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Thread started 09/06/16 4:58pm

JoeBala

Just Interviews Part 2

Part 1 Here:

http://prince.org/msg/8/428668

Cover Story: The Book of Bruce Springsteen

For 50 years, the rock icon has turned his struggle into songs, his unrest into performance. Today, as he wraps up a top-selling tour and publishes a 500-page memoir, he is coming to terms with life out on the wire.
OCTOBER 2016
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

I. THAT SIGNATURE SONG

About an hour before every concert, Bruce Springsteen draws up a set list of 31 songs, written in big, scrawly letters in marker ink and soon thereafter distributed to his musicians and crew in typed-up, printed-out form. But this list is really just a loose framework. Over the course of an evening, Springsteen might shake up the order, drop a song, call a few audibles to his seasoned, ready-for-anything E Street Band, or take a request or two from fans holding handwritten signs in the pit near the front of the stage. Or he might do all of the above and then some—as he did on the first of the two nights that I saw him perform in Gothenburg, Sweden, this summer.

That night, at the last minute, Springsteen jettisoned his plan to open with a full-band version of “Prove It All Night,” from his 1978 album, Darkness on the Edge of Town, and instead began the show solo at the piano with “The Promise,” a fan-beloved Darkness outtake. Eight songs in, he again went off-list, playing a stretched-out, gospelized version of “Spirit in the Night,” from his first album, 1973’sGreetings from Asbury Park, N.J., which he followed with “Save My Love,” a sign request. Onward he went with tweaks and spontaneous additions, to the point where, by the time the show was over, it was past midnight and Springsteen, a man approaching his 67th birthday, had played for nearly four hours—his second-longest concert ever.

“Yikes!” said Springsteen with mock alarm when I relayed this fact to him the next day, at his hotel in the Swedish port city. “I’m always in search of something, in search of losing myself to the music. I think we hit a spot last night where I was trying some songs we hadn’t played in a while, where maybe you’re struggling more. And then suddenly”—he snapped his fingers—“you catch it, and then, once you do, you may not want to stop.”

“You have to create the show anew, and find it anew, on a nightly basis,” Springsteen said. “And sometimes,” he concluded, laughing, “it takes me longer than I thought it would.”

VIDEO: Bruce Springsteen, Growin’ Up

There is one song, though, whose place and inclusion are never in doubt: “Born to Run.” Springsteen always slots it in near the start of his encore set, the clutch of seven or eight songs that see out the night. “It’s still at the center of my work, that song,” he said. “When it comes up every night, within the show, it’s monumental.” By design, every concert, no matter what its shape, builds up to “Born to Run” as the climax, with the songs that follow serving as a decompression from its operatic intensity.

It is not uncommon for an artist to grow wary of a signature song—Robert Plant has referred to “Stairway to Heaven” as “that wedding song,” and Frank Sinatra called “Strangers in the Night” a “piece of shit”—but Springsteen has never tired of “Born to Run,” which he wrote at age 24 in a small rental cottage in West Long Branch, New Jersey. Expressly conceived as an important work, it took him six months to piece together all of its elements, from the twangy, Duane Eddy-inspired guitar figure with which it announces itself, to its “tramps like us” refrain, to its appropriations of imagery from the B movies that Springsteen adored as a kid, pulpy road pictures like Gun Crazy, with John Dall and Peggy Cummins.

“A good song gathers the years in,” Springsteen said. “It’s why you can sing it with such conviction 40 years after it’s been written. A good song takes on more meaning as the years pass by.”

ENLARGE SLIDESHOW
1/7
See Annie Leibovitz’s Exclusive Portraits of Bruce Springsteen

What has made “Born to Run” endure, Springsteen believes, are the words with which his nameless narrator implores his girl, Wendy, to join him on the road: “Will you walk with me out on the wire? / ‘Cause baby, I’m just a scared and lonely rider / But I gotta know how it feels / I want to know if love is wild / Babe, I want to know if love is real.”

“That question gets asked every single night, between me and all those people that are out there,” Springsteen said. “Every night, I watch the crowd sing it. Sing it word for word. It’s just something that connected.”

It’s true. In Gothenburg, over two nights, I watched 120,000 Swedes surrender, full-throatedly and with fists pumping, to “I want to know if love is real”—notwithstanding the song’s otherwise acutely New Jersey-specific references to Highway 9 and the Palace, a now demolished Asbury Park amusement hall.

Springsteen’s new autobiography, to be published this month by Simon & Schuster, is also called Born to Run. Naming your book after your most famous song and the breakthrough album to which it lent its title could be seen as a sign of cash-grab expediency or outright laziness—plus, there is already a well-known Springsteen book called Born to Run, a biography by the rock critic Dave Marsh from 1979. But to Springsteen there was no other choice. Those three words have an emotional resonance for him beyond the song itself. They’re a sort of thumbnail memoir—a shorthand for a lifelong sense of unrest.

CARS, GIRLS, THE SHORE, THE WORKINGMAN’S STRUGGLES—IT’S ALL THERE IN HIS UPBRINGING.

To be sure, the latter-day Springsteen projects health and contentment. Onstage, he’s as limber and high-energy as ever: leaping and sliding in his concert uniform of black jeans, brown boots, black muscle T, gray vest, and gray neckerchief, and pulling in close to share a microphone with his wife, the singer Patti Scialfa, or his oldest friend in the band, the guitarist Steven Van Zandt. Offstage, across a table, he looks just as fantastic as he does from a distance, favoring formfitting snap-button western shirts that few other men his age could get away with; in one of our meetings, he even rocked the red-bandanna headband of his Born in the U.S.A. years.

But, inherently, Springsteen is a brooder: a serious, unglib man given to puzzling out the mixed-up thoughts in his head. In other words, a born memoirist. When I asked him, for example, about the genesis of that pumped-up Born in the U.S.A. look, I was surprised by how considered a response I received. I was posing the question from a superficial, stagecraft angle: Was his evolution from the scrawny chancer on the cover of Darkness on the Edge of Town to the muscle-bound W.P.A.-poster hero of the mid-80s a sort of less extreme version of David Bowie-style shape-shifting? Was it a conscious image reboot? Springsteen’s initial reply was that, first and foremost, he was trying to get healthy as his metabolism slowed, so he took to lifting weights, and “I had a body that just kind of popped in six months.”

“But if you want to get into it deeper,” he continued, “my father was built big, so there was some element of ‘O.K., I’m 34. I’m a man now.’ I remember my father at that age. There was the idea of creating a man’s body to a certain degree. I suppose I was measuring that after my dad. And also, perhaps, in some way, trying to please him.”

Then Springsteen went deeper still. “I also found that I simply enjoyed the exercise,” he said. “It was perfectly Sisyphean for my personality—lifting something heavy up and putting it down in the same spot for no particularly good reason. I’ve always felt a lot in common with Sisyphus. I’m always rolling that rock, man. One way or another, I’m always rolling that rock.”

SPIRIT IN THE NIGHT
Performing in July at the AccorHotels Arena, in Paris.

Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

II. BORN TO WRITE

The germ of Born to Run, the book, lies in a short, diaristic piece Springsteen wrote for his Web site in 2009, after he and the E Street Band played the halftime show of Super Bowl XLIII. The logistics and pressure of doing the 12-minute show threw even as battle-tested a performer as Springsteen for a loop, and he thought the experience would make for a good yarn to share. “Fifteen minutes . . . oh, by the way, I’m somewhat terrified,” he wrote in one passage. “It’s not the usual pre-show jitters, not ‘butterflies,’ not wardrobe malfunction nervousness, I’m talking about five minutes to beach landing, ‘Right Stuff,’ ‘Lord Don’t Let Me Screw the Pooch in Front of 100 Million People,’ ‘One of the biggest television audiences since dinosaurs first screwed on earth’ kind of terror.”

Doing the Super Bowl show, Springsteen said, led him to discover a “pretty good voice to write in.” With time on his hands after the big game, he kept at it, writing down vignettes from his life in longhand while he and Scialfa were staying in Florida, where their daughter, Jessica, a competitive equestrian, was participating in show-jumping events. He was pleased with the results. In fits and starts, back at home in New Jersey and on tour over the next seven years, a full-blown, 500-page autobiography eventually took shape, with no ghost or collaborator. Every word in the book is his own.

There’s no shortage of levity in Born to Run. We learn that young Bruce, for all his romantic association with cars and the road, was a terrible driver who didn’t manage to get his license until he was in his 20s, and that current Bruce, like many a passionate baby-boomer in the vicinity of a computer keyboard, is a fan of caps lock. On the seismic impact of Elvis Presley’s initial appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show:“Somewhere in between the mundane variety acts on a routine Sunday night in the year of our Lord 1956 . . . THE REVOLUTION HAS BEEN TELEVISED!! Right underneath the nose of the guardians of all that ‘IS,’ who, if they were aware of the powers they were about to unleash, would call out the national gestapo to SHUT THIS SHIT DOWN!! . . . or . . . SIGN IT UP QUICK!!”

But it’s the less jocular stuff in Springsteen’s life, the material germane to his autobiography’s title, that gives Born to Run its depth—and Springsteen knows this. “I knew I was gonna ‘go there’ in the book,” he told me. “I had to find the roots of my own troubles and issues—and the joyful things that have allowed me to put on the kind of shows that we put on.”

Van Zandt remembers the Springsteen he befriended in their teens as “shut down and closed in.” This was on the central-New Jersey garage-band circuit of the mid-1960s, when Springsteen was playing guitar in a combo called the Castiles and Van Zandt fronted a group called the Shadows. “You remember the grunge guys, with the long hair, staring down at their shoes? That was him,” Van Zandt said. “People were always wondering ‘Why are you hanging out with him? He’s such a weirdo.’ Some people thought he was mental.”

What Van Zandt quickly came to realize was that Springsteen was preternaturally focused, regarding rock music as his only way forward. “What inspired me about him, which nobody could really understand, was that he was completely dedicated,” Van Zandt said. “He’s the only guy I know who never had another job. I had to do some other jobs and fight to do it full-time, where he was always full-time. I got strength from that.”

What made Springsteen so determined? What was Bruce running from? For one thing, the dead-end, near-feudal circumstances into which he was born, living with his parents and paternal grandparents in a tumbledown house in Freehold, New Jersey. It sat on the same block as their church, St. Rose of Lima, and its affiliated convent, rectory, and school, as well as four other small houses, occupied by members of his father’s family. His father’s side was pretty much Irish-American, people named McNicholas, O’Hagan, and Farrell. His mother’s side, which lived just across the street, was Italian-American, people named Zerilli and Sorrentino.

“I’VE ALWAYS FELT A LOT IN COMMON WITH SISYPHUS. I’M ALWAYS ROLLING THAT ROCK, MAN.”

His father’s father’s father was called Dutch Springsteen, and Bruce has a handful of early childhood memories of the man (“His main thing was, he always had gum”), but, ethnographically speaking, the strain that gave Bruce his distinctive surname does not figure in his makeup—“The Dutch thing evaporated,” he told me. The point is, he was a classic central-New Jersey Roman Catholic combo platter, his family’s life dominated by the Church. “We collected the rice that people threw at weddings into bags and brought it home, and then we threw the rice at the next wedding, on complete strangers,” he said. “That was part of the show of our little street, you know?”

One of the pleasures of reading Born to Run is seeing how naturally Springsteen’s singular, familiar songwriting voice translates to a new medium, prose. Recalling, in present tense, the circumscribed little life his family led, he writes, “The bride and her hero are whisked away in their long black limousine, the one that drops you off at the beginning of your life. The other one is just around the corner waiting for another day to bring the tears and take you on that short drive straight out Throckmorton Street to the St. Rose graveyard on the edge of town.” Should the rock-god thing no longer work out, this guy might have a future filling the late Elmore Leonard’s shoes.

III. THIS DEPRESSION

Springsteen may today be a man who splits his time between a horse farm in his native Monmouth County, a second home in New Jersey, and luxury properties in Florida and L.A., butBorn to Run is an emphatic refutation of the notion that, as a songwriter, he can no longer connect to the troubled and downtrodden. Especially in its early chapters, the book demonstrates how honestly Springsteen has come by his material. Cars, girls, the Shore, the workingman’s struggles, broken dreams, disillusioned vets—it’s all right there in his upbringing.

“One of the points I’m making in the book is that, whoever you’ve been and wherever you’ve been, it never leaves you,” he said, expanding upon this thought with the most Springsteen-esque metaphor possible: “I always picture it as a car. All your selves are in it. And a new self can get in, but the old selves can’t ever get out. The important thing is, who’s got their hands on the wheel at any given moment?”

In Born to Run, the Bruce in the driver’s seat is often the kid or the conflicted young man who cowered or sulked in the presence of his father, Doug. The Springsteen catalogue abounds with songs about difficult father-son relationships, such as the recriminatory “Adam Raised a Cain,” the rueful “My Father’s House,” and the valedictory leaving-home ballad “Independence Day” (“The darkness of this house has got the best of us”), the last of which Springsteen introduced to the Gothenburg crowd as a song about “two people that love each other but struggle to understand one another.”

SOUND CHECK
In Paris, Springsteen with his wife, the singer-guitarist Patti Scialfa.

Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

Doug Springsteen came from a socially immobile family rife with undiagnosed or undiscussed mental illness—agoraphobia, hair-pulling disorders, aunts who emitted inappropriate howling noises. (“As a child, it was simply mysterious, embarrassing and ordinary,” Bruce writes of life with these relatives.) Doug was a high-school dropout who drifted from one blue-collar job to the next—as a floor boy at a local rug mill, on the line at the Ford Motor plant in Edison. He was short-fused, a loner, and a drinker—“a bit of a Bukowski character,” as his son put it to me.

And he didn’t get along with Bruce, treating the boy, depending on his own mood, with icy distance or tongue-lashing fury. Springsteen’s mother, on the other hand, the former Adele Zerilli, was all kindness and vivacity, and gainfully employed as a legal secretary. (Now 91, she maintains her upbeat disposition, Bruce says, despite having been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease four years ago.) Adele and Doug stayed together to the end, to his death in 1998 at the age of 73. Most extraordinarily, Adele went along with Doug’s plan to pull up stakes and move, in 1969, with Bruce’s seven-year-old sister, Pam, from their native Freehold to the promised land of California, with all of their belongings packed atop an AMC Rambler. By this point, the mental illness that ran in his family had befallen Doug, leading to bouts of paranoia and tears, and he was eager to start his life anew—even if it meant leaving behind Bruce (who was not yet 20) and his other daughter, Virginia, who was not only a mere 17 but also a new wife and mother, having married the young man, Mickey Shave, who had gotten her pregnant in her senior year of high school. (Forty-seven years later, the Shaves remain happily married.)

His parents’ enduring bond remains a mystery to Bruce. Adele had come from a family of relative wealth; her father, Anthony Zerilli, was a charismatic, self-made lawyer. On the other hand, he had divorced Adele’s mother and spent three years in Sing Sing prison for embezzlement (taking the rap, per family lore, for another relative). “What penance was she doing? What did she get out of it?,” Springsteen writes of his mother’s devotion to his father. He then proposes that “maybe knowing she had the security of a man who would not, could not, leave her was enough. The price, however, was steep.”

I underlined that passage, and remarked to Springsteen that his thoughts sounded like something that had been worked out in talk therapy. He acknowledged this to be the case—“A lot of these ideas were things that I’ve parsed over quite a bit over the years”—and, in the book, he credits his longtime manager, Jon Landau, with connecting him to his first psychotherapist, in the early 1980s.

Over the years, Springsteen has been forthcoming about the fact that he is prone to depression, for which he has sought relief through both therapy and antidepressants. In the book, he delves more deeply still into the subject. There is his clinical depression itself, he explained to me, and then a compounding fear that he is doomed to suffer as his father did. “You don’t know the illness’s parameters,” he said. “Can I get sick enough to where I become a lot more like my father than I thought I might?”

He acknowledges in Born to Run that his struggles are ongoing, and shares stories from the not-so-distant past. “I was crushed between sixty and sixty-two, good for a year and out again from sixty-three to sixty-four,” he writes. “Not a good record.” Springsteen remained professionally productive during these periods, however, and he says that he recorded his fine 2012 album, Wrecking Ball, at one of his lowest ebbs, with his bandmates none the wiser. (Though, he grants, the song “This Depression” might have been a tip-off.)

A SPRINGSTEEN SHOW OFFERS ALMOST COMIC ABUNDANCE—IN LENGTH, BUT ALSO IN EMOTIONAL DYNAMICS.

But in the privacy of home, he writes, when the blues descend, “Patti will observe a freight train bearing down, loaded with nitroglycerin and running quickly out of track.” Whereupon “she gets me to the doctors and says, ‘This man needs a pill.’ ”

“If I’m being honest, I’m not completely comfortable with that part of the book, but that’s O.K.,” Scialfa told me. “That’s Bruce. He approached the book the way he would approach writing a song, and a lot of times, you solve something that you’re trying to figure out through the process of writing—you bring something home to yourself. So in that regard, I think it’s great for him to write about depression. A lot of his work comes from him trying to overcome that part of himself.”

To some degree, Springsteen said, he has overcome the issues he had with his father. One of the book’s most moving passages occurs a few days before the 1990 birth of Springsteen and Scialfa’s first child, their son Evan. As was his impulsive wont, Doug embarked on an impromptu road trip, driving 400 miles south to Bruce’s house in Los Angeles from San Mateo, where he and Adele had made their home. Over beers at 11 A.M., Doug, uncharacteristically, made a small peace offering to his son. “Bruce, you’ve been very good to us,” he said. And then, after a pause: “And I wasn’t very good to you.”

“That was it,” Springsteen writes. “It was all that I needed, all that was necessary.”

I asked him if he ever heard the words “I love you” from his father.

“No,” he said, a little pained. “The best you could get was ‘Love you, Pops.’ [Switching to his father’s gruff voice.] ‘Eh, me, too.’ Even after he had a stroke and he’d be crying, he’d still go, ‘Me, too.’ You’d hear his voice breaking up, but he couldn’t get out the words.”

IV. FIVE GUITARS DEEP

Only half in jest, Springsteen describes touring as his “trustiest form of self-medication,” and you can see why. He was always an exuberant rock performer, but with time, age, and fatherhood (he and Scialfa have a third grown child, Sam, a firefighter, in addition to Evan, who works for SiriusXM, and Jessica), he has evolved into an all-around entertainer, allowing more humor and goofiness into his shows. He gambols along the catwalks that line the stage with a puckered smile and arched eyebrows that recall Robert De Niro in comedy mode (his mom’s sunny Italian side coming out), slapping hands with fans and edging his famous mug into their smartphone frames for mid-song selfies. He pulls small children from the crowds to join him in singing “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day,” a simple pop song from The Rising, his 2002 album. The song didn’t register as a hit in the U.S. but has been embraced by Europeans as a Pete Seeger-style folk sing-along.

