The people who were learning from me tended to be more commercial performers who were gonna rip off the salient idea to do it in a way that will sell, but they weren't going for the music.

When punk began to be a genre, people were going to go out and try to mine it. Some of the better groups, like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, were very artificial.

I was a pretty nice kid. Kind of quiet, but quiet in terms I wasn't going out and setting fire to anything. I had a big mouth and I was creative type, you know.

My general take on American music since 1969 is that it's just getting stiffer and people are getting more uptight - audience, performance, and palace guard.