You are married?

Yes.

Your husband, is he an industrialist?

No. He’s an artist. His name is Frank O’Conner.

Does he live from his painting?

He’s just beginning to study painting. He was a designer before.

Is he supported in his efforts by the state?

Most certainly not.

He’s supported by you for the time being?

No, by his own work, actually, in the past. [CROSSTALK] By me if necessary, but that isn’t quite necessary.

Mike Wallace: There is no contradiction here, in that you help him?

No, because you see I am in love with him selfishly. It is to my own interest to help him if he ever needed it. I would not call that a sacrifice, because I take selfish pleasure in it. I say that man is entitled to his own happiness. And that he must achieve it himself. But that he cannot demand that others give up their lives to make him happy. And nor should he wish to sacrifice himself for the happiness of others. I hold that man should have self-esteem.

And cannot man have self-esteem if he loves his fellow man? Christ, every important moral leader in man’s history, has taught us that we should love one another. Why then is this kind of love in your mind immoral?

It is immoral if it is a love placed above oneself. It is more than immoral, it’s impossible. Because when you are asked to love everybody indiscriminately. That is to love people without any standard. To love them regardless of whether they have any value or virtue, you are asked to love nobody.

But in a sense, in your book you talk about love as if it were a business deal of some kind. Isn’t the essence of love, that it is above self-interest?

Well, What would it mean to have a love above self-interest? It would mean, for instance, that a husband would tell his wife, if he were moral according to the conventional morality, that I am marrying you just for your own sake, I have no personal interest in it, but I’m so unselfish, that I am marrying you only for your own good.

Should husbands and wives tally up…

Would any woman like that? I agree with you that [marriage] should be treated like a business deal. But every business deal has to have its own terms and its own kind of currency. And in love the currency is virtue. You love people, not for what you do for them, or what they do for you. You love them for their values, their virtues. You don’t love causes. You don’t love everybody indiscriminately. You love only those who deserve it. Man has free will. If a man wants love he should correct his flaws, and he may deserve it. But he cannot expect the unearned.

There are very few us then in this world, by your standards, who are worthy of love.

Unfortunately…. yes… very few. But it is open to everybody, to make themselves worthy of it and that is all that my morality offers them. [CROSSTALK] A way to make themselves worthy of love, although that’s not the primary motive.

Isn’t it possible that we are all basically lonely people and we are all basically our brothers’ keepers?

Nobody has ever given a reason why men should be their brother’s keepers, and you see the examples around you, of men perishing by the attempt to be their brother’s keepers.

You have no faith in anything?

Faith…. no.

Only in your mind.

That is not faith. That is a conviction. Yes….. I have no faith at all. I only hold convictions.

As we said at the outset, “If Ayn Rand’s ideas were ever to take hold, they would revolutionize the world.” And to those who would reject her philosophy, Miss Rand hurls this challenge. “For the past 2000 years the world has been dominated by other philosophies. Look around you, consider the results.” We thank Ayn Rand for adding her portrait to our gallery. One of the people other people are interested in. Mike Wallace… Good Bye.

Yeah, I like my freedom. I like to do my own grocery shopping. People do recognize you. They are kind of shocked. Some people like it. It makes them feel at ease. It confirms their hopes that you are in fact similar to them. Some people can’t stand it. One time I sat down, we had good tickets on the floor at some rock concert. We moved in, we got there late. The fellow sitting next to me said, “You can’t sit here.” I said, “Why not? I’ve got tickets.” “But you’re Joni Mitchell.” I said, “So?” He said, “You shouldn’t be sitting there. You should be backstage, or you should be up in that box.” He was very annoyed. Some people are upset to see you doing ordinary things. Those people, if they were a celebrity, they would have an entourage. You know if you see yourself as a kingly type, then you need your serfs and your army and someone around you.

I like to move around. I travel. I’ve driven across country by myself. When I felt that fame, people were nosing me out, well I moved on. I used traveling names. Wigs, if necessary. I didn’t think I had much of a following in the south. I thought I was anonymous down there so I kept to the south. I found in certain pockets that I was quite recognizable, and I just hit a wig store.

At that time I was pretty much a. “Good Time Charlie.” I was a bad student in the school system. I failed the 12th grade. I had done my book reports from classic comics!

Oh really? (laughs)

I was anti-intellectual to the nth. Basically I liked to dance and paint, and that was about it. As far as serious discussions went, at that time most of them were overtly pseudo-intellectual and boring to see teenagers sitting around solving the problems of the world. I thought, “All things considered, I’d rather be dancing.” (laughs)

I liked playing in small clubs. I really liked holding the attention of thirty or forty people. I never liked the roar of the big crowd. I didn’t like the sound of people gasping at the mere mention of my name. It horrified me.

Also for a lot of reasons, because I knew people were fickle, I knew that they were buying an illusion. I didn’t want there to be such a gulf between who I presented and who I was. As Geffen pointed out, he said, “You’re the only star I ever met that wanted to be ordinary.” I never really wanted to be a star. I didn’t like entering a room with all eyes on me. I still don’t really like the attention of a birthday party. I prefer Christmas, which is everybody’s holiday. It’s just my nature. I don’t like to be that zeroed in on en masse. Over the years I’ve adjusted to it. Now I’m the other way around. You can give me 400,000 hostile people and I won’t even break sweat. If you give me 200 adoring people, my mouth will dry out. (laughs)

I don’t know how to sell out. If I tried to sell out I don’t think I could. By that I mean to make an attempt to make a commercial record. I just make them and I think if I was a kid I would like this song. So you have to have a certain amount of grab-ability, initially, and then something that wears well, that you’ll love for years to come. That’s what anything fine is. It’s recognized in painting. It’s not recognized … I’m just working in a toss-away industry. I’m a fine artist working in a commercial arena, so that’s my cross to bear.

I have lost my credibility as a hit maker because of these side excursions into other branches of music by not being consistent. Consistency seems to be all important.

What do you regret?

Oh I would do the same thing in a minute.

[crosstalk] never a minute of regret for that. You’ve been there.

Are you kidding? Oh I don’t. No, I have no regret.

Have you accepted the fact that you don’t sell more? Does it make you angry or frustrated?

What I’m telling you is no it doesn’t make me angry. It makes me curious: Why?

Do you ever get periods where nothing comes when you’re writing? Are there dry periods there, or are you prolific enough to keep writing?

Well, musically, I would never run dry. Any time I sit down to an instrument, I could write a song. I try not to steal from myself, but the modalities create similarities. Musically, I don’t think I’d ever dry up. I trust my musical invention. Lyrics are hard.

Where do you play at home?

Anywhere. There’s a room over the garage out there that I’m getting fixed now to… I think it’s going to be my practice room. You know sometimes you build a room and it ends up you can still go in the toilet, so I don’t know, I hope I like it but… I keep a horn on the piano and I have a horn in my bedroom. The flute’s usually back there because when I go down tired, I lay down and practice and…

About how many hours a day do you play, would you say?

Not too much at this time. I find that it’s only when something is trying to come through you know that I really practice and then it’s just, I don’t know how many hours, it’s just all day.

I did a foolish thing, I got dissatisfied with my mouth piece (laughs). I had some work done on this thing and instead of making it better, it ruined it. It really discouraged me, you know, a little bit because they were certain aspects of that playing that certain fast thing that I was reaching for that I couldn’t push because I had damaged this thing… so I just had to curtail it (laughs). But at that moment, it was so vivid in my mind, the difference in what I was getting on the horn, as soon as I put that horn in my mouth, I could hear it. I could feel it and I just stopped, I just went into other things. In fact, soprano’s one of the reasons I started (laughs) getting dissatisfied with that tenor mouthpiece, see? Because the sound of that soprano was actually so much closer to me in my ear.

I didn’t want admit this damn thing because I said well the tenor’s my horn, this is my baby but the soprano, there’s still something there, just the voice of it that I can’t… It’s just really beautiful. I really like it.

The people I was staying with have a friend, a young lady and she was downtown at one Malcolm X’s speeches and, lo and behold, who should plop down in the seat next to her but John Coltrane (laughs).

(laughs) Yeah

 Were you impressed with him?

Definitely, definitely. I felt I had to see the man. I was quite impressed.

Some musicians have said there’s a relationship between some of Malcolm’s ideas and the music.

Well, I think that music, being expression of the human heart or the human being itself, does express just what is happening. The whole of human experience at that particular time is being expressed. In any situation that we find in our lives, when there’s something we feel should be better, we must exert effort to try and make it better.

So it’s the same socially, musically, politically, in any department of your life. I think music is an instrument. It can create the initial thought pattern that can create a change, you see, in the thinking of the people.

I mean I want to be a force for real good. In other words, I know that there are bad forces. I know that there are forces out here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good.

What were you looking for John, do you want some cigarettes or…?

No, I’m just sitting up because my back is wet and I just need to get off the chair.

I don’t have any more of my prepared questions to ask you, or my improvised questions (laughs) to ask you. I don’t know when I’ll ever get the chance to sit you down with a tape recorder again (laughs). Do you have anything else to get on here?

I think you man, well you just about covered it, I believe…just about covered it.

Do you feel you have to be protected from the world that surrounds you or…

While you’re growing, sure, because you’re tender and you doubt yourself, and… Friendship is an island that you retreat to and you all fall on the floor and laugh at all the other ninnies that don’t have enough brains to have your good taste, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um… this is kind of a weird question. We had an article in our newspaper that said Ray Bradbury has never driven a car or been in an airplane. Is that true?

That’s right. What do you think I’m doing here in the back seat?

You’ve in your whole life ever driven?

Never have been behind the wheel.

Why is that?

Oh, it seemed a good idea. That’s all.

Are you scared of cars or scared or …

I’m scared of myself. I think I’d be a bad driver. I’m scared of cars, period. I’ve had too many friends killed now, and I’ve seen too many people killed in my life when I drove across the country when I was 12. I’m sure that has a lot to do with it. If you see a few real dead bodies with brains on the pavement, it does a lot to change your attitude. It means you can get it too. I’ve had a lot of relatives killed. I’ve had a lot of dear friends killed. It’s stupid. The whole activity is stupid.

What about… why don’t you like to go on airplanes? Are you scared of them, too?

I don’t like being up high. It took me 3 days to get to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

So you do write very realistically?

It’s a combination of realism with fantasy. But no, I don’t like realism. We already know the real facts about life, most of the basic facts. I’m not interested in repeating what we already know. We know about sex, about violence, about murder, about war. All these things, by the time we’re 18, we’re up to here. From there on we need interpreters. We need poets. We need philosophers. We need theologians, who take the same basic facts and work with them and help us make do with those facts. Facts alone are not enough. It’s interpretation.

We’d like to know how you go about writing a story. Like, do you take other people’s opinions? Where do you get your ideas?

You don’t pay any attention to anything anyone else says, no opinions. The important thing is to explode with a story, to emotionalize a story, not to think it. You start thinking, the story’s going to die on its feet. It’s like anything else. If an athlete is running around the high hurdles, let’s say, and he starts thinking about the next hurdle, he’s doomed. He’s going to knock it down. People who take books on sex to bed become frigid.  You get self-conscious. You can’t think a story. You can’t think, “I shall do a story to improve mankind.” Well, it’s nonsense. All the great stories, all the really worthwhile plays, are emotional experiences. If you have to ask yourself whether or not you love a girl or you love a boy, forget it. You don’t. A story is the same way. You either feel a story and need to write it, or you better not write it.

Did you have any formal training in writing, of any type?

Not formal, no. But I am a dedicated madman, and that becomes its own training. If you can’t resist, if the typewriter is like candy to you, you train yourself for a lifetime. Every single day of your life, some wild new thing to be done. You write to please yourself. You write for the joy of writing. Then your public reads you and it begins to gather around your selling a potato peeler in an alley, you know. The enthusiasm, the joy itself draws me. So that means every day of my life I’ve written. When the joy stops, I’ll stop writing.

In most of your books, the Martian Chronicles is about Mars, but even in Illustrated Man, everything that happens in outer space is on Mars. I was wondering, are you really preoccupied with Mars, or why are you?

Oh, I think because it’s closest to us. You grow up with the romance of Mars. When I was a kid, some of the earliest clear photographs of Mars were being published from the Lowell Observatory in Arizona. Since it’s the nearest planet, and we know, we’ve always had this feeling that someday, if we went anywhere, it would be to the moon and then to mars. That’s the way it’s turning out. We’ll be landing there in a few years now.

Well, you know, I was laughing the other night about something. I guess… My aunt had a toilet in the bathroom and we were so fascinated. We were afraid. I was afraid to use it. I just thought it was going to suck us right down. She also had the first television we ever saw, too.

How old were you when you first saw television?

Hmm… maybe eight.

The toilet around the same time?

Yeah, I guess so. It was just all new. I was thinking about if I was on the Johnny Carson show… I just got to thinking one night, I was laughing about how nobody had ever asked me about how we bathed or what we did because we made our own soap and in the summer time we’d go to the river. We’d just all pile in the truck or something. Of course we had a creek but the river was great. That was like a big bath. We could all go in swimming and we’d wash each other’s hair. Soap was just flowing down the river. That’s where we bathed in the summer time. I was making a joke about how there was so many of us and we were so dirty, we left a ring around the little pigeon river like a bathtub.

In the winter time, we just had a pan of water and we’d wash down as far as possible, and we’d wash up as far as possible. Then when somebody cleared the room we’d wash possible. [laughs] So that’s the way it was.

How often did you bath in the winter? Like once a week or every two weeks?

We bathed once a week once a week whether we needed it or not, as the saying goes. When I was in high school, it was a big deal, I had to take a bath every night because I wanted to be clean. The kids peed on me every night. We slept three and four in the bed.

I would wash every night. And as soon as I go to bed, the kids would wet on me and I’d have to get up in the morning and do the same thing.

When they wet on you, though, did you get up and wipe yourself down or just sort of accepted it?

No, that was the only warm thing we knew in the winter time. That was almost a pleasure to get peed on because it was so cold. Lord. It was as cold in the room as it was outside. We’d bundle up to go to bed.

So, we wanted to wear lipstick and stuff and daddy didn’t want us to wear lipstick so I … We didn’t have money to buy make up anyway but we used to have this medicine and mercurochrome, and that’s what I’d take as my lipstick when I was a little kid. I always wanted to wear make-up. I’d paint my lips and see there wasn’t nothing daddy could do, he couldn’t rub that off. It stained your lips and those little bitty bottles just perfect to go around your lip line. Then I would do that and I would blot it off and daddy he’d say, “come here get that lipstick off you.” I’d say real calm, “it’s my natural color daddy.” It’s so bull.  We would always like when we wanted eyebrows we’d get burnt matches, the matches that had been burnt and you could wet them and make your little eyebrows and whatever.

Like when I was a sophomore in high school I started… the teased hair came into style and I started doing that and ever since then I’ve done it. I just liked it and I wore my skirts so tight I couldn’t hardly wiggle in them. Even as a little bitty kid, even before I had a figure I liked my clothes snug and tight. People would always kid me in school about my little butt and my little blue jeans or whatever. Mama she always understood stuff like that. If we wanted to do something, Mama just always said, “you be what you are and you don’t have to worry about nothing. If you want to say something you say it, to whoever. If you want to say something just tell them.’ And I always did and I still do.

Do you like Los Angeles at all?

For awhile it’s beautiful out here and it’s exciting. I really enjoy it for a week. After that I go LA crazy. I just got to get out of here. It’s just so crazy and wild especially the places I have to be and the people I have to be around when I’m out here most of them are so spastic and so … just involved in all sorts of weird things. Especially show people. I just have to get away from here. That old get home feeling…

The country in you starts to…

Yeah, that old country in me says, “what in the world are you doing walking on this concrete when you can be rolling in the grass?”

I mean this story’s a rumor, as far as I’m concerned, but the story is that before I was born he told my mother that “If it’s a boy, he’ll be a scientist.”

My father used to sit me on his lap, and the one book we did use all the time was the Encyclopedia Britannica. He used to sit me on his lap when I was a kid and read out of the damned thing. There would be pictures of dinosaurs, and then he would read. You know the long words –- “the dinosaur” so and so “attains a length of so and so many feet.” He would always stop and he would say, “You know what that means? It means, if the dinosaur’s standing on our front yard, and your bedroom window, you know, is on the second floor, you’d see out the window his head standing looking at you. He would translate everything, and I learned to translate everything, so it’s the same disease. When I read something, I always translate it in the best I can into what does it really mean.

See I  can remember my father talking, talking, and talking. When you go into the museum, for example, there are great rocks which have long cuts, grooves in them, from glacier. I remember, the first time going there, when he stopped there and explained to me about the ice moving and grinding. I can hear the voice, practically. Then he would tell me, “How do you think anybody knows that there were glaciers in the past?” He’d point out, “Look at that. These rocks are found in New York. And so there must have been ice in New York.” He understood.

