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I grew up on the East Coast and was going to go to an Ivy League School, but at the last minute I decided to be a hippy. It was the protest movements on the war, peace movements were going on at our university. It was a fantastic time.

I've known a lot of people who were punkers who went on to get academic degrees. Very few of them, however, continued their active role in the punk community. Most of them hung up their leather jacket when they did so.

I was the only punk rocker at my high school. And there were at least a handful of black kids who liked hip-hop. Both were kind of the new music of the day, and it was lonely being the only punk.

High school and college were my punk, formative years. I was playing hardcore, learning to be a musician. In bands, you tour, but you're paid nothing; you're playing to 50 people in a basement, sleeping in a van, and you love it.

Then I left that school and I went to Cerritos College, which was in southern California; they had one of the best big band programs in the country at the time.

Berkeley had a liberal element in the student body who tended to be quite active. I think that's in general a feature of intellectually active places.

I was never really that interested in the punk movement. I was a blues guy: I liked Motown, James Brown.

There are several books out on punk history, but I haven't read any of them. I was there.

I went to UC Berkeley. I graduated in 1976, immediately moved to L.A. with a degree in English - which did no more for you then than it does for you now - then sold real estate and did theater for nine years.

I was in a little punk band and we put out a few punk records that weren't very political, at all.