Quotes from Wilson Pickett

The baddest woman in my book... my mother. I get scared of her now. She used to hit me with anything, skillets, stove wood.

I had recorded a song 'If You Need Me' for the Correc-Tone label, but it was a small label and distribution was a problem.

I made two or three albums with money from my own pocket, but I couldn't get them released or played on the radio. I got tired of beating my brains out. I got very depressed. I took a break from the business. Then I got bored with that and had to come back.

I'm going to wait til the midnight hour, that's when my love begins to shine.

All disco singers are non-professionals who can't do live shows. It loses what black people have created.

Joe Stubbs was very jealous of me, especially after 'I Found a Love.' We'd be on stage and he'd lay traps for me, make me look bad.

I have boxes of gospel LPs and 78s. The Davis Sisters, the Soul Stirrers, the Pilgrim Travellers. I love all that.

I can't keep singing 'Midnight Hour' for the rest of life. I gotta change.

If you get the disco or rap format on the radio, an R&B record doesn't fit, because it will break up the mood.

Motown was pop, Atlantic was R&B.

I thought wasn't nobody supposed to get gold records except those people on Motown, like Smokey Robinson and Diana Ross.

I got very bored with the music business.

I'd lived in New Jersey for 30 years. That was long enough. It's too crowded up there, and it's a very dangerous place to live. There's a whole lotta crime.

I took five hit records to Memphis, and '634-5789' was stolen from me totally. Those songs are worth millions. I've never understood how someone could just steal your song like that.

I heard Otis Redding singing 'These Arms of Mine' and I knew that was the band I needed.

When I make a record, I want to use some electronics, although I still want to keep things pretty basic.

I live in Virginia alone, and sometimes there's too much time to think. So you turn on the TV, but sometimes that don't do, so you turn the music on, and sometimes that don't do, and so you try and write a song, and sometimes that don't do... So you just take it as it comes.