A thing that was very important about my father was not the facts but the process. How we find out. What is the consequence of finding such a rock. But that’s the kind of guy he was. I don’t think he ever successfully went to college. However, he did teach himself a great deal. He read a lot. He liked the rational mind, and liked those things which could be understood by thinking. So it’s not hard to understand I got interested in science.

I got a laboratory in my room. We also played a trick on my mother there. We put sodium ferrocyanide in the towels, and another substance, an iron salt, probably alum, in the soap. When they come together, they make blue ink. So we were supposed to fool my mother, you see. She would wash her hands, and then when she dried them, the towels… her hands would turn blue. But we didn’t think the towel would turn blue.

Anyway, she was horrified. The screams of “My good linen towels!” But she was always cooperative. She never was afraid of the experiments. The bridge partners, would tell her, “How can you let the child have a laboratory? And blow up the house!” — and all this kind of talk. She just said, “It’s worth it.” I mean, “ It’s worth the risk.”

I took later solid geometry and trigonometry. In solid geometry was the first time I ever had any mathematical difficulties. It was my only experience with how it must feel to the ordinary human being. Then I discovered what was wrong. The diagrams that were being drawn on the blackboard were three-dimensional, and I was thinking of them as plane diagrams, and I couldn’t understand what the hell was going on. It was a mistake in the orientation.

When he would draw pictures, and I would see a parallelogram, and he called it a square, because it was tilted out of the plane, you know. And I -– “Oh God, this thing doesn’t make any sense! What is he talking about?” It was a terrifying experience. Butterflies in my stomach kind of feeling. But it was just a dumb mistake. But I suspect that this kind of a dumb mistake is very common, to people learning mathematics. Part of the missing understanding is to mistake what it is you’re supposed to know.

It isn’t the question of learning anything precisely, but of learning that there’s something exciting over there. I think that the same thing happened with my father. My father never really knew anything in detail, but would tell me what’s interesting about the world, and where, if you look, you’ll find still more interests, so that later I’d say, “Well, this is going to be good, I know — this has got something to do with this, which is hot stuff”. This kind of feeling of what was important and that is the key. The key was somehow to know what was important and what was not important, what was exciting, because I can’t learn everything.

The thing that I loved was, everything that I read was serious — wasn’t written for a child. I didn’t like children’s things. Because, for one thing I was very very — and still am — sensitive and very worried about was that the thing to be dead honest; that it isn’t fixed up so it looks easy. Details purposely left out, or slightly erroneous explanations, in order to get away with it. This was intolerable.

I kind of try to imagine what would have happened to me if I’d lived in today’s era. I’m rather horrified. I think there are too many books, that the mind gets boggled. If I got interested, I would have so many things to look at, I would go crazy. It’s too easy.

Wow. That’s great.

Each one has his or her own individual voice so you know exactly who’s calling.

Caller: I wanted to know if you believed that there were any undiscovered, large ape species.

You’re talking about a yeti or bigfoot or Sasquatch.

Is that what’s he’s talking about?

Yes, yes he is.

I’m out of the loop. Go ahead.

Now you’ll be amazed when I tell you that I’m sure that they exist. I’ve talked to so many Native Americans who have all described the same sounds, two who have seen them. There was a little tiny snippet in the newspaper just last week which says that British scientists have found what they believe to be a yeti hair and that the scientist in the Natural History Museum in London couldn’t identify it as any known animal.

Did you always have this belief that they existed?

Well I’m a romantic so I always wanted them to exist.

Animals were my passion from even before I could speak apparently. Then when I was about 10, 11 I found the books about Tarzan of the Apes. Fell in love with Tarzan. He’s got that wife Jane, so I was terribly jealous of her. That was when my dream started. When I grew up, I would go to Africa, live with animals and write books about them. That’s how it all began.

I got the opportunity when a school friend invited me to go and stay on their farm in Kenya. I was 23 and I sort of said bye-bye to family, friends and country and off I went. That’s when I heard about the late Louis Leakey and somebody said, “Jane if you’re interested in animals, you must meet Louis.” Louis realized that I was the sort of person he said he had been looking for for about ten years who didn’t care about hairdressing and clothes and parties and boyfriends. I really wanted to be in the wild.

It took him a year. He searched for money and eventually found a wealthy American businessman that said, “Okay Louis here you are. Here’s enough money for six months. We’ll see how she does.” The chimpanzees ran away as soon as they saw me. They had not seen a white ape before and I knew if that six months money ran out before I had seen something really exciting everyone would have … I would have let Louis down.

Of course at that time we were defined as man the toolmaker. That was supposed to differentiate us more than anything else in the rest of the animal kingdom.

You discovered that chimps could make tools.

David Greybeard, bless his heart, I saw him crouched over a termite mound. The whole thing putting in the grass, picking the termites up, picking up a leafy twig and stripping off the leaves which is the beginning of tool making. I couldn’t actually believe it. I had to see it about four times before I let Louis Leakey know and then I sent a telegram and he sent back his famous, “Ha ha now we must redefine man, redefine tool or accept chimpanzees as humans.”

After a bit Louis said, “Jane you have to get a degree because otherwise you can’t get your own money and I won’t always be around to get money for you.” But he said, “we don’t have time to mess about with a BA so you’ll have to go straight for a PhD.” He managed to persuade Cambridge in England to accept me as a PhD student. When I got there, it was actually a very unpleasant and hostile reception that I had. I shouldn’t have named the chimps. It wasn’t scientific. I didn’t know. I knew nothing. And worse sin of all was that I was ascribing to them emotions like happiness, sadness and so forth.

They were just aghast at you?

Yeah they were.

Whippersnapper

I was even accused of teaching the chimps how to fish for termites which I mean that would have been such a brilliant coup. [laughter]

Caller: Do you think a primatologists gender influences how they conduct their work?

Well I think in many cases it actually does. Louis Leakey always thought women were better as observers. He felt that they were more patient. Certainly it’s very often true that women tend to be a bit quieter and more prepared to sit there and let the animal tell you things.

Would you rather be remembered for discovering the tool making abilities of the chimps or for your work in the environment today?

I think I’d like to be remembered as someone who really helped people to have a little humility and realize that we are part of the animal kingdom not separated from it. When I do go back to Gombe it’s to be in that timeless world where it’s soft and where life is entwined and you actually see the pattern of nature. I always feel this great spiritual power which I believe is around.

We can turn this tape, there’s no problem. There’s so many questions to ask you, Mr. Fuller.

You can call me Bucky.

Bucky …

I was married in World War 1. Our first child was born and she caught this spinal meningitis and infantile paralysis and it was an awful struggle. This child lived to just before her fourth birthday and she died in November 1922 and so for 5 years I was feeling really horribly sad about this kid. I felt that if the kind of technology that went into making a battleship and an airplane and guns had gone into… I was sure this child had caught these things out of the environment and I was sure that there was something wrong about our environment. In the Navy I had learned how to navigate, I’ve used mathematics very powerfully. I learned how to calculate. I was sure things were just not being done in logical ways.

By 1927 our second child was born and I had suddenly a new child after 5 years of going without the girl we loved so much. I said I got a chance now to look out for this new life and I’m going to have to really re-think everything I have. I had absolutely no money and suddenly this new child and everybody tells you you got to earn a living. I said I think this is absolutely a blinding thing. I’m either going to say you go out to make money or you’re going to make sense.

I recall in Chicago wheeling my little child in her baby carriage in Lincoln Park. I was amazed, because a little biplane went over Lincoln Park. Air planes were not very common in those days. I said, “Isn’t it amazing. Here’s my child looking up at that airplane and that airplane in the sky is as natural to her as a bird.” Because when I was born, the airplane did not exist. It was really the start of the beginning of impossible things happening.

I began to feel for what really needs to be done in a very biggest way. Well I found that I couldn’t improve an airplane very much, I’m not going to improve electronics very much. There were a great many people preoccupied with that, but where man was living, he was really very ignorant. It’s where people live that needs attention and I saw that the way in which we built was very, very ignorant. When you build a boat it’s got to float. So you learn to do a whole lot with little. It’s got to be strong enough not to sink. It’s got to to carry a cargo. The world of building on the land was very different from the sea and the sky. I said, “why was it different?” Because man used to build fortresses and the heavier and higher and thicker the walls the more secure it felt.

Some people think of a house as a fortress rather than a place to live. 

Yes. So I’m going to see what happens If I will take the kind of technology that’s going with the sea and the sky and apply it over to the land.

So many things to ask you, Bucky, that you have foreseen. Thinking of your geodesic dome, do you see actually roofed cities ever?

We’re continually doing more with less, and my geodesic domes do a very great deal with very little but I think they’re only symptomatic, Studs, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we find ways to control that environment over the city without even seeing the roof there, there would be an electrical field control so forth. We could make the water go and dump over here, and pipe it there, and so forth, whatever it may be.

It seems that Buckminster Fuller speaks outrageously and, yet, you’ve come up with so many outrageous explanations that turn out to be right, and accurate, and true, and practical …

Time and again, I am asked, “who else do you know who thinks the way you do, or does what you do?” I find it very strange to have to answer, “I don’t know anybody else.” It’s not because I think of myself as unique, but simply because I did choose a very different grand strategy, and not because I think that I have capabilities that other human beings don’t have.

My daughter, who I was wheeling the baby carriage, who had an airplane as normal in her sky, now has her daughter and that daughter was born in New York. They were right in the flight path for flights out of LaGuardia and Idlewild. This little child then, in her crib, would hear this roar of those airplanes, and she saw many thousands of airplanes before she ever saw a bird. I saw the children’s books that were sent to her, which were the traditional, what a children’s book would be. They’re the same children’s books that were sent to me when I was a child. They were farm yard. There was a barn and all the nice natural things. The child would see the horse, and the pig, and the cow, and the goat, sheep, rooster. My granddaughter, in New York City, looked out the window and saw the airplanes, and she saw the automobiles going by by the minute, but when they gave her this farm book, she didn’t had never seen a sheep or a cow. It was as if you gave her these imaginary pictures of dragons and things. She was very accommodating. She laughed about it, it was very amusing. They weren’t natural to her.

Do you ever regret that you were never totally in the mainstream, that you were out there left wing most of the time in your career?

No, I started out with that in mind. People didn’t know certain things about me, which… I was out of creative writing class in school, Syracuse University; had a B.A. in English and wanted to write the great American novel but I also loved rock and roll. I was in bar bands all through college, playing fraternities and have to know all the songs in the top 10. That kind of thing.

What are your recollections of that Velvet Underground time? You guys were avant garde, cutting edge, new stuff. When this record came out; all of a sudden, there’s this kind of recognition?

Well there wasn’t any recognition. What there was, was a lot of bad press. I got a little puzzled at how savage the reaction against us was, when we got it, especially when we performed live and left New York. Like you know, “how savage and decadent”, da da da da; “look at what these songs are about; ‘Venus in Furs’ is about all of this.”  They didn’t even know “Venus in Furs” was a book; I didn’t write it. I just said it would be interesting to take this book and put it in a song. I just wanted to cram everything into a record that these people had ignored, which left you everything.

The other thing that killed me was stuff like this had been in novels so long, it was like nothing. I write a song called “Heroin”, you would have thought that I murdered the Pope or something. It should have been, “now we can get a lot of people who have talent for writing and everything into rock and roll.  We’ll all write about really adult stuff.”  That was what I wanted to do, is write rock and roll that you could listen to as you got older, and it wouldn’t lose anything; it would be timeless, in the subject matter and the literacy of the lyrics.

We didn’t expect to sell records. That’s not what we were doing. It would have been great. It would have taken a lot of financial pressure off us. It’s not like we had money. What we had was ambition and a goal. That’s the thing you can do when you’re really young.

What was the ambition and the goal?

Oh. To elevate the rock and roll song, and take it where it hadn’t been taken before. I’m saying like from my point of view and I know this sounds pretentious but I just thought the other stuff couldn’t even come up to our ankles; not up to my kneecap, not up to my ankles, the level that we were on, compared to everybody else. They were just painfully stupid and pretentious. When they did try to get in quotes: “arty”, it  was worse than stupid rock and roll. What I mean by stupid, I mean like The Doors.

You never felt Lennon and the Beatles… did you feel that they were in a league at all?

No, I never liked the Beatles. I thought they were garbage. If you said, “who did you like?” I liked nobody.

In the old days, the Velvet Underground, we had engineers who would walk out on us. They would say, “It’s too Lou Reed, this is terrible. You know I’m going to turn the tape machine on, you guys call me when you’re finished.” I’ve spent a lot of years since then, trying to figure out a way to be able to do what I did then, without going deaf. I actually went and had my ears tested just to make sure. The guy who was testing me was a fan, which was nice, so he took the test a little further just to assuage any doubts I might have. He said, “no, you have the average high end loss for a New Yorker.”

God, it’s true.

Right; for a New Yorker. It was very funny.

I had a lot of problems in the studio because of my background with engineers, see. A lot of my records sound like they were recorded completely dry and no one did anything, and that in fact was what it was because they would go to touch a button and I’d go, “what are you doing, man?” I have faith in my own vision, and didn’t want them to tamper with it. I thought my thing coming out badly recorded this way, is better than if these people take my voice and try to make me sound like a 14-year-old. They thin it out. I would tell them it’s like you tell a photographer, “don’t retouch this too much.” These lines, they mean something, I’m an adult, man. Don’t thin my voice out and make it like that high shit. This is the way I sound.  You’ve got to get people to understand that because they take the nuance and character out that makes the lyric believable. It’s an important thing.

How did that guitar gets its name?

I used to play a place in Twist, Arkansas. Still there, Twist, Arkansas. They used to have a little nightclub there that we played quite often. It used to get quite cold in Twist. They used to take something looked like a big garbage pail and set it in the middle of the floor, half fill it with kerosene, and would light that fuel and that’s what we used for heat. Generally, the people would dance around it and they wouldn’t disturb this container. This particular night, two guys started to fighting and one of ’em knocked the other one over on this container.

When they did, it spilled on the floor. Now it was already burning, so when it spilled, it looked like a river of fire. Everybody ran for the front door including yours truly. But when I got on the outside, then I realized that I’d left my guitar inside. I went back for it. The building was a wooden building and it was burning so fast when I got my guitar, it started to collapse around me. So I almost lost my life trying to save the guitar. Well the next morning we found that these two guys was fighting about a lady. I never did meet the lady, I never did meet the lady, but I learned that her name was Lucille so I named my guitar Lucille to remind me not to do a thing like that again. [laughs]

The early years when I was starting, blues player, you wasn’t always welcome in a lot of the other places. People usually have preconceived ideas about blues music. They always feel that it’s depressing and that it’s just something that a guy sit out on a stool, grab a guitar, and just start singing or mumbling or whatever.

You came out of relatively hard times, a lot of blues players did. Is it necessary to have hard times to reflect that music? To…

No, it’s not. It helps though. [laughs]

Hard times don’t necessarily mean being poor all the time. I’ve known people that was a part of a family and always feel that the family likes everybody else but them. That hurts and that’s as deep a hurt as you can possibly get. I’ve known people that would have problems with their love life. This is kind of how blues began, out of feeling misused, mistreated, feeling like they had nobody to turn to. Blues don’t necessarily have to be sung by a person that came from Mississippi as I did because there are people having problems all over the world.

I don’t like to feel that I owe anything. I like to feel that I pay my own way, no free lunch. When people give me all these great compliments, I thank them, but still go back to my room and practice. A lot of times I say to myself, “I wished I could be worthy of all the compliments that people give me sometimes.” I’m not inventing anything that’s going to stop cancer or muscular dystrophy or anything, but I like to feel that my time and talent is always there for the people that need it. When someone do say something negative, most times I think about it, but it don’t bother me that much.

You know who you are.

I like to think that I do.

Some of my friends would tell me from time to time, Eric Clapton said this, or Jimi Hendrix said this. I spoke with John Lennon once after I had seen in, I believe it was Life Magazine, where people were asking questions, “say, what is it you would like to do?” One of his things was to play guitar like B.B. King. That’s when I started to find that a lot of the young musicians had been listening to me. I didn’t know and, for the life of me, sometimes still wonder why.I’ve had my feelings of doubt, I think, in music, but to think that there are people, that learned to play by listening to my music, those dark days wasn’t dark after all.

Tell me how your very distinctive, soft vocal style kind of emerged.

