Richard Thompson:
“If you’re going to be a writer of any kind, you have to be alienated from your own generation, and from society as a whole, or you’ll never have enough perspective. I try to be an independent thinker…and of course independent thinkers find each other, sooner or later.”
James Williamson:
“A lot of guys thought [the Stooges] were good, but it was always this cult following. There weren’t a lot of compliments being shared.”
Lydia Lunch:
“My personality is what infected the guitar, and [my style is] what happens as a result. I mean, who you are is channeled through this instrument. My guitar playing is unique to the way I am.”
Johnny Marr:
“One of the things about the time I came out of—let’s call it post-punk—was that art became very reductive and fashion became very reductive. And when that happens, it can sometimes be great. So, to be specific, Chuck Berry riffs were thrown out, R&B and ‘ka-jinka-jinka-jink’ riffs were thrown out. Now, that was really saying something, because you’re getting rid of thirty percent of guitar playing right there. Long solos were thrown out, obviously, but unlike with punk, distortion was thrown out too. So you had no Chuck Berry licks—which includes your [Sex Pistols] licks—no R&B rhythm playing, no distortion, no lengthy solos, no blues, no bending unless you were kind of out of tune or being aggressive, unless you were no wave. So what you were left with was a skinny white, very pure guitar aesthetic, which you could also apply to the clothes. The clothes were very unadorned and stark, not necessarily because the times were stark, but because the style was reduced. Reduced, reduced, reduced, reduced.”
Tom Verlaine:
“My whole discovery of words happened in the first six months in New York, working at the Strand [Book Store]. Now it’s all younger people there, but in those days it was half younger people and half people that had been there for twenty years, really well-read people. They’d be throwing shit at me, literally saying, ‘Read this, kid’!—you know, because they could tell I was just some kid from Delaware. [laughs] And it’d be a Baudelaire book or something, and I’d take it home and I’d be like, ‘Oh, God, this is amazing’! I mean, I never knew you could think in these ways. I didn’t know you could write like this or have these kinds of thoughts; it was so inspiring.”
Keith Levene:
“I play guitar like Patti Smith does vocals. Just the whole open thing—the way Lenny Kaye plays with Patti is the way I had to play with John [Lydon] to make PiL work.”
Ben Chasny:
“It’s difficult to take different genres and make something cohesive. It was hard to make it so it didn’t seem like it was just sewn together. I think now I’ve developed my style to the point where it’s not such a challenge. But I remember after trying to work on that first [Six Organs of Admittance] record wondering, ‘How am I going to do this’?”
