Jonesy

Steve Jones and John Lydon are talking. It's a Friday in March, a cool L.A. midafternoon; they're sitting in a small, dark studio at Indie 103.1, the Los Angeles-Orange County FM station where Jones has done his two-hour show, Jonesy's Jukebox, five days a week since 2004. Jones is wearing a yellow T-shirt that says I Can't Live Without My Radio and a pair of thick-framed horn-rims; Lydon's got a purple sweatshirt and spiky hair the color of dirty brass, and they've just discovered that the pro-choice movement has missed its chance to elect them its musical spokesmen.

Specifically, they're talking about "Bodies," the second track on Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, the album they released in 1977, when Lydon was still rampaging the countryside as Johnny Rotten and Jones was working his guitar like a howitzer. "Bodies" follows a girl who has a backroom abortion:

Dragged on a table in a factoryIllegitimate place to beIn a packet in a lavatoryDie little baby screamingBody screaming fucking bloody messNot an animalIt's an abortionBody! I'm not an animalMommy! I'm an abortion

"But what do you think? Do you think abortions should be, er, up to you...up to you, the woman?" Jones asks.

"I've always thought it's up to the woman," Lydon says. "You know, though, the 'Bodies' song, I mean now that's from all sides of the border, right? But leave it open to the listener."

"Yeah," says Jones.

"Right? I'm not proabortion or anti, I'm pro the choice of the woman," Lydon says.

"Actually, that should be their theme song, shouldn't it?" says Jones.

"It should be."

"'Bodies.'"

"It should be," Lydon says, "because it comes at it from a real commonsense point of view. You can't just willy-nilly go out and have an abortion. You got to know that it is a screaming bloody mess you're leaving on the table. A potential future human being. But that's a lot better than raising a child that's unwanted, right? And I ain't seen much good come out of orphanages and foster homes. I ain't. I've seen wounded people...."

A few days later, over breakfast, telling me about trying to quit drugs and alcohol some two decades ago, Jones says, "Relapsing, coming back, relapsing. I didn't understand, I was so damaged. I didn't understand what all 12 steps meant. I shagged every bird in the meetings. That was my 12 steps--12 birds at a time! Somehow it worked. I've always been a damaged person, really, and that wasn't a good time. But it worked."

The wounds are still visible; he makes no attempt to hide them. But all the same, it's rare to find a man who has found his sort of similarly visible, successful repair. At the very least he has the ease of someone who has discovered some answer to the question of what you do with the rest of your days if, by age 22, you had already lived the two years of your life that were all but surely to define you for the rest of it. There ain't no moonlight after midnight, maybe, but as it turns out, there might be a few delights left in the darkness. Or even a new morning.

"I think we're going to aggravate the fuck out of everyone with this," Jones is saying. "I'm sure I aggravate the fuck out of some people." Today he's got on a T-shirt that says The Profession Of Violence; his west London accent offers no concession to the quarter century or so he's lived in California. "Well, they can call the bleeding station and complain. Complain! You idiots! You fools! You Jacobites!" he says, and breaks into giggles. We're at the Indie 103.1 studio, on Wilshire Boulevard. It's a Wednesday, two days after the New York awards ceremony for new inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (The Sex Pistols were one of the five acts inducted this year, but they declined to show up to pick up their awards; on Lydon's website they published a handwritten note that read, in part, "Next to the Sex Pistols rock and roll and that hall of fame is a piss stain. Your museum. Urine in wine. Were [sic] not coming.") Today it's occurred to Jones to fill up the two hours of his show entirely with songs that have boys in the title--this is what he thinks will irritate his listeners--and he's brought 20 or 30 CDs from home that he gathered that morning for the show. Over the next two hours he'll play Dave Edmunds ("Me and the Boys"), David Bowie ("Boys Keep Swinging") and so on, as well as give away tickets to a gig by a reconstructed version of the Cars (the contest, as always, is to call in with the name of the song Jones plays on his guitar and whistles into the microphone; today it's the Who's "I'm a Boy"), improvise a song on the air while accompanying himself on the guitar (in keeping with the theme, this impromptu performance has to do with boys--boys with toys, the joys of boys; also boys on steroids, Siegfried & Roy and hemorrhoids belonging to boys) and play with a loopy floral designer from Munich on the phone (using any opportunity to get the words concentration and camp into the conversation).

