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.

I had been brainwashed by my parents and society that to be a musician was unacceptable but by then I finally decided to at least give it a try.

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

I never really followed grunge.

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

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.

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

After I exhausted the blues thing, I got into jazz.

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...

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

But I don’t have the discipline to play jazz myself. At the time though, I was stupid enough to think I could be a jazz musician.

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

To me, the positive thing about it was we were pulling out these old influences like the Velvet Underground and the Stooges that were gone.

By ’65, I worked myself into hearing a little better and I was up to Jimmy Raney. I had a pretty good ear for it but I’ve never been able to play it.

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

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

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.

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...

I took guitar lessons in ’58. To find someone to teach you to play rock and roll then was rough. I had to figure it out on my own.

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

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

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

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

I had a band in St. Louis. By then, things that influenced me were the first Stones albums, the first Byrds albums, later the Velvet Underground.