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In London, in 1975...

there was a sense of the whole city winding down.

No investment. No hope.

Just a city in decay and a city collapsing.

It's like a wasteland with, just, nothing.

We had energy. We wanted to go somewhere.

We wanted to do something. There was nothing to do. Nowhere to go.

So you just kind of circle around...

walking underneath those housing developments, projects...

and concrete, soulless places where there's nothing.

A sort of hopelessness.

But we had hope, in a sea of hopelessness.

It was a very, very squalid period.

Massive unemployment. Absolutely no hope.

Class warfare rampant.

Quite literally no future.

I wrote my own future.

I had to. It was the only way out.

The story of punk really begins with lggy Pop.

He was authentic.

That's the problem with rock 'n'roll...

that there's not many really authentic madmen in it.

I hated school...

I hated being confined in office clothes.

I hated the guys in the fraternities around the college campus...

where I lived.

I just hated the whole American dream.

Iggy took the whole ethos of the beat writer...

and made it applicable to modern music.

People would lay him side by side with Jim Morrison.

I don't think that's quite fair...

because I think Morrison came from much more of a European mentality...

where lggy was so totally American, so totally Midwest.

Did the music of Detroit have much of an effect on your music?

The industrialism in Detroit...

what I heard wandering around was...

- There are 10 cars, and so on and so forth. - Sure.

I get a lot of my influence from the electric shavers...

- It's true. - But it's funny how those sounds...

you don't realize how they sound.

What did you do to those nice people out there?

Lggy walked on people's hands.

Iggy grabbed people out of the audience.

Suffice it to say lggy was a lot more dangerous than Jim Morrison...

who might be waving his penis around onstage in Miami.

You thought that lggy might take the whole crowd with him.

I wanted to have my stuff presented...

in a much more shocking way than the next fella...

because the next fella was usually better-looking than me.

He could sing better...

and they could get a better gig for more money...

but the reason they could is because they would imitate...

the five most popular English bands of the time.

It was obvious to me...

that person that could create something really of their own...

that was the person that was gonna have the key.

Do you feel you've influenced anybody?

I think I helped wipe out the '60s.

The American bands that were influencing me were the MC5...

that was just a very heavy, brutal, Detroit...

industrial rock ethic.

You were supposed to go out and kick the audience's ass...

and everybody'd get sweaty and gloriously beat up.

When I first heard the Velvet Underground...

it gave me hope.

Here's a band playing super-simple songs...

and the singer couldn't sing.

'Cause I couldn't sing either.

And I thought, "This is great. He can't sing, I can't sing, let's sing."

When the Beatles were singing Yesterday...

the Velvet Underground were singing songs about heroin.

Singing songs with real substance to them...

real stories with real lyrics that gave you pause to think.

It was the height of the psychedelic era.

They were giving out flowers on St. Mark's Place...

everybody was barefoot...

you brushed your teeth with LSD.

But the Velvets talked about real life on the street...

and they played noisy, crude...

It sounded as if you didn't have to know how to play...

to play what the Velvets played.

Obviously it's not as easy as they made it sound...

but it was inspiring.

The Dolls were an inspiration, too.

Don't fuck with us, sweetheart.

The punk scene, most people think, started with the Sex Pistols...

and the Sex Pistols defined it in the popular consciousness...

but the Sex Pistols were influenced by the New York Dolls...

and aren't ashamed to admit it.

The New York Dolls came along and returned to the 3-minute song...

which is what punk is all about, returning to the idea of a song.

A song that you heard on the radio.

You know, very stripped down: Chorus, verse, chorus, verse.

Music you were hearing on the radio in those days was terrible.

Captain and Tennille and all the crap.

I liked the way they were into what kids really liked about rock 'n' roll...

which was: "Do whatever the fuck you want to."

Offend the grown-ups and behave...

like the way a teenager really wants to behave.

They were so bad.

When they attempted to play rock 'n' roll...

I thought it was such a cacophonous racket...

that it made me laugh.

And their sheer audacity...

of being able to go out onstage and deliver this to an audience...

I thought was phenomenal.

When the Dolls came over...

and they played this really boring rock show...