A colleague of Johnny Carson's once said that, on TV, the Tonight Show host was "the visible eighth of an iceberg called Johnny Carson." On the radio, Jones sometimes seems as if he's about nine eighths of an iceberg called Steve Jones. He babbles and cackles, mocks himself, recounts his weekends, spills secrets, ruminates on his own victories and defeats; and pronounces himself the man who invented punk, the man who invented music. "I am the Man Who Can," he likes to say, or sometimes sing: "For two hours a day, do what he wants.... I am the Pontiff of Pop, the Sire of Wilshire...the Licker of Liechtenstein...the Sheriff of Rockingham." He'll make himself laugh, let the air go entirely dead when he has nothing particular to say, banter with his producer, Mark Sovel (whom Jones calls Mr. Shovel), answer his cell phone ("I'm on the air, you idiot"), grouse at considerable length about having gotten fat or the onset of a head cold or just having woken up in general grumpiness, slip into vaguely surrealist associative word and memory chains. The music he plays is from his own (continued on page 134) Jonesy(continued from page 98) collection, never programmed and usually not particularly planned; he often chooses which song to play next a few seconds before the previous one ends. Much of it is old stuff, like the Damned or the Buzzcocks or Sham 69, Cliff Richard to the Stooges, the Faces to T. Rex. But on occasion he also plays new bands he has come across. Or he'll devote a day's show entirely to reggae songs. Or anything from Curtis Mayfield to Philip Glass. He usually improvises his own song at the beginning of the show, about how he ate sausages that morning and his general thoughts on breakfast meats, or about how he is going to establish a religion with him as its god that will rid the world of all spastics, mongrels and imperfect physical specimens.

And he hosts what are possibly the weirdest, most wonderful guest spots this side of The Dean Martin Show. Sometimes he lets his guests talk and talk. Sometimes he's in the mood to tell them about himself. (Often the guests end up more interested in talking about Jones's life than their own.) Each of them, by the end of the show, is officially his new best friend.

Here is April 5, 2005, with Lisa Marie Presley:

"Now, you--you're what? You're not a Mormon. What are you?"

"I'm not really anything. I was never baptized, or anything."

"You do that other thing, though, what is it?"

"Scientology."

"What's that like?"

"It helps me."

"It's not a religion, is it?"

"Well, technically you can call it a religion, but it's not something you have to believe in--"

"I knew a girl who went there once. She wanted to meet a rich bloke. Is there people like that there?"

And September 6, 2005, talking about women with Paul Anka:

"I don't discriminate on age," says Anka.

"Oh, I do!" Jones says. "They've got to be bouncy."

"What, like in a diaper?"

"Anywhere from 29 to 30 is good for me. Have you tried the old magic pill?"

"Yeah, I tried it once. I don't need it yet, thank God."

"I've tried it once, Viagra, but you know, headaches. The big head started throbbing."

And with Stewart Copeland of the Police, April 4, 2006, about a party Copeland had three decades earlier:

"You and your mate Paul Cook stole a hat from my house," Copeland says.

"It must have been Cookie."

"Oh, was he sort of a kleptomaniac?"

"No, that was me."

Ten minutes or so later, Copeland tells him he feels the Sex Pistols started it all, burned down the walls of the record industry for a whole new generation of music.

"I'm here to thank you, Mr. Jones, for opening the door," he says.

"I'll buy you a hat."

•

"I actually get envious of youth," Jones says. We're sitting in the restaurant where he eats breakfast three or four times a week, an unassuming place on Santa Monica Boulevard with no hint of any sort of Los Angeles celebrity scene. Jones is having an oatmeal frittata with a side order of bacon. He is 50 years old. "I wish I was that age again, but I wish I had my head, my knowledge that I have now, then. If I did, I probably wouldn't do half the things I done, though. So who knows. But you fuckers who are still young--it's that innocence I resent now. And that fearlessness. I don't even like flying now. I get fucking panic attacks. I get fucking panic attacks, what is that?"