A Springsteen show, even a non-four-hour one, offers almost comic abundance—not just in length, but in emotional dynamics, musical variety, and visual richness. Sometimes, there are no fewer than five guitars being strummed on the band’s front line—by Springsteen, Van Zandt, Scialfa, Nils Lofgren, and the fiddler and multi-instrumentalist Soozie Tyrell—with the towering, Afro’d Jake Clemons, nephew and heir of the late, great Clarence Clemons, picking his spots to weave through them all with his tenor saxophone. The three longest-serving E Streeters, bassist Garry Tallent, pianist Roy Bittan, and drummer Max Weinberg, hang back and dress nattily; compared with the flamboyant Van Zandt and Lofgren—the former in his trademark headscarf, the latter in his Artful Dodger stovepipe hat—they look like private-equity guys playing in a weekend hobby band. (Completing the lineup is the organist Charlie Giordano, who stepped in after the death of founding E Streeter Danny Federici, in 2008.)

ABOUT THE BOOK, SPRINGSTEEN SAYS, “I HAD TO FIND THE ROOTS OF MY OWN TROUBLES AND ISSUES.”

Springsteen and the E Street Band remain an enormous live draw. The River Tour ‘16, nominally pegged to last year’s release of The Ties That Bind, a boxed set of the sprawling sessions for his 1980 double album, The River, was originally to encompass a mere 20 dates, but between popular demand and Springsteen’s ardor to perform more, it has expanded to a total of 75 concerts in the U.S. and Europe. As it draws to a close (with a final concert at Gillette Stadium, in Foxborough, Massachusetts, on September 14), it is on pace to be this year’s top-earning international tour; over its first six months, it grossed more than $170 million. Landau, who has been with Springsteen since 1974, told me that when he is recognized by fans “the most common thing I hear is ‘Hundred-and-third show,’ or ‘This is our 45th show.’ ” In terms of loyalty and repeat attendance, he reckons, the only rock act that has topped Springsteen and the E Street Band historically is the Grateful Dead, “and I think we’re in a very respectable second place.”

Plus, they’re still going strong. “We’ve never talked, not one sentence that I can recall, about ‘When does this stop?,’ ” Landau said. But Springsteen himself told me that there is no taboo surrounding the issues of age and aging. After all, in recent years, he has amended his nightly carnival barker’s call-out of his band so that it now goes, “You’ve just seen the heart-stopping, pants-dropping, house-rocking, earth-quaking, booty-shaking, Viagra-taking, love-making, legendary E—Street—Band!”

“Playing a show brings a tremendous amount of euphoria,” Springsteen said, “and the danger of it is, there’s always that moment, comes every night, where you think, Hey, man, I’m gonna live forever! You’re feeling all your power. And then you come offstage, and the main thing you realize is ‘Well, that’s over.’ Mortality sets back in.”

Three years ago, Springsteen underwent a surgical procedure to address the chronic numbness he was experiencing on his left side, which was inhibiting his ability to work the fretboard of his guitar and turned out to be attributable to damaged disks in his neck. The procedure entailed getting his throat cut open and his vocal cords temporarily tied off to the side to make way for the insertion of replacement disks—which meant that, for three months, he was unable to sing. “A little nerve-racking,” he said. “But it’s been very successful for me.”

Springsteen recognizes that he has “a finite amount of time in which I’m going to continue to do what I’m doing,” he says. But absent any further medical crises, he has no imminent plans to dial back his no-holds-barred approach. Tour dates are already carefully scheduled so that there is always at least a day off between shows for the musicians to recuperate, and everyone has his or her routine for remaining show-ready. “You gotta be in really good shape, baby!” said the 65-year-old Van Zandt, before ruefully commenting, over his pre-show beer, “I should be in better shape than I am.” Weinberg, who is also 65, has had eight operations on his hands and two on his back, and has had both shoulders reconstructed. Pre-concert, he said, he spends five minutes pedaling on a recumbent bike, “generating some sweat and getting the blood flowing.”

For their boss, the Boss, the River Tour ‘16 will be swiftly followed by a series of promotional dates for Born to Run, the book. A publisher’s dream, Springsteen has committed to a multitude of promotional and in-store appearances, and has even compiled an 18-song, retrospective companion album, titled Chapter and Verse, which covers his career from the Castiles and his choogling, hairy pre-E Street outfits Steel Mill and the Bruce Springsteen Band all the way up to the title track of Wrecking Ball.

HOMESTEAD
Springsteen at his horse farm in Colts Neck, New Jersey.

Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

I asked Springsteen if he has any plans to get involved in this year’s presidential election, having actively campaigned in 2008 and 2012 for Barack Obama. He has been silent in this cycle, though at a June concert at Munich’s Olympic Stadium he held up a fan’s handmade sign that read, FUCK TRUMP, WE WANNA DANCE WITH THE BOSS. Springsteen demurred, noting that an artist has only so many “bullets,” credibility-wise, to shoot. But, he said, “when the times have felt very drastic, I feel like, ‘Well, I gotta put my two cents in.’ So we’ll see what happens.”

What might better serve the good of the Republic is the planned release, sometime next year, of Springsteen’s first album of entirely new songs since Wrecking Ball. (His last studio album, 2014’s High Hopes, consisted of covers, new recordings of older songs, and orphaned songs from sessions for his preceding albums.) The new album, as yet untitled, has been finished for more than a year but has sat on the shelf while Springsteen has busied himself with the tour and the book.

“It’s a solo record, more of a singer-songwriter kind of record,” he said. Intriguingly, though, it does not follow in the spare, acoustic tradition of such previous solo albums as Nebraska, The Ghost of Tom Joad, and Devils & Dust. Rather, it’s inspired by a recent immersion in the 60s collaborations of the songwriter Jimmy Webb and the singer Glen Campbell, “pop records with a lot of strings and instrumentation,” he said. “So the record is somewhat in that vein.” That’s as much as he’ll reveal at the moment.

V. THE PACT

A final word on “Born to Run,” the song that anchors Springsteen’s musical oeuvre and autobiography. Since so much of the book concerns his relationship with his troubled, enigmatic father, and since we had been speaking freely of Springsteen’s time in therapy, I asked him if I could offer my own amateur-psychoanalytic theory of why “Born to Run” has so resonated with its author.

“Go ahead,” he said with a chuckle.

I told him that the pact the song’s narrator makes with Wendy—“We can live with the sadness / I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul”—jumped out at me, now that I’d read the book, as the pact that Doug Springsteen made with Adele.

Springsteen smiled. “That was their pact,” he said.

“And ‘We’re gonna get to that place / Where we really want to go / And we’ll walk in the sun’—I’m thinking of two people who had moved, relatively recently at the time you wrote the song, from New Jersey to California.”

“Yeah, my folks. I think that was the place I envisioned, was West. Where do people run? They run West. That’s kind of where I imagined the characters going.”

“So,” I asked, “is ‘Born to Run’ the internal monologue of Doug Springsteen?”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Springsteen said. “I never connected this song particularly with my father. I mean, I think it pertains as far as feeling trapped internally. He did. Which is why they ended up leaving for California when their kids were so young. We were 19, 17, and at a very critical moment in our lives. In my sister’s life, particularly. She just had a baby! So they had to go.” Springsteen seemed to be warming, ever so slightly, to my premise. “In a funny way,” he said, “my parents actually lived this song at that particular time.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” I responded. “I’m wondering if—”

“—later on, it clicked in my head?” he said, finishing my thought. “I don’t know where things come from. At the end of the day, you don’t know where everything comes from. It’s very possible.”

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JoeBala

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On the Road with Cyndi Lauper: “I Intend to Sing ’til I Die”

Taking a Detour with her first country album and tour, the girl-power pop legend chats re-invention, Broadway, and rockabilly roots.
SEPTEMBER 6, 2016 4:47 PM
From Mondadori Portfolio/Getty Images.

Cyndi Lauper has never played by the rules. Paving the way for women in rock and beyond with her She’s So Unusual debut in 1983, the music icon and Songwriters Hall of Fame-r remains full of surprises—but without a false move in sight. The last decade, in particular, has seen a trio of boundary-pushing re-inventions with 2010’s Grammy-nominated albumMemphis Blues, 2013’s Tony-sweeping Broadway smash Kinky Boots, and now Detour, Lauper’s first full-length country outing.

The Rhino Entertainment release, which hit shelves and streaming services earlier this summer, is a healthful dose of a dozen country-classic covers, featuring assists from Jewel, Alison Krauss, Willie Nelson, and others. Per Lauper’s insistence while working with these country greats, Detour marks only a departure from her own expected course, not from the genre’s distinctive roots. The singer confidently twangs and yodels her way through covers of everyone from Patsy Montana to Patsy Cline (a personal favorite of hers since childhood).

Just back from the European leg of her Detour tour, Lauper kicks off her second string of U.S. stops on September 10 in Austin, Texas. Further switching up the genre game, Lauper’s 18-year-old rapper son, Dex Lauper, will close out the tour when opening for his mom in Scottsdale, Arizona and Las Vegas, Nevada—so boys, too, are getting in on the fun this time.

Lauper hopped on the phone with Vanity Fair to discuss Detour, re-uniting with “Time After Time” co-writer Rob Hyman on Broadway’s forthcoming The Spongebob Musical, her dream of starting a girl band, and wanting to “sing ’til I die.”

Vanity Fair: What was your previous relationship like with country music, and specifically these songs? What made you want to cover them on Detour?

Cyndi Lauper: I wanted to work with [producer] Seymour Stein. We talked about a time period in country just before the birth of rock ’n’ roll. And actually, Wanda Jackson was doing rock ’n’ roll. When I was in Blue Angel, which was a rockabilly band, and I was looking and formatting who the heck I was gonna be and how I was gonna sing, I just started learning from listening to her and all the rockabilly singers. Patsy Cline and even Hank Williams, Jerry Lee [Lewis]—these people were country, but they really were rockabilly. And rockabilly was the birth of rock, so it kind of made perfect sense to me because it really formulated who I became. I never would’ve sang “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” or “She Bop” that way if I didn’t ever hear [rockabilly].

You also have an impressive roster of assists on this album.

Oh my God, I know! Unbelievable.

Willie Nelson, Alison Krauss, Vince Gill—the list goes on.

Emmylou Harris and Jewel. C’mon. I love those guys.

What have been some of your most fulfilling collaborations over the years?

I feel that this, the whole thing was a bucket list. To be able to sing with those people was incredible in the first place. I’ve always been a fan of Alison Krauss and Emmylou Harris, and, to tell you the truth, even Vince Gill. Vince Gill is such an amazing guitar player and a real, just all-around great artist. I was excited to work with him because I felt that if anybody understood that cowboy swing stuff, of course, him and the Time Jumpers—they know that like the back of their hand.

You were in a cover band when first getting your legs in the industry.

Hell yeah. Those were the punishment years!

What makes a good cover, in your book?

I stay true to what [the original] was. I was also working with Nashville cats; I didn’t want to re-invent the wheel. The songs really were and are very much Americana. There’s plenty more songs than that, but I wanted to pay homage to those people, those songs. I think I do Patsy Cline songs just like if you’re doing older music, and you have the opportunity to do Édith Piaf songs, you’re gonna do them. I had a Patsy Cline button I used to wear all the time, and I sang “I Fall to Pieces” in Blue Angel.

So it’s come full circle a little bit.

A little bit. Every time I think I’m doing something brand new, I always realize when I’m in it, “Oh, man, I’ve been here before.” I was very nervous about singing with these people. I was very excited about it; I wanted to do this, I wanted to do that. Then when I got there, I realized, “Wow, you’re not exactly Bob Dylan or Johnny Cash, are ya?” So I had to connect with them because obviously, they connected with each other. They play with each other all the time. I did [“Begging to You”] because I just love the story, and it reminded me a little of Roy Orbison, too. [Blue Angel] was named after a Roy Orbison song. When I started singing that, I gotta be honest, I really sucked. I couldn’t connect and I was—ugh—I was so upset. We went on to do “Funnel of Love.” We discussed how it could be. There was a scene happening in Southern California that had that kind of sound, and so when we did it and I started singing it, all of a sudden, it came back to me, and it was like, “Holy cow, I did this in Blue Angel!” And so that was the first time we connected.

What role does re-invention play in your career?

The blues album and this are kind of singers’ albums. They’re kind of a bucket list as a singer, honestly. I’ve always dreamed of being a great singer, and I’ve always wanted to become that. And unless you study and advance yourself, you’ll never get there. And so that’s what has always been my intention. I intend to sing ’til I die!

Is there anything else on your bucket list?

Plenty. Everything. I would love to sing with Emmylou again—maybe be in a girl band. I would love that.

In regards to your venture into Broadway, you had such success with Kinky Boots

Well, it wasn’t just me, it was us! It was me and [book writer] Harvey [Fierstein] and [director] Jerry [Mitchell]. . . . I don’t even know if I would’ve made it through had it not been for Harvey. Harvey was like my mother, and stood up for me all the time. I heard what [producer] Daryl Roth said. She wanted everything dance. The first song I wrote for Charlie [Price, the musical’s main character], I thought they’d have a heart attack, ’cause it was punk. I gave everyone their own style. Harvey said I could do it, and that was exciting to me because for the first time in my life, I wasn’t writing music and bringing it in and having people say, “You can’t sing like that, you’re Cyndi Lauper!” I could sing however I wanted. So it was really an extraordinary record to do. I also had to stick the story in there very sneakily. I’m not big on operettas. I just like songs with hooks that move it along. And I think Hamilton is off the hook, but that’s rap, and his songs are a little operetta. They don’t have, like, “Oh, here comes the hook—boom!” I still thought it was the most brilliant thing.

What can you tell us about your work on The Spongebob Musical?

I was gonna work with [director] Tina Landau on something. I think she’s very gifted. She was going to do this other thing, and I didn’t think I could do a good job for her, but she asked me if I would doSpongebob. She wanted a song called, “Hero Is My Middle Name,” and so I figured that’s the song—“Hero is my middle name / Sticks and trouble is my game.” You know Spongebob: there’s no better time like now. It was all because him and Patrick went in for a fortune telling, and the fortune-teller said, “Time’s up. It’s over.” And they thought she meant Bikini Bottom is over, so they have to save Bikini Bottom. It’s very complicated under water!

It definitely seems like an exciting project to be a part of.

It’s fun! There’s a lot of different people, not just me. Even David Bowie wrote a song. And I wrote the song with Rob Hyman, he was on tour with me, and we did it together. It was fun.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

ENLARGE SLIDESHOW
1/7
Behind the Scenes of Vanity Fair’s Kinky BootsPhoto Shoot

AJA NAOMI KING

DANI BRUBAKER

08/25/16

AJA NAOMI KING IN FEBRUARY, 2016. PHOTOS: DANI BRUBAKER. STYLING: LAURA MAZZA. HAIR: NIKKI PROVIDENCE/FORWARD ARTISTS USING FREE YOUR MANE. MAKEUP: JEN FIAMENGO/WALTER SCHUPFER MANAGEMENT USING NARS.



Before moving to New Haven to study for her MFA at Yale University, California-native Aja Naomi King had never seen snow. “I remember being a first year at Yale, being at rehearsal, and our director opening the door and saying, ‘Oh, it’s snowing outside,’” she told her friend actor Danielle Brooks over the phone last April. “I was like, ‘Real snow?’ I went outside and was not prepared at all! Seeing snow come from the sky felt like witnessing a miracle.”

King graduated from Yale in 2010 (Empire actor Trai Byers was in the year below her and other recent Yalies include Atlanta’s Brian Tyree Henry, The Get Down’sYahya Abdul-Mateen II, and, of course, Lupita Nyong’o). Her television career began immediately, but it wasn’t until King was cast as the ambitious Michaela Pratt in Shonda Rhimes's How to Get Away With Murder that she found her groove as a prime-time star.

Next month, HTGAWM, now a tentpole show for ABC, will return for a third season and King’s new film The Birth of the Nation will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. A biopic of Nat Turner, a slave and preacher who lead the most successful slave rebellion in U.S. history, The Birth of a Nation reclaims its name from D.W. Griffiths racist 1915 feature. King plays Cherry Turner, Nat’s wife.

Here, King and Brooks discuss their classical training (Brooks attended Juilliard) and the challenges of theater vs. television. At the time of this interview, Danielle Brooks was midway through her Tony-nominated run as Sofia in The Color Purple.


DANIELLE BROOKS: Hi Aja!

AJA NAOMI KING: It's great to hear your voice.

BROOKS: Yours too! Where are you?

KING: I’m in California, sitting in my car. [laughs] Where are you?

BROOKS: I’m in New York, sitting on my bed, just trying to relax. We've got a show tonight at seven. Girl, you’ve been doing it up. This is so exciting to interview someone I think is such a great actor and is doing so well and is sort of in the same category when it comes to trained black woman actors who are up-and-coming.

KING: Aw, thank you.

BROOKS: Something I didn’t know about you is that you’re from California. When I first was introduced to you, you didn’t know me yet. I actually went to your showcase when you were at Yale. You did Our Lady of 121st Street. You left an impression. [laughs] I don’t remember everything your classmates did, but I remember what you did.

KING: Oh wow! I love that.

BROOKS: Being that you’re from Cali, what made you want to study on the East side?

KING: I grew up in a very suburban neighborhood, so I was used to everything being safe and lovely. I guess I was more excited about grad schools on the East Coast because I knew it would be outside my comfort zone and I’d be forced to learn something new about myself. It’d be an exciting change for me. My parents are actually from New York and New Jersey, but I’d only ever been there once or twice with them as a child. The idea of living out there on my own was just a way of further challenging myself to see what I’d be capable of in that environment, since my upbringing had been so sheltered beforehand.

BROOKS: When you graduated from Yale, how was that? Was it scary coming out of school or did you find an agent and manager pretty much right out of school? Did you see yourself—I’m asking 500 questions at one time—

KING: [laughs]

BROOKS: Did you see yourself wanting to do theater or go straight into TV?

KING: Luckily, my showcase scenes had also made a major impact on my current agent and manager—I’ve been with them since I graduated. I feel very lucky that they saw something in me, recognized part of my talent, and we’ve made a great team. I’ve been really happy with the choices we’ve made with my career. It made moving to New York easier having an agent and a manager. I felt that even though I had day jobs, I had people who were watching out for me, sending me in, and so I was still able to pursue this thing that I wanted. I thought I was going to be on Broadway. [laughs] I thought, “I’m going to do theater.” [But] at the time when I came out of school, unless you were a super talented musical singer and dancer, there wasn’t a lot of opportunity for someone who looked like me on Broadway. When the doors to television were opened to me, that was quite a surprise. It’s been such a gift that there was so much TV and independent film happening in New York that I could be a part of. There was something to satiate my desire to be artistic and creative, especially when it wasn’t in the way I originally thought it was going to be. You study at these schools for three—or in your case four—years and you think you’re just going to go out and do more Shakespeare and Chekhov and all these great, unheard of, new, original plays, and all of that doesn’t quite exist yet. There’s more of it now, which is wonderful.