I didn’t like how I sounded singing in my band, but it was hard to sing like how I wanted to because playing live I had to just be at the top of my lungs all the time, and it made me sound like I had a really bad cold or something. It sounds really hoarse and macho and weird. [laughs] I mean I’ve been doing four-track songs by myself since I was like a teenager, where I’d sing in a way that I … I just didn’t think other people would like it, so I didn’t play it for them but eventually I got over that, which I’m happy that I did, because it’s kind of a drag to be playing a kind of music that you don’t really like as much as another kind.

Obviously some people have given you some sort of folk music tag and it just seems to be to be pretty off the mark.

That really bothered me right at first, when I first started playing, people would be like, “Paul Simon.” I’d be like, “I don’t feel like I’m anything like Paul Simon.”

How much of your writing about, let’s not call them addicts, let’s call them dependents, how much of that is based on subjective experience and how much is just based on being an observer?

I’m definitely in them, but on the other hand it’s not like a diary or anything. But, yeah, it’s good to call them dependents, because that was the point, as opposed to them being songs strictly about drugs or… There’s lots of ways people can be dependent, on another person, or drugs, or… I think everybody has that… Those two irreconcilable …

Impulses.

Constant… Doing battle with themselves that way, every day, all the time and sometimes it sucks, but other times it results in people making sort of a dream comprehensible to someone else. People are so… seem so chaotic internally, but being filtered through some form, like making a record, sort of filters it down into something that can be understood. It’s hard to represent chaos, or like an absence of something. It’s much easier to represent the presence of something or a situation. People can be chaos but it’s hard to fit it into some creative piece that you made. It’s hard.

Listening to Either/Or, I was kind of struck by how well it does manage to juggle sweetness and pain. Is it too easy to say these songs are kind of melancholy, there’s a lot of sorrowful quality to Elliott Smith’s music?

Yeah, they don’t make me sad or feel sorrowful to me, but on the other hand I’m not… a lot of people are kind of depressed. I’m happy some of the time, and some of the time I’m not. But like when I see a movie, for example, that I really like, that moves me or whatever, it’s usually happy and sad at the same time. Certain songs just feel a way that’s hard to put into words and it’s not happy and it’s also not really sad but I couldn’t say what it is.

You lived in these very different parts of America. Dallas, Portland, Brooklyn, is a kind of interesting triangle, there.

Actually, I’ve been thinking about moving somewhere, out of the US, maybe, just to get out of here.

Whereabouts are you thinking of going?

I don’t know, I have no idea. Somewhere where people aren’t so mad would be nice, but I don’t know if there is anywhere like that. Who knows?

Tell me how you write because I know Remingtons have played a focal point in some of your past books.

I owned an electric Remington, briefly, but we had a turbulent relationship. It made so much noise, it hummed all the time, it was like it was looking over your shoulder, egging you on, wanting you to work at a far faster pace than I am capable of working. Plus, it was ugly, some strange off-blue kind of teal color. Eventually, I just took a 2-by-4 and destroyed it. I work now with pen and paper. That’s my favorite way to write. I love the way the ink sinks into the wood, soaks into the wood pulp. There’s something about that process that’s so organic. I’d like to go back to the raven quill, actually, dipped in lizard blood or something. Write on orange butcher paper.

I started writing when I was 5 years old. I would dictate stories to my mother, and she would copy them in a scrapbook. If she changed anything to make it, in her opinion, better, I would throw a tantrum. I can’t remember exactly the first thing I wrote, but one of the stories, was about a pilot whose plane crashed on a desert island, and the only other life on the island was a brown cow with yellow spots. The cow had… to survive, had taught itself to eat and get nutriments from sand. I guess, I’ve always been interested in adaptability and taking whatever life hands you and running with it.

First I think I was interested in the stories, and later on, I became more interested in the language itself, so the stories became almost secondary, but it was kind of a background music for my life. I had a stick, and I used to go out in the backyard and fantasize, often aloud, and I would tell these stories. I would beat the ground with the stick. And then even today when I get excited about an idea when I’m writing, I often will pace the room, and I’ll slap my legs. I’ve always been too ashamed to talk about this bizarre behavior, but I was telling my paramour about it and she said, “Well, you were drumming,” and that hadn’t occurred to me before. That’s exactly what I was doing, was drumming out the story, setting up a rhythm behind the story.

There’s not a word in one of my books that hasn’t been gone over 25, 30, 35, 40 times. I read every sentence over and over again and rework it, not particularly looking for a more shining truth, but looking for the right rhythm. It’s like compulsive hand washing or something. Words on a page can hypnotize you if the rhythm is right.

I never outline. I don’t work from an outline. I have no idea where the book is going. I mean, even two-thirds of the way through, I don’t know how it’s going to end. If I knew how it was going to end, I probably wouldn’t write it. I finish the book so I can see how it’s going to end. I write that first sentence, and if it’s the right first sentence, it leads to the right second sentence and three years later you have a 500-page manuscript, but it really is like going on a trip, going on a journey. It’s a voyage.

When I finished my second book, I looked in the mirror, and I was all pale and wan and emaciated and bags under my eyes, and I said, “What you need, Tom, is a trip up the Amazon.” Three days later, I got an offer to take a trip up a river in Africa. It wasn’t the Amazon, but it was close. Ever since, whenever I finish a book, I go off and have some kind of adventure. Having had an adventure in my writing chair or on my writing sofa, an internal adventure, then I need to balance that off with an external adventure, so I’ll go tramping through Africa or whitewater rafting or float to Hawaii in a martini shaker or something.

Things that I see in the future. I see… it could be quite incredible if we can master a few problems, like the air and the water thing might be nice. I see governments dissolving these barriers are all falling down for economic reasons. They’re all so interbound. That’s why when one market crashes it’s almost like a world stock market. And this a very long economic explanation… something I haven’t got a fucking clue about.

Do you think that there’s a role of the artist in society?

Yeah. For a comic especially, to constantly never let it take itself seriously, to play with, to fuck with the parameters. The premise that comedy is there to basically show us we fart, we laugh. to make us realize we still are part animal. As intellectual as we think we are, you still trip, we still have human foibles, sexuality, all the different things to still make you aware of your humanity. That’s what we’re supposed to do. It’s just to keep us awake, cut through the shit, peel off the mask and go, “Oh, you got a big nose.” Or put on the big nose and make you realize, “Wait a minute, I don’t have a big nose.”  All that stuff. So you don’t take yourself seriously and destroy the species.

Do you ever worry about running out of material or ideas?

No, there’s a world out there. Open a window, and it’s there.

Sex…  if you view sex and just go, “you look pretty ridiculous.” Even the face. The face you make when you have an orgasm, is pretty much. No one looks… Probably even Warren Beatty, gets that kind of [shouts]. Everyone looks pretty fucking stupid, at the moment they fire the spoo. You get like the wind tunnel face. Baby, baby, baby, baby. Oh, baby, baby, baby, baby. Baby, baby, baby. Everything kind of goes [noise].

It’s nature going, “You look like an animal.” It’s that one thing you got to know. You look a little silly. I don’t care what type of lighting you use, whatever strap on attachments, you still, sometimes look like a poodle and someone’s going to get a fire hose. These are the things you wonder.

Let me ask you about birth as a topic. But you did do the birth of all 3 of your children?

I just remember it was like a magic act. All of a sudden they put this little tent and next thing I heard this [sound] and then … They don’t scream the first few seconds, they just kind of go, “Eh! Wait! It’s cold! It’s very cold!” Then they wash them off and they suture them and they put those little yarmulke on. The little teamster cap. The little longshoreman cap. “Yo, Dad! Yo! Excuse me! You want me to unload this ship?” Then they handed her to me.

I don’t think I asked you any about your faults, if you have any and what they are.

In comedy, not pursuing things, committing to an idea and taking it to its fullest extent because it started when I first started performing, it was all jumping around. Explore an idea until you’ve exhausted it, really go to all the different parameters of it. I think another one is not working so much. This is very interesting, “Look at what’s bad about you.”

What’s bad, yeah.

Look in the mirror, and go, “Nostril hair. The fact that I braid them.”  Sometimes, keeping track of people. It’s always a weird combination of worrying so much about the outside world, and not… you have to be more aware of the inner circle, the folks that matter. Because it comes from performing, you always want to make sure that everyone in the audience is all taken care of. That constant desire to please all the time. That can get you in some shit.

Do you have or ever make any New Year’s resolutions?

I haven’t in a while, I haven’t made any in, I think, since I was about a kid. I used to give up a lot of things for Lent, too, and then I still got hairy.

Here’s the best birth control in the whole world, if you really, if you have no pills, if you have no diaphragm, if you have no other form of contraception. Use it for ladies, if he comes at you with that little thing in his hand, just go [laughs]. Just laugh at it. They can’t deal with it, OK, it’ll be gone. The little thing will be out of there. Then it’s assault with the macaroni. Put it away.

I worked at this fast food restaurant in Oklahoma City, Long John Silver’s. Fried fish and french fries and stuff. I worked there for 11 years from the time I was 16 to the time I was 27 or so. I’d be working late at night and it was a reasonably bad area of town and we got robbed a couple of times. Especially in the late 1970’s because the economy and everything really got horrible.

The first time we got robbed I was the only… I’m not saying this because I’m racist or anything, I’m just being pragmatic about it. I was the only white guy. I was working with a bunch of black women. The guys who came in were black and they were pissed off and they had biggest gun I’ve ever seen in my life. Only because it’s pointed at me did it seem so big.

We all laid on the ground. I thought, “fuck, this is… this is it. Here I am, I’m 17 and this is how it ends. You’re just working one second and the next second you’re laying on the ground and some guy puts a bullet in your head.” Obviously they robbed us and left and didn’t kill me. But I remember the elation of just… We all cried. We couldn’t stop crying and laughing and jumping up and down. We were celebrating like we had just won a million dollars. The idea of we are alive and isn’t it a fucking great thing? I think it changed me.

I think the idea of sort of confronting this always present idea that people around you are going to die or you’re going to die or… I think it makes living better, it really does. To me, I hate this notion that I would ever forget of how temporary this whole thing is. You know life is worth celebrating and worth living even though we’re all headed to the same hole at the end of the day. Without sort of coming to terms with it you’re not coming to terms with some of the joys of life at the same time.

I don’t know. I think somewhere along the way music allows you to sing and talk and think about those things, and it can be beautiful instead of being horrible. I remember when my father was dying, I remember listening to Bjork, and listening to John Coltrane, and these things, and I don’t know why but music has the power to transcend your physical being and take you up just a little bit. Because music has a metaphysical quality it gets up there in these things and it really makes your life beautiful.

It’s the same thing for virtually every human that’s ever going to be alive. Things that make them sad are going to be love, loss of love, death, fear of isolation. It’s a really small little corner. So I think any time you sing about those you’re probably going to have a crowd that knows exactly what you’re talking about. But when you’re sing about things that make you happy, which I like to do that as well, you know, you never know if you’re going to hit the mark. That’s why when I sing a song like

She Don’t Use Jelly, people go, oh that’s crazy, what are you talking about, you know? Even though they enjoy it, they don’t understand it. Stuff like when I sing about the Spoonful Weighs a Ton and people understand this is about death and meaning in your life. They go, “oh, I know what you’re talking about.”

So when I go in there and I’m singing about things that seem to be personal, they can be my own exact personal experience, yet if I’m doing the job right I can make it seem like it’s your story at the same time. I’m not just simply pouring my guts out. I’m pouring my guts out so they can feel like your guts at the same time.

Well I should let you go.

All right, well thanks a bunch. I’m sitting in the lobby where the elevators come out. People have all been looking at me in my bare feet, talking existential bullshit with you as they get in and out of the elevators.

Hilarious, that was the odd ding I was hearing in the background.

Yeah.

Well thanks again and I really appreciate you taking out the time on a Saturday.

Well I’m glad you called. Okay.

Okay, cheers.

Alright, bye.

Bye.

Daddy Clidell was your stepfather.

Yes.

And Daddy Clidell lived by his wits.

Daddy Clidell owned pool halls and gambling houses. Daddy Clidell knew the racket. So he taught me how to look at cards and see if they were marked, how to weigh dice and know if they’re loaded. Then he brought in a lot of con men. Professional con men, who maybe take 2 marks a year.

We should point out a mark is someone who is taken.

My dad, daddy… He’d call the guys in and, “y’all, come on in here, fellows. I want you to tell my baby here how you sold that supermarket in Dallas.” [laughs] “I’m raising this girl. I got to educate her.” So they told me not only the supermarket, but they sold a bridge in Oklahoma. Yes. One man said that, “you see, you use the white man’s bigotry against him.”

There was a white man in the town…

It was Tulsa.

In Tulsa. Who had just exploited all the Indians and the blacks and if he hated anybody more than Indians, it was blacks.

These two con men went down. They checked him out and decided to play him against the store. In long con that’s when you set it up for two months, maybe, and spend a few thousand dollars. You have cards made, a telephone taken in, a secretary, everything, the whole front.

One of the guys played very, very ignorant and very shuffling and went up to the man and said, “look here. I got a friend who own a piece of land, you know. See he got it because he’s part Indian.” [laughs] “Some white man, some Yankee want to buy that land because it’s got a toll bridge on it.” Well my father’s two friends, they sent for a white con man from New York who came down as the big real estate agent from the north, who was interested in buying this land. The white southerner, the Oklahoman, went to the office to talk to this northern real estate man, realtor. The northerner said, “now, listen: I’m going to get this land for maybe $70,000 or something like that because the guy is ignorant. I’ve checked it out. My office has checked it out. He’s got the title of clear. When he signs, it’s mine. But if you check it out or you raise any kind of dust, the state will become aware of that land and that he really owns the property and they’ll move in and confiscate it. So just leave it alone. I’ll … well, you and I can work together.”

Well, this white cracker, the southerner, the Oklahoman said, “he knows niggers.” That’s his attitude. So if this northerner is going to buy it for $70,000, he can buy it for less than that. Get the whole thing.” [laughs]. So they made the deal. At first he was brought to this Indian black American. He went to him and he explained that he’d better have that land and how bad the northern whites were. He talked about the damn Yankees and so the shuffling Indian Negro said, “well, you know boss, I’d rather you have this land than that white man, that Yankee.” So it took some time and he bought it.

For about 50,000.

That’s right. Cash.

Cash.

And that is not a rare… that is not rare. I mean, when I was growing up, I used to know men, very intelligent men, who lived on maybe 2 marks a year.

Basically you’re talking about the stupidity of racism.

That’s right.

In a way, it’s almost a metaphor.

Of course because these men were born before the turn of the century. What a black man could be by 1915, his inability to function was crystallized. He simply had no way to move. Yet, here are men who lived by that intelligence. Suppose, imagine, if that intelligence had been able to be used constructively, that is more constructively for the common good.

Maya Angelou, our guest. Thank you very much.

Thank you Studs. It’s wonderful to see you again, to see you keep on keeping on.

I’ll stay on the case.

That’s it.

This necklace arrangement that you have on here, this costume? What is that?

It’s called a bib. Takes the place of a tie.

It’s not the kind of bibs I remember. What is made… Is that gold?

It’s 18 karat gold and…

Heaven’s sake.

… Russian lapis lazuli.

That’s a beautiful thing.

You must realize that I once was poor myself. I worked to get where I am today and I’ve worked hard to spend $100,000 a year on my clothes and I’ve worked hard to earn $3 million a year. I deserve what I get because I worked for it. I was born and raised during Depression Years when we were on County relief and we all went out and we hustled. we worked. I worked in a restaurant, I washed dishes. My mother worked in a cookie factory. My father worked in a factory. So anyone that dares begrudge what I have today, just better get off their duff and do something about it to do something for themselves as well as their country. I feel that I have a perfect right to spend my money the way I damn please.

I don’t profess to be a healer, a minister, a priest. I feel as an entertainer I can do more good for the world than I would if I were a soapbox orator or a self-made politician. I was, some years ago, privileged to have an audience with Pope Pius XII and later with Cardinal Cushing, and both of these men likened my work, dealing with the public in all parts of the world, to the work that they were trying to do from the pulpit. So I feel that if entertainment is that important, the media, then it’s my duty, not only to mankind but to God, to fulfill the promise that I carry on this work. If someone, for instance, can forget their pains and their ills and their strife by watching any performer then I think this work is worthwhile, yes.

You have found a niche that you are perfectly comfortable with?

I’ve found my bag, yes.

If I were President.

Here we go. In the first place, you’d have campaign buttons with chandeliers, I mean candelabras on them.

No

No you wouldn’t.

I would spend the money that is spent on wars every 20 years and spend it on giving people work. Let them build roads, bridges, buildings, schools.

In a way though, you’re being contradictory, aren’t you? Because a few moments ago you were suggesting that people get up off their duffs and do these things themselves and pull it up by their bootstraps.