He used to give other people panic attacks. It's been a little more than 30 years since, as teenagers, he and Paul Cook founded the U.K.'s most prominent enemies of the state, the reigning bad gods of punk rock, the Sex Pistols, to be joined by Lydon in his brief incarnation as Johnny Rotten, Glen Matlock and, later on, Sid Vicious. Any revolution needs a set of villains who might be heroes and heroes who might be villains, and the Pistols were a furious open wound onstage, absolute insolence, a welter of confusion and rage and miserable comedy. "The Sex Pistols were 100 times more of a kick in the ass of a sagging culture than the Beatles," Lester Bangs wrote, and even Bangs--who is still, almost 25 years after his death, the underground king of rock critics, a man who was comfortable provoking a drug-addled Lou Reed to anger or making Holocaust jokes or claiming in print that his hero was Idi Amin--admitted that the Pistols made him uneasy ("Bodies" particularly made him squirm). The Pistols were surely discomforting; indeed, part of what made them so brilliant was a hysterical admixture of offensiveness and vulnerability, defensiveness and attack: Rotten hanging onto the microphone as if it were the only thing supporting him, gibbering and screaming, his thin voice full of deep mutilation and twitchy fury coming on top of the carpet-bombing arrogance, the unfailing assault, of Jones's guitar.

They lasted about two years, coughed out fewer than 20 songs and probably pissed more people off than any other band in history. It's hard to overstate the terror they struck in the hearts of the U.K.'s variable voices of authority and public morality. They were banned and beaten up, an elected official called for their deaths, and they were dropped by one label and then another. A 12-day tour of the U.S. ended them. Greil Marcus, writing in 1978 about the Pistols' final show, in San Francisco, was fascinated by Rotten's crooked brilliance--"We will see nothing like him again"--and he noted Vicious's poses dutifully. But concerning the actual music, he was most interested in the drummer and the guitarist: "It was drummer Paul Cook and Steve Jones--somehow revitalizing every stance in the English book while sounding as if he were playing a guitar factory instead of a guitar--who made the noise," he wrote, "and together they were likely the only great two-man band in the history of rock and roll."

The Pistols began with Jones and Cook, boyhood friends who grew up in west London, with Jones as the vocalist. (Another guitarist, Warwick Nightingale, was dropped before they went public.) Jones was the only child of a hairdresser and a boxer; his father left the family when Jones was two, and his mother remarried a man with little interest in becoming a father, though Jones didn't know the man wasn't his real father for years. "He was like most guys," Jones says. "They want the woman, but they don't want the baggage. I was the baggage. And I was a pain in the ass." The baggage, already well on his way, grew into a proper delinquent. "Mostly theft and stupidness," he tells me. "Most of it was petty. Juvenile things. I got arrested 14 times. Eventually I was sent to a home in Banstead, for a year and a half. I actually enjoyed it. Then my parents moved to Battersea--before that we was just living in some basement in Shepherd's Bush, 13 Benbow Road. The three of us in one room, my mother and my stepfather and me. My bed was at the foot of their bed. It was one of them camp beds, and we had an outside toilet, we'd bathe in a tin bath and all use the same water. It was brutal. Like fucking Dickens or something. I didn't know any better. I just kept thinking, Why don't we ever get a place? Why doesn't anything good ever happen for us?"

He left home at 15, in 1970, moved in with a friend and then with Cook's family and quit school. "I went to school, but I didn't learn," he says. "I had no interest. It didn't make sense to me. I sat in the back with the black kids, and the stupid kids, and I'd just daydream and make noises in my head like music. Basically when I left school I couldn't read or write. It was terrible. I was embarrassed. If I ever had to sign anything, I was so embarrassed. Only up until 10 years ago, when I had some lessons. This girl would come over to teach me how to read and write. Before, if I had to go to a bank and sign a check, I'd be fucking shaking like I was doing something fucking dodgy, I'd be so embarrassed. Yeah, maybe Rotten tried to teach me or something, but I never learned properly. I only really learned when I had these lessons with this woman. Yeah. But I did it. Not bad for someone who's damaged."

