I don't think I'm turning back the clock by doing these old tunes. I love rock and roll and popular music. It's just that the spirits of the singers whose songs I do are living within me. That's why the songs come out in the voices of the original singers. I'm not doing imitations. That's the way they sound inside me.
As long as my voice is here, and there is a Holiday Inn waiting for me, then everything's just swell.
When I first went on the 'Johnny Carson show', the band did not want me, and Carson did not want me. If the audience had not received 'Tiptoe' so overwhelmingly, I do not believe Carson would have let me come over to be on the panel after the song.
Whenever I sang, I said to myself, 'Maybe tonight.' I would never let down, no matter how few people were listening.
I had this old wind-up phonograph when I was a kid, and I'd listen to records. And the radio.
I keep recording and recording, but they always stay on the rack and never get out there.
It was not easy to go into a subway in 1955 at eight o'clock in the morning smelling nice and hanging on the rails with white make-up. I could see people nudging each other saying, 'What is that?'
The devil reigns in me more than in any man I can think of.
At the start of the '50s, I had short hair. And I was getting nowhere.
If you go back to the minors, you have to start swinging and hitting the ball again. I've been in the minors since the '70s semipros, let's put it that way.
They say I spend too much money, so they take it and put it away for me. What do I spend it on? Oh, old records and presents and things.