People who sit back and wait for somebody to take care of them are the people that I am speaking of. These are the people that if shown a way, can be useful to our society.

Well, Mr. President, what about those who are shown and don’t pay any attention?

Well, then, I guess they’re just basic criminal people that don’t belong in our society.

People in show business who are interested in politics, like Ronald Reagan, fare so well because they do know the magic of dealing with the public. This is something that can’t be taught in a book. If they can produce after they’ve won over the public. If you can live up to your ballyhoo, you’ve got it made.

You talk about politics, I wonder, have you really ever given it any thought, huh?

No.

Seriously now? Representative or sheriff or something?

I don’t think I would be a good politician. I kid about it when I get a standing ovation. Sometimes I’ll say, “I may run for Governor,” but it’s strictly a joke.

But I was always terribly outspoken and just always said what I thought in as much as I knew about it. They say that in Hollywood one can’t do that, but I think honesty counts in Hollywood just as much as it does anywhere else. I think it’s just too much trouble to be dishonest and keep up with yourself, you know. There’s simpler roads to say what you think then you haven’t got to always check as to what you said to one person and what you said to another. I think this would be exhausting actually. One can be respected with the truth in Hollywood just as much as anywhere else you know or else I wouldn’t have had a career.

Do you feel that being…. let’s forget modesty and let’s be honest. Do you feel that having a certain amount of intelligence as you do, is sometimes a hindrance in your field?

As a female I think it’s a terrible hindrance in business. I think it’s a terrible hindrance for any female to have a lot of intelligence in private life, but I think in business sometimes it’s even worse because there’s deep resentment. No question about it, from the male side of the business. We all work for men. You know they’re the people in charge and I think they find women easier who haven’t the ability to think for themselves or stand up for themselves. One can make more enemies as a female with a brain I think. No question about that; among the opposite sex but I don’t think in business it matters whether you’re a man or a woman if you can do your job and have a brain.

Bette Davis, when you come home from studio after having to fight in a man’s world was it difficult to come home and then really be a woman?

No, because whether it was difficult or not I worked very hard at it. I think I worked much too hard at it because I went way overboard the other way of proving I was definitely just a female, and trying to divide up the two. Of course, it should never be attempted because it cannot be done. It’s impossible. It’s too much work. It’s ridiculous. But I must say I did try because I believe one should be a woman at home, you know. Actually, I think business women are better women at home, if you want to know the truth because you do understand what goes into a day’s work out in the world, a very nerve-racking affair. And that’s what life boils down to in the long run anyway. That’s all marriage is, is a great, great, wonderful communion of interest and a friendship. They don’t seem to want it to be that simple. I don’t know… [LAUGHS]

I think men have got to change an awful lot. I think somehow they still prefer the little woman. They’re just staying way, way behind and so as a rule I think millions of women are very happy to be by themselves, they’re so bored with the whole business of trying to be the little woman, when no such thing really exists anymore. It just simply doesn’t. This world’s gone way beyond it. The real female should be partly male and the real male should be partly female anyway. So if you ever run into that in either sex you’ve run into something very, very fine, I think.

We’ll have to start a whole new sex.

Well there is a new sex starting I think that is neither man nor woman. It’s a very independent male creature that lives alone, and a lot of independent females who live alone. It’s all very sad but it’s much easier for both sexes to do it this way nowadays. I have often said, “If men found out how to give birth to children they’ll never propose again.” You know it’s really The way the world is going. There’s no question about it. [LAUGHS]

There’s no writing for women anymore, this is the truth. There is none.

Women have always been the glamor part of the industry. I don’t understand that.

Women are the essential part of the theater but the writers are not writing about women. I think they’re too perplexed about the whole female situation probably. The world’s all full of thoughts about wars and space, and tragedies to the world. That’s what writers are thinking about because that’s what the world is thinking about. It’s very sad because that’s when we could use entertainment like mad to forget all of this, but there seems to be no subjects that they write about.

Bette Davis I think you are very kind to let me come up here.

No, I love seeing you.

It really is a pleasure seeing and talking with you. I don’t often get this kind of joy from an interview. Thank you very much.

I’ll have to take you and show you my birch trees now.

Good, and this is Shirley Eder thanking Bette Davis, wishing her well, and returning us to Radio Central.

Does he work very hard on his dancing?

Janet Jackson: He just… oh the question. Do you work very hard on your dancing? [laughs]

I should but I don’t. [laughs] I just… whatever you see me do is spontaneous reactions on stage. It’s nothing planned. It’s nothing that I got in the room and tried to think of hard. It just happens through feeling.

Does he actually find it hard to keep from dancing when he’s in the studio?

Janet Jackson: [laughs] Yeah, I think so.

[laughs] Yeah that isn’t my problem. I’m just dancing around…

Janet Jackson: Can’t keep still…

Yeah, hard to keep still. Moving around from the mic. [laughs]

My singing it’s just.. I’ll just say it simple as possible: it’s just godly. Really it’s just… When I was small I didn’t really know what i was doing. I just sang and it came out sounding pretty good. I just do it and it happens. It’s… I can’t explain it or… It’s no real personal experience or anything that makes it come across. Just a feeling and God, I’ll say. Mainly God.

You hear us talk about the peacock a lot because the peacock is the only bird of all the bird family that integrates every color into one. That’s our main goal in music. When you go to our concerts and you see every race out there and they’re all waving hands and they’re holding hands and they’re smiling and dancing. All colors. That’s what great. That’s what keeps me going. [laughs]

I do believe deeply in perfection. I’m never satisfied. I’ll cut a track or something and I come home and I say: “no, that’s not right. We gotta to do it over it’s not right.” And then go back and back and back. Then when it’s finally out, you say: “darn it. I should have done this.” It’s number one on the charts you’re still screaming about what you should have done. If you’re satisfied with everything you’re just going to stay at one level and the world will move ahead. [laughs] That’s not good either.

When Michael’s in the studio, is it important for him to go for a vocal straight away or does he kind of build up to doing the one?

Janet Jackson: When you’re in the studio does it… Do you, ah… do you have to go for a vocal straight away or do you have to build up to it?

No I do vocals pretty quick. But for instance “Ben” I did in one take. I went right in and cut it. I said: “want to do another one?” The guy said: “no, no, it was great.” I said “was it?” That was at Motown. I’ll never forget that little apple box I stood on because I couldn’t reach the microphone. My name was written on it and it’s sitting at Diana Ross’s house now. She has all my little doodling papers I would draw and write.

A lot of people have been overexposed. It’s true. Where people are fed up. I pray that that never happens with me. I just don’t like being on a lot of different things or being everywhere because I get kind of embarrassed. But I think secretly and privately there is… I mean really deep within there is a destiny for me and just for me to stay on that track and follow it. I really believe and feel I am here for a reason and that’s my job, you know, to perform for the people and if they accept it that I am rewarded. If they want to put me up on that pedestal I feel even better.

Was it through the Wiz that Michael Jackson got to work with Quincy Jones?

Janet Jackson: Was it to do with The Wiz that you got to work with Quincy?

Yes. That was… I met Quincy before at Sammy Davis’s house a long time ago. But the real meeting with Quincy, the real marriage, was the Wiz project. We really got to know one another. We worked beautifully together. Ah, so well.

And, ah, I called Quincy up one day and said: “Quincy, I’m ready to do an album, a solo album. But I want a real good producer to work with me.” I said: “can you recommend somebody?” I wasn’t trying to hint around at all. I wasn’t. I didn’t think about him. He said: “Smelly.” He calls me “Smelly.” He said: “Smelly: why don’t you let me do it?” I said: “ahhhh… that’s a great idea.” I started giggling and he said: “why don’t we start.” Next week we got together. We started planning and that’s how “Off The Wall” came about.

But you chose a whole career that is pretty concerned with that stuff.

It wasn’t the career I chose. The career I chose was a drama major in college, at Yale, when I played a 90-year-old woman. One of my most celebrated roles. Then I played a really fat person. I played a lot of different things. That’s how I thought I loved to wrangle my talent, my need to express myself. I like to do it that way.

I never thought I was somebody that would be on the cover of magazines in fashions, wearing fashions. It’s like not me. But that is what movie stardom entails. I always wore my own clothes a lot of the time, in interviews. In the marketing of a movie. I could…

Are these your own clothes?

Actually this is not. These are mine. These shoes are mine. But I missed … I got famous before you had to do all this stuff. I went up for King Kong. I remember that.

That would have been fun.

Jessica Lang’s part. Dino De Laurentiis, he was sitting there. He was meeting all these girls. I came in. I had really tried to look nice. His son was sitting in the room, and Dino spoke to him in Italian. I know Italian, studied Italian. So he said, “Why do you send me this pig. This woman, she’s so ugly.”

Oh no!

So I looked at him and I said, “brutta”.

What does that mean?

“I’m very sorry that I disappoint you”. He was so used to treating girls like bimbos. Of course, he would never imagine that a blond person would speak Italian.

I found my knitting bag just last week, and in it was a half-finished sweater for a boyfriend, long gone, and the knitting book, the knitting pattern which was in Women’s Day Magazine, 1967. I looked through this magazine and I just couldn’t believe it. I showed it to my daughters and they were screaming.

Because the second page, big, great big ad, “Join the only profession where you can make as much as a man. Be an accountant.” Yeah. There was a column called, “What Men Say About Women.” “The worst thing that a man can do to a woman is to let her get on top. They asked us in so many different ways not to let them, and if we don’t, they’re happier, and we’re happier.” Just a really different world. It’s hard to explain that to people.

Sometimes you look out the window and you look at all the windows, and think inside very single one of them is somebody with some huge, weird, terrible problem, some great jokes. There’s a lot of lives worth embodying. It’s very exhilarating to step into somebody else’s shoes. It’s very humbling to imagine somebody else’s really life and their pain. It’s my drug.

Well, I mean, I have so much doubt. I am an actor.

But you’re connecting with people so much right now.

That’s a great thing. Because I have a lot to say about the world, clearly. Only I can’t put together, as you can see, a clear sentence about it all, but through the work I can say what I think.

I have thought a lot about this actually in my life lately to be honest, and have gotten nowhere with it, in a way that… meaning that there’s a period of time in your life where I kind of look back and I think, “Was I happy? Or was I just not aware?” It seems like a very basic question, but I really do think you reach a time where you go, “I don’t know.” It really does up-end a lot of things in your own life and in your own mind” But in my life now I think, I have three children and I think I’m happy when I’m with them and they’re okay. When I see them enjoying each other in front of me, and then they let me enjoy them in turn. That brings a feeling which I would say is happiness. Now I don’t know why. I mean I do know why, obviously, on the surface because they’re my kids, but it is a certain thing that happens, and I’m like, right now. Right now. This is it.

But there are moments when something else creeps in there. And I’m not conscious of the love. I’m conscious of something else, which happens to be my own childhood. So all of a sudden, they start to reflect something other than what I hoped my childhood to be. Being with a kid always takes you to being a kid somehow, and they really are showing me a childhood I might not have had in some way. But if something else creeps in, it becomes a different kind of reflection. It’s of your shortcomings, your inadequacies, your incapabilities, your powerlessness, and on and on and on, which wakens up a whole other thing. That’s what I mean about happiness. Does it mean it ends, it ended? That gets so discouraging to me, about well, “What is this thing?”

You know how people always say life is short. That’s kind of the phrase. Life is short. Time is short. And it does. As we get older, time does quicken. It’s long, and it’s long pertaining to that thought, that the past is not done with you because you can’t rid of it. And so therefore, it just starts to drag. You get a glimpse of what you might have wanted, or what it could’ve been, and you can start to have it right here in your life now, but then the past does creep in pretty quickly. And that is a very difficult one, on how to keep it there and not have it kind of ruin it.

If we’re so keen on being happy, why do we spend so much time in the dark watching actors as brilliant as you portraying miserable creatures? What’s going on there?

Any great novel that I can think of is actually drawing a character or narrative in such a way that is so brutally honest, in a way that you’ve thought, “oh, God, I never would have put it that way, but that’s it.” All of the sudden you come across it in a book, in such a way that you’re relieved that somebody actually got it down on paper. And you’re grateful because it is that awful or that brutal. And therefore, that memorable. And that’s why I’m talking to you about it, because if I don’t allow people to somehow identify with the worst inside themselves, they never have a chance at actually walking out with that person in their heart, or in their minds. They’re too easy to dismiss. It’s like it might not be the thing they’ll admit to a friend, you know what I mean. But if you’re honest, you kind of probably do. I do, and I know I can’t be that wildly different from everyone in this room. You know what I mean. I identify with a lot of things that I’ve done in the movies. It doesn’t mean I’ve literally done them. It’s identify with them. I identify with their source.

That’s the thing with meditation too, right? If you meditate, every day, and you really get into meditation, meditation is actually coming right up to the lip of death and saying, “I’m here. I’m scared. I’m here.” That that’s life. If you can actually live in that place, that’s what happens. Right? It’s the same kind of thing that learning how to die, is therefore learning how to live.

Okay. So, happy?

Oh, God. When I am sitting out there I’m like, “I am the stupidest man in the room and I am about to step up on that stage.” That is what I think at that time and I go, Tthat has a lot to do with what we are about to talk about.” You know that I would think that. You know that I am going to talk about something that anyone would ever have to take seriously enough to incorporate into their own thoughts. But… so don’t listen.

There was a real feeling of inadequacy in that era. I never really felt like a rock singer or a rock star or whatever. I always felt a little bit out of my element which is a ridiculously high falutin way of looking at it. Now, from my standpoint, when I look back, I realize that from ‘72 through to about ‘76, I was the ultimate rock star. I couldn’t have been more rock star.

 You had a zillion records and the lifestyle, everything.

But the lifestyle and everything. Anything that was going out there that had anything to do with being a rock and roll singer, then I was hey let’s go for this, let’s see what it is like.

I read a quote, somebody called you a surreal cartoon character brought to life.

It was, sort of. Ziggy was. I mean he was half out of sci-fi rock and half out of the Japanese theater.  The clothes were, at that time, simply outrageous. And simply… Nobody had seen anything like them before.

Was there a point where people did not take your music seriously because you were doing theatrics?

I think I moved out of Ziggy fast enough so as not to be caught by that one. Because most rock characters that one can create only have a short lifespan. They are one shots, they are cartoony. And the Ziggy thing was worth about one or two albums before I couldn’t really write anything else around him or the world that I wanted to sort of put together for him.

I am a moderately good singer. I am not a great singer but I can interpret a song, which I don’t think is quite the same as singing it.  So I was never unaware of my strength as an interpretive performer but writing a song, for me… it never rang true. I had no problem writing something for Iggy Pop, or working with Lou Reed, or writing for Mott the Hoople. I can get into their mood and what they want to do, but I find it extremely hard to write for me. So I found it quite easy to write for the artists I would create, because I did find it much easier having created a Ziggy, to then write for him. Even though it was me doing it. I was able to sort of distance myself from the whole… yeah, well it can become very complicated.

There is a psychological name for that.

Yes. It is. Fucking with the fabric of time there. It did bring a whole sackful of its own inherent problems with it.

Do you have an affection for some of these characters that you have created as you look back?

I think the only time I get sort of nostalgic about any of that stuff at all is if I see the old videos or I see a bit of the Ziggy Stardust concerts or whatever. No, other than that I do not think I am cold about them, but I think it’s work done.

I think that is an actor’s attitude too.

I think you have to. Otherwise you start… You get into a danger of getting into the rut and maybe try to perpetuate something that has gone before. A lot of people that I know are bugged with the idea that they have got to have an audience, or they have got to be liked. I think the more that you fall into that trap it makes your own life harder to come to terms with, because an audience appreciation is only going to be periodic at the best of times. You will fall in and out of favor continually. I do not think it should be something one should be looking for. You should turn around at the end of the day and say I really like that piece of work, or that piece of work sucked. Not, was that popular or wasn’t it popular?

Is it hard being David Bowie?

Not really, not now, no. I do not have the outsider problem. For me, the world that I inhabit in reality is probably very different world than the one people expect that I would be in. It is quite sedate. It’s far removed from a lot of what they would feel to be the limousine traveling rock existence, or whatever.

I went to one of the first art-oriented high schools in England. I had a very excellent teacher, Peter Frampton’s father who really kind of is quite an inspiration. I went into the visual side of an advertising agency and I was doing pasteup jobs and small designs for raincoats and things like that. Awful, absolutely awful.

Maybe you should have kept it….

Well, if all this goes down the tubes …

You can always …

Get on Madison Avenue with the best of them. I think those days are over. But it did give me an unbridled interest in art. It goes through your entire life.