- The New York Dolls. ... wearing their high heels...

and, like, stuttering about and smashing their instruments...

that was something we'd never seen before.

And it was on television, even better.

It was wild and young and crazy, and these people were having fun.

That was a seed that later grew, I think.

The good life. La dolce.

Malcolm was here and he loved their style and their attitude...

and their aggression and the tension they attracted.

He wanted them to come to England.

He thought if they played there, they'd be a lot more popular...

but it was too late for the Dolls. They were really falling apart.

Johansen didn't want to play...

with half the band that was too drunk and stoned to play.

So not going back to anyone... Malcolm was there to sell clothes, basically.

You know, he was selling fashions.

And he sold rock 'n'roll fashion.

The best way to sell rock 'n'roll fashion was to have a band.

Slowly I began to move around New York...

and found a small bar called CBGB.

It seemed to be a scene.

And there was one character in the corner.

His name was Richard Hell.

And I noticed his T-shirt was very cleverly designed.

Being a haberdasher from the King's Road...

I was very enticed by this T-shirt.

Holes very carefully arranged in it.

And him playing this song, which was his song...

called Blank Generation.

I began to adore the idea...

of new rock 'n'roll through them.

CBGB's, you know, there weren't bands playing there when we started.

Part of my strategy was to do as the Dolls had done.

Find a place where you appear regularly...

so that people can get in the habit of knowing you're there.

The guy, Hilly, who owned the place, agreed.

So we started playing there every Sunday.

And it was a wino, Hell's Angels bar.

It was just a dump...

a bar, and it's in the Bowery, a skid-row section of New York.

Always dumpy and dirty and...

But at the time there was no place to play your own material.

We liked the place right off the bat.

It had a nice, quaint kind of atmosphere.

And the acoustics were great.

There started being this kind of uptown crowd...

mixed with a lot of dancers from Times Square.

Topless dancers and prostitutes and junkies...

mixed with these slumming chic people...

who thought we were cute and real.

In the beginning, they didn't expect to make any records or make any money.

The whole point was to have a good time...

because you didn't have a job you could like...

you weren't gonna make any money anyway...

so you might as well sing.

If Blondie was playing...

Richard Hell and David Johansen were sitting there watching.

If Richard Hell was playing, then Blondie and Patti Smith...

and the Talking Heads guys would all be around.

I mean, it was all playing for each other...

and so there's a lot of pressure...

to do something better and not repeat yourself.

It was a place you could go and knew you'd see somebody...

you'd like to talk to.

The only place in the world where you mattered at all.

You'd go there and...

like, matter.

By the time I walked into CBGB's...

which was in 1975...

I had been in the music business in one way or another for 20 years.

What was great about it, for me...

was that it signaled a rebirth.

It was about reclaiming rock 'n'roll.

It was reclaiming rock 'n'roll to a simple message...

and wasn't a big, bloated corporate-limousine-cocaine-ridden...

bunch of shit.

What a lot of people were doing at CBGB's...

was bubblegum and garage rock.

I saw elements of The Beach Boys there.

People thought I was crazy then and I think people still think I'm crazy.

But their songs, they were all very catchy.

To me, they were pop music.

They were what was played on the radio in the '60s, to me.

That's what I heard.

I thought they were the most commercial band.

I was kind of shocked when everybody said, "No."

Halfway through the third song, I turned on the mike, and I said:

"What is this crap? What is this noise?"

I took the record off the turntable...

and flung the record across the room.

And I said, "We don't need this junk. This is just noise."

I went and played a Billy Joel record.

I got hate calls when I signed the Ramones.

They said, "You know, you've got some nice bands.

"Why do you wanna fuck up your label and sign the Ramones?"

That first Ramones album, it was a fantastic record.

It was conceptually very interesting.

The fact that all the songs were very short...

very simple drumming, melody being carried by the bass...

the guitar being simply this pulsing distortion...

actually became the English punk style.

The Ramones' first album...

was almost the only piece of vinyl that we had that we could say was punk.

A lot of people I know learned to play along to that record.

Sid Vicious learned to play along to that record...

and Paul Simonon learned to play really along to that record.