Jones and Cook started getting a band together in 1972, and Jones began to outfit them with the necessities. That is, he stole everything. He picked up most of a drum kit from a BBC studio in Shepherd's Bush, a bass from somebody's parked van and two guitars from Rod Stewart's house. (Just for fun he also broke into Ronnie Wood's home and stole a fur coat, and he took a TV from Keith Richards's place.) "But maybe if I didn't have that drama, that horrible stepfather, I'd have ended up a bank clerk," he tells me, then thinks about it a moment and adds, "No. Thieving. A life of thieving, from cars to houses to banks. Robbing banks, whatever. And to prison. That's where I was headed." His crowning theft came from the stage of the Hammersmith Odeon, where he swiped every single microphone from a set being used to record a live show by David Bowie and his Spiders From Mars. (Mostly he stole from bands he admired, but on the radio show, talking about Genesis, he said, "I saw them once, at this place called the Surrey Rooms, in London, when I was like 15, and I had an opportunity to steal all of their guitars. And I thought, No, I'll watch them first, 'cause I might like them. If I steal their guitars, they won't be able to perform.... I regret not stealing their guitars.")

The full band came together in Sex, a clothing shop on the King's Road, run by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. McLaren signed on to manage them, and they soon picked up Matlock, to play bass, and a young green-haired Lydon, who auditioned by singing along to Alice Cooper on the jukebox. (Westwood had told McLaren to go get "that John" for a lead singer; after he found Lydon, she told him she'd meant John Simon Ritchie, later to be known as Sid Vicious. But it was too late, because McLaren knew he'd found something in his Rotten. Ritchie came by three weeks later, hoping to join the band. According to McLaren, he said by way of advertisement, "I can play the saxophone." It was only much later that they brought him on to play bass, which he couldn't play at all.)

McLaren went on to create his own myth of having manufactured a great con, proclaiming himself the architect of the Sex Pistols' every move: He insisted he had simply used his four young puppets to create a movement that was nothing more than his own little plaything. "I have brought you many things in my time," he says in the post-Rotten Pistols movie The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, "but the most successful of all was an invention of mine they called punk rock." It was a lie, but still a brilliant one.

"Everyone knows Malcolm's full of shit," Jones has said any number of times, and he's the one who likes him. But casual music fans don't know; they are probably more likely to recognize the punk fashions that came after the band or an image of Vicious's face on a T-shirt than the music. But McLaren seems to have changed--or at least modified--his tone. Talking with Jones on the show last year, he seemed comfortable with the notion that his boys had done their own thing musically and that he'd simply been the spin doctor who came across some kids calling themselves Q.T. Jones and the Sex Pistols. He suggested they drop the Q.T. and offered some initial organization, visionary publicity and image direction.

"You weren't faring that well," McLaren said to Jones. "And it was decided, at a certain point, after I think you molested John Cale's girlfriend down in Brighton, that you needed a singer."

That is, McLaren was there almost from the outset, but where the music went had little to do with him. "You were coming in with a whole 'nother angle--far, far more, I suppose, cutting-edge," he added. "Far more to do with creating--less a pop sound but rather something that was actually going to create something completely new. A sound that would really hurt people, that would annoy people, that would be stripped of all its slickness."

"Was you disappointed that we actually learned how to play after a while?" Jones asked. (He'd taken up the guitar only three months before the Pistols' first gig.)

"No, I always thought you could play. It just didn't seem as good a way of selling the idea. I never thought the industry should ever be sold a group that could play, because that would make you fit in too well. The whole point always was to not fit in with anyone."

"It didn't."

"And it didn't. And that, initially and ultimately, was its greatest success; it's because you didn't fit in--how you related to a legion of disaffected youth who equally didn't feel like they fit in."

•

For Jones, the early years after the Pistols broke up were mostly made up of the pursuit of sex and heroin--which he'd begun shooting after the breakup of the band, miserable that it was over and looking for something to fill the emptiness--in addition to session work with other musicians and a number of short-lived bands. He played with Johnny Thunders, the Clash and Joan Jett, before he and Cook formed a new band, the Professionals, in 1980. But by the summer of 1982 the Professionals were dead, and Jones stumbled on his own into another short-lived group, made up mostly of former members of Blondie. He was by then a full-fledged heroin addict. "I was out in L.A. after living in New York for a year," he says. "That whole Alphabet City thing, hustling. I drifted out here with this band Chequered Past two or three weeks before I was introduced to AA. I was staying with the singer of Chequered Past. And he actually kicked me out. I stole all his leather jackets and all his wife's bleeding stuff to get dope, so I couldn't go back there. I was basically sleeping on people's couches, trading Sex Pistols stories for it and stealing their TVs for a bag of dope. Homeless, no passport, no possessions, nothing but one pair of dirty old Levi's."

