DIY Music Scene Quotes

My mom was in a punk rock band called The Trash Women, and they toured and all of that. She had me when she was 17.

I started an all-girl punk band when I was 14, and I was the drummer, not the singer.

I remember ordering records out of the Dischord catalog in the '80s, and there would be a handwritten note.

Most bands are commercial enterprises. But I'm not in one of those bands.

I don't know how old I was when I first started going to shows, maybe 14 or 15, but very quickly, I discovered Dischord Records in D.C. and loved all the music on that catalog. I was a big Rites of Spring fan, Minor Threat, of course.

When I was growing up, it was a lot of punk and hardcore music going on in legion halls and firehouses, and we'd play those shows, and it was very Jersey. It was very suburban, and there's just a great pride there.

It all started in a local park in El Paso called Madeleine Park. At a ditch, a very small ditch, that everybody used to go skateboarding in. It was me and Jim Ward and an acoustic guitar. He and I constructed the very first phases of At The Drive In.

When Dream Theater first started, we were touring in a van and playing clubs.

When I first moved to New York in 2006, I spent most of my time hanging out at and going to shows at a punk house in Crown Heights called The Fort where, amongst many roommates, my friend Johnny lived. Johnny loves The Germs, the legendary L.A. punk band fronted by the late, great Darby Crash.

People are making their own records in their houses. It's an exciting time.

I left Edinburgh to follow the London punk scene in 1978, singing and playing guitar in various bands. My income was sporadic, so I did anything to eke out some kind of subsistence - laying down slabs, working as a kitchen porter.

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.

There's a lot of people out there who have seen us once somewhere in a pub or heard our songs late night on radio. We'd done four years of it before we'd even released a single. It's put us in good stead.

I started playing in punk-rock bands and touring when I was 15, so I missed high school.

There are a lot of bands who claim to be punk and they only play the music, they have no clue what it's all about. It's a lifestyle. It's not about popularity and all that crap.

Bad Brains is one of my all-time favorite punk bands.

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.

So, we just kind of created our own thing and that's part of the beauty of Athens: is that it's so off the map and there's no way you could ever be the East Village or an L.A. scene or a San Francisco scene, that it just became its own thing.

I mean Black Flag happened. I was lucky. I don't think I could have put together something with one percent of that oomph on my own.

I think the thing you're seeing now with the music industry is that the people who have tight-knit communities are now able to really hold each other up because of the internet tools. And the really top-down pyramid scheme of major labels and typical superstars isn't sustainable anymore because the system has collapsed.

I was seeing kids my age playing shows at their parents' houses or the couple of all-ages venues that existed. I feel like I saw so many different kinds of music that I wouldn't have discovered on my own.

The only person out there worthy of mixing political views and music is Jello Biafra.

My vision of punk rock was these dudes who were spitting on the audience and moshing. That's why I kind of left that scene. Then I see all these people around my same age or between 17 and 25 that were making music themselves in their own town. They weren't just singing, but creating. I see them putting out this music where there are tons of women involved in the scene and involved in the bands.