“The life of the cook was a life of adventure, looting, pillaging, and rock-and-rolling through life with a carefree disregard for morality,” Anthony Bourdain writes in Kitchen Confidential, his impassioned in-the-kitchen memoir. He adopts (at least) two Halloween-worthy personas in these lines: a pirate and a rock star. And it’s the latter he’s most concerned about in a recent issue of SPIN, in which he remembers the “shameful, embarrassing” year that was 1977. It was the year hip hop and punk rock exploded, and Bourdain experienced it as 21-year-old culinary student wandering through the grime and garbage of New York City (whose odor he pontificates upon in the same way you wish he’d instead describe the smells of fresh-baked bread). Though musicians and cooks seem unlikely bedfellows, Bourdain reminisces upon their common ground, which included sharing “the same hours and many of the same proclivities” (in other words, they both enjoyed baking something, and it wasn’t cookies).

Away from the steak-frites and saucepans, Bourdain exchanged food for tickets to gigs at such seminal downtown NYC venues as CBGB (arguably the birthplace of punk acts like the Ramones, Talking Heads and Television, among others), whose legendarily gnarly toilet was nothing to eat off of. Still, Bourdain lived to reflect upon 1977, a time when for him, food was love, music was love, and in them both lay salvation. With this in mind, welcome to Simon Says, where the culinary collides with the world outside the kitchen.