BROOKS: Once you started working in television, what do you think was one of the major learning curves for you? It’s so different from theater—you trained for three years and now you’re all of a sudden doing independent films and TV.

KING: There was definitely a learning curve, but more so in the sense of taking ownership of my artistry. When you do a play, you have all this time to rehearse and grow into the character. In television, even though you’re waiting and waiting and waiting, once you’re actually on set engaging in the scene with another actor, time is of the essence. If you’re doing an indie and you have time, sometimes you can do take after take after take, but if you’re working in television on that filming schedule, you don’t always have the time to do that. You learn very quickly, I think, how essential it is to come in with the strongest choice that you have. You have that planned, and then allow yourself to keep playing in the moment knowing any of these takes could be the one that’s chosen. That was kind of terrifying.

BROOKS: I’m discovering the same thing with doing Orange [is the New Black] and [my Broadway play] The Color Purple. Like you were saying, [with television] you have to make the best choices. When you do theater and you have four or five weeks to rehearse, you’re already making the strongest choices that you can make; when you’re starting to figure out what works and what doesn’t, you haven’t wasted all of your time trying to work up to making the best choices, you’ve already done it.

KING: Exactly. You’ve already done it. The incredible thing about that, since you come in so strong and yet you have all this time to continue rehearsing your play, by the end of it you’re so opened up to so many nuances that you haven’t even thought of. It’s all the better for your performance.

BROOKS: I love theater so much, because you get a beginning, middle, and end. But when you’re in TV, you don’t know where your character is going. I don’t know how it works on How to Get Away with Murder—do they give you all 13 episodes? On Orange you get one episode at a time.

KING: I think that is the typical way. I hear some shows, you will get all the information of the entire arc, but that’s definitely not our show. A lot of the time, depending on how well things work out, even the arc that the writers thought they were going to do may evolve as the season continues, which is exciting. You have to be so open and available to being more human. Sometimes as human beings, we’re so contradictory—we may say something or do something and completely contradict ourselves. That’s what I’m learning to embrace in television—not knowing what’s going to happen. I might make a specific choice for myself and then in the next episode the writers might write something that contradicts it. At first I want to fight it and say, “No, we just did this,” but then I think, “Wait, but that’s human nature.” We go back on our word, we make ourselves out to be liars, we betray ourselves in that way. I really enjoy embracing that. It’s a nice way to learn what kind of character this person I’m playing is.

BROOKS: I like that you said that, because I think that’s something that’s been tricky for me. Like I said, I enjoy having a beginning, a middle, and an end, so with Taystee it’s like, “I wish someone had told me I was adopted. I could’ve done so many different things!”

KING: [laughs]

BROOKS: “If you had just told me Taystee didn’t like women.” The beauty of being a human is that we’re always contradicting ourselves. I think that’s why the characters still work. People still are drawn to both Michaela and Taystee, because we’re human.

KING: Exactly.

BROOKS: We haven’t talked too deeply about How to Get Away with Murder, but I love that show. I actually know a few of your people. One of your friends just came to our show.

KING: Kendrick [Samspon]! He texted me.

BROOKS: And Connor came to the show. We’ve had some people from How to Get Away with Murder come to The Color Purple. How is getting to be a part of a show that’s bringing new talent mixed with seasoned actors? Specifically, I want to know how it is to work with Viola Davis every day. That’s so awesome. I’m sure you get that question a lot, but I haven’t asked it. [laughs]

KING: She sets the tone. She’s so professional, but so relaxed about it. I think that’s because of her theatrical background. Yes, you show up prepared, but then you’re open to play and discovering where this scene might go. She has that kind of openness about her. As artists, we thrive when we can express our comfort and our discomfort. If a certain scene is really challenging for us, if we’re in an environment where we feel safe, we’re able to do our work. She makes me feel so safe, and so empowered, because I see the beauty in what she’s doing, I see the way she treats everyone so well. It doesn’t matter what you do on the show, she’ll want to talk to you, make a joke, share something about herself. She loves sharing pictures and videos she found on Facebook. [laughs] And her daughter, telling stories about her and her husband.

She brings you in, and it feels like family. When you’re in that kind of family environment, when you’re tasked with doing something difficult, you can allow yourself to be brave because you know you’re surrounded by people that love you, that only want the best for you. From day one, it’s been that wonderful. I was terrified. That first scene we’re in together in the pilot, I was so scared. Here she is, being amazing in this room, and I just want her to think I’m amazing too.

BROOKS: Right, and you are. It’s such a beautiful thing to be a part of this next generation of women in this business that are being embraced by the older generation of actors. It’s teaching us how we can behave and be towards each other—it’s not a competition—and to really look at each other as sisters. When you win, I win. You get to work with Viola Davis, that’s a win for me.

KING: Seeing you or Kelly McCreary, who is one of my best friends, or Samira Wiley, who I love, seeing them in audition rooms in New York or L.A., it’s always this celebration of, “We are here, look where we made it.” It’s wonderful to see other women doing so well and getting work that is worthy of them.

BROOKS: That brings me to another point, as you just reminded me. Another moment when I first met you was the Essence Black Women in Hollywood [party], and how incredible that moment was to be surrounded by all these black, chocolate girls. You got to stand on the stage and recite your poetry with Oprah. Mother O. [laughs]

KING: Mother O, right. Talk about moment of my life.

BROOKS: Was that an ask from her?

KING: It was actually the lovely ladies who run the event from Essence who invited me to join her on stage. How incredible was that? I thought that was so kind of them to include me.

BROOKS: The poem you were doing, I ended up buying the book. [laughs]

KING: Yeah, it was really uplifting, and about being united and cherishing one another, valuing each other.

BROOKS: I also wanted to ask, because I’ve been following you from the jump. This whole new project, The Birth of a Nation—tell me about it! I don’t know if people are ready. This is going to set the tone for a lot of things to come. I heard people were on their feet at the end of the movie [at Sundance].

KING: Being at Sundance was such a whirlwind, I was barely there for 24 hours because I was flying from work to get there and I had to fly back to work, but the energy, the excitement was electrifying.

BROOKS: And you’re playing Cherry.

KING: I play Cherry, Nat Turner’s wife, in the film.

BROOKS: I hate talking about this, but it’s a necessary part of the conversation, the #OscarsSoWhite thing. I felt this will definitely be a contender, not only because it’s a black film and they need to nominate black films, but because it’s deserving. It’s worthy. It’s really exciting, I’m glad you’re part of it.

KING: I am excited for it to open. It was meant to be an educational tool for future generations so that they could know another part of our story, the story of enslaved Africans, so that children could understand that we were also strong, and we were brave, and we were powerful, and we will not submit. It’s a message for every generation, something we need to know about ourselves. We are also warriors and we know what’s important to fight for. And we’ll continue to fight for these things.

BROOKS: When you had to step into Cherry Turner, we’re both trained actors and we pull on different things and different experiences, but was there one thing in particular that really helped you through this process? Was it you using your imagination, or something you watched?

KING: I had, of course, done research and created a thorough backstory for myself with Cherry, fleshing out her character, but once I was on set, the thing that would always ground me would actually just be connecting with [Nat and Cherry’s love story]. It was almost like the rest of the world fell away and it was just Nat and Cherry existing there together, trying to possess each other’s hearts in a world where we’re not allowed to possess anything. It was the idea of that, the power of that, to dare to love someone and have ownership of it, that always grounded me immediately and put me right where I needed to be.


HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER RETURNS TO ABC ON SEPTEMBER 22, 2016. THE BIRTH OF A NATION WILL SCREEN AT THE 2016 TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL NEXT MONTH. DANIELLE BROOKS IS A JUILLIARD-TRAINED AMERICAN ACTOR WHO IS BEST KNOWN FOR HER ROLE AS TAYSTEE IN NETFLIX'S ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK. EARLIER THIS YEAR SHE MADE HER BROADWAY DEBUT IN THE COLOR PURPLE AND RECEIVED HER FIRST TONY NOMINATION.

Just Music-No Categories-Enjoy It!
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Reply #2 posted 09/12/16 7:03pm

MickyDolenz

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Jesse Ventura speaks about the black influence on American music Sept. 9, 2016 (at 0:35-5:30)


You can take a black guy to Nashville from right out of the cotton fields with bib overalls, and they will call him R&B. You can take a white guy in a pin-stripe suit who’s never seen a cotton field, and they will call him country. ~ O. B. McClinton
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Reply #3 posted 09/13/16 8:28am

JoeBala

smile Thanks MD.

WILLOW AND JADEN

STEVEN KLEIN

08/30/16

At this year's Met Ball in May, our friend, Interview alumnus André Leon Talley welcomed Willow and Jaden Smith to the red carpet by enthusiastically proclaiming them the future of fashion. We happen to agree with him—and not just because the two teenage artists project an earnestness and general, as well as gender, nonconformity that happens to align with the fashion industry's present tastes—we believe that Will and Jada Pinkett Smith's children and namesakes are the future, and we wouldn't necessarily even narrow the claim to fashion alone.

For starters, will we be able to so easily differentiate between artist, designer, model, and performer in the future? And will those differentiations even matter? Will difference hold back the great merge? Or will industries—be it fashion, music, movies, technology—integrate even more comprehensively than they are now? Maybe in the future, the Buddha will have been right and all will be one.

If increasing intersectionality and multiplicity is where we're headed, the fresh prince and princess of Calabasas are indeed the vanguard. Between them, Jaden, 18, and Willow, 15, have more hyphens in their descriptions than Morse code—which, tbh, they probably speak: recording artists, actors, designers, entrepreneurs ... They check so many boxes that they actually present a few conundrums (and not just the intentionally cryptic koans in which they often speak on social media).

Fittingly, perhaps, for a couple of avatars of an intricate and maybe more nuanced future, the Smith kids are a matrix of seeming contradictions. They are both to the manor born, and born woke af. In conversation and on their media streams, they are intensely engaged, conscientious, and yet utterly removed—heavy in the issues on these streets, but from deep within their gated community. In person, at least during interviews, they are undeniably present, self-aware, but always seem, somehow, aloof. They have been hugely, internationally famous nearly their entire lives, and yet they remain, well, riddles.

And, more even than their Billboard hits, more than their blockbuster films, more than the brand ambassadorships and art projects, it is probably this curious projection, their utterly inscrutable public personae, that remain the most beguiling bit about them. On their own or in tandem, the two seem as unshakeable as Siddharthas—above it all, maybe, but somehow seemingly unaffected by the gossip on the ground, mundane concerns. And if they can sound a bit utopian in their imaginings, albeit somewhat surfer-dreamy in their syntactical meanderings, isn't it, like, pretty cool that they want to change the world?

What does seem certain about this projection is that it is purposeful—wrapped in a mille-feuille of irony and self-consciousness, maybe, but not accidental. When, a few days before mugging for our cover, Jaden turned a random paparazzi ambush at a local mall into an impromptu photo shoot, he seemed to be mockingly, jokingly (or rather, deathly earnest, according to his expression) taking ownership of his public image, tagging the paps' pics with his imprimatur. "You can't steal a shot of me," he seemed to be saying. "Your dispersal of my image, as well as its construction and creation, I'll allow on my terms." It was also the funniest/weirdest reappropriation of the celebrity-industrial complex in a long while.

A few days later, Jaden, who has starred in the 2010 remake of The Karate Kid, as well as The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) and After Earth (2013) with his pops, and more recently played Marcus "Dizzee" Kipling on Baz Luhrmann's The Get Down on Netflix, showed up onstage at Madison Square Garden to rap a bit with his friend Justin Bieber. That same month, for his 18th birthday, Jaden released a new track, "Labor V2." Willow, who made her film debut in 2007, alongside dad inI Am Legend and went platinum with her first single, "Whip My Hair," released the album Ardipithecus in 2015. If these two are any indication, maybe in the future everyone will be everything, even if only for a little while. As they tell their pal Pharrell, they're only getting started.


PHARRELL WILLIAMS: So, what's up, guys? What's on your mind, Willow?

WILLOW SMITH: This morning actually was pretty intense because I was thinking about the world and my place in the world, things that I have made or want to make. I was thinking about all the things that I could do that I don't do. But, you know, I was just thinking about the world and everything.

PHARRELL: Well, you guys are the future. There's an older generation that feels like they know what the future should be. And then there's your generation that may have an idea of what the future should be, but that could evolve. How old are you now?

WILLOW: I'm 15.

JADEN SMITH: I actually just turned 18 last Friday.

PHARRELL: Happy belated!

JADEN: Thank you.

PHARRELL: Do you guys ever feel any generational divide when you have a conversation with older folks?

WILLOW: Oh, definitely. It seems like they don't understand our thought process. Or, like, things have happened in the past that they're still mad about. We want to accept them and move forward. I mean, I can definitely see things that have happened in the past that they're holding on to and things that are happening right now that bog them down, but this generation wants to transcend them.

PHARRELL: It would be cool if they would remember when they were teenagers what the generational divide was then. Except that the generational divide is much more blunt at this time. You guys grew up online. Part of your life is on social media. And when they look at it as just something to do, they don't realize that they also essentially live online. They don't realize that their phone has replaced their wallet.

WILLOW: Yep. I know so many kids who literally are, like, Instagram-famous. They have done nothing but post pictures on Instagram. And they have followings. People love to see them in person, but it's only because they post on their Instagram. It's literally crazy. Kids will paint a picture of themselves that is so far beyond who they actually are. It's like they're wearing someone else's skin.

PHARRELL: I love that there are pros and cons to all of it. I feel like your generation understands that. Some of them abuse it. And some just purely use it.

WILLOW: And then there's people, like me and Jaden, who want to utilize social media to elevate the consciousness of those people who feel like all they want from social media is to be famous. [laughs] Like, you can actually be a voice. You can actually say something that's inspiring and not just make people feel like you need to buy things and be a certain way.

JADEN: It's good to be happy and tell us how cool your life is and how awesome you are on social media. That's great because it inspires other people to be happy, too. But a lot of times, people are trying to be happy in the wrong ways—with money or with different things that are not true happiness. It's leading people down a rabbit hole that actually doesn't exist. So people think like, "Yo, once I get this money and these cars and stuff, I'ma be so happy." But that's not true. And I feel like that's why it's very important to educate people on different things while you are actually on social media.

PHARRELL: I love it. The positive path and the trajectory that you guys are on, where does that come from? Who are your biggest inspirations?

WILLOW: My parents. Growing up, all I saw was my parents trying to be the best people they could be, and people coming to them for wisdom, coming to them for guidance, and them not putting themselves on a pedestal, but literally being face-to-face with these people and saying, "I'm no better than you, but the fact that you're coming to me to reach some sort of enlightenment or to shine a light on something, that makes me feel love and gratitude for you." They always give back what people give to them. And sometimes they keep giving and giving and giving. And some people don't feel like they need to give anything back because it's like, "Oh, if you're famous, you can just keep giving, and it doesn't matter." It's not just about money. It's not just about giving people gifts or whatever. What my parents have given to me is not anything that has to do with money or success or anything that society says people should be focusing on—it's something spiritual that only certain people can grasp and accept. And that's how I act and move in the world today.

JADEN: I 100 percent agree with Willow on that one. My parents are definitely my biggest role models. And that's where me and Willow both pull all of our inspiration from to change the world. It all comes from a concept of affecting the world in a positive way and leaving it better than it was than when we came. I feel like that enters into all types of different areas because there are so many different outlets that life has to offer for us. That goes into technology, into music. That goes into science, into spirituality, into education. Where me and Willow come from, a lot of it is trying to make society more efficient, so that kids don't cry, like, "Why do I have to go to school?" Instead, kids are like, "Yeah! I'm so glad to go to school! I'm a better person than I was yesterday, and I can help people."

WILLOW: Exactly!

JADEN: That's we're trying to get to. Where every kid goes to school, and like 50 percent of children don't drop out. Where they feel like their teachers are actually on their side. Or they feel like law enforcement is actually on their side. We want to create a society that is working for us and with us—and we're working for society, not against it.

PHARRELL: It's beautiful that you guys are in such lockstep. Willow, you once said that you felt like the two of you were almost like identical twins, like you could finish each other's thoughts. Were you guys always that close?

WILLOW: Yeah. It's crazy, the sibling dynamic. I could've spent my entire childhood like, "I have to love this person." And it becomes a chore. But our parents were never like, "You have to love them." It was more like, "You have your life. He has his life. And when you guys want to come together, when you guys want to commune, that's up to you." And throughout us realizing ourselves and realizing each other, we just opened our eyes and were like, "Damn, you are the yin to my yang." Not a lot of siblings have that opportunity, because they're always being pushed together so much. They need their time apart in order to realize themselves and realize who they are.

PHARRELL: Has there ever been, like, some love-based competition?

JADEN: We never really felt competitive because Willow's always been better than me at everything. There's been no competition.

WILLOW: [laughs] Pharrell, that is so not true.

JADEN: Willow started making music first. I was like, "My younger sister is, like, 4, and she's making all these fire songs. What's happening?" Willow was doing all these things, about to have record label deals at like the age of 6, and I was like, "I feel like I'm underachieving." That was around the time that I was doing Karate Kid, and I could do flips, and I thought I was special because I could do flips. But Willow could do the flips, too! Willow naturally had it. Like, I was trying to do no-handed cartwheels. Willow had it. I was trying to get to the studio. Willow was in the studio. You know what I'm saying? Willow just didn't have as big as a passion for acting as me. But if she did, she could do what I did. So there's always been competition, but we've always worked as hard as possible to do the things that we want to do. We never got upset because we could always do the same thing. It happened so that me and Willow were able to go through every level or different section of life that we wanted to. If we wanted to act, we could act. If we wanted to dance, we were dancing. And we could do it on the level that we wanted to do it. So there was no, like, "I'm mad at you." Well, we would get mad at each other when we were young, but that stopped when we were, like, 9.

PHARRELL: It seems that you've always been—I hate using this word—famous. You've always been easily recognized for what it is that you do. So do you guys separate your public and private selves?