Most of the English bands really adapted...

the Ramones' distinct sound as their foundations.

And then they injected their own selves...

to create their own thing.

When it got over to England...

punk became a way to dress, look, and sound.

The New York punk scene was very diverse.

The name of this song is Psycho Killer.

Going down to CBGB's that night when I found the Talking Heads...

I was down there to see the Ramones, who I had just signed.

It was a beautiful night in November. It was almost like spring.

I was standing there with Lenny Kaye, the guitar player...

in the Patti Smith Group...

and all of a sudden, I hear music coming out.

I felt myself just moving more and more...

till I was inside the door and I was riveted.

I wanted to sign them right then and there.

That night began an 11-month courtship.

When I started working with them, they weren't sophisticated...

in using studios.

So I think I opened them up to the conceptual notion...

that making music involved everything...

from the first note you play...

to the moment this thing comes out as a piece of plastic.

Talking Heads are an intelligent band...

and ready for trying something new.

I don't know if that would have been true of all punk bands, by any means...

or new wave bands, or whatever they were.

If you're content to stay in a small club and not do anything else...

then you're also not content to grow.

Part of the trick is getting yourself out there...

and challenge yourself:

"Can you make a record and remain true to your ideals...

"and still sell those...

"you know, 20 billion records?"

The scene at CBGB stayed so out of the mainstream for so long...

that all the bands were able to fully explore their personalities.

- You know, including us. - Thank you.

It was a great time because it was just so spontaneous and pure.

And, of course, everything...

after a time, it evolves into something else...

but there's always these little pockets of time...

where everything just sparkles...

and everything is done because people believe in things.

There was something about her music that separated her...

from the rest of the pack.

I think that was the mixture of the profane...

which was common in punk, with the sacred.

And plus she was a poet, you know?

I mean she was a poet in the true sense of the word.

She mythologized herself...

like any really great rock 'n'roll star does.

...spinal stars in the noir crayola field we call sky.

'Scuse me! I tripped and dropped my hand in his.

It la la la landed like an insect nest and...

all the red wire spiders jabbed in his flesh like g-strings.

It was so easy to transform everything into guitar strings...

...illuminated calligraphy. Everything was something else.

A sound was a room, a spongy layer of flesh, a trampoline...

Patti sort of evolved her poems into rock 'n'roll.

In fact, what was amazing about her in that period...

was the way that she would just go off into the stratosphere...

into the astral plane.

She was performing in half a trance.

I met Patti Smith just about 1970.

And since Patti had grown up in South Jersey...

and I grew up in Central Jersey...

we shared a lot of the same reference points.

And at the time I was working at Village Oldies on Bleecker Street.

She would come in on Saturday nights, and we'd drink beer...

and dance around to the Dovells or the Moonglows...

and have a lot of fun. She knew I played guitar, and she said:

'"I'm doing this poetry reading. You want to do a couple... '"

We didn't even call them songs. Just '"play along with me. '"

CB's was so important to us for giving us a place...

to really understand who we were...

especially in the improvised songs.

Patti would tell a different story every night...

and we would just follow along.

We would go around the country and every town we would visit...

we would see little pockets that would become...

the alternate rock scene in that town.

You go to San Francisco...

and Crime and The A vengers would be at the show.

You go to LA, and The Zeroes and The Germs would be there.

I mean, you go to England...

what would become the Clash, the Sex Pistols, Chrissie Hynde...

they were all there.

And we all felt like there was a real mood...

of not only us against them...

but a sense that it was time for rock's regeneration.

We thought the rest of the world will catch up to this...

and they'll realize what we're doing. They never did.

And then, of course, the Sex Pistols came along and buried us all.

We didn't know it at the time, but all over London...

there was nucleuses of people who were looking for something...

other than what they'd been given.

And we were all probably 19 or 20...

and we'd grown up watching everybody else shine...

and we really didn't feel as if there was anything that was our own.

We were living in a squatting community where no one had any money.

So we just broke into houses and lived in these abandoned houses.

I looked at the people I was living with and decided...

that I could form them into a rock 'n' roll group.

