By many peoples' standards, my playing is very primitive but by punk standards, I'm a virtuoso.
By then I was in Brooklyn and drank my way through that summer. I stopped when I got sick of that and got a job at the Strand bookstore, which was a little better than the tax job.
I was 12 in '55 when rock and roll hit. It just completely transformed me.
Reading music is something that's inherently hateful to me. It makes music like mathematics.
It was just like Howlin' Wolf. Once you arrive at the point that you understand it, the emotional factor is darker than some of the saddest blues stuff.
After I exhausted the blues thing, I got into jazz.
I never really followed grunge.
The Stones were nasty and ugly and doing songs I was familiar with.
Meanwhile after failing the bar twice, I knew some people in New York and moved here in August '71.
I was coerced into taking piano lessons in the early '50s. It was a quite unpleasant experience.
I think Blank Generation holds up pretty well. You listen to that with headphones and there's a lot going on there with the guitars- it's the product of a lot of fighting.
I started off with the really funky stuff like Ramsey Lewis, Milt Jackson, Kenny Burrell.
From '69 til '76, I never played in public. I would play by myself at home.
Even by the time I was four or five, I had Gene Autry records.
I saw Suicide in '74 and it was pretty horrifying.
My playing started to develop through the Miles Davis stuff I was listening to.