JADEN: I think we definitely do. How people look at us in public is not how we actually are in private. It's just that we choose not to tell everyone everything. Like, okay, I'm in New York right now. I'm not posting an emoji of a plane on Instagram, like, "New York." I don't want anyone to know that I'm here in New York. And by the time this comes out, I won't be. We don't like people to really know what's happening with us or what we're into. The only thing that we want to keep people updated with is that we want to keep the kids that are following us, the kids that are looking up to us updated on what we're learning and what we're thinking about life. So that's why we have our brand MSFTSrep, but that's a different story. That's where we try to fuel the youth. Like, I have a homie right now, his name is Ian. He's from D.C. He's a super young dude. He's been a MSFTS fan for, like, ever. He's been to our shows. He's just starting to make music. And he's out here with me right now because I got him a hotel room at the spot that I'm staying at, for him and his homies to just to, like, witness a lifestyle, see that anything's possible. I put him here in New York City, his first time ever in New York City in his life, to be like, "Yo, this is what it's like. Anything's possible. Keep going." We're trying to inspire kids, like, "Join me and Willow. Join with the squad. And let's really, like, change the world."

PHARRELL: So you do have to censor yourself on social media? Do you also regulate your usage?

WILLOW: Definitely! Even for people like us who have an awareness that's slightly more awakened, it still takes over your mind. And you find yourself randomly going on your phone for no reason, randomly doing things. It becomes compulsive, and you have to start asking yourself, "Whoa, what is the real reason for me checking my Instagram every five minutes? What is the real reason for me posting this photo right now?" I never want to do things impulsively that have no meaning or intent, especially on social media.

PHARRELL: Do you feel like it enhances or hinders your creative process?

WILLOW: It does both at times. It hinders me when I get lost in things that other people are doing. [laughs] It helps when I can be inspired by things that other people are doing instead of just being like, "Oh, that's cool this person is doing this." It's literally a robotic function, scrolling through your feed and looking at mindless junk that people post every day. There's no thought that goes into it. There's no productivity in that. I'm all about looking at things and analyzing things and finding the beauty in it, even if you don't have to really analyze it. When I can see someone that's posting the way that they're thinking about what's happening in the world right now or even art that they've created, it inspires me to do the same. It makes me turn off my phone and go paint a painting or go hike a mountain or go record a song. Those are the kind of things that social media helps me do. But it also can make me sit in my room and not do anything.

PHARRELL: I think that's true for everyone, at least those who are aware. You can only point it out if you're aware, if your eyes are open. We must stay woke. Do either of you have a dream role or a dream artist collaboration or a dream director that you'd want to work with?

JADEN: I would love to work with Christopher Nolan, 100 percent. It would be a dream for me to hang out with you in the studio. Not even to make music but just hang out.

PHARRELL: Well, you guys know the power of speaking things into existence. You're more than welcome.

WILLOW: One of my dream collaborations is to work with a band called Hiatus Kaiyote, because their music is so beautiful, the changing of the time signatures. Nai Palm, the vocalist, I have such an affinity for her voice. And everything that she talks about in her music and everything that she stands for is just so beautiful. And, like Jaden said, not even making music all the time, but just seeing how they live their lives and observing them as a spirit and as a human, it's so beautiful.

PHARRELL: So how did your interest in fashion begin? I know it's a really lame question. But I'm sure people want to know at what point you recognized that you wanted to do it.

WILLOW: Me and Jaden, when we were younger ... [laughs] Ooh! We would wear the craziest things. Jaden would only wear his Spider-Man costume. I would freaking mismatch every single shirt and pants in my closet. We would just be so rambunctious with our clothing choices. And when we were old enough to start dressing ourselves, my mom was like, "Are you sure you want to go out like that?" And me and Jaden would be like, "You know what? Yes." And she'd totally accept it. I feel like that's where most of our confidence comes from. Because we weren't told, "Oh, you don't look good in that. You look crazy. People are gonna think this about you." Like, obviously, that was going to be happening regardless, but it wasn't like that ruled what we did or the choices that we made.

JADEN: Nobody knows that Willow and I were much, much cooler before. Like, before people were looking at the things that we were doing, we were so much more, like, method with fashion. We really went all the way. We went the extra mile on everything because there was no one looking at us. We've been through the roof, with ludicrous fashion ideas since we were extremely young.

PHARRELL: Well, it led to being a Chanel ambassador and the face of Vuitton, no?

WILLOW: Yeah, it really did. [laughs]

JADEN: We're so blessed! And we're so, so proud. And thankful.

WILLOW: If we didn't have the kind of exposure to the world that we do now, people wouldn't hear the positive thoughts that we have. It's amazing to be able to work with iconic people and to have my name on something that's so beautiful, but at the same time, the only reason why I do it is so that I can have more of a reach to different kinds of people and spread my message. The only thing that really matters is spreading love and light and acceptance and unity throughout the entire world in any way that you possibly can.

PHARRELL: So who are your favorite philosophers?

WILLOW: I love Osho. I don't know if you would call him a philosopher; I would just call him a really cool dude. Osho really changed my life. Because the way that he spoke about emotion and the male and female energies in the world and how people react to the world around them, it's so simple, yet it has such a depth.

JADEN: I feel like that's accurate, the entire collective is very strong. And it made us realize that being aware in the moment of right now is just the most important thing. All of our issues come from us not being aware enough or not seeing through our problems to the depths of the issues.

PHARRELL: Do you guys have any philosophical questions that you'd like to present to the world that's going to read this?

JADEN: A question I would like to present to the world is: Where is the love? And what are we doing? Who's making the decisions that are putting us in the predicaments that we are in, with all of these people losing their lives around the world in so many different ways? I feel like a serious revolution needs to take place in order for human beings to evolve in a way where we can truly exist as a society. Because, right now, we do not act as a true society. We act as a world under terror, just scrambling to survive.

WILLOW: That's definitely one of my biggest questions. Another is: How are humans going to start taking responsibility for the actions that they take? When are we going to stop pointing the finger at someone else for something we do unconsciously? How are we going to start being aware of those things and changing those things?

PHARRELL: Who are some of the authors that you like to read?

WILLOW: I'm reading a book called A Little Life right now, but that's not important. [Pharrell laughs] I read [the Bible-story-inspired novel] The Red Tentby Anita Diamant a couple weeks ago, and that book really made me cry. It put me in the place of gratitude for my sisters and mothers that have come before me, because it's rough out here. Like, racism ... People are dying at the moment because of unconscious cops. And I just had to take a moment to grieve for the world. But sexism is also a huge problem in society. And that book really opened my eyes to a whole other world of insanity and humanity.

PHARRELL: Wow. Are there any good films that you guys are seeing recently?

WILLOW: I love Mr. Nobody [2013].

JADEN: Yeah, Mr. Nobody is really crazy.

PHARRELL: Do you guys follow any TV shows?

WILLOW: Buffy the Vampire Slayer forever! I will forever be following that TV show until the day that I die. I love Buffy.

JADEN: Yes! Buffy the Vampire Slayer! That, and, what is it, Willow, Wormhole?

WILLOW: Through the Wormhole! Definitely.

JADEN: That show is beautiful. Once you watch that show, you will know that nothing is real.

WILLOW: A fan came up to me in New York a couple days ago, and they're like, "Is this real life?" And I looked at them, and I go, "I don't think it is." It was a crazy moment because I actually, like, looked into her eyes and thought, "She's actually asking me this question. Like, she's not BS'ing me. This isn't a joke. She's actually asking me, ‘Is this real life?' And I'm giving her my truest answer, which is, ‘I don't think it is.'" Because you see so many beautiful things happening in this world, and you see so many things that make you want to cry and crawl under a rock. But there's an underlying feeling of magic and mystery in everything that I live for. I feel like all of my art is trying to get people to see that underlying, subtle energy that lives within everything that we see and what we don't see in this world.

PHARRELL: Are there any plans for college in the foreseeable future for either of you?

JADEN: 100 percent.

WILLOW: I wouldn't say plans, but it's a very strong possibility. I'm a huge advocate of all sciences. And my favorite—actually, not my favorite because I love all sciences—but my primary science that I study all the time is physics. It's the mother of all sciences because it's just how things move and how things react to the world around them. I feel like I would definitely go to college for physics.

PHARRELL: Where do you see yourself in ten years?

JADEN: Gone.

WILLOW: [laughs] Did you just say, "God"?

JADEN: I said, "Gone!"

WILLOW: I feel that. I see myself in the mountains somewhere in a tent cooking a squirrel. [laughs]

JADEN: Not a squirrel, Willow! Why!? Why a squirrel?

WILLOW: I don't know! Because that's probably going to be the only food I have.

JADEN: Nah, you're going to be a vegetarian. You'll be surviving off grass in the morning.

WILLOW: Hopefully. Yeah, bro! I want to retreat back to living off the land and just being in nature, experiencing life in the most pure, natural way possible.

JADEN: Agreed.

PHARRELL: What's the best piece of advice that anyone's ever given either of you? And who was it from?

WILLOW: Well, mine is from my mom. And she said, "Do you, boo boo." [laughs] That is forever going to be the best advice.


PHARRELL WILLIAMS IS AN 11-TIME GRAMMY AWARD-WINNING RECORDING ARTIST, PRODUCER, AND SONGWRITER.

THUNDER STRIKE

DANI BRUBAKER

09/01/16

GUILLERMO E. BROWN IN LOS ANGELES, JUNE 2016. PHOTOS: DANI BRUBAKER. STYLING: LEAH ADICOFF & KAROLYN PHO. GROOMING:MAKIKO NARA FOR MAC/WALTER SCHUPFER.


In 2010, Guillermo E. Brown christened himself Pegasus Warning. The name came to him in a dream, but it stuck. After years of working as a jazz percussionist in his native New York—recording and touring with David S. Ware—he moved to L.A., where his newfound mythological veil provided him with the space to prioritize his solo work. "The Pegasus is all about the wellspring of ideas and creation, that thunderous strike in the sky that gives us that aha moment," Brown says. "It became basically a warning to myself; if I don't follow those creative impulses, I can get myself into trouble, and I should focus on my solo work just as an exercise to keep myself from going absolutely crazy."

On September 30, Brown will release PwEP2 (Melanin Harmonique Records), his second EP as Pegasus Warning. It's a faithful display of his idiosyncratic sound, which takes the form of yearning vocals gliding and vibrating over experimental, electronic backdrops anchored by percussive builds. Relieved, he tells us, "I'm happy to let loose these sounds." Below, we're pleased to premiere "Best Thang," the EP's first single. Brown co-wrote the track with Jamie Lidell and Kassa Overall, and it's fueled by a question: "Is there anything that we can do but search for those bits of life that are the most amazing?"




HALEY WEISS: To start off, I'd like to talk about the collection of songs you'll be releasing in late September. Can you tell me a bit about what your process has been like and what it's sounding like?

GUILLERMO E. BROWN: I've been really trying to focus on the songs and my voice. I always try to hit a few areas when I'm making a record; I want the sounds to be experimental and exploratory, I want the drumming to be distinctive, and I want my voice to be able to shine through. So I've been really focusing those elements, and making songs that have some lasting power and some staying power. I want the songs to be able to stand up to the "Casio treatment"—it's if the song can live just as a song with a foot stomp and a hand clap, or it can go with the bossa nova setting on a Casio, or the latest hybrid dance music form. The song is still there. It's almost like you can't fuck up a good song. I'm a big fan of new production techniques and new sounds. That's kind of what has been my focus out here; making sure that the songs can stand away from the production, however it's produced. My sound is super hybrid; the acoustic sounds are there and the electronic sounds are there.

WEISS: How did you arrive at that sound? Is it because you're a jazz percussionist?

BROWN: I think when I was coming up in New York, there are a lot of projects that sort of require both—whether it's a kind of electronic-minded approach to live drumming, or an improvisational approach to sequencing drums and programming. That's right down my runway. That's just where I live and that's one of the things I became known for in my collaborations as a drummer, [work] that calls for something outside of traditional jazz drumming or traditional MPC hip-hop programming. That's a super nerdy way of explaining it. [laughs]

WEISS: When you perform, what form does the band take? Are you solo?

BROWN: I come from a place where I feel like the band version of it should be modular. Folks that have seen me along the way—even here in L.A.—see I play solo, I play with a small trio, I play even with an eight piece. ... I think of every song like a game. It's like a video game: "Okay, I'm going to hop over here and if I press this drum, or if I hit this note, then that doorway opens. Oops, I fell down a trap door but I'm in a whole new world." Some people want to feel comfortable when they're performing; I'm kind of the opposite. The more uncomfortable I feel, that's where I know the magic is. I have some comforts; I know the song, I know what's coming, I know that when I sing there's going to be something that I'm into, and I know that spirit is the spirit that other humans connect to. I feel this and I know that other folks can feel it too, because we're humans and we're communicating even if we're not speaking in vocal ways; you can communicate by responding with your body or with a hand clap, with a laugh or with a smile, with non-verbal communication.

WEISS: Have you always been interested in creating solo work?

BROWN: I've always created solo work. When I first came to New York I was working in a few different areas; I was working as a drummer, a vocalist, an actor, and a dancer. I had gotten picked up more on the music side and that sort of went, and that's where I found my community in New York and that's the path that I went down.

WEISS: You're originally from New York, right?

BROWN: Yeah, I'm from New York. I grew up there. I grew up in Westchester County, the suburbs. For me, that was always the best of both worlds. I was super lucky to have a place where I could pretty much practice drums unperturbed. Obviously there were neighbor's complaints, but not very often, and I could get to the city easily by myself or with my parents.

WEISS: How old were you when you started drumming?

BROWN: I think maybe five or four. My grandfather was a drummer, so it was always around, and my mom is an ethnomusicologist. At that time she was really focused on that side of her work.

WEISS: What exactly is an ethnomusicologist?

BROWN: An ethnomusicologist is a cultural anthropologist who focuses on music.

WEISS: So did you learn a lot about music from her?

BROWN: Absolutely. My mom and grandfather are my first teachers of music. Those experiences and the process of exploring music as a discipline through them and with them is one of the main foundations of my life as musician.

WEISS: I read that your father is a priest/wizard. I'm curious as to what that entails.

BROWN: [laughs] I call him a wizard because I like to highlight people's superpowers. Humans have real superpowers and when I see my dad, and saw my dad, work with communities and help people change viewpoints, and lead people in healing and guide them through troubled waters in their lives, that represents to me a real world wizard—if you want to look at it with prismatic eyes. That's what they're talking about you read about a magician. Obviously there is magic, too, but when you really sort of uncover it, what are folks talking about? Sometimes in fiction they're talking about people who have whatever that thing is—it could be a smile that soothes a broken heart. Whatever that thing is, he has it, and that's what I call wizardry. But he's actually an ordained Episcopal priest.

WEISS: Was it pretty early on that you knew you wanted to pursue music as an occupation? What other jobs have you had your hand at?

BROWN: This is what I've wanted to do for a long time and I don't think I could've gotten this far without maintaining music as my focus. I've had a thousand different types of jobs and internships over my time, so it's not like I didn't consider or I'm not even still considering what it would be like to open a restaurant or a bar or venue. I've worked as an arts administrator, in a chiropractor's office, for a company hauling gear around New York City, as a graphic designer's assistant, for visual artists, and worked for and with choreographers as a composer, and as a touring assistant. I can really keep going. [laughs]

WEISS: You've cited Grace Jones and Sun Ra as major influences. How have they informed your work? What do you find particularly inspiring or interesting about them?

BROWN: I guess their independent spirit, I'm thinking in the case of Sun Ra, an artist who was able to galvanize a whole community of musicians around his ideas and maintain a large group of musicians for many years which still goes on to this day—the costume, the pageantry, the non-conforming-ness, the nontraditional identity of it. And Grace in the same way. I feel their spirit and their images are so clearly not the norm, that for someone who chooses my path, they're the planets that you want to go to when you're taking on a project like this. That's my thing; I'm not trying to be weird or what have you, it's just that there's so much of something else that my thought is, "Why wouldn't you be opposed to that, whether it's in your visual imagery or your stance on life?" I think they're two of the greats, especially in terms of imagery—I mean, sonically as well. But music is so visual now.

WEISS: You used to collaborate quite closely with David S. Ware. How did your work together influence the music you make today? And what were you doing together?

BROWN: I recorded with him, played with his band, and toured with him. Man, that was a trial by fire experience, and learning... He's another kind of brutally individual sonic being. That experience has stuck with me in terms of at the show, to never be afraid, you have to keep on playing in order to expose whatever the thing is that you're trying to get. Sweat it out, work it out, it's there—you just need to keep pushing through and you'll find it. That's one of the beautiful lessons I learned working with him in a live setting. I would be sitting, of course, at the drums and he would be standing over me in a way, with his horn facing me, just drums and saxophone. We did that from Hammerstein Ballroom opening for Sonic Youth to some beautiful outdoor amphitheater in Sardinia, the Blue Note [Jazz Club], to Jazz at Lincoln Center, just all over. He never wavered from his approach to music, and never, ever, ever let up. That, for me, is the biggest lesson; just stick to you. That's the best thing you can do for yourself and for others—to be able to see that and experience that. It's okay if it's not working for whomever it's not working for, because it's working for someone.

WEISS: How did you become a part of Karen, the house band on The Late Late Show?

BROWN: I heard about the audition through a friend of a friend and I went to the audition. In much the same way as many of my other experiences, the music is based in improvisation. It was Reggie [Watts]'s choice—Reggie was looking to put a band together—he wanted full collaborators, full creative partners in music on the show. That's how he explained it and I imagined it. I went in and played with Steve, the keyboard player, and Tim, the guitar player, who were already set in the group. We just played, and that's very much like many of my other formative experiences in music—just playing. That was the interview.

WEISS: What has the experience been like thus far? Have you enjoyed playing on television?

BROWN: Absolutely—it's incredible. I couldn't be more elated and positive about it as a musician. I studied with Johnny Carson's drummer for many years during one of my summers away from home at the Skidmore Jazz Institute, and I saw this guy who had been playing, and he had played with everyone—just many, many years of music. I never even considered it—or maybe I did at the time think, "Maybe I could take Ed Shaughnessy's job" [laughs]—but however my mind constructed it, here I am in fact walking in part of the path that he and Marvin Smitty Smith laid out for me, and Terri Lyne Carrington, all the drummers from late night who I absolutely adored. I still pinch myself every day, basically; I believe it but I'm still enamored and it's still joyful and it's a pleasure to work with everyone at the show. ... I think it comes from James [Corden] and Reggie as well. If those are the folks who are the face, the absolute front of the show, it makes a lot of sense that everybody else connected to the show has that same spirit in some way.


PwEP2 WILL BE RELEASED SEPTEMBER 30, 2016 VIA MELANIN HARMONIQUE RECORDS. FOR MORE ON PEGASUS WARNING, VISIT HISFACEBOOK.

Just Music-No Categories-Enjoy It!
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DISCOVERY: KICKS

CARA ROBBINS

09/08/16

LEFT TO RIGHT: CHRISTOPHER MEYER, JAHKING GUILLORY, AND CHRISTOPHER JORDAN WALLACE IN LOS ANGELES, AUGUST 2016. PHOTO: CARA ROBBINS.