I was working for a cosmetics company, Elizabeth Arden...

in a big glass building, working as a computer operator...

and I was feeding punch cards into this machine.

In fact, we were connected up to the main computer...

which was one of these billion dollar brain jobs.

We were all people who always dreamed of making music...

but the right circumstances never seemed to be there.

And bit by bit, the scenes have created the right circumstance.

And one of the things that drew us all together...

had a lot to do with the shop that Malcolm McLaren had started.

Originally, it was a Teddy boy shop which aligned it with rock 'n' roll...

and then they made it into this sort of sadomasochist store called "Sex."

Basically, here was a shop that was selling black rubber...

black leather, fetish wear, on the King's Road...

to everyday kids, who were searching for a scene.

It was the kind of store where you could go in and just hang out.

I got talking to Malcolm. We became kind of friends.

But I was stealing clothes off him as well at the same time.

Some of those kids began to ask me...

whether I was interested in helping them...

become rock 'n' roll stars.

I wasn't. I'd had enough after the New York Dolls.

I really was more interested...

in working in this sort of fetish fashion in clothing.

But it soon dawned on me...

that music needed to give it some propelling force.

I used to steal a lot of bands' equipment.

He said, "Why don't you learn to play some of this stuff...

"and get a band together?"

So that's what I did.

I was spotted on King's Road...

in a "I hate Pink Floyd" T-shirt.

I'd personalized it myself.

That, at the time...

I know it seems hard to believe now, when you look back at it...

but that was just about the most insulting thing you could ever do.

They were as popular as the royal family.

We said, "Can you sing?"

He said, "No, but I can scream and shout."

I said, "Come back to the shop."

And there was a jukebox in the corner.

We said, "Sing along to a song, then."

Actually, I picked the Alice Cooper records...

because the rest of the stuff they had was unbearable to me.

So I put the song on. John was at the other end.

We all stood by the jukebox and watched as he performed...

Iooking and behaving like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

He was just taking the piss out of the song when he was singing it.

I hated the guy. And that's actually how we got our sound.

I couldn't play, and Johnny Rotten couldn't sing...

and it created this horrible noise.

John Lydon's voice, just this big hell...

was the sense of exorcism.

The Sex Pistols were just blowing everything out of the way.

It was an incredible roar of rock 'n'roll.

Everything that was going on in town, it was completely over...

the second they came out on stage. And I saw that.

That's when the old scene died, and the new one began for myself.

The thing about the Clash is that...

they were a lot more experimental with music than the Pistols.

The Pistols had their particular sound, and they went with that till the end.

And we'd just try and play anything...

that we thought was good.

They were obviously looking at one of their first loves, which was reggae.

The kind of minimalist aesthetic of punk...

had a lot to do with what was going on in dub, early dub.

Completely destroy the track and double and triple echo...

and that was dub.

It had that urgency that you get from documentary footage.

You know, as soon as you see grain on television, you think, "This is for real."

The white kids, they never had any form of expression...

and reggae was a sound that spoke about my people...

my problems.

It was both a protest movement, underground, outside.

It wasn't the only rebel sound around.

Bernard Rhodes, who'd introduced me to Mick and Paul...

he'd say, '"Why don't you write about what affects you?

'"The dissatisfaction among the young people.

'"The way everyone seemed to be going nowhere. '"

We were tagged as the more positive thinkers.

The Pistols would smash everything down...

and we would come through with something...

another set of values or a way to be, to think, to feel.

It was a lot to bond you together.

Wherever the Clash or the Pistols played...

when people saw them after they'd finished playing...

six or seven other groups would start up from that night.

They were something the fans could get into themselves.

It sort of said to everybody, '"You can do this, too. '"

They played three chords, it was good enough.

It didn't matter. Everybody was playing the same Chuck Berry chords...

putting the new poetry on top.

On sale, 50 p's, from the box office.

It happened everywhere. It was amazing, really.

I had no hope of a job. If I did, it was a job I didn't want.

The qualifications I have wouldn't have given me anything.

So I had nothing, and the great thing was...

that you had a way of life that you could tap into.

A music way of life.

You were actually creating a future for yourself.

