Dion said he’d help and now he was proving it, typewriter before him, transcribing the buzzsaw tapes of Robin’s interviews with Mary. No quality control and the questions were nothing but garble and mumble and pshrit and pfraht. Robin said not to worry, he’d work backwards and figure it out. Best of luck then and Dion typed out Mary’s chatty, bitchy, expansive, curt answers at his Kelly-Girl quickest.
I said that irony is a great tonic.
Rapture has no beginning and no end, just a middle that stops and starts.
You do the physics, then.
Obviously I should have acted surprised.
I’m as easily offended as the next Bohemian a la tarte, but my reactions tend to slow down, to be slow.
It was more of an honor to be asked to eat fire than do background vocals.
His demeanor seemed to say: there’s only one solution which I will accept.
She said she knew she had conceived because her headache vanished. Just like that!
The world has always worshipped bad taste, the trick is not to let it get you down.
I lined the empty bottles up along the mantelpiece and squinted at them where the sun was hitting them in a liquid flood of colors and that gave me the idea for a song that starts off full tilt and then a different instrument drops out at each new verse till it ends with the singer, by her or himself, asking the sound engineer what time it is.
Anybody looking for a moral wouldn’t really have to look all that far, would they?
There are times when I realize that I probably haven’t had a normal night’s sleep in nearly twenty years.
One reason is the concept of original sin.
It’s my favorite because it explains things, you know?
Once you buy into that, then everything falls into place, I mean, not neatly or in any orderly way, but everything else proceeds towards an end of little jolts, tiny shocks, but no big surprises.
The fewer the words the closer to the truth? Bullshit.
Drugs made me feel beautiful, damaged and sad and beautiful.
Maybe that’s the point?
Do you always carry on like this?
I don’t believe in sounding the alarms. I do believe in sign language.
Well, for starters, he wanted me to drink a concoction he’d just made of champagne and lime and blood and sperm.
I moved away.
But like I said, I gave in, or rather, I agreed, actively, and if there’s a crime, or some guilt attached in his having put such a desire into words, and the words into a sentence with a question mark at the end, well, English is something I speak with moderate fluency, and the word ‘yes’ isn’t necessarily or always the first one out of my mouth.
Do you believe that?
Then why would you say it?
Why repeat it?
An interview should be a seduction, not a rape. Just pointing it out. For future reference.
The light was in my eyes.
An amp was starting to smoke and there was a smell like new car, you know?
It was as though everybody suddenly lifted their masks.
Being afraid of something is sometimes its own logic for seeking that something out.
A cheese and onion pie. The shrimp was an afterthought.
He was always talking about a legacy of … pain? Or brutality. He made it sound like a duty. I didn’t buy it, or I don’t buy it now, but when he was whispering to me, when he had his hands on the back of my head, softly touching my hair, well, I wasn’t either naïve or innocent but … it sounded … it had the ring of … I might have believed, maybe, you know …
We’d seen some guitarist out of New Mexico fucking her in the men’s room at Rudyards, if you can believe that.
Standing up would be my guess.
Number 37, have a look.
I was really sad when I learned about the feud between Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds. For some reason that really bothered me at the time. I found out quickly enough how much hate there can be between different bands. It’s almost racial, almost tribal.
I started to dress, self-consciously I mean, after I read the article on the Rolling Stones in Ramparts magazine. Keith made me cream, simple as that, and dressing like him was like having a very secret love affair going on. That excitement, you know, that exhilarating freedom that comes from doing a bad thing.
My ninth grade algebra teacher was the first to show me the, how should I put it, the human face of hypocrisy. He’d helped to break up a fight I’d gotten into over, believe it or not, the shootings at Kent State. I trusted him and he didn’t seem to hold it against me that I sucked at algebra, and eventually I ended up in his den as his private photography project. Not so private, as I learned later, but what the hell, no hard feelings.
Oh, hell yeah! Any guy who tells you he didn’t practice playing guitar in front of a mirror is lying. Like saying you’ve never masturbated in front of a mirror, yeah, right. I’d put the headstock of the guitar right up against the glass and it vibrated so I could feel the tremble go through my whole body. Very sensuous, let me tell you. I watched myself from every angle, practicing those casual leg spreads and pelvic in-outs, I’d imitate Hendrix smiling extra sweetly, or Alvin Lee’s electroshock neck-jerks, that weird chicken-head thing he did, kinda prefiguring headbangers, now that I think about it.
It’s much different from synaesthesia but maybe that’s the closest analogy. Like sailing down the pale blue? Which ones? Hmm, let me think. I need a drink first. Be right back.
Yeah, the ‘Eskimo Blue Day’ intro, how it glistens, it’s almost tangible, it’s moist, it contains its own echo. Don’t ask me to explain, just listen for yourself. Oh, and the guitar thing on ‘Tales Of Brave Ulysses’. There’s that cloudiness and then a momentary glaze and it’s exactly like when heroin goes liquid in the spoon.
The funny thing is that nobody in my high school crowd listened to ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ when they were coming down. It was always the Velvets’ ‘Loaded’. Always, I swear to God!
I didn’t go back there. Not since Dave Van Ronck howled the rafters down.
But who needs that? Getting patronized from the stage when you’ve gone to some trouble to be in the audience? Who needs to be shushed by David Crosby? Wooden music, whatever, kiss my ass, honey.
Boston freaked me out, to be honest. All those grieving girls on the subways with their black armbands, the day after Ian Curtis hanged himself. But it’s where I first heard about, and then actually heard the Psychedelic Furs, so I couldn’t stay freaked out forever.
When Dream Syndicate got booed off the stage? Yeah, that was painful. Painful.
Sex is always a commodity. You know that. I’ve used it myself and I don’t see the need to apologize.
The Hot Tuna poster? Sure, it’s a good story. And sordid, yeah. I got it from a music store in Georgetown. It was behind the counter up on the wall. I just loved that fat cat, and I still think it’s as fine a line drawing as Durer’s rabbit, I really do. Anyway, I asked the clerk if I could buy it. Well no, I actually gave him my sweetest smile and asked if I could have it. He was, oh I don’t know, maybe in his early thirties. I was thirteen. He just smirked and asked if I even knew what it meant. See, it’s got this fat smug-looking cat and it says ‘What’s that smell like fish’ and then down below it says, all caps and exclamation points HOT TUNA!!! and yeah, by then I knew there was a pussy reference but I wasn’t going to say that outright. So, the clerk looks around the store, there were a few other customers in there, and then he leaned over and whispered what I could do if I really wanted the poster. I said ‘ewww’ or some equivalent and went back to looking at the guitars and records and stuff. He laughed, of course. I had a single by Sly and the Family Stone, I think, and maybe Free? Can’t remember, they might not have even formed yet. But man, I really really wanted that poster. So after a while I went back up to the counter and said yeah, I’ll do it, BUT I also want a pack of Fender Rock and Roll super slinkies and that glass slide. He shook his head like I was a little hustler and then he took me in the back and we, shall I say, concluded our deal. When I got home I put the poster up right above my bed and that’s when I wrote that song “I’ll Do Anything (To Get What I Want)”. Good story, huh?