Dito Montiel Quotes

When we first started playing shows, we were all 17. Everybody started somewhere. There were guys throwing shows in condemned houses and backyards just for the love of music and for the love of what bands were standing for.

High school and college were my punk, formative years. I was playing hardcore, learning to be a musician. In bands, you tour, but you're paid nothing; you're playing to 50 people in a basement, sleeping in a van, and you love it.

When I came up in a band - not just in a band, but a kind of underground DIY community - there was such a clear cut distinction between what pop was and what not pop was in very simplistic terms.

I loved Fugazi, the D.C. hardcore band, because they always did everything themselves. They had their own label, and the CDs always cost nine dollars, the T-shirts always cost eight dollars, the shows always cost five dollars, no major label.

Since I loved underground music, I tried to carve a space for feminism within it. Those were my hopes.

There weren't a lot of career opportunities in crazy-fast hardcore punk, so you didn't have a lot of ambition, just the love and passion to play music with your friends.

SDC has a great reputation for putting live music on stage.

There I met Gordon Jackson and Dave Meredith who were playing in local bands.

I really want to do a book on the history of the no-wave music scene in New York, how it extended out and formed lots of other things. It was such a great visual culture.

It was all about music, about getting your friends to come and see you play. I don't see that same intimacy happening very much today.

The first Decline I did was out of sheer love and appreciation for the music. In 1977, it was more about bands, because punk was a new form of music. It was groundbreaking and political.

I'm the first to admit that we were totally dependent on a particular place and time... for us, seeing Minor Threat at the CBGB hardcore matinee was just as necessary a force in our lives as the Treacherous Three at Club Negril or the Funky Four + One More at the Rock Lounge.

Go out and support your local rock n' roll band.

All the serious bands, all the punks, came from Bristol.

Here in Ohio, the hardcore scene is a big thing, so some of our good friends are in hardcore bands. So we've had to figure out how the heck we get these people to respect us.

Back in 1981, the chances of a punk-rock girl band from L.A. doing what we did was completely nil.

The U.K. trio Let's Wrestle doesn't make music for its art, but for its attitude.

We didn't have a garage to rehearse in. We had to aggravate the folks in the house. But I got a chance to play in a beer joint, and that's how it started.

When I started out, I wanted to be the kind of artist who could play the CMA Music Festival and then turn around and play Bonnaroo, and I've managed to do both.

My first job in NYC was playing a gig in the early nineties at CBGBs.

I'm from Louisiana, and that's where I got my start, in Cajun music. There's a huge music scene down there centered around our culture. Those are people that are not making music for a living. They are making music for the fun of it. And I think that's the best way I could have been introduced to music.

If you're a new artist, practice your art and share it. Set up shop somewhere, whether it's a street corner or a coffee shop. I got my start in a coffee shop that didn't even have live music. I wanted to play in coffee shops that did have live music, but I didn't have an audience.

Punk is not just the sound, the music. Punk is a lifestyle.

I didn't really see the British punk movement, if that's what it was, as wildly original, because I had been listening so intently to all the New York music since 1973, really.

In cities like New York and Austin, there's much more of a social context for music than in other places.