Out tomorrow, Justin Tipping's Kicks is a modern day, hip-hop infused version ofBicycle Thieves. Based on the first time writer-director's own experience of getting mugged, the film follows the often bullied, baby-faced Brandon (Jahking Guillory), whose impoverished life is improved drastically when he scraps together enough cash to buy a pair of the classic Air Jordan 1's (or knockoffs, but no one can tell the difference). Brandon's high is cut short, however, when the psychopathic Flaco (Kofi Siriboe) steals his new kicks at gun point.

Finally looking to stand up for himself, Brandon convinces his best friends Rico (Christopher Meyer) and Albert (Christopher Jordan Wallace—son of Christopher Wallace, better known as the Notorious B.I.G.) to join him in an ill-advised mission to retrieve his sneakers. Shot with fluid, lyrical camera movements in an unnervingly empty Oakland, Kicks explores the way masculinity, street violence, and poverty are so enmeshed, all through a pair of Jordan's.

The definitive takeaway from watching the film is the power of its core trio, an immediately recognizable group of kids whose chemistry is natural and potent. Guillory plays Brandon—our hero—with a silent, emotional intensity, forever trying to match his personality with the intimidating front he puts on. Wallace's Albert cuts the tension with his braggadocio, blithely claiming to have bed as many women as Wilt Chamberlain with little proof to back it up. And Meyer as Rico gives the three a de facto leader, an effortless lothario who's defined by his charm, loyalty, and flaring temper.

Speaking to all three stars over the phone, it was immediately clear that their bond transcends the screen and that the story is an honest one. Guillory cited a friend who had been killed over a backpack and Meyer spoke of the film's dedication: "We did this for the city of Oakland and for the poor neighborhoods. We did this for the 'hood and for the youth, and that's who we really want this to speak to."


NAME: Jahking Guillory

HOMETOWN: I'm originally from Moreno Valley, like Riverside and [Inland] Empire. Now I'm living in Long Beach to pursue my acting career. I'm closer to L.A.

ATHLETIC BEGINNINGS: I've been playing football since I was five. My dad put me in it just to put me in it. I found that I really liked playing the sport. I would come home with bruises and nicks and my mom would complain, "Oh no, my baby is getting hurt!" My dad would be like, "He's a boy, he can take it." Football just came naturally to me. I've been blessed with this talent: speed and ability to run hard. I was pretty good. Running back, linebacker—I played every position.

COACH SNOOP: Snoop Dogg actually recruited me. When I was 11, my team won back-to-back championships. Snoop Dogg heard about it and he said, "These boys from Riverside—I really got to get a hold of them." He got a hold of my coach, and my coach was actually his cousin. Right when they got in contact it was an easy team swap. I was on his team and he was the coach and everything. Snoop Dogg was cool. He was a great coach. I would be on the sidelines and he was very supportive. He called me King.

CHOOSING TO PURSUE ACTING: I started acting when I was probably seven. I was doing background and all of that. What really inspired me to be an actor was Disney Channel's Suite Life on Deck with Zack & Cody. That really [made me say], "Mom I want to be on TV!" I just really enjoyed it. It was funny.

I didn't really take it seriously because I was playing football and running track. I really started acting—like really, really started being dedicated—when I was 12 because my mom made me make a decision between acting and football. It was a lot of money going into acting and we were playing teams [in football] all the way in Las Vegas for tournaments and all that. It was too much and I chose acting. Right after I did that I became more dedicated to perfecting my game and I booked Kicks.

THE IMPORTANCE OF KICKS: It means a lot of things. It's not just about kicks; it could stand for something else. Kicks is very important because people get killed over shoes every day, and other things too. One of my friends got stabbed to death over his backpack. He got stabbed like 15 times walking to pick up his sister. I hope this film really opens people's eyes and lets them know it's not just about shoes, This story is going on every single day. We are showing the daily Oakland life for teenagers. If this film saves a life then we did our job.

RELATING TO BRANDON: I could compare to him [in] many ways. Brandon is an underdog. People don't believe in him. In football people didn't believe in me because I had long hair. They thought, "Look at this little pretty boy. He's a girl." I proved them wrong by hitting harder than them and being faster than them and playing smarting than them—getting touchdowns every play. I proved them wrong and Brandon proves them wrong.

FAVORITE SNEAKERS: I have to say the Yeezys. Kanye West—he's just so creative and stylish. Everything that he touches turns out to be gold. The Yeezys—I just saw them and took an immediate liking to them. I have two pairs. [laughs] I went to the Adidas store right when they opened and there was a line out the whole store and down the block! I was like, "What the heck?" Right [after] it was my turn they were all sold out. I love them. I wear them like every single day.

FUTURE PLANS: I've been so busy with meetings—meeting with directors, producers, everybody, new people. I think Kicks is so special. I don't want to do anything for the sake of doing it. I want something that is a really good project and is as special as Kicks—one that means something.


NAME: Christopher Jordan Wallace

HOMETOWN.: I was born in New York—in Manhattan—but I've grown up in L.A. most of my life.

BIG BREAK: The first movie I ever did—the first time I ever really auditioned for something—was for Notorious. It was a really good experience to be able to do that at a really young age. I got a lot more knowledge on my dad from that. I [do] wish I was a little older so I could really understand. I was like 12 or 13 I think—still in my pre-teen years, not really at my full growth and knowledge yet. I feel that connection with my dad now that I'm a little older.

My grandma asked me if I wanted to possibly play him as a kid. At first I was a little hesitant about it. She showed me who was going to be playing my dad and I saw the resemblance and I felt like it would be a cool experience. I think it was kind of meant to be. I still had to audition for it. There was a lot of people trying to get my spot but I still feel like it was one of things where it was only right.

FOLLOWING IN HIS FATHER'S FOOTSTEPS: With my siblings—we've been making music since we were little. Me and my brother and my sister, since we were nine years old or even before [we were making music]. My sister made beats—she was the first one of the pack to do her own thing. She inspired my brother and he started making beats and rapping. As I saw he got good with it we started our thing. Over the past few years we've been taking it seriously. We've been making music all our lives though.

Notorious—that was one thing I felt pressure with. That got all my jitters out my stomach, if you will. The pressure doesn't really shake me that often, though it does with music more than anything.

GETTING INVOLVED WITH KICKS: My aunt sent over some sides to me. I was told to do a self-tape the first time, when I first heard about it. I sent it over to them and they loved it. I remember doing the self-tape in the car with my brother. It ended up being pretty funny. They liked my creativity and they called me in.

I did my first audition with Chris and Jahking—all of us together in the same room. We just had that connection. It was immediate, as soon as you saw it. At first I didn't know Justin was the director. He was in the audition room while we were in there. I didn't even know who he was at the time. It's actually pretty funny—I never told him that. [laughs] Now that I know he was in there he definitely saw something in us three. It was pretty funny how that all happened.

WELCOME TO OAKLAND: I had never been to the Bay. That was a crazy first experience—to meet so many Bay Area legends like MISTAH F.A.B. and a lot of people involved in the movie. They were happy we were doing this and we were out in the Bay even though I think most of us have never been there before. I was accepted with open arms being there the first time. It was pretty humbling.

THE ESSENCE OF ALBERT: I'm definitely not [wisecracking] all the time—not as much as Albert. I'm more laid back. I'll definitely hold my tongue sometimes. Being with Chris and Jahking—they gave me this confidence, and I liked being someone I'm not.

I definitely could say I relate to Albert a little bit—in a weird way. I wish I had Albert's confidence. It's funny cause he doesn't get the girls but he makes you think he does. He plays it so well. You think he's actually the dude he says he is but really he's not. I don't know if I wish I was Albert, but I wish I had his confidence for sure.

ON SET: We improvised. It wasn't easy. I wouldn't say I've never had comfort on set but Justin was another breed as a director. He really let us say what we really say. He tried to make it as real as possible. It wasn't like he ever gave us complete control—he definitely had control; it was always his set and his movie. It was cool in him letting us be real and ad lib and make things more real.

He also referenced the masculinity and being a young African American in America [a lot]. It's really tough. It touches on so much. It's a great story for what's going on in today's culture.


NAME: Christopher Meyer

HOMETOWN: I am originally from Brooklyn, New York—specifically Kennard Street, which is off the east side. Right now I'm living in Los Angeles. Acting prompted the move. [I miss Brooklyn] every day dude. I think New York City is the best city—I mean Brooklyn is the best city in America! I wish I could go back every day.

STUMBLING INTO ACTING: I went to an arts school. I only auditioned because my best friend auditioned and I didn't want to go to middle school without my best friend. I auditioned and I was like, "What do I have to lose?" Apparently I got the highest score out of nowhere! I had never considered acting seriously. I had always been a class clown. I had always just been making jokes, making people laugh. Once I got into the school and started doing plays and stuff like that I really fell in love with it.
Image result for Justin Tipping Kicks
RAPPING AS A SIDE CAREER: [There were] many freestyle battles in the school courtyard. I remember going to school and there was always a big crowd and there were these dudes rapping. I remember listening and thinking, "I can do that!" I went home one day, wrote up a nice little thing and came back to school, did it and everybody went crazy. There was only one dude who was better than me and he's my best friend. I now think I'm better than him. Ever since then I kept writing and kept writing. I came out to L.A. and saw how accessible it was to get into studios and I started creating. I actually have a mix tape coming out sometime in the fall. It's called Wolftape.

JOINING KICKS: I had a meeting with my new manager and we sat down and talked about what I wanted to do—what project I wanted to be attached to. I brought up movies like Juice and Boyz N the Hood, Paid in Full—'hood classics like that. When [the Kicks] script came across his desk he called me very ecstatically. I was like, "Dude, what's going on?" He sent an email and they were nice enough to send me the entire script. I immediately fell in love [with it]. I knew it was something I had to do and I had to do work very hard to get it.

PLAYING RICO: [laughs] Rico taught me a lot for sure. It's fun to play like that. That part is definitely the most fun part—being so free and loose. Everything with the girls was improv, which was why it was so fun. I'd like to think he's rubbed off on me, but you'd have to ask my lady friends.

OAKLAND AS INSPIRATION: I was scared [when I got the part]. I'm not going to lie. When you are a lead in a movie—whether it's an indie or not—it can be a scary job. It's a big responsibility that you're carrying this movie. When I got it and I got the call that I booked it, I immediately was happy and then turned into fear. I have a big fear of failing. Before I went to Oakland I just didn't have a plan as far as character prep. When I landed there it was very clear I had to immerse myself in the environment and becoming a kid from Oakland. I barely spent time in the hotel. I was out all the time—whether it was at the mall with my castmates, at the movies, hollering at girls in the street in places I maybe shouldn't have even been in... [laughs] I did a lot of exploring—the good side and the bad side, all of it.

THE ACTOR TO EMULATE: Shia LaBeouf. I love that guy. I love the preparation he puts into his work. I know he can get a bit crazy sometimes, but I think you have to be if you want to great. Name one genius that wasn't crazy and I'll stop acting tomorrow.

I actually got to meet him at [the Tribeca Film Festival]. It was really cool. I was coming out of Paper magazine doing an interview or something and he was coming in and walked right past me. I literally asked this random lady, "Is that Shia?!" I ran and stopped the elevator he was getting in like an idiot and he stopped and talked to me. He actually saw Kicks and he gave me props.

RELATING TO KICKS: Rico and I grew up in the same environment. West Coast and East Coast are a world apart, but we grew up in poverty-ridden neighborhoods. I grew up with liquor stores on every corner. I grew up in a neighborhood where kids did get jumped for their sneakers or their necklace or their wristband or their hat or some shit. It wasn't that hard to jump in the world since I'm from there. I relate to Rico. And we both smoke weed, so that helps too.


KICK COMES OUT TOMORROW, SEPTEMBER 9, 2016.


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Reply #5 posted 09/21/16 7:57am

JoeBala

Norah Jones Returns to Her Jazz Roots

Norah Jones’s album “Day Breaks,” due on Oct. 7, brings her back into the jazz fold. Credit Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times

Moments before taking the stage at the Newport Jazz Festival in late July, Norah Jones paused to reflect on her ties to the tradition it represents. “Sometimes I feel like a jazz dropout, you know?” she said in her trailer, wearing a floral print summer dress. “But whenever I’m around those people, from high school or college or my early days in New York, everybody makes me feel like part of the family.”

Jazz, or at least her homespun take on it, brought Ms. Jones one of the most decorated albums in recent history. “Come Away With Me,” her 2002 debut, took home eight Grammy Awards, including album of the year, and has sold over 11 million copies. She trained as a jazz pianist and singer (and signed with Blue Note Records) before sidling over to the countrified folk and low-gloss pop that marked her three subsequent albums, from 2004 to 2009, all certified platinum. A first-time Norah Jones performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island, the world’s oldest and still one of its most prestigious, was both an overdue and unforeseen event. It’s no coincidence that the festival hit maximum capacity, for the first time in more than 15 years, on the day that her name was on the bill.

She made the occasion a public preview of her new album, “Day Breaks,” which brings her back into the jazz fold without taking the safe or familiar route. Due on Oct. 7, it features prominent jazz artists like the saxophonist Wayne Shorter and the bassist John Patitucci. And when she took the stage at Newport with several other musicians from the album, including the drummer Brian Blade, the message was clear: Rather than making some sort of prodigal return, she was accessing her musical core.

When she got to “Flipside,” a turbocharged new rhythm-and-blues tune, she belted the chorus but compressed just as much feeling, at a cooler temperature, into the second verse:

I finally know who I’m supposed to be
My mind was locked but I found the key
Hope it don’t all slip away from me

A few weeks later, during a lunch interview, Ms. Jones allowed that those lyrics reflected her current state of mind. “I feel very comfortable with myself, in a way that I probably didn’t 10 years ago,” she said. “I think that’s probably what happens when you get older.”

She is 37, the mother of two children: a toddler son and a daughter born several months ago. But Ms. Jones seemed well rested and at ease as she occupied the window seat at Frankies 457 Spuntino in Carroll Gardens, not far from her Brooklyn apartment. (“They’re playing Elvis,” she noted, outing herself as a regular. “They usually play the Dead in here.”)

Photo
Ms. Jones and the first lady, Michelle Obama, at a Mother’s Day tea at the White House in 2014. Credit Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

And she enjoyed her Newport Jazz Festival experience: “I thought that the whole set was pretty sloppy, but loose and fun in all the right ways.”

Fifteen years ago, when Ms. Jones signed to Blue Note, a storied jazz label, she was obviously an outlier: an unproven young singer-songwriter blending acoustic jazz with rustic country and folksy soft rock. Her success set a precedent for later signings like Amos Lee, the Wood Brothers and Kandace Springs as she continued to push her sound: Her previous solo album, from 2012, is “Little Broken Hearts,” a pop mélange produced by Danger Mouse.

Ms. Jones happens to be angling toward jazz at a moment when its pulse can be felt through a lot of popular music: nestled in the style of hip-hop artists like Kendrick Lamar and pop megastars like Beyoncé; in the touring bands of soul survivors like D’Angelo and Maxwell; in the bloodstream of vanguardist electronic producers like Flying Lotus; all over a valedictory recent album by David Bowie.

Photo
Ms. Jones at home. Credit Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times

But the spark for “Day Breaks” can be traced to a single moment two years ago at the Kennedy Center in Washington, when Ms. Jones appeared on a 75th anniversary concert for her label and performed “I’ve Got to See You Again,” a smoldering tune by Jesse Harris, with a group that included Mr. Shorter, Mr. Patitucci and Mr. Blade.

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“When I started thinking about making a ‘jazz record,’ mostly I was thinking about recording with Wayne and Brian,” she said. “I didn’t want it to be standards. I was hoping for something very rhythmic, with Wayne floating over the top.”

Ms. Jones has played more guitar than piano in recent years, on her own and with side projects like Puss n Boots, a vaguely tongue-in-cheek singer-songwriter trio, and the Little Willies, a springy vintage-country band. (She also mainly played guitar on “Foreverly,” a nod to the Everly Brothers, made several years ago with the Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong.)

Photo

Ms. Jones at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island. Credit Philip Sherman/The Daily News, via Associated Press

“I think even more than a return to jazz, it’s a return to the piano,” Ms. Jones said of “Day Breaks,” a point seconded by Mr. Blade, who played on her first two albums, and has also backed hall-of-fame singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan.

“Norah accompanies herself like Carmen McRae or Shirley Horn — or Joni, for that matter,” Mr. Blade said by telephone. “She’s a great architect from the instrument, while listening and taking suggestions from the band.”

Ms. Jones didn’t shy away from topicality. “Flipside” takes issue with societal oppression and runaway gun culture. “It’s a Wonderful Time for Love” has a jaunty cadence but lyrics that nod toward the darkness.

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Ms. Jones at the Grammy Awards in 2003. Credit Scott Gries/Getty Images

“I just thought, ‘The whole world’s kind of falling apart right now,’” Ms. Jones said. On tour recently, she noticed that one of her older songs, “My Dear Country” — written about the 2004 presidential election, but even more fitting in 2016 — struck a nerve. “It was insane,” she said. “People were flipping out.”

Ms. Jones’s fall tour will feature her regular working band, and bring her to the Beacon Theater in Manhattan on Nov. 29. But she’ll also play four nights, Oct. 10 to 13, in a small theater at the Sheen Center on Bleecker Street, with the same special-edition jazz crew that joined her in Newport.

With luck, her tour will include the standout Neil Young cover she included on “Day Breaks” — a deep cut called “Don’t Be Denied,” from 1973. Its lyrics are autobiographically raw, and to connect with them Ms. Jones changed the point of view from “I” to “she.” His “Winnipeg” also becomes her “Anchorage,” in accordance with her own childhood story, which included a trip from Texas to Alaska and back with her mother. (Her father, the Indian sitar master Ravi Shankar, was a distant presence in her life.)

The song is about bitter disillusionment, and the hard-fought wisdom that casts a skeptical eye on the meaning of commercial success. The chorus consists entirely of the title phrase: “Don’t be denied.” Ms. Jones sings it a total of 19 times, making it sound both like an reassurance and a battle cry.

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Reply #6 posted 09/21/16 8:32am

JoeBala

David Bowie: Stardust Memories

Reflections on a life of wit and style

David Bowie performs during his Glass Spider Tour, Amsterdam, Netherlands on March 30th, 1987. Rob Verhorst/Redferns/Getty

FOR FIFTEEN YEARS, David Bowie has been the ring-master of rock style, whipping up new fashions and attitudes with every flick of his public image. A prodigy of self-invention, he has been at various intervals Art Man, Dance Man and Pioneer Androgyne. Today he's just plain David, but the contemporary urban clubscape is still littered with Bowie replicants bearing painted witness to the lingering influence of his past personas: whole ribes of bleached and preening Ziggys, plucked and pallid Aladdins, sleek, cadaverous Euro-lizards. But the man behind those masks has long since moved on.