•

We're back in the same joint; today for breakfast Jones is having eggs Blackstone with an extra hamburger patty. He's been telling me about what he uses instead of drugs or alcohol, beginning with his losing his virginity at 13 at a gypsy fair and continuing with his lifelong pursuit of a version of the same high ever since. "I've backed up a little now that I'm 50," he says, "but I've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on prostitutes, fucked thousands of birds--oh, look at that...she's a piece of ass...no, no, I've seen her before, she's something--well, yeah, fucked some stunners, fucked some monsters, some degraded-looking things, almost bag ladies, out of desperation. And I can finally say that that bondage, that obsession, has been lifted. I still like it, but I'm not on that quest to put my cock in a hole like I did. Thank God. Look, she's sitting this way so she can look at me. There you go! She made out she don't care. I'm not imagining this, am I? Her boyfriend knows who I am, I've seen him talking about me. I'm not delusional, am I? You get some people who think everyone must acknowledge them. I'm not one of those, am I?"

He's not. He likes to play at arrogance ("I am a higher being!") but mostly to mock himself, to mock rock stars turned into caricatures of the breed. Sex is, however, surely one of his favorite topics. He speaks on the air unabashedly about his preferences ("bubble butts"), discusses his own desires without hesitation (and sometimes almost without end). Here he is on March 6, 2006, talking to Rosanna Arquette, who spends most of the interview encouraging him to consider trying a real relationship:

"I did therapy for six years. You think I need more, though, don't you?" Jones says.

"Well, you're not in a relationship, and you said you get to a certain point and then you stop," says Arquette.

"Yeah, the beginning," says Jones.

And then, as they discuss a music documentary Arquette directed, Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders comes up:

"She's in my documentary, and as you know, she's one of my best friends in the world--"

"Do you know I had sex with Chrissie Hynde?"

"Oh, I'm--I did know that. But I wasn't going to tell everyone on the radio."

"Did she say I was good?"

"Uh--she loves you, Steve."

"Okay.... Do you know who else I had sex with?"

"I bet many."

"This is a shocker, though. Joan Jett."

"Wow.... Does she know that?"

"How dare you?" They begin laughing. "I think so. She was a big fan. And ever since she's only been with ladies."

"Maybe you broke her heart."

"Yeah, that's what happened."

Later, reading a list of people in her movies, Jones asks Arquette about musicians she didn't like; she says she liked everyone.

"Joni Mitchell was pretty amazing," she says.

"Joni Mitchell? What's her big hit? What's her song?"

Arquette offers some songs.

"What's she look like? Joni Mitchell. Blonde-headed bird.... She's blonde, right?"

"Yeah," says Arquette, laughing, "Joni Mitchell's blonde. You'd like her."

"I had it off with her, too," says Jones. "She had a nice big mouth."

"Oh my God--"

"She's not a lesbian now, is she?"

And then on March 22, 2006, with Chrissie Hynde, talking about her former husbands, her longtime vegetarianism and other topics:

"They all want me back, of course," Hynde says.

"Right," says Jones. "So when--"

"As you can well, I'm sure, vouch for that."

"Yes. So when we had sex, many years ago--we did, right?"

"Well--"

"I remember--"

"I think when I didn't have a place to live and I used to come around to the studio on Denmark, I think you used to give me one," says Hynde.

"Yeah, but I remember another spot as well. It was at a party in the bathroom. I remember that, too. What, I was that good, you don't remember?"

"It was that good?"

"Even I remember," says Jones.

"Do you know what I remember about that party?" says Hynde. "There was a--like a turkey or a chicken, and I ate a piece of it. I still remember that 'cause of course, you know, it was a huge violation for me, but I was so hungry, and after what I'd just been up to in the bathroom with you, I thought, you know, I was already working with the Man Downstairs, and I thought, Fuck the chicken." She remembers she's on live radio. "Sorry!"

Here's Hynde a little later on, as Jones extends the discussion:

"Bloody hell...if I'd known before I came in...you dirty--"

They play a Pretenders song together and then the Stooges' "I Wanna Be Your Dog," dispose of a suggestion by Arquette, who has joined the interview midway, that they ought to fall in love with each other, and eventually go back to talking about music.

"Well," Hynde says, "then when that punk thing happened, I knew I could get in there without it being too much of a novelty, being a chick. Of course it served me well. I've never--it made it easier being a girl because guys would carry my guitars, tune them and stuff."

