Now, if someone wants to spit on me, I just roll up the window of my BMW 540i.
Scott Asheton was a brilliant drummer, a natural musician.
The history of apartheid-era South Africa is incredibly sad and at times infuriatingly incomprehensible.
When you’re holding people’s attention, I feel you must give them high-quality ingredients. They deserve nothing but your best. And if they need information, get it, cross-check it, and try to be right. Do not waste their time; do not enjoy the ego trip of being onstage.
When you are young, there is so much ahead of you, it’s like the Saharan desert. You can’t even see across it.
If you listen to ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,’ by Gil Scott-Heron, that album is dripping with rage.
The perpetrators of the actual bad stuff that does real and lasting harm to people, like leakage of industrial chemicals into water systems, seem to get not so much as a second glance; the bloviation from media pundits and think tanks creates false problems that waste time and energy debunking.
I love to go on stage and sing.
I have been restless for as long as I can remember.
Could it be that violence is as much a part of the American identity as the Constitution, and a vital component to its economic stability?
I think marriage is a boring and fault-ridden contractual obligation.
I can deal with people who watch me on stage but I am not good in communicating with people any other way than through my work.
We all learn lessons in life. Some stick, some don’t. I have always learned more from rejection and failure than from acceptance and success.
One person’s disaster is another person’s talking point.
One of the most insane environments I have ever spent time in is a gun range. There we are, all in a line, armed to the teeth, firing away.
While I have no empirical evidence to back this up, I bet that the number of homosexual people per thousand has not fluctuated all that much over the centuries. I do not believe the dented wisdom my father used to extol, that homosexuality was a sure sign of a civilization in decline.
No matter how rough things can be at times, many Americans are optimistic and on the move.
One person’s disaster is another person’s talking point.
Being unique is never easy, and often, by the time culture catches up with you, there are only a few people who notice.
My father did not rock. He just earned and hated. Don’t end up like this man.
Death metal uses a lot of white face paint and black hair dye to make its point. I quite enjoy this genre for its intensity, extremism and underlying irony: You have to be alive to play it and listen to it.
To get a human through a life, lives of broken bones, knock-me-over-with-a-feather susceptibility to myriad viruses, and whatever else might befall someone will cost money.
Miles Davis would have this lineup of all these amazing musicians and one day would just say, ‘We’re done.’ After tons of great records and tickets sold, he said, ‘Now I’m going to grow my hair out and play my horn through a wah-wah pedal.’ Rather than play it safe, he went on.
I’m terrified of motorcycles. I’ve been on one a couple of times. I did not like it.
As a young person growing up in Washington, D.C., summers were hot, humid and relentless. My friends and I grew more restless and adventurous with every passing year.
No one should die when they’re 50.
Think about it: No matter who you are, the past plays a large part in your life. I am all about living in the present as best as I can. Try as I might, there is only so much I am able to achieve on this front.
It’s one thing to buy a copy of ‘Atlas Shrugged.’ You actually have to read it to get anything out of it.
Most of the people who call me a sellout were 7 when I was down face-first in the punk trenches.
Yes, I guess you could say I am a loner, but I feel more lonely in a crowed room with boring people than I feel on my own.
I’m a big fan of the American Tapes label. But that’s very hard to keep a grip on that because you blink your eyes and they’ve released three records, all of which are limited edition, all sold at one show. So you have to follow in drips and drops on eBay, which I do.
We Californians can watch the Weather Channel for images of winter’s brutality unleashed upon our fellow Americans and thank our lucky stars we don’t have to contend with it.
I know that collector types can be a pain in the neck and seem perpetually frozen in time – or at least in their parents’ basement – but someone has to look out for the past, lest it slip away forever.
I get letters from young people telling me that they’re broke and download my albums for free. They ask me what I think about that. I now have a standard line. I tell them, ‘I would rather be heard than paid.’
I’m very boring.
I love being a storyteller. I love telling stories.
The only difference between me and others is that they think they can change something with cute little poems, nice cards or embracing trees and being nice to little lapdogs.
Like a lot of inwardly drawn young people, I spent a lot of time in libraries. At my high school, I often spent my lunch breaks there.
If I lose the light of the sun, I will write by candlelight, moonlight, no light, If I lose paper and ink, I will write in blood on forgotten walls. I will write always. I will capture nights all over the world and bring them to you.
As the middle class is predated upon with an ever greater malicious intensity, their children stand to lose more and harder than their parents ever did.
More guns equaling more safety is a slippery slope, and what makes it so is human blood.
I have always thought that change you can see and feel is best.
Literally thousands of lawsuits have been filed against the NFL by retired players, many of whom say that information on brain injury in football was withheld from them.
I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone.
I’m not in a position where I get to pick and choose roles. I usually go on auditions in long lines and embarrass myself in front of casting directors, and with a lump in my throat and my ears burning, I walk past reception and smirking actors as I go to the parking garage and go back on the highway.
I have always maintained that Iggy Pop is the Heavyweight Champion of Rock & Roll.
We spend millions of dollars to remove pain from our lives. It’s why so many people get hooked on painkillers. The body becomes addicted to painlessness. That tells you a lot.
Weakness is what brings ignorance, cheapness, racism, homophobia, desperation, cruelty, brutality, all these things that will keep a society chained to the ground, one foot nailed to the floor.
I’ve made some great mistakes in my life, but, you know, they were honest mistakes.
I think about the meaning of pain. Pain is personal. It really belongs to the one feeling it. Probably the only thing that is your own. I like mine.
Imagine a 15-year-old kid saying, ‘I have two moms – it’s cool.’ I don’t fear that at all.
The only thing about sanctions is that, like a lot of drone strikes, there are countless unintended victims. Cutting off aid to Uganda only increases the pain there.
When someone asks you, ‘What’s punk?’ my reply is, ‘If you have to ask, you’re never going to know.’
The best compliment I get every year is that a band will write me and say, ‘We were just on tour, and we had people coming to our show saying they had never heard us before they heard us on your show.’
I tend to gravitate to the darkest or most obscure part of any venue in an effort to have my own space to experience the music on my own, free from unwanted conversations and other distractions.
Every year, August lashes out in volcanic fury, rising with the din of morning traffic, its great metallic wings smashing against the ground, heating the air with ever-increasing intensity.
That Newt Gingrich or any mainstream Republican has the nerve to look down from what they perceive as their moral mountaintop at anyone is laughable.
America is a country born from semi-mythologized blood, glory and acts of selfless patriotic sacrifice.
I once asked Ozzy Osbourne, truly one of my favorite people in the world, if he was cool with singing Black Sabbath songs year after year, whether he was performing with Black Sabbath or out on a solo tour. He said it was great.
Sleep is for squares.
America sold VX nerve gas and anthrax to Iraq for years, even after the Halabja gas attack, which killed thousands of Kurds.
If people are being upstanding citizens of the Republic, then you have to widen the net to incarcerate them. This explains why America’s prisons are full of nonviolent offenders – a perfect example of American exceptionalism.
It’s not lost on me that everyone dies, but some people have a kind of immortality about them, and you can’t imagine that they will ever be gone.
I’ve been on ‘Jay Leno,’ and everyone likes Jay, but being on that show is a really boring afternoon. I sincerely like Jay, but I wouldn’t want his job, because I’d have to interview Kathy Ireland, and there’s nothing there I’d want to know.