As he sat down for an interview in a suite at a Westwood hotel one recent afternoon, Bowie was wearing simple black jeans, a snug tank-top T-shirt and steel-toed Gaultier brogues, it was February, one month after his fortieth birthday, and Bowie was in Los Angeles to shoot videos for his seventeenth studio album, Never Let Me Down. Cleareyed and lightly tanned beneath a generous thatch of blond-plus hair, he looked astonishingly fit and professed his eagerness to wade back into the rock-biz fray. He'll kick off a world tour in June, performing songs drawn from the breadth of his twenty-year recording career, backed by a band featuring his old pal Peter Frampton – the son of Bowie's high school art teacher – on lead. It will, he said, be something special.

The subject was rock style, of which Bowie pretty much the reigning embodiment. Born on January 8th 1947, and raised in districts of Brixton and Bromley, he is old enough to have witnessed firsthand the arrival of rock & roll. As a kid, he marveled at the brawling, zoot-suited antics of the Teddy boys, England's first rock-oriented youth cult. In the Sixties, he took up the saxophone, joined a school band (the Kon-rads) and felt himself drawn toward the clothes-obsessed mods, who shared his musical taste for American R&B. He idolized such British beat legends as the $ély Who and the Yardbirds (whose lead singer, Keith Relf, inspired him to grow his hair down to his shoulders). As Davy Jones, he hacked around with a succession of groups – the King Bees, the Manish Boys, the Lower Third – to little avail. Advised in 1966 that another Davy Jones had hit it big as a member of the Monkees, he adopted the stage name Bowie and went solo. He recorded his first album in 1967 and scored his first hit single – the trippy "Space Oddity" – two years later.

Bowie's breakthrough came in 1972, with the release of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, an album of hard, snarling guitar rock pumped out by what may have been the best band he has ever had (lead guitarist Mick Ronson, bassist Trevor Bolder and drummer Woody Woodmansey, three musicians from the north of England, with American keyboardist Mike Garson added to the lineup a bit later). The main attraction, though, was Bowie's pancaked, mock-mincing Ziggy persona – a character that came to define the glitter-rock era of the early Seventies. (Bowie occasionally appeared in public wearing dresses and at one point even told a reporter that he was gay – a statement he disavowed in a 1983 interview with ROLLING STONE.)

Ziggy grew ever more alien over the course of such subsequent LPs as Aladdin Sane and Pin-Ups (a terrific collection of oldie remakes). By the time of 1974's Diamond Dogs – the cover of which depicted David with the body of a dog – Bowie was feeling burned out: wasted by heavy cocaine use and increasingly isolated by the MainMan organization, a production office set up by his drug-disdaining manager, Tony DeFries, but staffed by high-living trendies recruited from Andy Warhol's Factory axis, among them ex-groupie Cherry Vanilla and future biographer Tony Zanetta. Weary and confused, he hired a new personal assistant – Corinne "Coco" Schwab, the multilingual daughter of a noted French photographer, who had been raised in India, Haiti and Mexico and thus shared Bowie's own general sense of statelessness. He then split from MainMan and in 1975, with disco on the rise, suddenly slicked back his hair, suited up and released the ultradanceable Young Americans, an album of what Bowie called "plastic soul." The following year came Station to Station and yet another new character: the skeletal and decadent Thin White Duke. Bowie also starred in Nicolas Roeg's movie The Man Who Fell to Earth (inaugurating an erratic film career that includes 1978's Just a Gigolo, a resounding bomb; 1983's The Hunger, a campy vampire flick directed by Tony Scott, and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, a memorable prisoner-of-war movie directed by the esteemed Japanese filmmaker Nagisa Oshima; and 1986's Labyrinth, a goblin fantasy directed by Jim Henson, and Absolute Beginners, a musical fiasco by video wiz Julien Temple). Bowie moved to Berlin, began listening to such German synthesizer groups as Kraftwerk and in 1977 released the first of a trio of largely brilliant art-rock collaborations with former Roxy Music synth avatar Brian Eno (Low, "Heroes" and Lodger).

By 1980, a new cult of fashion-crazed kids – the New Romantics – had sprouted up in London. Bowie walked among them (they were his stylistic children, in many ways) and came back with Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), an album that, unfortunately, yielded no major hits. Was he running out of steam? Bowie answered that question with an emphatic no in 1983, when he dropped all his guises and went dance pop with Let's Dance, the biggest-selling album of his career.

Bowie was married for nearly ten years to Angela Barnet, an Anglo-American woman with whom he had a son, Zowie (now called Joe). Their union, hardly strengthened by David's dalliance with such girlfriends as black singer Ava Cherry, dissolved in divorce in 1980. Today, David lives with Coco and Joe – who'll be sixteen in May – in a house in Switzerland, not far from the jet-set resort of Gstaad, where Bowie frequently skis. He also works out and roller-skates in his spare time – of which there's never much: he remains a workaholic. Despite his now-moneyed seclusion, he remains an artist with one ear – and one shrewd fashion eye – ever cocked toward the street, ever alert for the latest innovations. At last glance, however, no likely usurpers had appeared to challenge Bowie's position as the king of rock style.

First of all, a belated happy birthday.
Thank you!

Has turning forty made you reflective?
No, not at all. Now I feel I can do and say what I want [laughs].

Were you aware of style as a kid?
Yes, I liked how things went together, and it interested me how it all worked. But I think I was always drawn to the crass [chuckles], so that saved my ass, really: I was never very hot on sophisticated taste when it got too sophisticated. I didn't mind a sense of elegance and style, but I liked it when things were a bit off – a bit sort of fish-and-chips shop.

Were you aware of the Teds when they appeared?
Yeah. There was a bloke who lived down the road from us who was a Ted – Eric, I think his name was. He had brilliant, curly ginger hair and razor blades in his collar – for purposes of not being molested, I guess, by other Teds. That I found very impressive. But he was slightly potty – he would just stand on the corner for hours, swinging a chain manically.

Were you ever inclined toward Teddishness yourself?
Yeah, a lot of kids my age got into those things. But I didn't really like the Teddy clothes too much. I liked Italian stuff. I was really early into Italian stuff. I liked the box jackets and the mohair. You could get some of that locally in Bromley, but not very good. You'd have to go right up to Shepherd's Bush or the East End. And once I'd left school, you could save a little money and go find a tailor who would make it up really well. There were some good tailors. The one I used to go to was the same one that Marc Bolan used to go to, a fairly well known one in Shepherd's Bush. I remember I saved up and got one suit made there, but that was really all. The rest of my money I put into equipment and saxophones and things.

There's a picture of you with the Kon-rads where you have this sort of upswept crew cut. . . .
Oh, yes, yes. I loved the hair-style stuff, yeah.

And the band is wearing, like, little candy-striped ties. . . .
We wore gold corduroy jackets, I remember, and brown mohair trousers and green, brown and white ties, I think, and white shirts. Strange coloration.

Was there a particular rock performer who had really turned you on as a kid? Someone you saw and said, "That's what I want to do"?
Little Richard. I saw him at Brixton Odeon. It must have been 1963, 'cause the Stones opened for him. I'll tell you who else was on that bill, as well. Oh, it was wonderful, listen: The Stones opened, then there was Bo Diddley and, if I remember rightly, Duane Eddy, and it closed with Sam Cooke. That was the first half. Then the second half . . . Who else was on that thing? Somebody else unbelievable was on, and then Little Richard. And Little Richard was just unreal. Unreal. Man, we'd never seen anything like that. It was still mohair suits then – I mean, just great suits – baggy trousers and all that. And he was workin' with a British band called Sounds Incorporated – our only horn band, the only band that knew anything about saxophones. There was one other, Peter Jay and the Jaywalkers, but they weren't as good. Sounds Incorporated were the one. And I think it was probably Red Price on tenor sax, guy with dark glasses. I used to love all those sax players, 'cause that's what I wanted to do. And he led Lord Rockingham's XI, too [laughs]. Remember them? "Hoots, mon, there's a moose loose about this hoose!" You don't remember that?
Anyway, that show was unreal. And the Stones were so funny. They had, like, four fans at that time, who rushed down the aisles to the front. These four chicks in the front there – it was so funny. Keith was dynamite, 'cause he did that aeroplane stuff in those days, whizzing round and round – he really made an entrance. And Brian was kind of dominant in the band then; he really was. It's amazing the progress that Mick's made, thinking back, because as stage personalities, Mick and Brian were equal. And some bloke – I'll never forget this – some bloke in the audience looked at Jagger and said, "Get your hair cut!" And Mick said, "What – and look like you?" It was so funny! I went with the Kon-rads, and we just collapsed in our seats.

What kind of stuff did the Kon-rads play?
Lotta covers. And then . . . the band broke up because of me, actually. Yes, folks, I broke the Kon-rads up – now it can be told!

Why did you do that?
I wanted to do rhythm & blues songs, and nobody was interested. I remember the first one I really tried to get them to do – and I wish we'd done it, 'cause it would've done rather well – was "House of the Rising Sun," off an old blues album that got released in England.

In 1963? You were ahead of your time.
Eh! It was so great, and I wanted to put a beat to it. But I rather got beaten to that.

What about the Manish Boys, that seven-piece group you were in till early 1965?
That was just survival. I didn't really like that band at all. It was rhythm & blues, but it wasn't very good.
Nobody ever earned any money. The band was so huge; it was dreadful. And I had to live in Maidstone. That's where the Manish Boys were from, and so I had to go and live there, because we were gonna rehearse and work outta there. I don't know if you know Maidstone. Maidstone Prison is one of the biggest in England. It's all criminals round there – one prison and a few suburban houses. It's the only time in my life I've ever been beaten up.

By whom?
By some ex-prisoner, I suppose. I don't know. It was just this big herbert walkin' down the street just knocked me on the pavement, and when I fell down, proceeded to kick the shit outta me. For no reason that I could fathom to this day. I haven't got many good memories of Maidstone.
That wasn't a long-lived band, though, the Manish Boys. But I affected a Keith Relf haircut, I believe, at the time. I was quite keen on Keith. I thought he was pretty cool – my favorite R&Ber. I liked the Who's sound but Keith Relf's look. I thought, "If I can get that down, wow – watch out world." [Laughs.]

Was the Lower Third, your next band, a happier affair?
The Lower Third was very Who inspired.

Did you do Who covers?
No, we wrote our own stuff. I was fully into writing by then. I was absolutely convinced that I could write anything as good as anybody else, have a go at it.

And proved yourself right, eventually.
Yeah, that's right – see, Pete! [Laughs.] I took my first single to Pete Townshend. It was at a Who concert in 1969 – must have been around there – and I took it and I got backstage and I gave it to him. I said, "Play that and let me know what you think of it one day." And it was many years later he said, "By the way, son, I remember you bringing me that single. I meant to let you know – I did like it." Lyin' bastard! [Laughs.]

Were you much of a mod?
Yeah. Oh, absolutely.

I mean, were you deeply into it?
Not deeply into the lifestyle. Superficially. Because I didn't like riding scooters. And I was never too much of a club guy – never really went clubbing very much.

Really?
No. Like once a week or something. Which actually, in that time, was not very much. I mean, those kids used to go every night and hang out till seven in the morning. I liked going to art museums and bits of theater, things like that. I wasn't really that concerned with that many clubs.

But you picked up on the mod clothes?
Yeah.

Where would you buy them?
Let me see. At that time, I suppose sport shops and things. Like now. See, that's come back full cycle. A lot of mods used to wear sports clothes – Fred Perry shirts and things like that. Um . . . Carnaby Street was briefly popular, for like a three-month period or something; then it fast became . . .

What it is today – a sort of tourist slum?
Yeah, exactly. And then of course the Kings Road also had its time, you know? But they were all sort of very fast. I didn't really have a hangout for clothes. I didn't wear much that was fashionable, actually. I mean, I was quite happy with things like Fred Perrys and a pair of slacks. Not very loud clothes.

Did flower power pretty much sweep everything else away, fashionwise?
Yeah, I think everybody did become psychedelic, at least. I don't really remember the people that I knew being that affected by the love-and-peace things about it. They were definitely affected by the mushroom aspects, and the colors and all that – the clothes and the psychedelic music. But love and peace, I felt, was very much the American part of it all. It certainly made its impression in the hit parade, but it was very commercial oriented – you know: "If you're going to San Francisco," that kind of stuff. And we had bands like the Flowerpot Men. There was a lot of that about. But the best aspects of it were some of the early things that Jeff Beck did, you know? Now, that's what I liked about it – that was really good stuff.

Your Ziggy Stardust persona was a daring departure for rock. What were those early shows like?
What was quite hard was dragging the rest of the band into wanting to do it.

They were pretty much rock & roll, pub kind of guys?
Yeah, we always had that problem. That was the major problem, that we really didn't think alike at all. It was like "Jesus, come on, you lot – let's not just be another rock band, for Christ's sakes." [Laughs.] But they were a great little rock band, you know? And they caught on to it as soon as they found that they could pull more girls. Then it was "Hey, they like these boots." I thought, "Yeah, there you go." That's what it needed. God – get a bit of sex into it and they were away, boy. Their hair suddenly got . . . oh, it was every color under the sun. All these guys that wouldn't get out of denims until two weeks ago [laughs].

Where did the clothes for the Ziggy period come from? Did you design them yourself?
No, that was a designer whose clothes I saw, a guy named Kansai Yamamoto. Now, of course, he's an international designer, but he was very experimental at that time – his stuff was way off the board. So the very first things were influenced by him, and then I got to know him, and he made all the stuff you really know – the suits, the pull-apart stuff, all those things. He said, "Oh, this band are weird – tee-hee-hee – they wear my clothes."

How did audiences respond to the early Ziggy shows, before the Ziggy Stardust album actually came out?
There was quite a bit of antagonism. Nothing like, say, the Pistols got when they started. But the first couple of months were not easy. The people did find it very hard, until we had a musical breakthrough. The actual look and everything, I mean, it was "Aw, a bunch of poofters," you know? Which was kind of fun. I mean, we played it up – well, I did, anyway – played that up a lot. Because it was the most rebellious thing that was happening at the time.

Is it true that when Ziggy and the Spiders played Santa Monica on the first tour, the band went off to a Scientology meeting and got converted?
Well, two of the band are Scientologists now. Mike Garson always was a Scientologist. I mean, Mike was a real hard nut to deal with, a very strange cat. I mean, he spent all his time tryin' to convert everybody – it was kind of difficult to work with him, you know? And he converted Woody Woodmansey, the drummer. Mike got him. He tried it on me for a bit, until we had a bit of a fight about it. He said, "Oh, well, you'd never understand, you're a druggie." I said, "Yeah, that's it – drugs are keepin' me away from Scientology." He was so po-faced. Very serious guy.

You had conceived Ziggy as the ultimate plastic rock star; ironically, the music that "he" made was really great.
I know, I know. It sounds all right now, yeah. I find it ironic when I look at a band, say, like Sigue Sigue Sputnik, where it's so outré, so absolutely in the Ziggy court, you know? All this time later, it still raises its brightly colored head.

Like psychedelia: it never goes away.
Yeah. That whole period, I guess. They keep recycling all of us – Roxy, me, Gary Glitter, Marc Bolan. I guess those four were the big ones from England, the champions of the early Seventies and all that. But it really seems to have permeated every area of rock now – something that one of us did is somewhere in all modern music. Which is great. I think that's fabulous.

Like Prince, maybe?
Prince, yeah, sure. I mean, he's probably the most, eclectic artist I've seen since me [laughs]. I think he's a great stealer.

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Reply #7 posted 09/21/16 8:33am

JoeBala

Continued

Was Aladdin Sane meant to be a conscious modulation on the Ziggy character or something completely different?
It was meant to be . . . a crossover: getting out of Ziggy and not really knowing where I was going. It was a little ephemeral, 'cause it was certainly up in the air.

Did you design the Aladdin Sane makeup yourself?
I came up with the flash thing on the face.

What was that meant to be?
Lightning bolt. An electric kind of thing. Instead of, like, the flame of a lamp, I thought he would probably be cracked by lightning. Sort of an obvious-type thing, as he was sort of an electric boy. But the teardrop was Brian Duffy's, an English artist-photographer. He put that on afterward, just popped it in there. I thought it was rather sweet.

And how did Aladdin Sane then mutate into the Diamond Dogs period?
Christ knows! I know the impetus for Diamond Dogs was both Metropolis and 1984 – those were the two things that went into it. In fact, Diamond Dogs was gonna be a rewrite of 1984 – I wanted to try to get the musical rights for it and turn it into a stage musical for touring. But my office, MainMan, didn't bother to do anything about it, and then I found out that if I dared touch it, Mrs. George Orwell would sue or something. So I suddenly had to change about in midstream, in the middle of recording, you know? But, I mean . . . well, it wasn't a real office in those days. Nobody did anything.

In 1973, midway between Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs, you released Pin-Ups, a collection of cover versions of your favorite oldies. A lot of people still think it's one of your best records. Might you ever do another one like it?
Yeah, I'm dying to do that. But I'd want to do it properly, not just as a filler between albums, you know? I really want to do it. 'Cause I've always made lists of things that I want to cover one day, and those lists go on and on and on. So it would be easy to just drop one in. I think the best time to do it would be at the end of a tour, when you're really up and you've still got the energy to do some high-energy performances. I'm so tempted – this is the time.

What songs would you like to cover?
I'm not gonna tell ya! [Laughs.] 'Cause I've got some beauts that nobody'd ever dream of doing.

Young Americans, the studio album that followed Diamond Dogs in 1975, marked a brand-new artistic direction for you – deep into black American dance rhythms. What do you make of the current state of black pop?
There's nobody that's knockin' me out. I'm not in there with Lionel anymore. I liked Cameo's "Word Up" and then I heard the album and I just went to sleep. Rap is really the only cutting edge at the moment – Run-D.M.C are my favorites. But I have a tough time with a lot of black music now – it's all a bit dancey, and there's no real underbelly there, you know? I think Prince is probably the best of the current crop.

Did you see his second movie, Under the Cherry Moon?
Yeahhh . . . I saw it. I'm not gonna say a thing. I mean, I've had so many of those myself, I wouldn't even dream. It'd be the pot callin' the kettle black, you know? Whoops! [Laughs.]

In 1976, you moved to Berlin, and the following year, you began a new avant-garde period with the release of the Low and "Heroes" albums. What's your impression of the state of the musical avant-garde today?
Well, in America, it seems to have died.

It does seem very career oriented here.
That's an interesting thing. There's Philip Glass, who's now at the zenith of his professional bit, and Laurie Anderson, who does TV and stage shows. In Germany, that period is over. I think it was starting to fold up on itself just around the time I left Berlin. The stuff that's coming out of Düsseldorf now is really boring.

