From a "Mix Magazine" Ambel interview:

It was the summer of 1976, and I had just come home to Chicago for the summer from the University of Wyoming, where I played trumpet all the way through college in marching band and taught skiing for the University. This was right when punk rock started.

I was working as a waiter, and I won these tickets from this great radio station in Chicago called WXRT, to see these two bands I had never heard of; The Ramones and The Dictators. [Laughs] It was at the Ivanhoe Theater, and both bands were really impressive.

During the Ramones, there was a woman sitting two seats away from me masturbating. I got up and starting walking around the theater, and I saw other women doing this in public. I counted seven.

At the time, being a young guy in bands playing guitar, the cool thing was Jeff Beck's "Blow by Blow" and the whole quasi-jazz thing. I wasn't exactly into that, but it seemed that you "had to" be into that. But when I saw these two bands playing this real rock 'n' roll that was so primal that it could get a woman to masturbate in public, I signed up right then and there. The Ramones' jackhammer attack and what I saw was the most rock 'n' roll thing I had ever seen. I found out years later, when I was touring with Joan Jett, that there was actually this group of girls who called themselves the Candle Club, who went around and did this sort of thing.

Before I saw the Ramones, I had never seen a band that played their own music in a place that wouldn't hold a football team. So this was a whole different world and that pretty much opened up the whole thing for me.

So I went back to school in Laramie, Wyoming, and started the punk rock band called the Dirty Dogs. We became The Accelerators when we moved to LA. We literally showed up in Hollywood on Halloween night, and ditched our car on Hollywood Boulevard and jumped into the whole thing. That was 1978.

We were in LA, when it really was the heyday with X and The Germs. I was at the first Go-Go's gig ever. We had a practice space in The Masque, which was this rehearsal space underneath the Pussycat theater over on Hollywood Boulevard. This was like the center of the real punk rock thing in LA.

By 1979, our band had broken up, and I was already playing with some other people, this guy, Rik L. Rik and this other guy named Top Jimmy, who was this great rockin' blues dude. Top Jimmy & The Rhythm Pigs.

Read the Eric Ambel interview by Jay Grant.