I was still struggling, trying to get my songs to publishers...

going into people's offices with a guitar...

and making them sit down and listen to me play...

and not really getting anywhere. They weren't really terribly interested.

There just started to be a few rumblings of things going on.

I used to read music papers 'cause that was my only contact...

with the professional business, really, apart from rejection letters.

Sometime in '76, the founding of the label, Stiff Records, was announced.

It had been a long time since such a record company existed in England.

They're more or less inventing independent record labels...

or reinventing them.

I took an afternoon off and took my tape to this office in West London...

and there was just one girl in the office. There was nobody there.

Next thing I know, they said, '"You'll get to make an album.

"But we'll call you Elvis." I said, "Are you out of your mind?"

Stiff had this energy. They were thriving off these things happening in London.

All this punk stuff I was reading about.

I found myself involved in a company that had something to do with it.

We was starting to make some noise in the music press.

We'd play at some clubs, and a fight would break out...

and there just happened to be a photographer there.

And they'd catch the fight... There was always something going on.

I mean, something out of the ordinary.

Good Lord. Now, I want to know one thing.

Are you serious or are you just making it up?

- Shit. - It's what?

Nothing. A rude word. Next question.

- No. What was the rude word? - Shit.

We didn't know this was going out live.

Dirty bastard.

- Again. - You dirty fucker.

- What a fucking... - That's it for tonight.

The phones are all lighting up. Lights were going on everywhere.

Malcolm come running out as red-faced as you can imagine:

"Quick, let's get out of here."

The following day...

was incredible. Every newspaper ran headlines:

"The filth and the fury of the night the air turned blue."

"Call it punk, we call it filthy Lucca."

I had to go to work that day and sat with everybody.

There were middle-aged guys reading the newspaper...

with steam coming out of their ears. It was really funny.

About the word '"punk. '" It means worthless, nasty, jolly rotten.

- Are you happy with this word? - No, the press gave us that.

It's their problem, not ours. We never called ourselves '"punk. '"

It just became like the circus, doing something to get in the press.

That was McLaren's thing, to keep the media thing going...

and the music really kind of went out the window.

One week after EMI dumped Sex Pistols, A&M Records picked them up...

before EMI could get rid of them and had to buy off the contract.

Here they were, signing a new contract that could make them a lot of money...

and they already had a song to record for A&M in honor of the Queen's jubilee.

You thought you'd gotten rid of us, didn't you?

But you are wrong, old bean, 'cause we're back with a vengeance.

God save the Queen, my son.

About that time, nobody in England said anything bad about the Queen.

There was this incredible attempt to stop anybody hearing it and buying it.

We could no longer play anywhere.

The records were never gonna be heard on the radio. They were banned.

We could take a boat on the Thames, and we could play on the water...

a quarter of a mile behind the Queen's flotilla.

The boat was finally surrounded by the river police.

I was arrested and spent the night in jail.

And God Save the Queen did become number one.

You cannot affect change...

unless you attack the very things that are keeping you down.

The class system in Britain, this is perpetuated continually...

by the very idea that you have a royal family there...

and that's not to be tolerated.

The Sex Pistols' current record God Save the Queen...

is at number one...

but the IBA, which administers the Broadcasting Act...

has advised us that particularly at this time...

this record is likely to cause offense to a number of our listeners...

There was such paranoia around the city.

Paul Cook was violently attacked.

Johnny Rotten and Chris Thomas were attacked with knives.

I, funnily enough, wasn't attacked at all.

We had to be careful 'cause a lot of reactionary people...

come out of the woodwork.

Maybe they just wanted...

to teach us a lesson, so they would say.

So, it did get quite heavy.

When all is said and done, really all I've seen...

is a bunch of spotty kids being naughty.

Somehow, it worked.

We hit on something there, not deliberately so.

Instinctively.

The album came out. It was again a public scandal.

The name was considered too vulgar...

and we were destined to go to America to tour.

It was Malcolm's idea when the Pistols came over to America...

not to play the typical rock star hangouts...

not to come to CBGB's, and not to go to The Whiskey in Los Angeles...

but to come and play in America.