"I never carried your guitar."

"I'll bet you did."

"I'll bet I didn't. I'd carry it now, though."

He probably wouldn't--or at least he wouldn't do it hoping for anything in return. ("Twenty to 30--no birds over 30," he tells me; Hynde says on the air that they are too old for each other.)

Talking about refusing to go to the Hall of Fame ceremony in March, Jones says, "If they'd offered you medical or something, I could understand, but otherwise, fuck it." But old rock stars don't get offered health insurance. What they do get offered, as if this is any surprise, are the favors of all sorts of women. Within an hour of meeting Jones for the first time, I watch a waitress stumble through trying to offer him a blow job ("For free," she says, a little confused. "Not interested," he says after she's gone). The offers keep coming all week. "That shallow, meaningless sex, I enjoy that. I still enjoy that, that's the worst. Sex addiction--well, that don't work anymore. That obsessiveness, needing it every night, that's not true anymore." At which point the restaurant's pretty hostess comes over to flirt a bit, and we forget what we're talking about entirely.

"When I got out here," he says once we've figured it out again, "it was the big-hair bands, and I'd go out on the Sunset Strip. I'd just park outside the Rainbow on my motorbike, and I used to just get birds on the back of my bike and bring 'em back up to my place and then right back. There was so much pussy. I didn't get off the bike. I just sat there. I didn't even have to speak most of the time. I looked the part, anyway. That weren't really me, that long-hair thing, but I was so into pussy that I'd do anything to get my needs met."

This is his usual question for me at breakfast--"Did you get your needs met last night?"--and Jones has little trouble achieving it himself. "Well, I've quit everything else," he says. "That and food keep me going."

Yes, that and food. But also, to be honest, the show. Before Indie 103.1 came along, Jones had put out two solo albums, spent some time producing bands and playing with other groups and solo artists--Iggy Pop, Bob Dylan and members of Guns n' Roses, not to speak of Don Johnson and Johnny Depp--as well as doing two Sex Pistols reunion tours, in 1996 and 2003. But none of it particularly seemed to lead him to feel that the great part of his life hadn't essentially ended in 1979.

That lasted until 2004, when a friend called to ask if he wanted to be involved with a new radio station. "I said, 'I want to be a DJ,'" he says. "Out of the blue. Never thought about it before. Never crossed my mind." He was very clear about his rules from the outset, however: "I said, 'This is what I want to do. I want to play songs I want to play. I want to say what I want to say. You let me do that, we can be in business.' I said, 'Even if the show does well or the station does well, no one comes to me a year later to give me Limp Bizkit songs to play or whatever.' And they said, 'Okay, deal.'"

The deal has worked out well for Indie 103.1: Jones is its franchise player without question, its superstar and a growing favorite in the town. He's regularly on all the L.A. media's best-of lists; every kid with an indie-rock band in the city (and in L.A., as many kids have bands as hope to be movie stars) seems to be dreaming of his or her guest spot on the show. His fans seem terrified of missing a single show--they might miss a bit of his life. "It's the weirdest thing," he says. "Cops, taxi drivers, limo drivers. Regular joes. You got it all--and yeah, a lot of hipsters. But I knew I was onto a good thing when a mate of mine came to L.A. and got in a cab, and the cabdriver was listening to it. He says, 'I love this Jonesy guy, this Jonesy,' he says! I love that, this guy who never heard of the Sex Pistols. It's amazing for me to get a second shot at something. And it's me own, too. I'm not on the coattails of anyone."

That the show is his own thing makes Jones particularly happy. The Sex Pistols myth is, to be sure, hardly his sole property. "Well, I mean, it's always a picture of John and Sid, even though I started the band," he says. "Which is cool. I don't want to be it. I have no resentments. That's what we did together, and we needed all of us." But this is the way he does it on his own, which, for one of the accidental founders of a movement, is the essence of that movement. "Jerry Lee Lewis--he was punk. Beethoven was punk," Jones says after breakfast, somewhere in rural Beverly Hills. We've ended up taking a hike through one of the canyons, which perhaps doesn't seem very punk rock. But it's what he wanted to do, and that's the point. "They did something new, or at least something that was theirs, and no one told them how to do it. Punk to me was just doing your own thing, not doing what anyone else told you to. Just doing it the way you--you yourself--thought was right and good."