I lost my mind. It was so fucking nasty and sexy. Dirty music.

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“I was sitting there and watching the Cramps, they were out of tune and falling all over the place. It was a trainwreck, so when they finished their audition, Hilly told them that they had failed and they were practically crying. I told them they could play at Max's, as long as they showed up with a tuning machine. They came down a couple of days later and Jayne will tell you, people were looking at me with that expression of what the hell was I thinking? I said, "Just wait, you will see." Suicide played on the same bill as the Cramps and it was a perfect match up. You have the hillbilly version and the New York City Times Square version.” Lux Interior: "We opened for Suicide a lot. We couldn't believe it. Marty was great at what he did, but Alan ... if somebody got up to go to the bathroom, he'd leap up and take the mic stand and block their path with it. He'd do stuff like that all the time intimidating the audience. It could get really scary sometimes."

'gimme some echo and some fuzz and some garbage can sound.'

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The great thing about the Pretty Things was that they didn't give two shits for blues purity, R&B purity, or any other kind of purity, except perhaps when it came to their drugs. They were therefore conceptually free to aesthetically amplify the physical uses to which distortion and proto power chord riffing could be put. Perhaps one downing the PTs was the Downliners Sect who indicated via their roughed up, impolite and impolitic take on the Chess label output that they did not give even a single shit for blues "purity." 

makin' out, dancin' the frug, the swim and the mashed potatoes

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Things went from 35mm to the full 70mm in issue 15 with 'Mutant Monster Beach Party'. It was filmed in photographs and featured Debbie Harry as The Beach Bunny and Joey Ramone as the surfer boy. "Joey helped write scenes in 'Mutant Monster Beach Party' he wrote the scene where a UFO picks him up and takes him to the bikers. He also wrote some of the lyrics for the theme song. He ended up using them later on in Danny Says, 'You can't go surfing because it is twenty below." This example of paper cinema featured a host of guest stars appearing as themselves, including Andy Warhol, John Cale, Lester Bangs and various members of Blondie, the Patti Smith Group, Dictators and Voidoids. Great fun, although it totally bombed when it came to sales. "'Monster Mutant Beach Party' pretty much put us out of business. Both photo story issues were our worst sellers. We put them out there and nobody bought them. They are our most popular issues now, but at the time they were too radical even for our readers."

They were weird and different and didn't play songs like everybody else

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Lester Bangs: Rolling Stone had flown me up to San Francisco to check me out, since I had been writing for them for about six months. I guess they wanted to see if I was executive timber. I guess I wasn't, because not only did I get moved from Greil Marcus's to Langdon Winner's house after about two days, but I thought it was as curious that they sat around, not even smoking pot, but listening to Mother Earth and Creedence with absolute seriousness, as they were bewildered by my penchant for guzzling whiskey all day while blasting 'Sister Ray' at top volume ... to make a dismal story mercifully short, I discovered a magazine in Detroit called Creem, whose staff was so crazy they even put the Stooges on the cover. Of every issue! So I left my job and school and girlfriend and beer-drinking buddies and moved to Detroit, where my brand of degenerate drool would be not only tolerated but outright condoned, and over the five years I worked at Creem we used our basic love for it to exploit the punk aesthetic and stance in just about every way humanly possible.

Joey was born with a malformed Siamese twin growing out of his back

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Grandpa Al Lewis’s politics were radical and to the left. There in the living room, with his cigar and classic New York accent, Lewis argued for the abolishment of New York’s harsh Rockefeller drug laws and the establishment of universal health care. John wasn’t into it.

“You give these lazy immigrants something free like that and you’ll never get rid of them.”

“Who wants to get rid of them except you?” Lewis said. “They built the country. Do you know how many Chinese immigrants died pounding out the Union Pacific Railroad, my friend? Hundreds!”

I had to laugh hearing John warn us about immigrants taking free stuff. All his T-shirts came from the band’s merchandise. He never under any circumstances bought underwear or socks. His mother always bought him a ton of them for Christmas and that was all he ever needed. John’s yearly wardrobe budget was zero dollars and zero cents.

Grandpa Al was more than a left-winger. He was an eccentric and one with a delusion here and there. He told us he served on the legal defense team of the 1920s anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. There was no doubt Grandpa would have if he could have, but he was about eleven years old at the time. He also informed us that in the sixties he met Charles Manson, who babysat his sons. “He was a gentleman!” Grandpa said. Hearing this, Dee Dee started talking about his own sons, who didn’t even exist, and about his fictional days fighting the Vietcong. Someone should have grabbed a tape recorder, because this was an album.

taking the Yardbirds’ sound and reducing it to this goony fuzztone clatter

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my favorite nights were just getting drunk and walking around the East Village kicking over garbage cans. Just the night. Just the night. Just that it would be the night again. And you could go out, you know? It just seemed glorious. And you’d be humming these great songs and anything could happen, and it was usually pretty good … We were into this Urban Pioneer thing, which was a bunch of kids born in the suburbs to middle-class families, moving back into the city, because they thought the city should live. The city I loved everybody else hated: it was totally deserted, people fled when the sun went down. It was run down, but we thought it was beautiful at the time of youth when you’re prone to romanticism.