We played at bars that were in shopping centers...

and we played someplace in Oklahoma City and Dallas...

and God-knows-where.

All these places that were not really at all...

on any kind of standard rock tour route.

But they were bars that local bands used to play in...

so they'd play for these people who wanted to hear rock 'n' roll...

and it was pretty rowdy, pretty loose, and pretty real.

He fucking put us right out there in the boonies.

You know, deliverance.

It felt like we were just like a circus, you know.

And Sid was so out there, he didn't care. He would fight anybody.

Can't believe someone didn't get shot.

I didn't give a shit about the music anymore. It didn't matter.

You know, it was all about... It was just...

We were all off the edge, totally wasted all the time.

When you first go out on tour, and you're traveling in a coach for 10 months...

and it's a shock to the system for a lot of people.

Some people take to it better than others.

And others start having to take pills.

You're partying a lot and staying up late because you like it.

When we got to San Francisco, so much was going on by that time...

we just totally burnt ourselves out.

I think everyone had had enough by that time, that we didn't want to carry on.

Coming to America was like the nail in the coffin.

I drove almost 200 miles from Silver Springs just to see it.

I enjoyed every minute of it.

I'd drive 200 miles again tomorrow night. I really enjoyed it.

I'd think these people are where it's at right now.

It was great. That's what music's meant to be.

I think that's where rock is going and where it's going to stay.

My sound was really horrible. Nothing worked.

I had a terrible cold. Sid was, like, fucked up. We didn't play any note.

And John was like...

Mr. Righteous and Dig My Life, you know what I mean.

The ego was of fucking blown out of proportion.

And I just thought when we were playing the shows:

'"What the fuck's this all about? What's the purpose?

'"This ain't how it used to be like. '"

We were playing like shit and everyone was loving it.

Ever get the feeling you've been cheated? Good night.

When I said, '"Ever get the feeling you've been cheated? '"...

I meant that for us, who had to perform this stuff.

'Cause that's what it had become by then, just stuff, just rock 'n'roll.

Just trundling out night after night.

It lost its point.

It was too much like a Rolling Stones-on tour affair.

Too big.

And indeed, when things get that way, then you should stop.

It's the easiest thing in the world to just stop.

If you don't want to be a pop star, just stop being one.

The Sex Pistols came along, made incredible amount of chaos...

and then broke up.

And left everyone else to clean up their mess.

The Ramones had to go out there and keep playing.

We kind of felt us and the Sex Pistols would become...

almost like the Beatles and the Stones of the '60s.

Like, we were the new revolution, let's say.

But America wouldn't have it that way.

And no record company wanted to touch anybody after the Sex Pistols...

who was in a punk band.

I liked the Sex Pistols but they were just there for a second.

They were gone really fast. By the time the Sex Pistols had come and gone...

there were these great LA bands playing.

Punk, in the neurosense of the word, where you had to play a certain way...

sound a certain way on record, look a certain way...

probably worked in England because England was...

A: Much more fashion conscious, and B: Poor.

That kind of punk, that kind of anger certainly doesn't work...

in a '70s America where kids have plenty of toys to play with.

So, music of rebellion, or music that challenges establishment...

had to take a different form in America.

Basically the 200 people that made up...

the original punk rock scene of LA were people who didn't fit in.

And it wasn't just artists...

it was working-class people that were bohemian.

The time that we began X, it was a frightening time...

because people didn't want to know what we were talking about.

What we wrote about was how estranged we were...

and we wrote a lot about being poor and seeing a lot of wealthy people.

'Cause it was still the Hollywood scene, there were still movie stars...

and rock stars and producers and people getting big deals.

There was still Fleetwood Mac, and we were so different from that.

It was just like Los Angeles in '66, '67.

The same kind of street-club activity was happening all over again...

in '78, '79, '80, and I was just absolutely hooked.

I was everywhere in that day that you could possibly go.

And I told everybody, I said, "None of you know this...

"but this is exactly what we did 15 years ago, the psychedelic generation...

"and you guys are now totally insane punk rockers."

X was one of the most exciting bands I'd ever come across...

and I couldn't believe that they were actually poetic.

