Sonny Sandoval Quotes

When I was a kid, I was into hardcore music. The scene in New York was tiny. Every person hanging out was in a band and played at the A7 Club. There was not much rehearsing or anything. Just doing.

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.

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.

It isn't a band. It's bigger than a band. It's a lifestyle.

I came to New York for the first time with Peter Buck at age 19. We spent a week living out of a van on the street in front of a club in the West 60s called Hurrah. It's where Pylon played. I saw Klaus Nomi play there. And Michael Gira's band before he did Swans-they all wore cowboy boots and were so cool and had great hair. I was so jealous.

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.

There are always young bands playing in their garages. A lot of punk rock is not going to be in the mainstream. It's below the radar. The beauty of it is that you're not supposed to always know. It's subterranean.

Punk rock really came out of N.Y. as a philosophy before the groups were ever recorded. I had a kind-of intellectual interest in the idea of creating a new scene that could be a grassroots thing.

The jury had down right contempt for punk rock grass roots ethics.

When I was 16, I used to hang out at the Nambucca pub in North London and see The Libertines play live.

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

The Midwest breeds funny, eccentric people, to varying degrees. You play shows not because you're expecting to get a record deal, but to do something fun outside of mowing lawns. Everything else is just gravy... Or mustard.

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

I get a thrill meeting kids who are into alternative music.

But I just love that music scene so much, and I enjoy really being around those artists and watching them even more than I do performing, because they are a whole group of people that do it because they love music.

I spent my teens in northern California listening to KALX, KUSF, and KFJC, finding people that changed my life.

We first started to rent old VFW halls in Philly or whatever; we rented kegs and did parties and played our own music. We had to find a way to do it because nobody else was helping us, and I think now it's important to keep those dialogues happening, those parties happening.

Even before the mainstream knew about P.O.D., we were going for several years underground. For me, those were the times where it really was about the music and really about the fan base.

Playing in London in 1979 was exciting: it was at the start of new wave, the transition period after punk, and there were a lot of radical, fashionable young people on the streets and in the venues.

I didn't really want to be in the lifestyle without the music. And I didn't want to be in the music without the lifestyle.

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

I was a failed grunge kid who was too nerdy to totally get down with rock.

I loved all that riot-grrl scene and Nation of Ulysses and Bikini Kill and Huggy Bear. I loved it. It was the moment sort of first growing up where bands had stopped looking like roadies.

We know that listening to Black Veil Brides, wearing Black Veil Bride shirts, or being in Black Veil Brides isn't always the most popular thing in the world.

We think of the Warped Tour as kind of like everyone's big birthday party.