What about Kraftwerk? You named one song on "Heroes" after that group's Florian Schneider. What do you think of its latest music?
It's its usual pristine self. And it's good, in its genre. But they're like craftsmen – they've decided they're gonna make this particular wooden chair that they designed, and each one will be very beautifully made, but it will be the same chair. It's like a cottage-industry thing. They're craftsmen.

Despite all the touring you did – and the critical acclaim you amassed – through that early part of your career, you wound up in considerable debt. How come?
It was all the MainMan tribe. Most of them wanted to be stars; so a lot of them were usin' the money that was comin' in – if it wasn't for drugs, it was to put their own stage productions together and things like that. I mean, there were more drugs goin' around – unbelievable. I thought I was bad, but it was just incredible how many drugs there were. And that's what happened to all the money.

You finally got the business side of your career together in 1983, when you signed a very lucrative contract with a new label and released your biggest LP, Let's Dance. How do you look at the music business today – as a game you've sort of mastered?
I had a few problems with it a couple of years ago, at the time of Let's Dance and just after. I suddenly had this huge audience that I'd never had before. I didn't quite know what I was supposed to do. So I just cut out last year – stayed in Europe, up in the mountains most of the time, writing and working, just doing the things that I really like. And that put me back on course. That's why I guess this new album sounds so much more . . . as though the continuity hasn't been broken from Scary Monsters. It's almost as though Let's Dance and Tonight were in the way there. And I'm going to do a stage thing this year, which I'm incredibly excited about, 'cause I'm gonna take a chance again.

Can you say what it might be?
No! [Laughs.] Too many other acts are goin' out. I'll just be doing what I always did, which is keeping things interesting.

What do you actually do at home in Switzerland? It's a pretty quiet place, isn't it?
I work. All me time. If I'm not working, I ski. That's my only other preoccupation. I paint if I have the time or if I feel in the mood. And I read extensively.

What have you read recently?
I've just finished reading Joe Orton's plays. I also read Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter, which is a fabulous short play.

Have you ever met Pinter?
Lord, no. I'd love to meet him. Well, I think I'd like to meet him. Actually, I hate meeting famous people. It's always a letdown. They're a lot shorter than they look on television [laughs]. Charlie Sexton's the only bloke I've met recently who's taller than I thought he was. No, hold on – there's a Duran who's like that as well: John Taylor. He's quite tall, yeah.

What do you make of the Durans? Are you buddies with them?
I had a hard time with them when I first met them a few years ago. I thought they were really sort of a bit arrogant. But I guess we all go through that. They've really got okay over the last year or two. Simon seems to have changed an awful lot since he seriously got back into sailing again. And since he changed his hair color [laughs].

Have you read these two recent books about you, Bowie, by Jerry Hopkins, and Stardust, by journalist Henry Edwards and your old MainMan employee Tony Zanetta?
The two books on me? Do you know that at last count there are thirty-seven? Thirty-seven, at the moment. I stopped reading those things after about the fourth or fifth one. Because once one saw the cast of characters, it became obvious that they were making a career out of it. The inevitable names would just keep coming up: the ex-wife, Ava Cherry, Cherry Vanilla, Tony Zanetta. Basically, all the people who had such a good time in the early Seventies and now are broke.

Have you ever been approached about doing your own book?
A million times. For amazing amounts of money.

Ever been tempted to do it?
Not in the least.

You started a feature-film career in 1976 with The Man Who Fell to Earth, and there've been five more movies since then. Are there any new films in the works that you can talk about?
Not really. Mick and I are always talkin' about doing one. I guess that probably will come off, but only if we can arrive at a story that we believe in doing, and not just being put together for an on-the-road movie, or something like that.

You've been looking at scripts?
We're more concerned in writing something. That's what we're endeavoring to do. I think we've got to play it very carefully. It's got to be a story of some considerable substance, and inevitably it should have a lot of music in it. But I don't think it should have performance. Otherwise, it falls into that abyss of, you know, the celebrity rock & roll movie.
It's a difficult one, but I think we're cracking it. We are workin' on something, I've got to admit. We're working in conjunction with a writer that we respect a lot, so we'll see how it goes.

Is it difficult for someone like you – who deals in masks and personas onstage – to do film acting, to reveal himself to the camera?
No, it's not difficult for me. I don't know enough about it, so it's quite pleasant for me still. I don't have the burden of thinking, "I've got to better my last performance," you know? [Laughs.] So I just enjoy it.

Were you happy with the way Absolute Beginners came out?
I liked that movie. I see it as another Rocky Horror Picture Show. I was in Tower Video the other day getting a couple of things, and they said that that film is one of the most rented movies. And kids come back sayin' they've learned the entire script of it. If that starts, and it starts goin' out into those late-night theaters, I can see it becoming one of those kinds of movies.

Well, it's not like any other movie.
[Laughs] No, it's not like any other movie. And Julien Temple, like Tony Scott . . . I mean, I had the pleasure of workin' with Tony on The Hunger – fortunately, we're still friends – and after The Hunger, he had such a tough time. People wouldn't even look at him. I mean, nobody ever suspected – least of all him, I think – that he would become the biggest director in America. One Top Gun [snaps fingers] – suddenly he's got Beverly Hills Cop II, and he's it! I knew he had incredible talent as a director. And I feel the same way about Julien – Julien will break through.

I always thought The Hunger would become a cult movie.
That rents pretty good, too. It's in that book, Cult Movies. Along with Absolute Beginners. Listen: Absolute Beginners, The Hunger, The Man Who Fell to Earth – they're in there, boy. [Laughs] Of course I looked!

Which of your films are your favorites?
The Man Who Fell to Earth I still think is a fascinating movie. And Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, I guess. Those are the two I like the best. Although I do feel quite sympathetically towards The Hunger now. Yeah, there's some quite interesting stuff in that. I tell you, the first twenty minutes rattle along like hell – it really is a great opening. It loses its way about there, but it's still an interesting movie.

Everything lives on on video now. I think that's great.
Yeah. Well, for some it's great [laughs]. They can lose Just a Gigolo, as far as I'm concerned [laughs].

That's probably in Cult Movies, isn't it?
I didn't even want to gaze at the J section [laughs].

Not a pleasant memory?
Well, it was, actually. I had more fun on that than any of them. Because we all looked at each other after a couple of weeks and said, "This is a piece of shit, isn't it?" "Yes." "Okay, let's just have a good time." So we had a great time in Berlin for the five or six'weeks. But we knew.

Did you ever meet Rainer Werner Fassbinder during your time in Germany?
I never met him. I saw him once, in a bar.

Drunk?
No, he was all right. He was standing up. With a bunch of really heavy-looking guys. The kind of guys that the Hell's Angels would stay away from. I mean, he hung with a heavy crowd there – a heavy dude! But he was a fascinating guy. Extraordinary use of film, and the symbolic messages in it. Just incredible. I must say, I do have a penchant for the German filmmakers. Herzog is just fabulous as well.

Tina Sinatra recently said that you and Robert De Niro are the two people she has in mind to play her father, Frank Sinatra, in a film biography she's doing.
Which part of him would I play?

The English part, I suppose. She said that Frank "respects" you as an artist.
That's very decent. What an extraordinary thing.

Have you ever been offered the lead in any other biographical films?
Oh, funny things – like Byron, stuff like that. I don't know, I think Mick would do a better Byron. I'd probably be a better Shelley [laughs]. But I don't think I'd like to do those kinds of things. I'd much prefer to do originally created stories for the screen – things that I could treat more seriously than some of the stuff I'm offered.

Do you think there are any movies that have really captured rock & roll on film?
I think probably Sid & Nancy, in a strangely macabre way. Those are the aspects that seem to grab people's attention, and it was a great film in those aspects. I thought the characterizations of some of the people around Sid were awful. I thought Iggy was ridiculous. I mean, did you see that as Iggy? It was incredible. The guy was like Neil Diamond or something, in this big apartment with all these girls round him. I've never seen Iggy like that in my life, and I'm sure the Pistols never saw him like that either. And Johnny Rotten was terrible. But Gary Oldman was good as Sid. I only met Sid twice, I think.

How did he strike you as a person?
Just a mindless twerp. I didn't find anything at all romantic about him, or even interesting. I think he was just completely under the charisma of Rotten. Whatever Johnny said, Sid would jump to it.

Did you ever see the Pistols live?
No. I just saw them because of my involvement with Iggy, on his 1977 tour, when I was playing piano. And Johnny and Sid – they all individually turned up to different shows, you know? 'Cause, I mean, they just worshiped the ground that Iggy . . . spat on [chuckles].

Ah, the old nihilism. You used to be very apocalyptically minded, it seemed, back in the Diamond Dogs days. Do you still feel that way – that the end is near?
No, I don't feel that at all. I can't feel that. I always have to look for some kind of light at the end of the tunnel. Having a son does that. You change a lot. I think when you're young, you feel it's kind of exciting to have that kind of negative feeling about things. But that changes as you get older. That's the one thing that does change. The energy doesn't change; it just gets channeled in a different direction.

Do you think rock & roll has changed?
Rock & roll is for us – it's not for kids. We wrote it, we play it, we listen to it. We listen to rock. Kids listen to something else – they have a new need for music, in a different way.

Do you think rock is dead?
Purely on release of high spirits, it's still just as important as it was. But socially, it's changing its calendar; it's changing its vocabulary continually. Which is what makes it the most exciting art form, really. Because it is social currency; it actually has a place in society. It's a living art, and it is undergoing constant reevaluation and change. Which makes it far more interesting than, say, painting, or any of the plastic arts, which are so much for the few. And there's quite as much money attached to painting these days as there ever was in rock. . . .
I think there's a refocusing in rock now. I think the emphasis is off videos – which is great – and it's returning back to stage, to interaction between the audience and the artist. It's entirely physical and dangerous at the moment, but I think artists and audiences are coming together again in a different way. Video was very much in the way between the artist and the audience over the last few years.

Which is your favorite new band?
The Screaming Blue Messiahs. I love them. I think they're terrific. . . . And I've always had a penchant for the Psychedelic Furs. I think they're a great band. I've always wanted to produce them, and they've often asked me to, but I never had the time. I would never be forward enough with most bands to suggest producing them, because I always like what it is they have themselves. It would never occur to me to suggest to, say, the Messiahs that I want to get involved with them. Because they seem to be so right on course with what they're doing that they need me like a hole in the head.

Does your son turn you on to groups?
Yeah. I got this band I've got to listen to, called the Stupids. I never heard of them. It's a band in England that Joe quite likes. He really liked PiL, until he saw them, which was unfortunate. I thought the last album was great, but we went to a bad show. The whole thing was so tired. There was no enthusiasm in the band or the audience. . . .
I don't like many of the English bands at the moment. And the older ones, who were exciting, like the Fall . . . I mean, that new album by the Fall is such rubbish, such fourth-form poetry. It's really sophomoric.

Your own latest album has a certain recherché feel to it, with sitars and Mellotron, even some harmonica. And on one song, "Glass Spider," the backing vocal sounds remarkably like John Lennon.
Well, actually, the album was reflective in a way, because it covers every style that I've ever written in, I think. And also all the influences I've had in rock. On one song, "Zeroes," I wanted to put in every cliché that was around in the Sixties – "letting the love in," those kinds of lines. But it was done with affection – it's not supposed to be a snipe. I just wanted the feeling of that particular period, the very late Sixties.

What inspired the title track, "Never Let Me Down"?
It's basically about Coco, more than anybody else.

Is there a romantic relationship there?
No, it's platonic. But there is a romance in it, I guess, inasmuch as it's hard for two people to feel totally at ease in each other's company for that period of time and not expect too much from each other. Always being prepared to be there if the other one needs someone, you know? There's not many people you find in life that you can do that with, or feel that way with.

Any other long-term friendships?
Yeah, I've got three or four friends that I used to go to school with. One of them I've known since I was five. I see them every year. In fact, we all came together again when I was forty – 'cause they're all gonna be forty, too, you see. So we all met, and we just went back: "Oh, do you remember . . . ?" And "Did you ever think . . . ?" It was really something.

Do you think you've changed a lot over the years?
I'm more like I was in 1967 now, say, than I was in 1977. I feel like I am, anyway. I feel as bright and cheerful and optimistic as I was then – as opposed to feeling as depressed and sort of nihilistic as I was in the Seventies. I feel like I've come full circle in that particular way.

Well, you don't wear dresses anymore.
Do you know, the only time I wore dresses . . . There was that funny little white thing with white boots, which was Kansai's answer to Dick Whittington, if I remember: "It-a Dick-a Whittington-a!" "I see." "Sorta like-a international-a pantomime." "It's a dress, Kansai." "No, no – it's got-a boots." "Yeah – they're satin. . . . All right, we'll do it."
And I did three drags for the "Boys Keep Swinging" video. And I wore a dress on Saturday Night Live, which was based on a John Heartfield photo montage – sort of a Communist Chinese air-hostess look. But I never wore dresses as much as Milton Berle did.

Do you feel relieved that you don't have the sort of burden of outrageousness on you anymore?
Why, no, not really. It's a bit of a disappointment [laughs]. I'll keep tryin'. I've got a few things up me sleeve.

Any final fashion statement?
Wide shoulders are the flared trousers of the Eighties.

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Reply #8 posted 10/05/16 7:41am

JoeBala

True Bruce: Springsteen Goes Deep, From Early Trauma to Future of E Street

Rocker opens up about his life, expanding on revelations in candid new memoir 'Born to Run'

Bruce Springsteen goes deep on the revelations in his new memoir 'Born to Run' – from his childhood trauma to the future of E Street. Danny Clinch for Rolling Stone

Enter Bruce Springsteen, whistling. He's cradling a couple of leather jackets for a photo shoot and looks a touch tired, probably because he was just on a stadium stage outside Boston 36 hours ago, wrapping up the last in a series of four-hour-plus concerts with the E Street Band. A week before his 67th birthday, Springsteen is back on his farm in New Jersey's Monmouth County, on a cloudless mid-September afternoon lovely enough to justify allegiance to his oft-maligned home state. He has a gray shadow of a goatee, and is dressed as you'd expect him to be dressed: black T-shirt, slightly stretched at the neck; dark jeans; boots.

Bruce Spingsteen photographed in Monmouth County, New Jersey, on September 16th, 2016.Bruce Spingsteen photographed in Monmouth County, New Jersey, on September 16th, 2016. Danny Clinch for Rolling Stone

He's just trekked over from his actual home to his home studio, housed in a garagelike structure made of pristine blond-on-blond wood. It is, overall, a long way from the four-track cassette machine he used to recordNebraska.

The main lounge is filled with memorabilia, most of it devoted to Elvis Presley or Springsteen himself (the couch has aGreetings From Asbury Park pillow, and there are Bruce-and-Clarence outtakes from theBorn to Run photo shoot on the wall). The room is overflowing with books, many of them music-themed, from Chuck Berry's autobiography to Gerri Hirshey's soul historyNowhere to Run to When We Were Good, a study of the Sixties folk revival.

Springsteen just wrote a perfect addition to this collection: his lucid, earthy, anecdote-stuffed autobiography, Born to Run. Along with rock & roll tales (no drugs, some sex, precisely one smashed guitar), it offers a psychological recipe for the creation of a self-flagellating superstar: overly worshipful grandmother; withholding dad who turns out to have been mentally ill rather than just a hard-hat hardass; indefatigable mom who adheres to an "ain't no sin to be glad you're alive" ethos.

Bruce Springsteen's New 'Born to Run' Memoir: 10 Things We Learned

Boss' recent battle with depression, Bob Dylan's role in reuniting E Street Band and other revelations

In a sunny sitting room where windows overlook the green sprawl of his property, Springsteen discusses the genesis of the book, his struggles with depression, the future of his career and much more, staying silent on only one topic. When I mention my horror at the sight of Donald Trump–endorsing New Jersey governor Chris Christie pumping his fist and singing along to the lines "poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king" at a recent concert in Brooklyn, Springsteen laughs until he turns red. When he catches his breath, he says, "I have no comment."

So why do an autobiography?
It kind of happened by accident. I didn't think of it initially as a book. I was writing to pass the time, and I felt if I didn't do anything with it, maybe my kids would like to have it. I wrote quite a bit for about two or three weeks. When I went back and read it, I said, "This feels pretty good." I'd write longhand in some notepads, and then I'd put it away for months. I'd dictate it to Mary Mac, my assistant, and then rewrite it until it felt nice and tight and concise. It just became a project I was working on. When we'd tour, I'd put it away for the entire tour, a year and a half. When I finished what became the first of the three sections, I said, "Well, there's a tale going on there that might be interesting to people."

So you wrote it in chronological order?
I did. I let the third section sit for quite a while. It's the most difficult one, because you're writing about your current life and the people that are currently in your life. There's just a lot of different kinds of judgments to make.

You didn't hesitate to put in facts of your life that were halo-puncturing. Did you want to shatter your aura of saintliness a little?
Yeah, that part of my thing has always annoyed me. It's too much, you know. So any dent in it I can make, I'm pleased to do. I mean, it wasn't something I was intent on doing. It was just writing about a life, and all of its many aspects. But I also decided that it was a book about my music first, and about my life kind of secondarily. If I didn't want to write about something, I didn't write about it. I didn't have any rules, except I wanted what was in the book to relate back to my music. So the revelations I made about my family or my own inner workings, I felt that could be central to understanding where some of my music came from. I didn't write all about myself. Plenty of things, I held back.

At a 1990 concert, a guy shouted, "We love you!" And you said, "But you don't really know me!" Does this book get us closer to really knowing you?
You know, I would say so. But once again, it's a creation. It's a story that I drew from my story. It's one of the stories I drew from my story.

You use the word "misogyny" to describe your attitudes toward women as a young man. That's a striking self-evaluation.
You have to wear the shoe that fits. I was an internal rager. So I had to look back at some of my attitudes when I was young, and that's the only way I can describe it.

What do you know about women now that you didn't understand then?
[Laughs] What do I know about women that I didn't understand when I was a young man? Oh, Jesus [laughs, pauses]. When Mama is happy, everybody is happy. When Mama ain't happy, nobody is happy.

Did you give anyone in your life veto power over the final section of the book? Patti [Scialfa], particularly?
I did have to open up parts of our life. She's an artist, she understands that part of our job. But it was still a really strong and generous thing on her part that I'm deeply thankful for. To go back to the question you asked – what I do know about women, I have learned from Patti. It was knowledge that I was searching for, and she came into my life and just provided me with an enormous amount of vision and love and security that I never had previously. She's the love of my life.

There have been other books written about you. What do you think of them?
I haven't followed them that closely. I mean, I read Dave Marsh's book [Born to Run] a long time ago, in the Seventies. And Peter Ames Carlin's book [Bruce] that came out recently. They're all good, if you're interested in different sides of me and different parts of my story.