The lyrics had that kind of street, beatnik impact...

took me back to '58, '60, '62, when the beats were at their height...

and I thought, "Man, this is the same kind of stuff."

And everything went along just great until, at some point...

the audiences went from being relatively intelligent...

and understanding, interesting people...

to kind of scary young kids who liked to spit at the bands a lot...

who wielded chains and beat up people who had long hair.

And it became a kind of a war between what was...

and this kind of new, hard-core scene.

Along with the misfits, there were some who were genuinely psychotic.

And they were there to inflict pain...

and not to be part of the core audience.

A song like Johnny Hit and Run Paulene, we don't play because the audience...

I've seen too many 19 and 20-year-old boys... men...

boy-men, going like this...

"Johnny hit and run Paulene," and don't know that it's an antirape song.

And they're into it for the wrong reasons. So, we don't play that anymore.

Society stinks.

But this hard-core scene was particularly scary and violent.

It was what gave punk a bad name.

We kept begging them to stop spitting at us.

The media wants to make this into a cartoon, and they say...

in England bands get spit at by the audience.

This spitting was just utter nonsense, journalistic fabrication.

Unfortunately, the newer crowds that came into it...

didn't understand that.

Spitting on your heroes has been popular ever since in different ways...

and maybe that's okay, and maybe that was...

The part of punk was the thing about the antihero, really.

Yeah, a healthy disrespect for authority...

is what supposedly runs through the whole history of rock 'n' roll.

Stop!

Sorry, ladies and gentlemen. There's no reason to do this song here.

That's what the irony was about, because in a corporate society...

where a few record companies and a few TVnetworks control everything...

if you're an act signed to a label and you pretend to be a rebel...

it seemed to be a bad joke.

I was never a part of any punk rock thing. I used to read about it.

But it was some sort of elitist thing to me.

I lived in the suburbs. I couldn't afford to go to nightclubs.

I had a wife and kid, and I had to go to work.

If music was gonna pay my way...

it had to pay my way to the same extent as my job.

I've had a strange career in the sense...

that I started out on an independent label predominantly.

I was signed within six months to a very big corporation in America.

I was a pop star, you know. There's no other word for it.

I found it really at odds with what I believed...

being a musician in the long term was.

From there on, I just did whatever the hell I wanted to...

and left it to the record company to sort out.

That's their job. Mine's to make the music. Theirs is to sell it.

And it never said in my contract...

that I had to make the same record over and over again.

I think it's harder for people to change the rules in rock 'n' roll...

because it's such a very, very limited form musically...

that it comes down to somebody's imagination...

what they have in their heart.

As soon as the people got hold of the idea that it's punk.

We get it. We got it.

And then, when we started to play other things...

they didn't like it 'cause people don't like change.

When you step into that public arena...

on one hand, it's maybe where some of the greatest possibilities are located...

at the same time, it's the most dangerous place...

because it's where you're most easily subverted.

To reach a wide audience, you have to give something up.

People still hate us in England for making it in America.

I'm glad we did. You know, somebody had to break out...

and prove that this thing was a global thing.

It wasn't just a neighborhood thing.

When you're struggling to get somewhere, the struggle can really hold you together.

It's not a blinding rush for fame.

You're expressing your soul, and you gotta do it in the right way.

What killed us was success.

For some reason, we weren't prepared.

We'd spent five years getting there.

Perhaps, after five years, we'd said our piece, if you like.

A lot of the great groups didn't exist for very long.

To lump artists like the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and Elvis Costello...

under the banner of punk is really an indication of how categories fail.

I suppose everybody wanted one band to do it like it happened with the Beatles.

And it turned out not to be one band...

but a lot of bands, a lot of journalists...

a lot of young people who went into the record companies and changed them.

I remember when Seymour Stein sold Sire Records to Warner Bros.

Bugs Bunny, the Warner Bros. Character...

was in advertisements in a black leather jacket saying:

"Don't call it punk. Call it new wave."

So, new wave was really a term for college kids, you know.

At the time everybody said:

"I don't like the Ramones, but I like the Talking Heads."

It was safe. New wave was safe.

