell a lot about what went wrong at Altamont by watching what went right at Monterey. I couldn’t agree more . . . It’s fascinating to watch both of these films and compare what happened just a few years and less than a hundred miles apart. First off, Monterey Pop, which may be my favorite of all Criterion DVD packages. The booklet is printed on nature-rough hippy-grade paper stock that you would have first encountered on the streets of Haight-Ashbury, in the form of a free press or psychedelic poster on a telephone pole, and later on your thrift-store coffee table with a pile of pot about to be rolled next to it! Yes, it is this evocative! The DVD box set includes amazing outtake performances with Laura Nyro, Quicksilver Messenger Service, TINY TIM (!), and Buffalo Springfield . . . and another DVD, Jimi Plays Monterey and Shake! Otis at Monterey, contains the complete performances by Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding (with commentary by the ever-enlightening Peter Guralnick, who knows the history of Memphis musicians better than anyone alive). The accompanying doc of a conversation between record producer Lou Adler and filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker is such a coup—not only do you hear how the concert came together and how it was organized during the entire event, but you also get to hear Lou Adler’s story. A lot of people don’t know (although smarty-pants me did) that Adler started his music career with Herb Alpert, as songwriting and producing partners . . . and he has awesome stories of Paul McCartney hanging out at Cass Elliot’s house in Laurel Canyon . . . There’s endless music-nerd gold like that! The color in the film is all that psychedelia had to offer—vibrant, otherworldly, and hyperreal. There’s an innocence throughout Monterey Pop that exceeds the “positive vibes” of Woodstock a few years later and that is of course completely nonexistent in Gimme Shelter. You can also see in Monterey Pop the cops in the crowd (who were replaced by Hells Angels at Altamont) and SEATING! My student pointed out there were folding chairs on the lawns at Monterey—very civilized. Now that wasn’t throughout the concert grounds, but it was more in the tradition of the Newport Folk Festival than the mayhem to follow in Altamont. Also like Newport, the performers were in the audience—they were not in some rarefied backstage area, cut off from the fans or their fellow performers—and you get to see the moment when Mama Cass Elliot in the audience has her mind blown by the powerful performance of young Janis Joplin. There’s a fabulous interview with Papa John Phillips, who cofounded the event with Adler, and a gorgeous photo exhibit by photographer Elaine Mayes. Gimme Shelter director Albert Maysles was one of seven cameramen on Monterey Pop. And I need to point out that you do see a few Hells Angels on the lawn toward the end of Monterey Pop. So the Angels already had a presence at large outdoor rock events that far back. I’ve talked to a lot of people who were at Altamont as performers, friends of bands, and audience members, and the consensus is that nothing in this film was manipulated in the least: the vibe was bad from the very start, and the filmmakers didn’t create that in the editing room. Interestingly, the film is shot much darker than the saturated colors in Monterey Pop—but then again colors were becoming less vibrant in pop culture and fashion at that time too. But interestingly—here you have some of the same players—you have Jefferson Airplane, who are almost humble on the Monterey Pop stage (despite the fact that Grace Slick shows off her powerful rock pipes at Monterey—she was the first true female rock singer and very underrated in my opinion), having to stop their set at Altamont when singer Marty Balin is dragged off the stage and beat up by the Hells Angels. The Grateful Dead play a soothing jam at Monterey and don’t even make it to the stage at Altamont. Chris Hillman with the Byrds plays an evening set to the Monterey audience, and in Gimme Shelter his band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, only get two songs done before the mayhem drives them off the stage at the Speedway. Watching Charlie Watts listening to the interviews with the promoter and with Hells Angel Sonny Barger makes Watts your favorite member of the band if he wasn’t already . . . His quiet devastation over the murder at his band’s concert is profound to witness (and you do feel as though you are let in on a very private event)."