When I was 7-1/2 or 8 years old, my mother had a heart attack. This heavy-set doctor brought her home, told her some things while she was lying in bed.  Then came out to see me. Then he grabbed me by the arm.  It was summer, hot day and the sweat was dripping off of his face and falling onto my cheeks.

He said: “Don’t ever get angry with your mother because you might kill her.”  He was not very psychologically oriented.  But the other thing he said was: “Try to make her laugh.” And that was a huge thing although I didn’t realize it at the time.  For the first time in my life, I tried consciously to make someone else laugh.  I knew I was very successful when she’d run to the bathroom and say: “Now, look what you’ve made me do.”

When you please your mother by doing something, it gives you confidence that you can please other people.  I think that’s where the courage to make people laugh came from, but I didn’t want to be a comedian. I wanted to be an actor.  Maybe a comic actor, but an actor. That’s what got me into acting was putting on an act, because in life, I wasn’t funny and I felt on stage or in the movies, I could do whatever I wanted to. I was free.

When I was 18 and the hormones were raging and I was at school, University of Iowa I suddenly felt the overwhelming compulsion to pray.  I must have prayed for 20 minutes or so. I didn’t know what I was praying about, but I was feeling guilty about something. The next day or two, it was 30 minutes. Then it was an hour, then two hours. To skip ahead to the end of the 7-1/2 years of analysis, I was so afraid to feel free to enjoy my own life if my mother was sick and suffering everyday of her’s.  I didn’t think I had the right.

If you ask an actor: why do you want to act?  I don’t think most of them know the real reasons.  After 7-1/2 years of analysis, I have a fairly good idea why.  My analyst said it’s better than running around naked in Central Park isn’t it?

I was offered the part of Willy Wonka in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. When the director came to my house I said: “Well I like the script except when the audience sees Willy Wonka for the first time, I want to come out of the door with a cane and limp my way to the crowd. And they are like: ‘Oh, Willy Wonka, oh he is a cripple. Oh, my god, who thought…. I never knew that.’ And they quiet down, quiet down and Willy Wonka’s cane gets stuck in a brick and he starts to fall forward and he does a forward somersault and jumps up and the crowd cheers and applauds.” And the director said: “What do you want to do that for?” I said: “because from that time on no one will know whether I’m lying or telling the truth.” He said: “you mean if i say no, you won’t do the picture?” I said: “I’m afraid that’s the truth.”

If the bell goes off when I read a script I say I’ve got to do this, but the bell hasn’t gone off for a long time because I’m tired of movies that are just based on special effects, on the F-word and “you mother F” and the F-ing. I’m being very polite.  But it’s the truth. I haven’t read anything that I really wanted to do for so long.  Now, I find it’s much more comforting to sit in my study, write starting at 10:30 or so, come out after an hour and a half, get a quick kiss from my wife, make a cup of tea, go back in, write, come about for lunch go back until 3:30, quarter to 4 and then call it a day.

Yoko: Well, I never thought that it would happen in this late stage of my life.  I mean, I just sort of, I was starting to give up hope, you know, that kind of thing, you know.  Becoming very cynical and all that.  But it happened and it’s very, very, very good.

It’s no good having, being with people you can dominate all the time.  Or being with someone who can dominate you all the time.  Because either one is boring.  But if you’re with somebody who’s got a ticking mind, which was the best part about being with the Beatles when they were ticking, is they were ticking, you know?  But it began to slow down.

But with Yoko Ono, it’s like living with 4 or 5 people…. [laughs] It’s far out.

Yoko: Well we do say, four of us are getting along very well these days aren’t we? Or something like that.

That’ll do. they’ll have us put away.

Marriage thing itself, as an official ceremony seems to have somewhat gone out of style. How come you decided to go through with a regular marriage?

Because we turned out to be romantics.  I mean we went through the whole intellectual bit about marriage, you know, where it’s a bit of paper and some guy gives it to you.  And that’s all true.  But when he gave it to us, it was very emotional, you know, and it wasn’t even a, we couldn’t even get a nice vicar or a bishop, you know, to do it. It’s completely against what we thought, what I thought intellectually, I thought well it’s never again, forget about this one.  You know, what a joke, what a joke it all is.  And the next minute, I’m standing there and she’s crying and it’s like we’re soft kids, you know.  So we’re romantic, and it made a difference.

Can there be such a thing as being too close? Can that actually… Because in your case it doesn’t seem that way.

Like stifling each other then. You see we’re both mind people, you know. So to be apart, we don’t have to physically be apart.

Yoko: Exactly. You have to say that.

I just said it.

Yoko: Oh, alright.

I just said it. Ding dong, ding dong. Next round.

Yoko: But the point is this is an interesting example….

Well they’re all brought up to think that a couple, you mustn’t give a child too much love, a couple mustn’t be together too much, it’s good for the husband to be working in America while the wife’s in Brazil. You know, we don’t believe all that jazz. That’s just some social Christian jazz that someone must have laid on us a few generations ago. And you can’t give a child too much love and if you love somebody, you can’t be with them enough. There’s no such thing. We don’t want to be apart.

I just like TV, you know. I think to me, it replaced the fireplace when I was a child. They took the fire away and they put a TV in instead and I got hooked on it.

Yoko: The complexity of it is incredible, you know.  So you can see, observe TV on many levels actually, many different levels.

I was a great one as a kid for standing and just looking out a window for hours and hours and hours. Now the TV does that for me, except for the view changes immensely. One minute it’s the saint, the next it’s a rocket, or Vietnam. It’s very surreal. I leave it in on whether I have the sound on or not.

Yoko: You don’t have to go to India any more. You know, you don’t have to go anywhere, you can just be here.

It’s like Paul Kraston said, all I ask in life is a water bed, a TV and a typewriter. Well, I’ll just have an ordinary bed, a TV and a guitar. Apart from Yoko Ono.

Do you really need to tour so much? Do you need to work so hard and drive yourself so hard?

For my soul I do. Yeah, for my soul. It’s a gift. My mother always told me that any talent is a gift of God and I always believed it. If I quit, I would just live in front of the television and get fat and die pretty soon. So I don’t want to do that. You know I just hope and pray I can die with my boots on. I’ve been in hospital beds and I don’t want to end it up there.

I went through a period that I didn’t want to sing those old songs again. I finally decided that I was really cheating them and myself. And I started singing all the old ones with gusto and lust. Like I loved them. Those songs, I Walk the Line and Folsom, Sunday Morning Coming Down, Ring of Fire. They’re part of me. They’re an extension of me when I get in front of that microphone. They’re a part of me going through that mic, you know, to that audience. They feel it and they know it if I feel it, you know. They’ll turn it right back to me, the appreciation. That’s what it’s all about. That’s what performing is all about, is sharing and communicating.

Do you think… Could you have ever been a preacher? Were you ever tempted to-?

No. I think in my world of religion, you’re called to preach or you don’t preach. Called by God to preach. I never been ordained by God to preach the gospel. I have a calling, it’s called to perform and sing. I think gospel song is a ministry in a way, you know. gospel music. gospel music is so ingrained into my bones, you know. I can’t do a concert without singing a gospel song. It’s what I was raised on. It was the thing that inspired me as a child growing up on a cotton farm, where work was drudgery and it was so hard that when I was in the field I sang all the time. Usually gospel songs because they lifted me up above that black dirt.

I was going to ask you how the pain is in your jaw these days.

It’s pretty severe.

Really? All the time? Constant?

Almost all the time, yeah.

How do you-?

Except when I’m on stage.

Really?

Yeah.

That’s miraculous that it just leaves you. Yeah. Power of music I guess.

Yeah, I pray for that and it works. It doesn’t alter or hinder my performance.

It must be a struggle to have to take pain killers at the same time, to be able to regulate them-

I don’t take them. I can’t take them. It’s like an alcoholic. he can’t drink. I can’t take pain pills.

You must be very brave to-

No. I’m not very brave because for five years I didn’t try to take the pain. I fought it. I had a total of 34 surgical procedures on my left jaw. Every doctor I’ve been to knows what to do next, too. To relieve me of pain, I don’t believe any of them. I’m handling it. It’s my pain. I’m not being brave either. I’m not brave at all after what I’ve been through, I just know how to handle it.

When you look at yourself in the mirror do you feel like an American icon when you look at yourself in the mirror?

God, what a question. Shit. I see the pimples on my nose and I see the fat jaw from the pain where it’s swollen or thinning hair or whatever. Icon? No. I don’t see him. He’s not in my mirror.

You don’t see the John Wayne of rock and roll?

No. … Thanks anyway.

Do you look back now and think, “Wow, dressing in black was one hell of a smart career move?”

No, I never thought about it. How does it help me? I don’t know. What good’s it do? I’m so uncomfortable wearing colors in public. I really am. Even denim. If I’ve got a day off in a town, I want to go out for a walk I’ll put on denim. But almost everything I’ve got the black on.

I was interested to know whether you ever talked about gospel music with Elvis?

Oh yeah. That’s all we talked about. Well that wasn’t all, we talked about girls too. Yeah, Elvis and I, a lot of shows we would sing together in the dressing room and invariably we’d go to black gospel. We knew the same songs. We grew up on the same songs.

You’re fidgety.

Exactly. Fidgety. My nervous energy is usually the easiest form of energy to tap into. It’s a pattern for me, going into any job carrying a certain level of anxieties and doubt, self doubt, fears toward my inabilities and not being able to… I fooled them, or I can’t do this. I’m not an actor. I shouldn’t be here. I think everyone goes through that. I certainly do, and I recognize it as a pattern. I recognize it as necessary because without it I wouldn’t try as hard to overcome it.

You have to be willing to be manipulated in the first place because you can either recognize that in your director and then fight it because you don’t trust them, but I’m not going to let them manipulate me. Or you think they’re on to something and that they’re manipulating something out of you which is interesting and new.

So you kind of go with it. There’s as much self manipulation as there is directorial. I mean in terms of trying to convince yourself to believe the story and believe your characters. To me, I believe acting truly is harnessing the power of belief.

I find just hanging out more useful than rehearsal time. I really don’t like to rehearse at all. I think getting to know someone and gaining someone’s trust, the people you’re working with around you, is really important, particularly when you find yourself in such vulnerable positions in the story.

People generally express more in between their sentences when they’re not speaking. Words are usually there to disguise who someone is or what they’re feeling. So sometimes words are too complicated and they over-intellectualize moments –

Well they’re a crutch, that’s what they are.

Yeah, and they’re red herrings, too.

If having true love and love that is expressive and free outside of work affects a project where you have to be restrained and in denial and fixed and closed off. This doesn’t mean you go out and just destroy your love outside of your life and kind of mirror your movie.

We’re actors at the end of the day. I don’t take it home with me. My experience outside of work, I love… when I hear wrap, it’s the most exciting part of my day. I’m the first to have my make-up off, in the car, out. I’ve gotta go home. I want to get back to my life. I love it back there.

Was Ang [Lee] in the mix, or –

Ang was our next door neighbor! I remember one morning waking up and Michelle and I were making coffee and having a cigarette. Going down to sit on the little stairs of our tiny little trailer. And then our eyes kind of come to and start adjusting to this cold morning. Ang is like sitting on a park bench in front of us. You can kind of make out that he’s holding something and you can hear this sound. Then you realize he’s sucking the eyeballs out of a fish. And his son had caught rainbow trout in the river and is eating the lips and eyes off of the face of the fishes at 5 o’clock in the morning.

Ang is so fascinating!

Yeah. But he’s not alone. There are hundreds of millions of people that do that. I’m just not into eating  fish face!

They used to claim that Woody’s band were faggots because we were so stoned we didn’t care to go for the women. There were no faggot on that band. Jazz music is a man’s game. Let’s face it.

Even when you were so much involved with both drugs and alcohol, you played well.

We played well all the time. You can do anything with practice. I’m sure we could’ve played better if we weren’t.

I’m a recovered alcoholic. I don’t do anything anymore, but those things, those things take away … You’re a different personality completely when you take those. For those who are really chemically dependent on anything, it’s not you. Of course, I’ve done some dastardly things, but what can I do except make amends and apologize? Since I stopped drinking, which is almost a year ago, I’ve started to feel like I’m a member of the world. I never was. I was so fucked up all my life.

I had a 10-year heroin habit and kicked that. Then I became an alcoholic. I drank two fifth’s a day.

What finally triggered this [crosstalk]

It’s just like they say at Alcoholics Anonymous. I was either and/or going insane or I was going to die. I was one of those guys who was in constant denial. Look, I work. I do my job. I support my family, boom. I do everything I was supposed to do. If I want a drink, fuck you, I’ll drink.

It’s a disease and it took me that long. It took me 45 years from the time I was 15 until I was now and I just wouldn’t believe it. I could drink. I’d get up there and play and I don’t remember. Most of my records I don’t remember making.

Do you enjoy playing in front of people, concerts, tours?

More and more these days when I’m alcohol-free now and even to see the world around me, I appreciate it, but I never truly enjoy too much of it maybe because I feel like I’m a working musician. There are some joyous moments, but I will not think a joyous moment. Hearing myself so much all the time, I don’t think I sound that special all the time because it’s me.

Do you get tired of being a musician at all or are there times when … ?

The day that I think I’ve got it done maybe I will until then, no. It’s different every night.

It does appear, doesn’t it, the days of the baubles and bangles and the freaky hairstyle have all disappeared.

Yeah, but see everybody goes through those stages… The first time around when you wear all these different things, you know. I just did that because I felt like I was being too loud or something. because my nature just changes, you know. Well I don’t want it to be only hyped up on all the visual thing, you know. I wanted people to like listen, too. I don’t know if they were or not though. It started to bring me down a little bit so I started cutting my hair. And started… rings disappearing one by one. [laughs]

One time I said: maybe I should burn a guitar tonight. You know [laughs] smash a guitar or something like that. And they said: yeah, yeah! I said: you really think I should? They said: yeah, that’d be cool. I said: well, ok. So like I just worked up enough anger where I could do it, you know. But like I didn’t know it was anger until they told me that it was, like with destruction and all that. But I believe everybody should have like a room where they can get rid of all their releases, where they can do their releases at. So my room is a stage. [laughs]

I mean, it has been said of you that you invented psychedelic music.

[chuckles] A mad scientist approach. The way I write things, I just write them with a clash between reality and fantasy mostly. You have to use fantasy to show different sides of reality; it’s how it can bend. As a word reality is nothing, but each individual’s own way of thinking. Then the establishment grabs a big piece of that.

You know all I write is what I feel that’s all. I don’t really round it off too good. I just keep it naked almost, you know. And like when we go to play, you know, you’re flipping around and flashing around and everything. They’re not going to see nothing but what their eyes see, you know. Forget about their ears. So like well I was trying to do too many things at the same time, which is my nature, you know. I just hate to be in one corner. I hate to be put as only a guitar player or only as a songwriter. Or only as a music tap dancer. Something like this. [chuckles]

I think certain people think of your music as essentially as “angry music.” As raging against perhaps the establishment principles.

Oh it’s not raging against it. If it was up to me there’d be no such thing as the establishment, you know. It’s the blues that’s all I’m singing about. Today’s blues.

Do you have any politics in fact yourself?

Not really. I was getting ready to get into all that, but like everybody goes through that stage, too. I just… it all comes out in the music most of the time. We have this one song called “Straight Ahead.” And it just says, like, power to the people, freedom to the soul. Pass it on to the young and old. We don’t give a damn if your hair is short or long. Communication is coming on strong. And all this kind of stuff, you know.

What are the things that you would like to see change?

Oh, I don’t know. More color in the streets probably. I mean [chuckles] I really don’t know. If there’s a new idea, a new invention, or a new gas, or a new whatever you know, It should be brought at least into the open instead of carrying these same old burdens around with you. You have to be a freak in order to be different. And freaks they are very prejudiced. you have to have your hair long and talk in a certain way in order to be with them.

In order to be the other way you have to have your hair short and wear ties. So we’re trying to make a third world happen, you know what I mean? There are too many heavy songs out nowadays. music has been getting too heavy, almost to the state of unbearable. I have this one little saying: when things get too heavy just call me helium–the lightest known gas to man. [laughs]

You talk quite a bit about audio visual importance, too. The importance of a having a film with your music. Now are you thinking in terms of the days when we can fit a cassette into the side of our television and play music and a film together or, I mean…

Yeah, a lot of people are making more money than they ever had nowadays. So when they get their flat they can…. they always find themselves with an extra room. So like this extra room could be a whole audio-visual environment. They could go in there, you know, just lay back, and the whole thing blossoms out with this color and sound type of scene. You can go in here and jingle out your nerves or something, you know.

I laid my clothes out the night before school started. And my birthday’s Sept. 12th, so school happened to hit this year on my birthday. This was my 18th birthday. I was getting ready to graduate. I was at an all-boys school. Bad boys. Called Jacob A Riis.