Punk rock wasn't necessarily very musical or melodic...

and I think new wave is when things...

You know, a few jangly guitars and melodies. I guess. I don't know.

We thought we were a punk band for about a minute.

Very early on, just after we'd figured out our barre chords...

we realized that we wanted to say more than "Fuck off."

Even though there were some cool ways of saying "Fuck off" around at the time.

New wave is watered-down.

That was the complete corruption of everything.

It's where everybody tried to be nice all over again.

Don't be nice. It's the kiss of death.

We were trying to change something.

The music industry. The way we live.

You know, to be accepted in a way we wanted.

I've always believed that to be esoteric...

or underground, music of one generation...

becomes the pop music of the next generation.

You know, there's jazz purists...

whose job is to keep it pure and the same.

Rock 'n'roll is the opposite. It started as a bastard, as a hybrid.

It was never pure to begin with.

When the punk rock groups started, it was an '"us and them '" thing.

The establishment was '"them, '" and there was '"us. '"

But I think they had to grow up very rapidly.

Because some of them became successful, got deals, and realized that really...

they had to work with the system to get anywhere.

Some handled it, some left totally devastated. They got money...

and consequently didn't get that creative 'cause they weren't hungry anymore.

Or they could buy more drugs, and they ended up dead.

You know, only the people that had any real...

content and staying power, managed to get over that hurdle.

Most of the musicians I know, their work is the core of their identity.

It's a good deal of what they created their identity from.

It's fundamental to you. You feel like it is you.

And so, when you step into...

the mass cultural arena...

Like I said, there's a real element of "You're on dangerous ground."

At the same time, I always thought that that was where...

you found out what you could do.

American corporations took 10 or 15 years...

to recover from the shock of the Sex Pistols...

and the fluke of actually managing to sell the Clash to the general public...

to really take a step back and find Nirvana and a few other bands.

Punk came... You know what it was in England.

That was the last time anything important happened in England...

or came from England to affect anybody.

You know what happened is that punk said:

"We're fed up with Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin...

"the sort of skeleton of the Beatles.

'"Let's have some music from the street. '"

And what's happened in America in 1991, '90...

is that you finally got your own punk.

I didn't know him, you know. But I know that...

that type of success is very stressful on you, you know.

It's very stressful.

And because you're constantly... You feel yourself...

You think you feel yourself slipping away in some fashion.

Maybe you're not. Maybe you are, you know.

It brought home to me...

as many things have in my maturity...

the fact that this is a very dangerous business.

It's very dangerous for the practitioners.

It's like a fire...

and it burns, and it burns...

And that sounds like a sort of romantic fire idea...

until you realize that what's keeping the fire alive is bodies.

I think rock 'n'roll exists...

to deliver this truth that needs to be constantly delivered.

Rock, hip-hop, whatever you call it.

It reminds us, like this unspoken message...

is that it is fun to be alive.

It's a hell of a lot better than being dead.

I think that my whole life was saved...

and opened up and made into a real life by my favorite singers.

By Johnny Cash, Muddy Waters...

the Rolling Stones, the Beatles.

I'm gonna forget so many people. John Lee Hooker.

I'll forget a lot of people, but yes, by the stuff that went before.

Rock has thrived on people not necessarily willfully throwing things into the mix...

but stumbling on things, crossing over short circuits and misconnections...

and the people who have the tight...

spandex pants on and their hair just so and the guitar at the right angle...

aren't it at all, you know. The cigarette coming from the lip like this.

'Cause it's a facsimile that was previously rock, doesn't make it rock 'n' roll forever.

It's somebody in a bedroom somewhere doing something you haven't heard yet.

With any luck.

How did the audience react when The Stooges first started playing?

What did you look like?

I appeared in an aluminum Afro wig I made myself...

out of strips of heavy-duty aluminum which I curled.

No eyebrow and a woman's maternity smock, totally white-faced.

I was playing a Hawaiian guitar, standing on...

Another fellow who operated a Wearing blender.

There was another guy whose job it was to just tip over the top of an amp...

at certain times with the reverb turned on 10.

It was like...

I also played vacuum cleaner.

And people found it really interesting.

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