When I first started going to punk shows, I never even knew where people got those clothes. Me and my friends would drive over from Belleville to St. Louis, which wasn’t a hotbed of punk rock fashion, but there were enough kids there that had the uniform. And we were like, “Where do you get those boots?” They don’t have those at Thom McAn. They just don’t. It was all mystifying to us.

At one of the first punk rock shows Jay Farrar and I went to see in St. Louis, Jay tied a bandana around his leg, and I made a belt out of two bandanas. I remember walking up the sidewalk to the show and seeing all the punk kids out in front—and slowly, surreptitiously taking the bandana belt off, like a magic trick. It felt like I was wearing a beret. We were both like, “That’s not what they’re wearing at the punk rock show. Noted.”

Ultimately, though, it was a blessing to not be able to so readily put on that uniform. I don’t know if it would have ever worked anyway, because the uniform kind of comes from within. You have to want to fit in, and we eventually discovered bands that didn’t.

This was also around the time I started writing songs and playing shows. It felt like the only chance I had to be the person I saw myself as. It seemed like the place where I would feel better. And it still is. Miraculously, it ended up being a conflict-free zone compared to other parts of my life. I would go onstage and actually feel more relaxed than I did backstage. I felt that way before I had any right to—before I had put in the work to feel comfortable on a stage.

Addicts in general, I think, feel like they deserve be able to feel as good as they’ve ever felt at all times. And coming to terms with that not being how the world really works is hard. Before I had drugs, I had an ability to exalt myself to that sensation, even as a kid. And that probably comes from being somewhat exalted in my mother’s life and my birth order: My youngest brother was 10 years older than me. So it was like, “Yeah, I’m pretty special.” That’s not particularly healthy. Everybody should feel special, but everybody shouldn’t feel special all the time.

I’ve never understood the idea that you have to pick one musical style or the other; I’ve never really met anybody that has listening habits like that. Even the music of Uncle Tupelo was way more constrained than what I felt inspired by. To me, the whole point was to love more, to find more to listen to, to be more excited about more things.

I loved Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message.” It’s incredibly catchy, with emotional storytelling. I still know that whole rap, everybody from that time does. I probably had more that I could relate to in “The Message” than anything from the Clash, because Belleville is geographically located next to East St. Louis, which was just such a terribly underserved community at that time. It still is. But growing up, it was just horrible. They had no trash collection; you knew you were in East St. Louis when it started getting smokey, because everybody had to burn their trash.

And there was just so much casual racism where I grew up. Just constant. It was horrible. But my mother was somewhat woke, using today’s terminology, compared to people around town. She had a terrible experience with a guy running a nut stand that she had used the N-word with when she was a little girl, and it made a lasting impression on her. She had seen how deeply she had hurt this man, and she didn’t want to hurt somebody like that again.