In the 1970s, we had Carl Sagan, and he was so suave with his turtleneck and his tweed jacket. And he was, you know, he made science look cool. And in punk rock, we haven't had that. We haven't had the Carl Sagan of punk.
I've always loved punk music, since I was in my early teens, since middle school.
I definitely care about how the concept of New York punk was constructed, and why it mattered. But I wasn't gonna do that. Partly because I'm not a great journalist...
I came up in the punk rock scene of Seattle.
When the punk rock thing happened, I thought, 'Right, I have one chance here to be seen as part of some wider social phenomenon.'
I went to theater school at Northwestern, and I was quite conservative. Reagan at the time seemed quite revolutionary, or at least a rock star: He was radical and kind of punk rock.
I had been listening to Jackson Browne, The Eagles, and Linda Ronstadt. Ramones was not my kind of music. Now, I'm a huge fan and I get it. I wasn't initially a punk-rock fan. Now, I can appreciate what they stood for and who they were.
You know there was always a confusion that punk was a style of music.
Then the early punk rock period with Television and the Ramones. That's what I loved- that's what I was listening to immediately prior to when I started to play.
I'm like a Sid Vicious for a new generation.
I think that clearly it has an influence, to be coming of age during the punk rock era, to come from a difficult and sporadically violent background, to have been in and out of such chaos, I think it actually helps. But I don't know for sure.