This was in L.A.?

Yeah. Southeast Los Angeles. But when I got up the next morning, I wasn’t going to school, Joe. Something said, “you’re going to Hollywood today.” I was standing there combing my hair in the mirror and I said: “mama, i’m not going to school today.” She went crazy: “baby, you gotta go to school. This is your last semester. You’re going to graduate.“ “I got to go to Hollywood. Today.”

I walked all the way up to Hollywood and Vine and I stood on the left corner facing Capitol, before you cross over. Capitol Records always represented Hollywood to me. I stood there about 3.5 – 4 hours. Just looking.

Just looking.

Looking at the cars. Looking at the people moving, people with briefcases. It really inspired me. I knew that’s where I wanted to be.

What was it like around Hollywood for a young guy trying to make it?

Very tough. If you were a young kid, 19, 20 years old who has two children and a third one on the way and refuses to leave them. A kid who was on welfare, because he refused to steal anybody’s property or take anybody’s money. You found life a lot tougher.

I came into it knowing what I had to offer. All I had was the will and the love for music. I couldn’t read music or write it. No connections, no car, no money, no bankroll, no clothes, no nothing. But what I loved about it was, you were always able to meet somebody interesting that was doing something.

See, I’m the boy with the flapping shoes. I’m the one who was not embarrassed to walk up in front of you with his flapping shoes and ask you did you have anything for me to do. I knew I didn’t know. I never came into this industry with an ego, ever in my life. I knew I had to learn. I knew I had to earn that car. I knew I had to earn those shoes. I had to earn that coat to wear in Hollywood and I wanted to earn it in Hollywood.

Everyone to me has to pick a subject to talk about in music if you’re going to be a writer. Mine is love, because I know when a man’s making love the last thing he thinks about is war.

I guess so…

Ok, the last thing he thinks about is how he can blow up a nation. Fleas fuck. Flies, snakes, everybody’s into love-making, Joe.

Besides that, it’s the most powerful element that men and women possess. Most of us don’t know what… how to use it, but we all possess it. The women used the music to get their men to relate to them better: “talk to me, tell me what’s on your mind.” Men used the music to get the girls in the mood to make love. So either way you had it, Barry White is the one artist who actually was in your bedroom with you at your most sacred, sensuous moment of your life.

Alot of baby’s have been named Barry. The Barry-Boom that was the baby boom in the ‘74 that they wrote about. One of the greatest highlights of my career then was Ted Kennedy when he printed in print that the only music he listens to in his yacht and in his home is Barry White’s music

My philosophy is you have to be loyal to something. You can’t be a whore all your life, man. I think that there’s a time when people give their words to each other it has to mean something. I’m a street cat. See I’ve belonged in gangs and when you had a partner, you went down with your partner whether you won the fight or lost it. You went down together.

I didn’t know (coughs) when we moved (coughs) that I‘d be up there for the rest of my life. I thought to become a serious american writer, one ought to write a novel or two. I was a New Yorker contributor and I hadn’t written a novel, so I gave myself this sabbatical which stretched then into a lifestyle that lasted all my life.

I sat in this rented house in this north shore town and after writing a couple of short stories, which they took so I knew I wouldn’t starve… Yet… meanwhile we were getting used to the town and to country-suburban living. And bought a house. I actually begged the Guggenheim grant so I could feel I could take a break from trying to write and sell short stories. It was a mere thousand dollars in those days, but a thousand dollars went a much longer way than it does now. And, I felt, too… I’d said I was a Pennsylvanian Dutch, Dutchman and I thought if I’d taken the money I oughta write the book. So I wrote Rabbit Run. In… for much of ‘59, much of 1959… so that is how I wrote Rabbit Run.

As somebody who’s had a family of your own and has been producing an innumerable amount of work every year over 50 years, how did you strike that balance?

In those days, you know the man worked and earned the bread. And the wife took care of the children, whether it was one, or, as in my case four. After the children got to be, ah, four in number and all very young. Pretty noisy. They couldn’t help it. My wife suggested I get out of the house. For her too in a way. There is something very nice about having children in a home. They bring into it all the new things. The new gadgets. The new words. So that it’s a plus for a writer up to a point to have children around. But after awhile they do get to be distracting. So I rented a room and tried to go to work.

But I was seeing it as a job and as a livelihood. I think I was maybe the last generation that could actually try to enter the literary profession, as if it was a trade and something you did and you produced a product that was useful enough that you’d get paid for it. And now I think it’s harder. There were a lot more magazines that paid for short stories and a dollar went a long way. Well I have been re-reading my old short stories and of course the sums of money that people dealing with is laughable. Two men eating lunch in a New York restaurant for less than five dollars [laughs] I could hardly believe these figures, but there they were.

What brings you to your writing desk every morning?

To put the more fearful anxiety ridden spin on this, there is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say. You neglected somehow that the key thing. It’s not likely. I’ve written a lot. I must have somewhere touched on almost every aspect of my life and experience. Nevertheless there’s this haunting fear that maybe the thing you left out is finally going to be captured. [laughs]

I’m not really that educated. You know. And I’m not really a religious person. But I believe that God wants me to do something and it has to do with Thug Life. You know I want there to be a life for the street element. Instead of we always getting shut out. You know. Instead of defenseless, having power.

Well my mother was a woman. A black woman. A single mother. Raising two kids on her own. So she was dark skinned. Had short hair. Got no love from nobody except for a group called the Black Panthers. So that’s why she was a Black Panther. Because I don’t consider myself to be straight, you know, militant. You know what i’m saying? I’m a thug. I’m a thug. And my thug comes from… my definition of thug comes from half of the street element. Straight street hustling. And half of the Panther element. Half of the independence movement. Saying we want self-determination. We want to do it by self-defense and by any means necessary. That came from my family and that’ s what thug life is. It’s a mixture.

How do people treat you differently? The people that you grew up with. Now that you’re famous.

They believe in the machine, not Tupac. They don’t even know me no more. They just know about the machine.

You mean the press machine.

Yeah.

Is that painful for you?

Uh-huh. Everybody wants to use me. Everybody. From this level to the street level. I mean I’m used on every level. I have no friends. I have no resting place. I never sleep. I can never close my eyes. It’s horrible. Can you imagine what it’s like for you to be who I am, who I was, and for them to say that I raped a woman? And for the whole world to actually be entertaining the thought that you raped a woman. That’s hell.

You’re feeling ripped off by the press.

I am being ripped off, because I’ve never lied to the press. Just as much truth I bring to my work, a journalist should bring that much truth to their work. Why do I have honor and you guys don’t have honor? I’m not a fucking journalist? I’m a thug.

Do you think you’ll prevail in court?

I have to see. I believe in God. Whatever supposed to happen supposed to happen. But I can not live in a jail cell. That’s why I don’t rob people and stick up people. But for you to put me there and I didn’t do it, I wouldn’t go that route. I would die in jail. And that’s what they want. They want me to go through that. Then come out. I’m already dead. No creativity. I’m finished.

There’s a machine that I have nothing to do with. It’s called the ”Tupac Machine.“ And the media in this country has just fueled it and made me a monster that people just… They say I’m a criminal. They say I spit hateful, vicious, violent lyrics. You know I’m ready to be the bad guy. They gave me that job. I’m ready to have it.

When Dan Quayle was suggesting that your album should be pulled off the racks and stuff like that, in a way that could have been the best publicity you could have gotten for the album.

I don’t see that as being the “best publicity you could’ve gotten.” Who wants the Vice President of the country that you live in. The country that you are ready to defend to say that your music is not fit without him even having listened to your album. Without him having known you or to meet you. For him to just make that. To say it out loud over the air.

So you were hurt by that?

I was crushed. Crushed.

Do you have some great respect for Dan Quayle?

No, I just have respect for government. A little respect for government to say, you know, how could you do that? You know what I’m saying?

Do you see yourself as a role model?

No. I see myself as real. Like I mean if I was the President I would have a responsibility, because people put me there. Nobody put me here. They just buy my records. They wouldn’t buy my records if my records wasn’t good. I’m being who i am in the record.

Is there anything that’s giving you comfort these days?

Recently Madonna came to me. Madonna, um… I met Madonna. She is a supporter.

What was that like? Tell me about that.

She told me: “they treat you like the Antichrist and I’ve been through that before and I just want to be a friend.”

Was this the first time that you had met the President?

Well actually, no. The first time was before he became President, during that year that he was in the hospital in New York with his back. I had been to a dinner party where I had met Mrs. Kennedy and her sister [Lee Bouvier Kennedy] for the first time. They asked me to go to the hospital with them to pay a visit to help cheer him up. They wanted me to go into his room and say I was the new night nurse.

Did you?

Well I hesitated. I was terribly embarrassed. Eventually I was sort of pushed into the room by the two girls. I introduced myself, but he had recognized me at once and couldn’t have been sweeter or more quick to put me at ease.

When today you think of the late President Kennedy [John F. Kennedy], what is it that comes to your mind most vividly—or, shall we say, to your heart?

His youth. He was one of my own generation, so that for the first time in my life I became deeply involved, spiritually, and sympathetically, with the presidency—the office as well as the man. I felt personally involved.

Speaking as an American?

Oh, yes, as a born American but also as the wife of the head of an independent European country. We felt somehow that at last the United States had a leader who, from the point of view of age, appearance, and dynamic personality, genuinely reflected his era. My husband often remarked what a pity it was that a great country like America, which in Europe is still regarded as such a young nation, should be represented seemingly only by old or infirm men.

From the moment he became President, it seemed as though a wave of excitement ran through all of the young painters, poets, writers and musicians of the United States. Now that someone of their own age was in the White House, there was somehow a better chance for them to be seen or heard.

I remember the luncheon that we were privileged to have at the White House. I kept the menu. I’m one of those people who keep everything. We had soft-shelled crabs and spring lamb and strawberries Romanov. Mrs. Kennedy and I fell into woman talk with a discussion of our children of course—our two Carolines [Caroline Bouvier Kennedy; Princess Caroline]—and our special problems connected with bringing them up. I remember Jacqueline was very upset about that time at the photographers who were hounding the children. She was determined that Caroline and John [John F. Kennedy, Jr.] should be able to get in and out of the White House without being pestered by photographers, or being made constantly aware of their position.

Do you feel that his life—and death, will have any lasting effect upon international relationships?

Are you asking me whether I think that President Kennedy died in vain?

In a sense, yes.

Well, it might not seem so today, but I, for one, cannot believe that a man of Mr. Kennedy’s stature and achievements was put upon this earth for no other purpose than to stop an assassin’s bullet. I believe that God allows these certain tragedies to happen in order to emphasize the man and his achievements and to inspire those who follow to have the strength and the will to accomplish his unfulfilled dreams.

Was it The Warlocks very long before you became the Dead?

About a year.

And what triggered the new identity?

Well we finally discovered that there was a band that was recording using the name Warlocks. We thought: “oh, shit, we can’t have that kind of confusion.” So we went on the band hunt, you know, looking for a name.

The name came from whom? Who dug it up?

Well I found it in an old dictionary at Phil’s house. I just opened it up and there I saw “the Grateful Dead.”

Jesus. You could have been… could you imagine what would have happened: the Warlockheads. The dictionary changed society.

It absolutely did. Yes, it did.

That was about the time we fell in with the acid tests with Kesey and those guys. We had starting taking acid ourselves while we were still The Warlocks. We didn’t do it at shows. At the time we were playing the divorcees’ bars up and down the peninsula. You know. Our booking agent was this guy who used to book strippers and dog acts and magicians and everybody else. It was the standard gig: six nights a week, five sets a night. Standard bar stuff. We were doing that for about a year. And, you know, after that you’re ready for anything.

We knew a lot of the people in Kesey’s scene, because it was all part of the Palo Alto scene, which we were a part of. And they knew of us. The one guy, named Paige, who was one of the Pranksters, came to one of our late night sets at one of the bar’s we were playing at.

He said: “Hey, you guys, we’re having these parties up at Kesey’s place in La Honda [California] every Saturday night, why don’t you guys come?” I said: “well, we’re working all the time.”

Luckily the following week we got fired. And we had nothing to do. So Saturday night came around. We went to the first one of those parties, which later became the Acid Tests.

What did you do there? It was just experimenting?

No. We just set up the equipment. Everybody got high. And stuff would happen. Now Kesey and his Pranksters have been doing this for a long time, so they had instruments and they played weird music. But mostly it was completely free. There was no real performance of any kind involved. Everybody there was as much performer as audience. You know.

These guys had never been confronted with a regular rock and roll band, you know. And we plugged our gear in which looked like space age, military nightmare stuff. Compared to all their stuff, which was all hand painted and real funky you know.

And WHAM, we played for about five minutes. Then we all freaked out. You know. We played for about five minutes, but it completely devastated everyone. So they begged us to come back to the next one. And that’s how it happened essentially.

When you guys now you’re doing some acid, you were playing around. What did you expect to be? Were you going to be a Beatles? Were you going to be a great rock n roll… what were you going to do?

We didn’t really care whether we went somewhere specifically. We mostly wanted to have fun. And when we fell in with the acid tests we a started having the most fun we’d ever had ever. More than than we could have ever….. I mean it was just incredible.

And how long did that go on?

For about six months. But that was probably the most important six months in terms of directionality. Because the neat thing about the acid tests was we could play if we wanted to. But if it was too weird, we could always not play. So that was the only time we ever had the option of not playing.

I think The Grateful Dead kind of represents the spirit of being able to go out and have an adventure in America at large. You know what I mean? You can go out and follow the Grateful Dead around. And you have your war stories. Something like hopping railroads. Something like that. Or being on the road like Cassidy and Kerouac.

That’s interesting.

But you can’t do those types of things anymore. But you can be a Deadhead. You can get in your van and go with the other Deadheads across the States and meet it on your own terms. Sort of a niche for it, in a way.

My mother has always tried to keep a little bit of English culture in our family. Like we’d drink tea all the time. You know? Although I’ve never really known my ancestry. I didn’t even know until this year that the name Cobain was Irish. I found out through different phone books throughout America, I couldn’t find any Cobains at all. So I started calling Coburns and I found this one lady in San Francisco and she had been researching our family history. And it came from County Cork, which is a weird coincidence, because when we toured we played in Cork and the entire day I walked around in a daze. I’d never felt more spiritual in my life. I was almost in tears the whole day. It was the weirdest thing.

I had a really good childhood until the divorce. Then all of a sudden my whole world changed. I couldn’t face some of my friends at school.I desperately wanted to have the classic, typical family. Mother, father.

Because I couldn’t find any friends, male friends that I felt compatible with, I ended up hanging out with the girls a lot. And I just always felt that they weren’t treated with respect. Especially because women are just totally oppressed. I mean the words bitch and cunt were totally common. Although I listened to Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin, and I really did enjoy some of the melodies they’d written, it took me so many years to realize that a lot of it had to do with sexism.

The way that they just wrote about their dicks and having sex. I was just starting to understand what really was pissing me off so much, those last couple of years of high school. And then punk rock was exposed and then it all came together. It just fit together like a puzzle. It expressed the way I felt socially and politically. Just everything. You know. It was the anger that I felt. The alienation.

Did you have problems with people thinking that you were gay?

Yeah. I even thought that I was gay. I thought that might be the solution to my problem. Although I never experimented with it, I had a gay friend and then my mother wouldn’t allow me to be friends with him anymore because, well, she’s homophobic. It was real devastating because finally I’d found a male friend who I actually hugged and was affectionate to and we talked about a lot of things.

So did you stop?

Yeah, I couldn’t hang out with him anymore.

Tell me how do you sing?

Most of the time I sing right from my stomach. Right from where my stomach pain is. Every time I’ve had an endoscope, they find a red irritation in my stomach. But it’s all from anger. And screaming. I mean not only is my stomach has inflamed irritation, but I have scoliosis. And the weight of the guitar has made my back grow in this curvature. So it gives me a back pain all the time. You know? I’m always in pain, too, and that really adds to the anger in our music. It really does. I’m kind of grateful for it in a way.

Maybe you’re feeling a bit better now…

Yeah. Especially since I’ve been married and I’ve had a child. You know within the last year, my whole mental state and my physical state has almost improved one hundred percent. I haven’t felt this optimistic since right before the divorce. You know? [laughs]

I don’t sing “Georgia” like the record. I sing “Georgia” true. I sing “Hit The Road Jack” true. I sing what I sing true. Each night I sing it the way I feel that night.

Ain’t no way in the fuck I can sing “Georgia” the same way I played it on the day. Because I’d have to go and study myself and learn. I mean it really would be a chore. That’s why I can’t lip-sync.

