Boz Scaggs – HuffPost 3.1.13

Mike Ragogna: All right, I have a standard question that I ask everybody, which is what advice do you have for new artists?

Boz Scaggs: I’d say play live. For my generation, in the blues idiom and the R&B idiom that I grew up in as a kid in small-town Texas and Oklahoma, it was about singing the songs that you like to do and trying to do them yourself. Throughout the sixties, which was my generation as well, that was it. I only contend that The Rolling Stones are who they are and that The Beatles are who they are because they worked live a lot. Go back and look at what The Beatles were doing before they recorded. They worked four sets a night in Liverpool and in Germany. I still see it. I see them in the clubs in San Francisco, the vans and the trailers with the young bands still coming through. Radiohead, everybody. You work. You get out there and you hone your craft and you learn what you’re good at. You either excite them or you don’t. You figure out how you’re going to do that and the best way to figure that out is to get in front of live people and really play.