High Priestess of Punk

Our philosophy was that rock and roll should be a cultural voice and not glamorized. It didn't belong to the rich and famous; it belonged to the people. It was the perfect place for us to excite each other and incite people and develop what we were doing. It's sad for me to see CBGB's close down because it really hasn't changed at all, that's the other beautiful thing. The same murals are up on the wall. It hasn't gotten any better. The sound system hasn't really gotten much better. The smell hasn't gotten much better. It's the same place. Actually I think Lenny and I are going to play there on May Day. It's just a little job. We're just going to play to thank CBGB's, thank the walls, thank the stage. We're just doing it to touch those walls again.

Do you have any big plans for the Meltdown music festival?

I'm just hoping there'll be a mix of veterans and new people. I would really like for everybody to draw something new from themselves, the best of themselves and have it be as I understood rock and roll when I was young, as being a cultural voice. So, there'll be poetry, a certain amount of politics and a lot of fun, irreverence and also reverence. We're going to salute William Blake and have a night of "Songs of Innocence," perhaps things for children and lullabies. And then "Songs of Experience" another night, which will have a lot of electric guitar. I'd like to see people reading. Reading from "Moby Dick," reading from great classics, reading from the Qur'an.

Do you think rock and roll as you understood it when you were young is still rock and roll as you hear it today?

Rock and roll as I understood it was a voice. You heard it on FM radio and it was really good. You had people that were provocative but we all loved the same music. When a Jimi Hendrix record came out everybody in America was waiting for it. Everybody in America was waiting for the new Bob Dylan record. Now there's just so much information and so much between the listener and the voice. There's so much image; there's all this music TV, all this lifestyle, that to actually be spoken to, there's a bigger gap than ever. Across the board everything is so materialistic and so sexualized and there's so much violence that the core issues of humanity are sort of lost.

So maybe rock is on the brink of a new movement?