Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk

I had played in Prague with my band years earlier, and after the show Havel had come backstage to introduce himself. We had a translator, and he was trying to describe to me what the Velvets' music and lyrics had meant to him and his cohorts when they were trying to blow up Russian tanks, creeping around the woods, and going to jail. Many people have said, "Oh your music got me through high school," and that's wonderful, but Havel is much more than a fan. It's very hard to describe. He couldn't even describe it.

So when we all had dinner with him, I thought my mother was gonna have a heart attack. There was Havel, the Velvets, my family, Sylvia Reed, and a few of the people who had been in that Chapter 17 thing. One guy had spent eight years in prison for playing rock & roll. Eight years for being in a band.

There was one band who used to go out into the woods and have secret concerts of Velvet songs. They printed up lyrics from our first album, and made about two hundred little booklets, and they passed them out to people they could trust, because it was known that if anyone got caught with this— big damn trouble.

So all these Rasputins are sitting around the dinner table, who are now like the secretary of the interior, ha ha ha. I have five kids and my mother along, and they were thunderstruck, the whole bunch of them. Holy shit.

Patti actually managed a pretty canny thing. She managed to be a rock & roll death without having to die.

I could have been a ward of the state. I had like a lotta problems. I was just real different from everybody else. I was a lot smarter than them. So I just started to really rebel against my parents, I hated them a lot. They got real worried and sent me to a shrink. They just couldn't handle it, I hated them so badly. I just couldn't stand them.