“I haven’t been this excited about rock and roll in at least 10 years. First it was isolated artists, then a vanguard, but now it looks like a movement.”

“I’m jumpin’ around and crawlin’ on the floor and realizin’ shit I’m better than those idiots up there. So I sez, ‘Hey if they can do it we can do it, right guys?’ ‘Right!’ ”

“When I first saw the Ramones I said, ‘This is the best band in the world.’ I went up to them after the set and ‘You guys are great! You guys are great!’ That’s all I could say.”

The Clash and the Pistols have established social realism as an essential part of punk ideology, but this does not make their music the “direct expression of the contemporary working class.”