By many peoples' standards, my playing is very primitive but by punk standards, I'm a virtuoso.

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.

Even by the time I was four or five, I had Gene Autry records.

From '69 til '76, I never played in public. I would play by myself at home.

I never really followed grunge.

I saw Suicide in '74 and it was pretty horrifying.

I started off with the really funky stuff like Ramsey Lewis, Milt Jackson, Kenny Burrell.

I was 12 in '55 when rock and roll hit. It just completely transformed me.

I was coerced into taking piano lessons in the early '50s. It was a quite unpleasant experience.

Meanwhile after failing the bar twice, I knew some people in New York and moved here in August '71.

My playing started to develop through the Miles Davis stuff I was listening to.

Reading music is something that's inherently hateful to me. It makes music like mathematics.

The Stones were nasty and ugly and doing songs I was familiar with.

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 quit the tax job then and decided that I was going to play in a band. I answered ads in the Village Voice and went through two days of auditioning for bands.

I really feel fortunate to have been around then because there have been good and bad years in rock but the best years were '55 to early '61. I got to see Buddy Holly and everybody else.

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.