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In the early days, myself and my friends were into punk because we had no money, just very basic instruments and skills. It was more about the ethos and the energy.

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.

Punk rock really came out of N.Y. as a philosophy before the groups were ever recorded. I had a kind-of intellectual interest in the idea of creating a new scene that could be a grassroots thing.

I think one of the most important things punk brought back was the whole concept of staying independent and doing things yourself. It made music a lot less boring in any category you can name.

Punk rock seemed to make sense. I was listening to The Clash and I really loved their social messages and they have a great history of fighting racism.

Jazz in the 1920s and '30s was dance music, teenage music for parties, for being wild and young. There's this punk feeling I really love. It was something so radical and different and new and not codified. People didn't have a definition of what they were doing.

To me, rockabilly music paralleled punk's energy and feeling, but the players were much better.

It was never fun being in the Ramones, which is the saddest thing of all, cause it shoulda been fun. It was probably fun when we played Performance Studio, and maybe some of the early gigs at CBGB's. But the Ramones were the type of group that had a bizarre mindset. Being in the band was so cut off from reality.

Starting out really punk came from not knowing any better and listening to music like that, not knowing how to play music - well, still not knowing how to play music.