Brenda: Have you ever considered yourself a punk? You’ve played with X for many years, but I don’t think of you as a punk.

Billy: I consider myself a Punk Rocker. I think X is a Punk Rock band, and the Ramones are THEE Punk Rock band. I don’t think Hard Core bands like Black Flag are Punk Rock…I’m not knocking them; I just don’t think that’s Punk Rock.

Brenda: What was it like in the band’s early days and playing all those shows to punks?

Billy: Which early days? The Early early days?? Back then, we knew almost everybody in the audience. In the beginning, the mainstream media left us alone and pretty much just ignored us. The USA had just switched to Formatted Radio, where each station only played one particular type of music…Classic Rock, Country Rock, Disco, etc. They were all programmed by the same computer. Unfortunately, in the beginning, they had a category for each type of music that was currently popular, but they didn’t include a category for any new music. It took ten years for them to come up with the Alternative Music category that covered the New Wave and Second-Generation Punk in the 80s. As a result, the U.S. Punk scene was a vibrant but very underground, Urban scene. In major cities, it spread through the community largely through word of mouth and college radio stations. Also, in a number of large cities, there would be one little Indie radio station that survived by playing what no other stations would play. KROQ in Los Angeles, WBCN in Boston, etc. Even today, when we tour, it’s obvious which areas had an Indie or college station that played Punk and which areas didn’t.

For the first few years, smaller cities were completely oblivious to Punk Rock, and for the most part, so were the suburbs. However, there was a big shift in the scene in the late 70s when the kids in the suburbs started discovering Punk Rock and showing up in Punk clubs on the weekends. Unfortunately, a lot of them had been introduced to Punk Rock through Malcolm Mclaren’s intentionally negative publicity campaigns for the Sex Pistols and by the exploits of Sid and Nancy and their contemporaries, which of course, the American media devoured, suddenly finding Punk Rock to be very newsworthy after all. Hordes of suburban Punks started showing up at Punk shows, expecting to find all the violence and craziness they’d heard and read about. Very little of that nonsense had existed in the original Punk scene, but of course, these little shits brought it all with them. For a time, violence at Punk shows became an actual problem.

Another result of the suburban invasion was that suddenly, there was a correct way to be Punk, and there were actual rules that had to be followed…at least according to these younger suburban Punks who were now the official experts on anything and everything Punk. I’ve always felt that the Punk Rock scene ended the second there was a wrong way to do it and that Punk was all over by 1980. Interestingly, the early 1980s saw a lot of young Americans discovering what they thought was Punk Rock.