When punk began to be a genre, people were going to go out and try to mine it. Some of the better groups, like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, were very artificial.
Second only to the sea, the Miami sky has been the greatest comfort in my life past 50. On a good day, when the wind blows from the south, the light here is diffuse and forgiving.
Well, it wasn’t like I was going to run out and score heroin and score an ounce of coke – but incidentally, on the road, I would usually get tanked up and as stoned as I possibly could to go on stage. And offstage, it would be a demon that would come up about twice a week.
If you give a good performance, something that gets some feeling across to people, that’s such a rare gift. It’s underestimated at this point in history, when the music biz is inevitably turning into a kind of politics.
There are no pimps, no whores, no transvestites – gone. Now that’s more the culture I’m comfortable in … I don’t like it in the house, you know what I mean, but I like it somewhere around.
The most successful stuff is sold to you as indispensable social information. The message in the music is, ‘We are terribly, terribly slick and suave, and if you listen to us, you can probably get a leg up in society, too.’
I was a pretty nice kid. Kind of quiet, but quiet in terms I wasn’t going out and setting fire to anything. I had a big mouth and I was creative type, you know.
Miami’s not anybody’s poor cousin. It’s an aspiration to live in this town, not something you have to do to promote yourself like some of the larger cities.