Somebody asked me one time how I feel about being called a genius. Do I feel I have to live up to something? You know it ain’t that kind of ballgame. I feel that whatever people say about me or call me… You know I mean all the little adjectives and different things that people have put on me and things said about… I had nothing to do with that. I never said I was a genius. I never said I was a cornerstone. I’ve never said I’m a legend in my own time. You never heard me say nothing like that. You know, what I got to live up to is being myself. If I do that the rest will take care of itself.

I think that most great artists who are extremely known, as I am, would intimidate a lot of people. I don’t want to do that to people, but I know I do. yes. When I’m having a rehearsal and there are new guys who come in to try out for the job, I always let my conductor rehearse them. Because I don’t want the guy to get bent out of shape, because I walk in. I always stay out of the rehearsal room you know when they first come in. Then once they had chance to play a little bit, then I walk in. Because I’ve seen guys fall apart, man.

I remember the first time I went to Carnegie Hall and normally you would think that you’d be scared stiff. At least that’s what you’re supposed to be according to what everybody… Wherein for me, as opposed to being scared I was so glad… something I always wanted all my …. If i ever got to Carnegie… You ever have something in your mind and you say “oh, lord, this is ultimate of my goal.” I couldn’t wait to get out on stage. So I never was nervous. I was so happy to be able to play Carnegie Hall and be there. I guess I didn’t take time to say: “look fool, you better get nervous about this first.” [laughter]

The public has supported me, man. Do you know that? Even when I was nobody. Even through all the trials and tribulations and suffering and stuff i went through. They still stuck by me. And that’s why I believe in giving the public the best I got every night. I never go out there and half do. I don’t care how big the audience is. If we got 500 or 5,000, I work the sam, because I want those 500 to go back and say: “man, there wasn’t too many of us there, but boy they put on a hell of a show.”

I am still not quite used to it. I’m still sort of at awe when I go places in the world where they speak very little english and yet they know me on sight. They know my music. You know I really marvel at that. I still can’t quite grasp that. But isn’t it wonderful?

Still gives you a kick.

Yes indeed. It still gives me a kick.

A lot of women have been saying that the whole field of rock music is nothing more than just a big, male, chauvinist rip-off. How do you…

Yeah?

Yeah. And when I say: “well what about Janis Joplin, she made it?” And they say: “oh, her.” And it seems to bother a lot of women’s lib people that you’re kind of so upfront sexually.

Well then that’s their problem. Not mine.I haven’t ever hardly talked with anyone in women’s lib. I haven’t been attacked by anyone yet. How can they attack me? I’m representing everything they said they want. You know what i mean? Well I have an opinion about this. It’s sort of like: you are what you settle for. Do you know what I mean? You’re only as much as you settle for. If they settle for being somebody’s dishwasher that’s their own fucking problem. If you don’t settle for that and you keep fighting it, you know, you’ll end up anything you want to be. How can they attack me? I’m just doing what I wanted to and what feels right and not settling for bullshit and it worked. How can they be mad at that?

One girl I know said: well how come she doesn’t have any women in any of her groups?

[Laughs] You show me a good drummer and I’ll hire one. Show me a good chick… Besides I don’t want any chicks on the road with me.

You don’t?

I’ve got enough competition, man. [Laughs] No, I like to be around men. [Laughs]

Did all that shit I said about chicks sound bad?

No, you said what you wanted to say. Don’t be silly.

Well I don’t want to offend people. It’s just that like, you know, I have a certain set of circumstances I live under. Like you know all this repressive upbringing and things. I had that, too. You don’t think I had a repressive upbringing in Port Arthur, Texas? It’s just that it drove me crazy and I kept fighting against it. I don’t think you can talk anybody into fighting against it. If they don’t have it in themselves to need more. You know what I mean? Just plain need more. Then that’s that. If they do need more, they’ll get more. They’ll demand more. You know what i mean?

Okay. thanks a lot.

Sure enough.

Okay. Goodbye.

Bye

Laura Galloway: My grandfather died before I was born, and this is my picture of him in my head. This photo has traveled with me to every city I’ve ever lived in, and has been in every office I’ve worked in, and in my house.

Clark Galloway: So, do you see in this any possible danger for Cuba?
Clark Galloway: Pues, ¿ve usted en esto algún peligro para Cuba?

Fidel Castro: The revolution that we are making offers…
Fidel Castro: La revolución que nosotros estamos haciendo le ofrece…

Laura Galloway: You’ve got my grandfather leaning in with Castro in a very animated discussion…

Fidel Castro: The Cuban people things that no other social regime in the world can offer today. Do you understand? I have no fear at all of any other ideology. The ideology of the Twenty-sixth of July Movement…

Fidel Castro: Al pueblo de Cuba lo que ningún régimen social en el mundo le ofrece actualmente. ¿Comprende? Yo no tengo ningún temor a ninguna ideología del 26 de julio…

Laura Galloway: …and you can see the plush velvet curtains behind them and imagine them stiff with cigar smoke.

Fidel Castro: …which is the ideology of social justice within the limits of the over-arching democracy, liberty and human rights, is the most beautiful thing that can be promised to a man.

Fidel Castro: … que es la ideología de un sistema social dentro del más amplio concepto de la democracia, de la libertad y de los derechos humanos. Es la promesa más hermosa que se le puede hacer al hombre.

Laura Galloway: And maybe there’s a scotch somewhere sitting on a side table.

Clark Galloway: As you may have heard, rumor has it that your brother, Maj. Raul Castro, and Maj. Ernesto Guevara are communists or communist enthusiasts. Those are the rumors. I’d like you to comment on this.

Clark Galloway: Como usted debe haber oído ha habido rumores de que el mayor Raúl Castro y el mayor Ernesto Guevara son comunistas o simpatizantes del comunismo. Esos son los rumores. Quisiera que usted haga algún comentario sobre eso.

Fidel Castro: The Twenty-sixth of July Movement is a party of radical ideas, but it is not a Communist movement and it differs from communism in several respects. In a series of essential respects. Do you understand? And in the Twenty-sixth of July Movement there are men like Raul and like Guevara who are very much in agreement with my political thinking.

Fidel Castro: El Movimiento 26 de Julio es un movimiento de ideas radicales. Pero no es un movimiento comunista. Y difiere fundamentalmente del comunismo en una serie de cuestiones. En una serie de cuestiones esenciales. ¿Comprende? Y el Movimiento 26 de Julio, los hombres, tanto Raúl como Guevara, como todos son hombres que están muy de acuerdo con el pensamiento político mío. No es un pensamiento comunista.

Laura Galloway: A few years ago, beneath piles and piles of articles and stories and letters that my grandfather had written, under the albums and more albums of calling cards from ambassadors and presidents. All of people that he had met and interviewed throughout his life. I found a single cassette tape that simply said “Galloway-slash-Castro.”

Clark Galloway: As a Prime Minister, you have an important work to do.

Clark Galloway: Como primer ministro usted tiene un gran trabajo.

Laura Galloway: I’d actually never heard my grandfather’s voice before. So to hear his voice doing this interview was just absolutely incredible to me.

Clark Galloway: How are you going to put the Government’s matters in order? Would it be possible to delegate some of your responsibilities?

Clark Galloway: ¿Cómo usted va a ordenar los asuntos del gobierno? ¿Sería posible delegar algunas de sus responsabilidades?

Fidel Castro: I have a lot of work. Because mine is an administrative function, but it is also a political one. I have to talk to the people, guide them, encourage them…

Fidel Castro: Yo tengo mucho trabajo. Porque la función mía es administrativa, pero también es política. Tengo que hablar con el pueblo, orientarlo, animarlo…

Laura Galloway: What’s really fascinating about this tape are all the sounds that you can hear in the background. Matches being struck. Cigars being smoked. You can hear the ding of a typewriter in the background. And just a lot of ambient noise that lends color to what the moment in time actually looked like.

Clark Galloway: What is your position in regard to the United States base in Guantanamo?

Clark Galloway: ¿Cuál es su parecer acerca de la base naval de los Estados Unidos en Guantánamo?

Fidel Castro: There have been some minor conflicts arising from the fact that sailors always let them disembark, to go to Guantanamo for example. Of course, it was economically convenient because they spent money. But they were thousands of sailors and they were going to certain places for entertainment. And they did not know their way around well and would often come by the houses of decent people and knocked at any home. It is a problem. I am highly concerned about preventing even the slightest incident from happening. Do you understand?

Fidel Castro: Ha habido algunos pequeños conflictos originados en el hecho de que los marinos los dejaban siempre desembarcar, ir a Guantánamo por ejemplo. Claro que económicamente convenía porque compraban. Pero iban miles de marinos e iban a ciertos sitios de diversión. No conocían bien y muchas veces llegaban a las casas de las personas decentes y tocaban a cualquier casa. Es un problema. Sobre todo a mi me preocupa mucho que no vaya a ocurrir ni el menor incidente. ¿Usted se da cuenta?

Clark Galloway: Well, it seems that there are no issues of whether or not the United States continues to occupy the base on the present terms.

Clark Galloway: Pues parece que no hay problemas de sí o no los Estados Unidos siga ocupando la base en los términos actuales.

Fidel Castro: We have other problems which are of more interest for us. If we can maintain friendly relations with the United States. I see no reason why conflicts can arise.

Fidel Castro: Nosotros tenemos otros problemas que nos interesan más. Si nosotros mantenemos relaciones podemos mantener relaciones amistosas con Estados Unidos. Pues, yo no veo peligro de que se produzcan conflictos.

Laura Galloway: What’s remarkable is at the end of the interview, and that’s when Fidel Castro actually asks somewhat of a rhetorical question about my grandfather. He says: maybe people will think that you’re a communist…?

Fidel Castro: Perhaps they call you communist because you wrote an article favorable to the Cuban Revolution and they want to investigate you in the Senate of the United States.

Fidel Castro: Posiblemente a lo mejor a usted le dicen comunista porque ha hecho un artículo a favor de la Revolución cubana y le quieren hacer una investigación en el Senado en Estados Unidos.

Clark Galloway. No, señor. [Laughter]

Laura Galloway: My grandfather did this interview in 1959 and he actually died in January 1961. He was really deeply surprised by the fact that Castro became an overt communist. And he had not really anticipated that at the time. He thought that Batista was a terrible sadist and this would be a very positive change for Cuba. But things turned out very differently of course.

So my grandfather served as a colonel in army intelligence for Latin America during World War II. And after the war he returned to journalism. And he was purely a newsman as far as I know. But he was a really good intelligence officer. And I wouldn’t know today in the year 2013 whether or not he had a double life. But I don’t think so.

She actually came in a black Jaguar driving to a restaurant I was meeting her at in the Hollywood Hills. And she was 47 years old. She was still very attractive. She still had that dynamic smile. And the story that really she told me was a turning point for her was this story in the taxi, because she said that it proved to her that she wasn’t to be taken lightly. And that she was not a Charlie’s Angels airhead, basically. Farrah was doing “Extremities” the play, off-Broadway in Manhattan and…

It was raining and I remember I was on 5th Avenue and 51st. And I had on these—I remember it exactly—these pants, these Maud Frizon shoes with little heels but they were like stiletto and kind of this big shirt. But it was raining and I was wet. And all I was thinking is: I am going to have to do this performance with wet hair. What am I going to do? I am going to be late. There’s no taxi, you know. When it rains in New York, you know, there is no— I’d never been late. I’ve never missed a performance. Oh my god. So I was panicking.

I had my assistant with me who was a gay guy. I didn’t know him very well. And so one of these what I thought I guess was a gypsy cab, kind of a van, pulled up. And he said, “Are you trying to get a taxi?” And I said, ”Yes.” He said, “Okay, get in. I’ll take you.” And he said, “Where do you want to go?” And I told him.

Now we passed, actually, the street I wanted to go to and I went, “No, wait, wait. Oh no, you passed—” because now I’m in a panic. And so he just slams on the brakes and reaches over and pulls a screwdriver out of the, you know, glove compartment. And he turns around to us and he holds it like this and he goes, “Give me your [bleep]ing money.”

So I said: “Oh man, you know. Listen, let me tell you something: I’ll give you all my money. Just please take me where I want to go which we passed it, so if you just do that…” He said, “Just shut the [bleep] up. Give me your money.” He was like really abusive.

So I just sat there and I looked at him. And all of the sudden he said, “You, faggot, out,” which was my assistant. And he said, “And you, [bleep], give me your fucking money.” Now I dislike that word so much, and I really was offended that this guy said this to me. So I had my assistant like pulling on my right hand which I’m right-handed so my strongest hand in case I might need to defend myself. And the guy has got this screwdriver really close to my face, and I’m going, “Let go of my arm.” And so he gets out., and the guy says, “Close the door,” so he closes the door. And we are just staring at each other.

In my mind I’m going: Okay, he’s got a screwdriver. That will go in my leg and that will hurt. That will hurt. It won’t kill me. He’s not going to get my eye. I’ll go back. And I’ve got on these stiletto heels. Aim for his face. Okay, if he wants to duke it out, my legs are my strongest. You know, okay.

So we just sat there looking at each other. And he’s like enraged. He’s like some crazy guy. He’s white but he’s just like— His face is all frothing and everything. And so I said, “Come on, chicken [bleep]. You going to use it or what? What? Come on!” And so he just went, “You shut the [bleep] up. Shut the [bleep] up. Give me your money.” I said, “[Bleep] you. No. If you took me where I wanted to go I would. Now [bleep] you. So do something or let me out, because I have to go.” He said, “You get out. Get out.” He starts screaming at me: Get out, get out.

Anyway, I got to the theater like two minutes before I went on. And when we got out my assistant said, “I can’t believe he called me a faggot.” And I said, “He called me a [bleep]. Shut up and don’t ever grab my arm again.”

James Stein: I’m James R. Stein.

Michael Aisner: I’m Michael Aisner.

James Stein: I was 14 and a half.

Michael Aisner: And I was 15 years old, and James and I went off to interview Louis Armstrong for our high school radio station, WNTH. New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois. To set the stage, it was June 24, 1964. We’re at Ravinia. It’s an outdoor concert. The place is sold out. We get to go backstage, so we’re watching his concert.

James Stein: I remember it was a hot summer night, but for some reason he was speaking to us in his underwear.

Michael Aisner: He was definitely in his underwear. I remember the tank top. And I also remember—

James Stein: I wasn’t sure if it was Jockey or boxer.

Michael Aisner: It was boxers.

James Stein: Boxers?

Michael Aisner: Boxers. Louis Armstrong wore boxers.

Michael Aisner: He was literally fending off the Chicago Sun Times, and the Daily News, WGN. I remember that. And he would just say out the doors, “Excuse me, but I’m in an interview.” And he gave us an outrageous amount of time. Twenty minutes, sat there with a couple of kids.

Michael Aisner: Mr. Armstrong: I’ll begin the questioning by asking you just when, where and how did you begin your show business career?

Louis Armstrong: As a youngster in the little orphanage home in New Orleans, I was the bugler of the institution. When I got to be around 13 or 14 years old, they took me off the bugle and put me in the little brass band. Finally they made me the leader of the little band on the corner at— So we got so good we could play “When the Saints Go Marching In” for the boys to March to church every Sunday. (Laughs)

James Stein: Who would you say was essentially responsible for launching your professional career?

Louis Armstrong: Well, I’d say myself because I was determined. I had a chance to play with the best musicians that were coming through because I was pretty good myself or else they wouldn’t have tolerated with me, you know. You’ve got to be good or bad as the devil. (Laughs)

Louis Armstrong: You can’t take it for granted. Even if we have two, three days off I still have to blow that horn a few hours to keep up the chops. I mean I’ve been playing 50 years, and that’s what I’ve been doing in order to keep in that groove there.

James Stein: You still got to practice?

Louis Armstrong: I’ve got to warm up every day at least an hour, you know.

Louis Armstrong: You either have it or you don’t. You play your horn just like you sing a song or a hymn. If it’s in your heart, you express yourself in the tune. I’ve been playing music so long. What else is there to do? What can you prove at 64? I mean as far as trying to create what? You know? The best I can do is stay happy.

Michael Aisner: We hope you stay happy for a very, very long time. Thank you very much, Mr. Armstrong.

Louis Armstrong: Okay.

Michael Aisner: Pleasure interviewing you.

James Stein: I want to wring my neck back then because, you know, I wasn’t involved in a conversation with the man. I was asking him questions, and sometimes I wasn’t even listening to his answers. I wish that I could have done some following up like I might do now and actually engage him in a conversation. But, because we were so nervous, I think you kind of stick to the script.

Michael Aisner: These little pre-pubescent sounding kids and this guy with this gravelly, incredible voice, but he gave us time and respected us.

