How did you get into punk?
I grew up in Southern California and always loved melodic pop music. In the late Seventies, the radio got really boring and played a lot of Doobie Brothers, Seals and Crofts, the Eagles – music that did not resonate with me as a teenager, even though I appreciate it now. Then in art class, some of the kids showed me Iggy and the Stooges, Lou Reed, the Velvet Underground, and that introduced me to a whole other type of music I didn’t know existed.
I got really into it and saw Roxy Music at the Palladium and started going to the record store every two weeks, when they’d get a shipment of NME and Melody Maker, so I was reading about the Sex Pistols and this new type of music. I hadn’t heard the music, but I loved the way the kids looked in London.
