Johnny Ramone was the first guitarist who blew me away -- he showed me that maybe I could do something with the guitar. People like Hendrix also blew me away, but I felt like that was something I could never do. But when I saw Johnny and the Ramones, it was different.
After getting into the Ramones, my attitude became one of using that guitar as simply a noise generator. I didn't have any ambition to learn the guitar; I just wanted to generate noise like he did. On the surface, [his playing] seemed really simple, but there was a never-ending depth to it, especially on Leave Home, which is my favorite record. It's somewhere between stupid and genius. Even though they were part of punk, the Ramones were much more sophisticated. Most punk players were tied to Chuck Berry-isms. Johnny wasn't. It made him more radical.