I think there is something barbaric in children, and it’s missing in lots of books for them because we don’t like to think of it. We want them to be happy. Childhood is a very tough time. It was for me, and it was for my brother and my sister. They were both considerably older than I was and they protected me from my parents. They were the good parents. And my real parents were not so good, okay? They didn’t mean any harm. They were confused; they didn’t speak English. Living in a foreign country, and take it out on your kids. That’s all.

But there are a lot of crazy people who have children, and I’ve always been interested in how children maneuver and decide how to live. It’s hard. I’ve always had a deep respect for children and how they solve complex problems by themselves.

And how do they?

I think through shrewdness, fantasy and just plain strength; they want to survive. They want to survive. The kids in Hansel and Gretel: Gretel, she saves her brother’s life. And a little girl saving a little boy’s life—when did children have to confront such terrible ordeals? Well they do. They do.

Just a broad question: what should children’s stories contain?

Well, how would I know? All I do know is that my parents were immigrants and they didn’t know that they should clean the stories up for us. So we heard horrible, horrible stories. And we loved them. We absolutely loved them. But the three of us—my sister, my brother and myself—grew up being very depressed people.

So the great thing was my brother, who wrote stories and I’d illustrate his stories. There was one story we called “We Are Inseparable.” And they’re going to get married. The brother and sister are going to get married and nobody knows that there’s anything wrong with that. Nobody. Nobody. Hey, you love somebody. So it’s your sister. Big deal. Okay?

Now, obviously Freud stuck into my brother’s head at the last minute to prevent this wedding from taking place. The boy’s in an accident—and I can’t remember what—and he’s bandaged and looks like a mummy. And she comes tearing to the hospital. “Let me in! Let me in!” And the parents are holding her back, holding her back and then she breaks down the door and she jumps on top of him and they both scream in unison, “We are inseparable!” And they leap out the window of the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital—like the 40th floor—and that’s how it ends. It was a really happy ending. (Laughter)

Let’s tell the truth. Let’s talk about the kid who doesn’t make it sensationally well. Who struggles and fights, but really doesn’t know what he’s fighting against or for. And I don’t think that changes. We’re all adults in this room sitting talking about that. Has that ended? No. It doesn’t end. I still think the same way I thought as a child. I still worry. I’m still frightened. Everything is the same. Nothing changes.

I interviewed James Brown in Washington DC. It was 1984. I was working at ABC News there as an entertainment reporter for ABC Radio Network. James Brown was in town for like a tribute thing down at the old convention center. I was among a lot of other young reporters there waiting in the hallway to be introduced to James Brown. And the door opened up to his dressing room… And there he was with his wife in there who was styling his hair. And hair was a very important thing to James Brown.

The worst thing that can happen to you is to stay number one for too long.

And he gave us a little Q&A, like a mini press conference.

I want to tell you something about these shades. Excuse me for cutting you off. Because I don’t want you to sit up there thinking I’m trying to be be hip and that’s why I put my shades on. This is a different kind of pair of shades. They make an even tone. Anyone put them on and you’ll see the difference. There not no hip shades.

It relaxes your eyes?

Yes. It’s a different kind of shades.

He sort of talks in phrases, and he’s very philosophical about what he says. He sort of, you know, blurts it out.

Black is not a color; it’s an attitude. It’s the attitude of independence, respect and dignity.

It’s not, you know, hard to understand it because he is expressive. The man is a self-educated man.

How the blind going to lead the blind? I really feel sorry for the Afro-American. He really doesn’t know what’s happening, because they were never trained. They don’t know and see this is where White America has the advantage over most people in America. They know how the country’s run, because they made the rules. See what I’m saying? My father got out of the Navy and instead of him going to school, he went and signed up for school and paid the teacher part of his check to mark him present when he was not present. He paid to be ignorant. Why do you think I’ve got everything going? Why I can talk to the president? Because I know how the country is run. I speak for the world. They want me to bring all the world leaders together. Leader of Russia. Leader of Africa. See, because you’ve got to know what’s going on.

What do you think of [President Ronald] Reagan?

I think he’s the most intelligent… I think he’s the most well-coordinated president we’ve ever had in history,

You think he’s going to win again?

I’m not here to endorse. I just know he’s the most well-organized president we’ve ever had in history. His acting ability taught him the whole structure of the country.

Communication, you mean?

Huh?

Communication?

He knows what everybody wants. You see, every American, every American man is still a cowboy. See you’ve got to remember that. Because of the frontiersman.

He knows how to act. He knows everything about that. He knows about emotions of people. He knew he was going to be president. See, that’s what’s called a man of conviction. You understand me? I’m not Democrat or Republican; I’m for the man. I’m a humanitarian.

Mr. Brown, you’ve been crowned the title of the Godfather of Soul. Okay, what more do you have to look for now in life?

Just keep living. I’m living every day.

Well, you’ve reached the peak?

What peak? I haven’t reached no peak. Wherever God sends me, that’s where I want to go. Godfather just means that I held on to the word “soul” until everybody got it recognized. Ten years ago, ya’ll liked disco. And y’all liked punk rock. You all keep changing every day. Don’t keep changing so much.

So what is the present James Brown style? Is it the same?

Whatever I want to do. Whatever I want to do. Whatever I want to do. I am not going to tell people what I do no more. I’m going to do my own thing. Because they got mad when I told them. I’m going to do what God say and work in a church and preach about religion. I didn’t get no thanks for it. Only a few people understanding 10-20 years later what I’m doing.

You had a nice childhood. A very solid childhood, and that’s very important.

Yeah, you know the only thing that was not so nice was that I was this height at 14 years of age.

Seven foot?

Yeah, and can you imagine going through America at that time, a man of color, a little boy, 14 years old, that height? You know, I was looked upon as a freak. Today, when you see someone close to my size or whatever, people think: “sports,” “basketball,” “zoom dollar signs.”  And they don’t think “circus freak” or what have you. The toughest thing for me was growing up and being stared at and being looked at and being talked about in that particular way. Other than that it was a good childhood.

Did it give you a complex? I mean, did it make you feel insecure: Wow, I’m so tall?

You know, well, not insecure, but, you know, I kind of wanted to hide a little bit. I did not want to bring that notice to me. If I was on like the bus or we had the El, you understand, I would always sit down. I was taught to stand up and give my seat to ladies or women, and I never did. I was always just going to sit there. Because if I stood up, my head would be like almost touching the ceiling and everybody would look, so I was really quite conscious about that.

I was played the villain so much because I was bigger and stronger than most, and they cast me as the villain everywhere I went.  And villains are kind of hard to really know on a personal level when you see them as mean, unsensitive-type people.  And also when you have this great size, sensitivity once again is not given to you. They talk about all these things that you can do and whatever, but never do they say are you gentle, really sensitive about things.  And we are.  You know, a big dog tends to be much more at ease with kids and gentle with them than a little one that’s always yelping, yelping, yelping, you know? So I don’t know where they get that because you’re big you have to have this gruffness about you.

You do mention the sensitivity issue in the book about sex and how rewarding it felt for you that the woman would find you very sensual and sensitive, that it was a shock to some people that you could be that way.

Well, let’s talk about that a second. You know, I say that you want to be treated just like everybody else in that respect, but on the other hand: viva la difference.

I think my attraction, if there was attraction that women had for me, was the fact that I was different. Of course when you’re famous, you have a little more money than some people and you’re involved in something like professional sports: that’s an attraction. But I think a lot of ladies found me so attractive because I was different. And I acted on that in a way.

I think that Wilt Chamberlain, as age has come upon him, is even much more secure. Even though I can do less, I feel much more secure about it.

MCA: We got in last night. We took the bus right after the show.

Rocci Fisch: Where were you last night?

MCA: We nearly got arrested.

Mike D: Yeah. Virginia.

MCA: Listen to this: we’re on the stage playing and we happen to say—can I curse on this or is this like uh—

Rocci Fisch: I’m going to edit it.

MCA: So I said “mother fucker” a couple of times or he said “mother fucker” or something like that. And, ah, some cops went up to Madonna’s manager and said that the second we came off the stage that they were going to arrest us and put us in jail and it was that simple and there were no two ways about it.

Mike D: Like it was really scary ’cause as soon as we came off the stage they grabbed us and said, “Yo, boys. You’re going to prison.”

Ad-Rock: I tried to run away because I didn’t know what was going on and this guy, this cop, like he didn’t hit me that hard, but he like you know hit me in the back of the legs with his club. I mean if we had known in the first place we wouldn’t have done it. But this guy had to go and hit us.

MCA: I never knew that it was illegal to use profanity before this.

Mike D: You know, there’s a way we talk and it includes profanity. We never figured we’d be arrested for it.

Rocci Fisch: What’s it like opening for Madonna?

Mike D: Usually there’s about basically almost a riot breaking out after every show because either the crowd wants to kill us or we have to run from the girls because they mob us.

Ad-Rock: Every single night is definitely really hard work. Harder work than I ever really imagined. We go out there and we just have to win this audience over. They don’t want to see rap music. They don’t want to see the Beastie Boys. They don’t care what we’re doing. They want one thing and one thing only: that’s to see Madonna come on stage. But then we go out there, we work hard, we win them over, and then they get real happy. It’s really kind of cool.

Rocci Fisch: Are you guys the only white rappers?

MCA: It looks that way right now and I’m real surprised at it. Although kids always come up to me after the show and tell me they rap also. But we’re the only ones on vinyl, I imagine.

Rocci Fisch: Someone said today that maybe you’re “rappers for the suburbs.” How do you feel about somebody describing you that way?

Ad-Rock: Well whoever said that is an ignorant moron, because we’re certainly not rap music for the suburbs. Because if he ever listened to our records and knows anything about rap music. That we are soul, hardcore, b-boy music, and we do not play sucker music. Like a Chaka Kahn “I Feel for You” is suburb rap music. They think that anything with someone, you know, saying something in a rhyme is rap music.

Ad-Rock: But that’s certainly not us at all.

Mike D: I’d just like to say, like, these people just don’t realize that when we’re in New York City we’ll go to the worst neighborhood in Queens, play to an entirely black audience with someone like Kurtis Blow for a thousand people. This is not a suburban audience. This is like the hardest core urban audience. The thing that really bothers like white critics won’t like us, because they have this whole preconceived notion of what rap music is: you gotta go out there and be angry and sing about the ghetto. And that’s the only reason for rap music to exist. You know?

Rocci Fisch: How did you get your group name, Beastie Boys?

MCA: It’s from the good old days. We were a hardcore band.

Mike D: Yeah, we were like—I was like what, 14?

MCA: Yeah.

Mike D: I was like, 14, 15? That’s when we made our first record. We were all going to high school at the time and that’s how we met.

MCA: At time it was the stupidest name that I could possibly think of. And if you could think of a stupider name I’d probably be pretty impressed now. So lay it on me: can you think of a stupider name than the Beastie Boys?

Rocci Fisch: Not really

MCA: So then that answers your question right there.

Rocci Fisch: What’s def?

MCA: What do you mean?

Rocci Fisch: What do you mean def?

MCA: Def is uh, you know, we are def. I’d say that’s a good answer. We are def.

Ad-Rock: Def in New York is what—is something that’s really good, like us. You know what I mean? Def, like def jam.

Mike D: Kind of like if you put on a James Brown record and you just know that’s def.

MCA: Jam is something that you put on toast.

Ad-Rock: We’re very into breakfast.

Mike D: Yeah, we’re into breakfast a lot.

MCA: It’s like, we like hot butter on our breakfast toast and we also like def jam on it.

You put on a lot of weight. Are you eating a lot?

Well, um… You know that’s something that really bothers me. What’s wrong with being fat? That’s what I want to know. Why is there such…

I didn’t say there’s anything wrong with it.

Why is it so onerous to be fat? Um… I don’t see anything wrong with fat. You know? I mean, I remember when I used to weigh 185 pounds. I’m the same height. I was the same height that I am now and I weighed 185 pounds and I was going to college. And I had this food ticket at the cafeteria. And the cafeteria food is mainly all based on starch. You know it’s cheap food, right?

And so I don’t know what it was, but in order… I don’t know, I just felt like I was… If you missed your meal you just, you know… I just figured: “Well I was getting screwed, right?” If I missed a meal I blew it. So I’d get up at 6:30 every morning just to make breakfast, right? Eggs and grits and sausages and toast and milk. Then I’d go do a few classes. And I’d make it in there for lunch.

Mashed potatoes. Every now and then they’d put a little piece of meat in something, you know? Then I’d go to a few more classes. And then I’d go to dinner and it was more mashed potatoes.

And so about three months later I was 185 pounds. And you know what? I felt so great. I felt like a tank, you know. I felt like a large mammal. A big beast. When I’d move through the corridors or across the lawn, I just feel like I could knock anybody out of my way, you know. I was solid, man. It’s terrible to be thin and wispy, because, you know, you could get knocked over by a strong wind or something. Fat is beautiful.

How much do you weigh now?

I don’t know to tell you the truth. I’d guess somewhere in the neighborhood of about 150.

Really?

You want to compare biceps? (Laughs) You want a dead arm wrestling match, Howard? Are you ready? Are you in shape?

All right. Yeah.

Jim Morrison: We’ll wait until the interview’s over.

Michael Aisner: Okay, so we’re 17 years old. We’re sitting in the office, and Ali screeches up in his red Cadillac convertible. Twenty-four years old. Comes in the office, and this girl comes and sits on his lap. She must have been 18 or 19 years old, and he starts doing this riff of him going to Mars and fighting the champion up on Mars.

Muhammad Ali: We estimate our time of getting there in about 10 years, 1976. I expect to fight to go about 12 seconds. I’m fighting the Green Giant up there, name of [gibberish name] and after knocking him out I hope to be back on Earth at about 1986.

Michael Aisner: I have this microphone in front of this guy who is one of the most famous people on Earth and we start to ask him questions.

Michael Aisner: Okay, Muhammad Ali. How did you first become interested in boxing?

Muhammad Ali: Well, I started about 12 years ago. Someone stole my bicycle and I said I was going to learn to fight so that I could catch him and beat him up. But I never did catch him. But I ended up the champ of the whole world.

Michael Aisner: That’s right. Is there any particular boxer that you really idolized before you became a pro?

Muhammad Ali: Sugar Ray Robinson was my idol. And he’s still, I think, the greatest of all time.

Michael Aisner: Did you more or less try to pattern yourself after him?

Muhammad Ali: Well, some of the ideas I got from him. Foot work, left jab, things like that.

Michael Aisner: Did you resent that hard training you had to go through before major fights?

Muhammad Ali: I’ve never really resented hard work because I’ve always liked it. Up every morning for roadwork. Going to the gymnasium every day at 12 o’clock. I never change my pattern.

Michael Aisner: Why did you feel that you had to campaign for your first fight with Sonny Liston?

Muhammad Ali: There were so many fellows ranked over me until couldn’t just whoop them all. So I had to out-shadow them by talking. It made me a bigger drawing card so promoters wanted me instead of the rest. It gave me a quicker shot at the title.

Michael Aisner: Mr. Ali, what in your estimation is the future of boxing today?

Muhammad Ali: Well if the boxers are a little more colorful, talk a little like I did and just do half as much as I did for boxing, it will be all right.

Michael Aisner: What business do you feel you would like to go into after your retirement?

Muhammad Ali: Oh, real estate. Real estate building. Projects. Apartment houses.

Michael Aisner: As I was leaving, I did something that I had never done in any of my other interviews and that is I asked him for an autograph. And he put out an album and I actually had him sign it. And he signed it “From Muhammad Ali. World Champ.” And it says “1966.”

Muhammad Ali: So I hope that all of you will be here waiting for me and tell your children before they come into this world here on Earth that the Champion is leaving now and will be back in 20 years with the Universal Title. Thank you.

Michael Aisner: I guess If I have any regrets at all is I didn’t get him to somehow spit his gum out during the interview. He was sitting there chomping away on a piece of gum. It’s like, “come on, man, I’m trying to get a good clean cut here.”

They wrote about things like that we were from heaven, sent to them, can you imagine We played 12 concerts in Poland. Underground meetings and underground concerts. The last night they threw a party for us and the president of the underground club wanted to give a toast and he stood up and said, “You’re going home tomorrow. I want you to know how we Poles love freedom as much as you Americans, and thank you for coming.”  So what we did, we didn’t understand how we could be that important. We had no clue that we were helping people break away from Communism.

Eventually we went to Russia three times, but twice our ambassador called me and he said, “Dave, don’t come. If you come, the Secret Police are going to have a table at the door and everyone who comes in, their identification card will be taken. They will never get an education; they will never get a government job or a good job.  I don’t think you want to come because some people are going to come and lose everything just because they want to see you.” Can you understand how that is?