Great Punk Quotes

[dave]

Damn, computer's fucking with me. In the meantime please enjoy this article I just found:

A History of Punk

[dave]

ed sanders

Punks reminded me of armadillos: people whose attire was a kind of armor to protect themslelves from the tentacles arising from the iridium to get them.

-from legs mcneil and gillian mccain’s please kill me

[dave]

Mark E. Smith & The Fall

“If you can’t deliver it like a garage band, fuck it.” -Mark E. Smith

“It’s possible that John can form some kind of nightmarish career out of his enthusiasm for unlistenable records.”- john peel’s school report, 1950’s

“The Fall’s Peel Box, and by association, their recorded output in general, reads as a secret history of the last 3 decades of popular music.” - stewart lee, the wire primers

[dave]

john doe

People knew Devo for some reason, so that’s what hicks would yell out of their pickups to slag you: “De-e-e-v-o!” or “F-a-a-g!” You could elicit that response  by wearing tight black jeans and a leather jacket with a regular haircut. Here we were in Hollywood, where you’re supposed to be able to do anything and not faze people, and the general public was offended by this style. Everyone I knew just scratched their head, wondering what it was that pissed people off so much, but it gave you the feeling that you were fighting the good fight.

-from we got the neutron bomb

[dave]

The Butthole Surfers

The influences were clear; the cacophonous jungle howl of the Birthday Party; the Fall’s caustic chants; Pere Ubu’s art-punk; the synthetic mystique of the Residents; the eerie, bleak side of Public Image, Ltd.; and the turgid, rambling assault of Flipper.
-Micheal Azerrad on the Butthole Surfers, from Our Band Could Be Your Life

When an interviewer asked why Haynes electronically manipulated his voice so much, Leary explained, “It’s just because, y’know, he’s got knobs and he can do it. It’s like, why does a dog lick its balls?”

[dave]

Killing Joke

It was while rampaging across Europe that Killing Joke hooked up with Konrad “ Conny” Plank, the legendary producer/madman who had famously produced Can, Neu!, and Moebius. Plank provided the inspiration for their third album, Revelations, encouraging Ferguson’s love of the occult, and drawing out for the first time the facination with Masonic imagery which later inspired a number of songs. […] Coleman developed a career as composer in residence for the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra ( the country where he now lives most of the time)
-from Al Spicer’s rough guide to punk

[dave]

michael azerrad, from Our Band Could Be Your Life

“The 80s were a little like the 50s- it was sort of a conservative era, money conscious, politically nasty, and Republican… And usually that means there’s going to be a good underground. There’s something to get pissed off with communally.”

-mission of burma drummer peter prescott

“It’s like living in the 60s again. It was like a nihilist hippie movement, that’s all it was.”
-thurston moore on punk

“People got this idea that ultimately what mattered was the quality of what you were doing and how much importance you gave to it, regardless of how widespread it became or how many records it sold.” - lee renaldo

It was about viewing as a virtue what most saw as a limitation. […]
You could jam econo on your job, in your buying habits, in your whole way of living. You could take this particulear approach to music and apply it to just about anything else you wanted to. You could be beholden only to yourself and the values and people you respected. You could take charge of your own existence. Or as the Minutemen put it in a song, “Our band could be your life.”
-from our band could be your life

[dave]

Peter Prescott

Punk rock is unique and individual and is not for everybody, so almost by definition it can’t be popular.

[dave]

Henry Rollins

As long as I tell the truth I feel that nobody can touch me.

[Bobby]

"Guiness is what I drink when I'm not drinking." -Shane Macgowan

[Justin Scarred]

"You've got to decide, then, whether you want to just keep repeating yourself, in the hope that you keep those first people interested, or whether you want to be true to yourself. Which in some sense is more Punk Rock than anything."

-Elvis Costello

"Punk can be a mental ghetto.  People get into it and make all these rules and pretty soon they’re worse than born again Christians and have stupid three hour conversation about things like, which band is a sellout and is straight edge cool or un-cool and it’s just completely idiotic.  So punk has taught me the aesthetic of the outsider, which is great, but it’s also taught me not to get involved in petty little cults." - Jesse Michaels

[John Battles]

 " If you say Punk is not Rock 'n' Roll ,  well , that's wrong. And , if you say Punk is not a form of Rock'n'Roll , well , that's wrong. Punk , to me , is the art of cramming into one second what it used to take all night for us to do. When The Elevators would play with , say , The Conqueroo , at the end of the show, when we'd both played our sets , you HAD to jam. Don't even think of what kind of Hell they'd raise if you did'nt jam.".

"I like The Sex Pistols , sure. They remind me a lot of Fiorello La Guardia. My favorite Sex Pistols song? Hmmmmm. I have it. The First Sex Pistols Song I ever heard? I guess "Hot Cars".

"Somebody sent me a Talking Heads tape.   It's hard to listen to !". 

Roky Erickson.

[Ghislaine]

''you created the monster,not me''--John Lydon