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.

I think her whole premise is that you can't be stopped by the darkness, you have to take the light force, and go with that because that's the force of life, that's the force of God, that's the force of art and creation, not degeneration and self-degradation—like all that Sid Vicious stuff.

But I was thinking, "Why? Just because I like good music? Just because I'm trying to turn you on to good rock & roll? I'm trying to get through to you, and you think I'm flaky? Well, I think you're bourgeois, and I don't like you. Bye."

But I didn't stay with Jack because I really didn't want to be riding around in somebody's Rolls-Royce, listening to Pat Benatar. It was just not my idea of a good time. And whenever I tried to put on the records I liked, everybody thought I was so adolescent. You know, immature and freaky.

I don't know, rock & roll is for when you're a kid anyway. Rock & roll is like a kid's game, you know? A lot of it is based on that kick out the jams thing—this release of all this pent up energy and frustration and anger and desire for attention that you have when you're that age.

I mean, who was this news for? It was news for the wrong reasons. It was like, here's the Pistols making front-page news in England every time they burp and fart, which they did a lot. So it was reported in America, and it couldn't help but define punk rock, because as soon as something is on the seven o'clock news and on the front page of the newspapers, then that is punk rock.

So I wound up hanging out with these kids from Paris—I wanted to know all about Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo, and they wanted to

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know all about Johnny Thunders. They'd been reading about all this punk stuff, right?

I said, "No, I wanna know about, you know, Godard."

They said, "Godard? Who cares about Godard? We wanna know about Blondie!"

Like, I'm on this European trip and they're on this New York trip, and I'm their representative punk—along with Amos. It was wild.

was about real freedom, personal freedom. It was also about doing anything that's gonna offend a grown-up. Just being as offensive as possible. Which seemed delightful, just euphoric. Be the real people we are. You know? I just loved it.