O.K., I'm a rock critic. I also write and record music. I write poetry, fiction, straight journalism, unstraight journalism, beatnik drivel, mortifying love letters, death threats to white jazz critics signed 'The Mau Maus of East Harlem,' and once a year my own obituary (latest entry: 'He was promising...').

I was in high school (oh, I told you - that was kind of where they put you when they didn't know what to do with you - when you were too big for the Kiddie Kok…

Things started to go downhill. Instead of singing about taking tea with Mary Jane and boppin' your dingus on ol' Sweet Slit Annie it was Help me God I don't kn…

The top rockers have a mythic aura about them, the 'superstar,' and that's a basically unhealthy state of things, in fact it's the very virus that's fucking up…

The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper-whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.

I write just because the fire of my emotion is burning. Had I not, I would not have been able to find peace.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.