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

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

I never really followed grunge.

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

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.

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

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