"I was writing obscurely, a la Dylan, in those days. It’s from ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter.’ ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ To me, it was a beautiful poem. It never dawned on me that Lewis Carroll was commenting on the capitalist and social system. I never went into that bit about what he really meant, like people are doing with the Beatles’ work. Later, I went back and looked at it and realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the story and the carpenter was the good guy. I thought, Oh, shit, I picked the wrong guy. I should have said, ‘I am the carpenter.’ But that wouldn’t have been the same, would it? (singing) ‘I am the carpenter…"

"If you want to persuade people to give Frank Zappa a second go, you play them 'Trouble Every Day', it's one of the greatest songs ever, and it sounds like it could have been off one of the first two Velvet Underground albums. Again this is an album that Mark Smith played me. Just the other day I played 'Concentration Moon' in which he's having a go at the VU. He hated everyone, the Velvet Underground, the beatniks, the hippies… it was a landmark album because it was the end of hippie culture. People say it was after the stabbing at Altamont but musically this was it. It has the Beatles referenced in the pastiche on the cover. It's really fabulous, really cynical."

"As a very young kid, A Hard Days Night [editor’s note: by the Beatles, in case you’re an idiot] was a big deal. Probably, and when you say “my own money,” keep in mind I grew up very poor, so I didn’t have a lot of my own money; but I probably bought, like, Boston’s first album or the Beach Boys Endless Summer. And after that, when CDs came around, I would just buy The Best of Steely Dan, The Best of BTO, The Best of Deep Purple and I’d really just buy “the best” because a CD was like 13, 14 bucks and I was making six bucks an hour – you do the math."