I thought it was sort of hilarious that you name-drop your first manager Mike Appel's book, Down Thunder Road, which is pretty negative.
I mean, if you're interested in that, that's there too. I don't have a problem with all the different portrayals of me.

I looked at that book again. There's a caption, "Bruce in 1989. Too old to rock."
[Laughs] I love that.

You used to say onstage that your mom wanted you to be an author. True?
Yes. She did when I was young.

Your talents weren't recognized in school, so what did she see in you that suggested that direction?
I did start to write the songs when I was very young. I was 15 and I was already scribbling some things down, and I suppose to her it was a respectable way to be a writer of some sort. I happened to be good at it. While I wasn't very good at much else in school, in my creative-writing classes or when we had to do some writing in my English classes, I tended to do better at it.

You've had what seems like a pretty serious and rigorous self-education. How did that work for you?
It came very naturally. I never set out to hit the books or anything. I was always curious, but I was too young in school to take advantage of it, and things were presented a little dryly. When I met Jon [Landau], he was a conduit into film and books, and I started to read things that touched my soul. A lot of them were by noir writers – James M. Cain, Jim Thompson, Flannery O'Connor. And then I started to read history books. I was curious about the big story. I read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and one by Henry Steele Commager [A Pocket History of the United States]. One thing led to another, and I became quite a self-educator.

These days, I actually find myself more missing college. I missed the chance to live in the world of ideas when I would've been ripe to take advantage of it. A few years ago, my friend Robert Coles had a class at Harvard about Walker Percy, and I sat in. It was fun and I felt very at home. Made me wish I went to college!

Springsteen at his home studio in New Jersey.Springsteen at his home studio in New Jersey. "I happened to be good at writing. I wasn't very good at much else in school." Danny Clinch for Rolling Stone

What writers shaped the voice you found for the book?
Everything I've absorbed led to finding a voice I was comfortable with. I love all the Elmore Leonard books, for instance. But you can't copy it if you're trying to do something original.

Your paternal grandparents loom large in your story, but you wrote just one, never-released song about them – "Randolph Street (Master of Electricity)."
That was it. I probably don't think the song was very good. But it did capture some of the intensity I felt about them. It didn't enter my mind to write other songs about it, and I work from the inside out. I don't take a topic and decide to write about it. I write about what grows out of me.

You've said that Nebraska connected back to your childhood in some spiritual and emotional way.
I would say that it did. If you were looking for a record that connected to my grandparents, that's the record. It's just setting the tone of the time in our household.

Did the emotions stirred up by Nebraska open the door to the depression that hit right after you made it?
It could be. I was 32 at the time. I had just finished Nebraska, literally. I don't think it was out yet. And that was a pretty lonely record. It may have struck home. But my own biological clock may have been ticking toward that point. You carry your baggage, and if you don't start unpacking, your bags get heavier as you move along. So at some point, the weight becomes impossible to carry and you look for some way to unpack those bags. And it can get pretty messy. That's what happened to me.

Where do you see the depressive side of your nature in your songs?
In my songs? Every other record, probably [laughs]. And obviously, you look at The Ghost of Tom Joad and Nebraska and there's plenty of it in Tunnel of Love. I address it on Tunnel of Love, in the song "Two Faces." It's something I addressed as I've gone along by seesawing between what might be considered band records and what might be considered solo records. If you go to Darkness on the Edge of Town, there's plenty of it there.

The other side of it is that the dark material helps us believe the lighter stuff.
That was part of making a good song. You got to have friction and tension, something to push up against. Every writer needs that. I think it was Tom Stoppard who once said he envied Václav Havel.

Right, talk about something to push up against.
So if the triumphant part of the song was going to feel real and not just hacked out, I had to have something I was pushing up against. I just understood that balance. It comes out of gospel music, which is the music of transcendence. I wanted my music to be a music of transcendence.

When you sing, "I believe in the faith that can save me," maybe we believe you because it feels like it's coming from someone who might not have believed it the day before.
Yeah! Or maybe barely believing right now, you know?

Interestingly, one of the only concerts that you describe in detail in the book is the overhyped Hammersmith Odeon show that was so rough for you in 1975, your first trip to England.
Something heavy to push up against. It was a nightmare of a mind-fuck, so it remained with me for a long time. These days, I think you go onstage with a lot of confidence, because you've had so many years behind you. And I tend to try to move to that place every night, to that moment where suddenly it's just you and the audience; everything else has kind of fallen away, time, space. Some nights it's easier than other nights. But I pretty much always get there. You're just in this very kind of lovely place where you're really communicating. But it's always something you have to do on a nightly basis. Even after all the years, you still have to.

Bruce in West Long Brance, N.J., 1969, watching an opening act before performing with his band Child.Bruce in West Long Brance, N.J., 1969, watching an opening act before performing with his band Child. Billy Smith Collection

You talk about being able to control time onstage. How does that work for you?
You're doing a lot of things. You're compressing time in your music. You're compressing years into moments, an enormous amount of experience into just a few minutes. You're shifting between youth and maturity, so time gets warped and flipped around a lot during the evening. People are going back and forth in their lives. Time ceases inside of any creative piece. It creates its own time and space.

The depression you write about suffering in your early sixties, how did it affect your working life?
Not very much. I couldn't give you an answer to why that is. But I'd be way out on a limb and then I'd come into the studio and I'd just go to work. I'd write, record.

How often have you toured while you were in that state?
I had it come up on tours on occasion. And generally, it doesn't affect me onstage or the choices I make, but it may affect me offstage a little bit. I may feel down or confused at a certain moment. It's very rare, because touring is so emotionally and physically cathartic. If you work yourself physically to the point of near exhaustion, you're too tired to be depressed, and that may be one of the reasons I've done it my whole life. Your mind is not on overdrive – it doesn't have the energy to start looking for trouble in the weeds. Instead it's a very mind-clearing, centering experience, and you don't have the kind of space that depression thrives in.

You used to have an element of self-punishment in those long shows.
I was a good Catholic boy. So there was an element of the purification ritual.

But have you come around to where now you're doing the same thing from a healthier place?
I'm not sure myself [laughs]. Why does a man play four hours a night? I'm still not exactly sure, you know. And I would have to say it still hearkens back to some of those original impulses and the fact that I need to go all the way, all the time.

There's a passage where you describe dinner with your mom's family in terms that sound just like your concerts.
There would often be a level of hysteria that perhaps is not uncommon in Italian families, and mine was certainly no different. People were shouting and yelling. But also, there was a tremendous amount of joy and this unusual excitement about life – over nothing, except living itself.

You mention a dream where you say to your dad, "That guy onstage, that's how I see you." What does that mean?
They say that those you can't get close to, you emulate. So I was basically a bum who never worked outside of scratching on my guitar. But when I went to work, I put on the clothes of my father and I slipped into his roles in a lot of ways, in order to be close to him, in order to understand him. I didn't realize this till much later. So that dream was just me trying to explain to my dad, "Look, this is where all this took us. This is where you took me, and it's how I see you in my heart of hearts."

You chose to universalize your dad's story into something it wasn't. Was the reality too messy for a rock & roll song?
Perhaps. Or perhaps I was just influenced by East of Eden and those kinds of archetypes, and I cast the two of us in those roles. That's why in the book I say I was a little unfair to my dad, 'cause our lives were much more complex.

You write that you were kind of traumatized by what was going on at home.
It was enough to make me a nervous wreck and it wasn't just what my father was doing, either. It was the nature of my relationship with my grandparents, which was very intense, perhaps incredibly anxiety-provoking. I didn't have any release for it. So I just chewed my knuckles until they were rocks, or blinked uncontrollably.

You describe yourself around the age of eight as a "sissy" and a "weirdo."
Totally.

How did you make the journey from there to being a very conventionally masculine rock star, especially in the Eighties?
It was an obvious reaction, I think, to my childhood – and I look back on it and it appears one-dimensional. My dad, to me, was a very conventionally masculine man. He worked physically. He was a big and beefy kind of guy. And again, you emulate. I believe that's how I got there. But he himself had that dichotomy. I believe he was similar to me when he was young. He was soft inside. And in the Forties and Fifties, you couldn't survive like that. As a child, he hadn't been provided with the confidence to be himself, to be fully masculine, and I don't mean that in a one-dimensional or conventional sense. So I had to sort my way through all this stuff myself, and what did I use to do it? I used my music and did the best I could.

Springsteen with his sister Ginny in his future musical home of Asbury Park, 1954.Springsteen with his sister Ginny in his future musical home of Asbury Park, 1954. Billy Smith Collection

What have you tried to teach your sons about what it means to be a man?
I try to emphasize the softer side of myself, and that there's no need to feel ashamed of or misunderstand this part of yourself. Just as you've got to be comfortable with the other side.

There were so many times you came close to total failure. Is there a universe where you went back to Jersey and were just the greatest bar-band leader anyone ever saw?
You can be very, very good and miss. But do I personally envision a scenario where that could have happened? No [laughs]. Or maybe I just prefer not to. I was a lion in pursuit of the things that I needed. And as I traveled around, I don't see that many people that are better than me. I've seen some, you know. Now of course you were very isolated in New Jersey at that time. Sometimes some sort of B-level rock star passing through town catches your band and says, "Oh, man," but nothing happens.

And sometimes they slept with your girlfriend, apparently.
Unfortunately. That part is true too [laughs]. So I knew what it was like to miss.

The song "Backstreets" seems to capture that time in your life. Where did that song come from?
Just youth, the beach, the night, friendships, the feeling of being an outcast and kind of living far away from things in this little outpost in New Jersey. It's also about a place of personal refuge. It wasn't a specific relationship or anything that brought the song into being.

You mentioned the election onstage the other night. What do you make of the Trump phenomenon?
Well, you know, the republic is under siege by a moron, basically. The whole thing is tragic. Without overstating it, it's a tragedy for our democracy. When you start talking about elections being rigged, you're pushing people beyond democratic governance. And it's a very, very dangerous thing to do. Once you let those genies out of the bottle, they don't go back in so easy, if they go back in at all. The ideas he's moving to the mainstream are all very dangerous ideas – white nationalism and the alt-right movement. The outrageous things that he's done – not immediately disavowing David Duke? These are things that are obviously beyond the pale for any previous political candidate. It would sink your candidacy immediately.

I believe that there's a price being paid for not addressing the real cost of the deindustrialization and globalization that has occurred in the United States for the past 35, 40 years, and how it's deeply affected people's lives and deeply hurt people to where they want someone who says they have a solution. And Trump's thing is simple answers to very complex problems. Fallacious answers to very complex problems. And that can be very appealing.

The New York Times found the guy you wrote the song "Youngstown" about, and he's a Trump supporter. What do you make of that? Does it surprise you?
Not really. Not if you see the history of Youngstown and what happened.

If people there are pushed to the edge, and reaching for a metaphorical gun in the form of Trump, it's the same anger you've written about.
Yeah. I mean, I started writing about this stuff 30 years ago or whenever it was.

What do you think of Black Lives Matter?
Well, it's all chickens coming home to roost. These are issues that have been ignored or hidden, and due to modern technology and the availability of cellphone cameras and constant video feed, these things are coming to the surface. Black Lives Matter is a natural outgrowth and response to the injustices that have been occurring for a very long time in the United States.

Why is it so hard for so many white people to grapple with? Why the backlash?
Nobody likes being told they're wrong.

What do you think of Colin Kaepernick's protests and the reaction to it?
Athletics is a difficult place to make political statements. There was the Olympics in the Sixties, and obviously Muhammad Ali. But sports is such an escapist field. I think when politics or personal expression is injected, it rankles people more than in other fields. But we're in a time where there isn't any place where these issues can be excluded. I admire Kaepernick, but it's a very difficult field to be outspoken in.

As was music, maybe, at times. In the Eighties, you tried to disassociate yourself from Reagan. But you didn't go nearly as far as you went later. Why?
Maybe I didn't have the confidence.

You haven't chosen to do anything for the campaign this year. Have you lost faith in whatever power you might have to affect these things?
I don't know. I think you have a limited amount of impact as an entertainer, performer or musician. I feel what I've done was certainly worth doing. And I did it at the time because I felt the country was in crisis, which it certainly is right now. I don't know if we've been approached or not to do anything at the moment. If so, I would take it into consideration and see where it goes.

No, I haven't really lost faith in what I consider to be the small amount of impact that somebody in rock music might be able to have. I don't think people go to musicians for their political points of view. I think your political point of view is circumstances, and then how you were nurtured and brought up. But it's worth giving it a shot when it's the only thing you have.

Is there a lack of enthusiasm for Hillary on your own part?
No. I like Hillary. I think she would be a very, very good president.

Where do you see the upper limits of performing live? We have Paul McCartney, who is, what, 76?
Seventy-four.

Seventy-four. You're keeping track! He's playing three-hour shows. But how does it work for you going forward?
At my age, life is day-to-day. Depending upon your health, you can be at a very different point in your life at the age that I'm at. So it's how you're feeling and the shape you're in and how you feel emotionally and spiritually inside and what you're up for and what kind of effort and commitment you still want to bring to what you're doing. I'm still firing on all eights. I'm completely committed like I was when I was 16 or 21 years old. I can still do it with no problem. But life as you get older is more like, "What a great day today is. And let me see, what am I going to do? What am I going to do in the next six months or the next year?" But there's no real answer to that question, because it's just where you're at right now. You realize there's a finiteness to it. So that changes your nightly experience. You can look out ahead and go, "OK, I'm 67. In 10 years I'm 77. Maybe that's four tours away, or five tours." You can do that and go, "Wow." You can speculate, but that's all.

Musician Bruce Springsteen performs in concert at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass., on Sept. 14, 2016. (Springsteen live in September 2016. "You're compressing years into moments," he says of being onstage. Keith Bedford/Getty

You said onstage that the older you get, the more it means. Is that the finiteness?
It's the finiteness. The intensity that the audience brings to the show now – they experience the finiteness also. You can appreciate it a little more. And the whole experience gets heightened.

The next few years and beyond: Is the idea to just move between the different modes you have – E Street, solo, archival releases?
Yeah. All of the above, you know. At this point, my plan is to do everything that I do and at different intervals. I'd love to tour solo again. I look forward to playing with the band again. We're going to play in Australia this winter. And whatever else comes my way, whatever projects come my way. I don't have any five- or six-year plan, outside of having whatever music I'm making now and getting out and just continuing my work life.

You've said you have an album done that's influenced by Glen Campbell and Jimmy Webb's collaborations.
I don't want to overemphasize the influences too much, because people may hear it and go, "What's that got to do with that?" But it was sort of a place where I found some inspiration.

Is that a different record than the one you almost finished before Wrecking Ball?
It's the record I wrote before Wrecking Ball but could not finish, and in attempting to finish it, I wrote Wrecking Ball. So the roots of the record go back quite a ways. Sometimes you have to wait for these puzzles to sort themselves out, and it can take years. I mean, I have a record that I've been working on that's 20 years old. That's just the way the process is working at the moment.

What's the pace of your songwriting now, compared with the 2000s, when you were extremely prolific?
Well, Wrecking Ball came, I would say, easily. The albums and songs have been coming along for quite a while. But I haven't written in a while right now, outside of the record that I have ready.

What would you have said to Elvis when you hopped the fence at Graceland in the Seventies, if he had been there?
I had a song I was probably trying to sell him, "Fire." Outside of that, I truly have no idea. I'm not sure what I was looking for.

Has fat Elvis haunted you – perhaps as a fitness inspiration and as an example of exactly where you didn't want to end up?
I don't know. I saw Elvis shortly before he died and I remember enjoying the show tremendously. Everybody makes their maps, and people will look at the one I wrote and there will be things they'll want to follow and things they won't want to follow. I got so much from Elvis as an inspiration, and I admire that voice so deeply right until the end. And everybody struggles.

At the same time, you have a "stay hard, stay hungry, stay alive" kind of counter-philosophy.
There are a lot of distractions along the way and a lot of places you can lose yourself. I was very aware of that, thanks to the people that came before me. And I worked very hard to avoid some of those pitfalls, and still do.

You write that the E Street Band was hitting its stride in the studio with The River. But after one more album with them, you waited 18 years for the next. In the abstract, doesn't that seem a little odd?
It's just the way it played out. I think we learned how to record finally with The River, even though we made somewhat of a mess of it. But we were making the kind of sound we wanted to make, and that continued into Born in the U.S.A. But Born in the U.S.A. was such a transformative event that after it I didn't really know where to go with the band. So I went in a different direction. Also, I wanted to immediately downsize, because I didn't want to play the game of "You have to top this and top these sales." I don't want to get into being that kind of artist.

That said, how did you feel about the commercial underperformance of Human Touchand Lucky Town in 1992 – which ran straight into grunge?
I think Nirvana hit at the moment those albums came out. I remember Jon, at the time, was nervous that the records hadn't done as well as he'd hoped or we'd hoped. We had a conversation: "Jon, it's just not our time. We'll have other times." And if you have a long life and a long work life, you're going to go through that. Sometimes it's just not your time. It was somebody else's.

You write about 1995's The Ghost of Tom Joad as a pivot point back to writing about the larger world – how do you understand your avoidance of topical songwriting for so many years?
You're always in a box, and you're an escape artist if you do what I do – or if you're a creative person, period. You build your box and then you escape from it. You build another one and you escape from it. That's ongoing. And you may at some point escape enough boxes where you find yourself back around to the first one again and you go, "Oh, I didn't think I had any more to say about these things. Wait a minute, yes, I do. I've got a lot more to say about these things!"

How do you balance the magic that happens with the E Street Band with the quotidian realities of being the boss?
You have to accept the fact that along the way it becomes a business – if you don't accept it, everything is going to get fucked up very deeply. So you're doing everyone a service by acknowledging that's a part of your relationship and negotiating your way through it as friends and as adults.

You write that you needed disciples rather than employees early on. Did that mean total dedication?
Yeah, it did. I made unreasonable demands and then perhaps things were unreasonably demanded of me in return [laughs]. But that was who we were at the time. I was an insecure young man. So my need for total dedication from the people I was working with was very great. Those things were tempered as time passed by. There's still an enormous amount of dedication, but we have healthy boundaries now that we didn't have when we were younger.

In the studio, you deliberately played Steve Van Zandt off Jon. Where did the instinct come from to do something as –
As devious as that? [Laughs]

I was going to say maybe sophisticated, Machiavellian, but let's go with that.
It came very naturally out of that part of me that is ruthless in the pursuit of my song. And they joined a team, so they're in for the whole ride, and we're all big boys.

You write that you and Clarence Clemons couldn't hang out because it would have ruined your life.
Clarence was a wild liver, and it was fabulous. But don't think you can do it at home, kids. He was a hearty soul.

So you have deep friendships that aren't hanging-out type of friendships?
Of course. I've got plenty of them. As you get older, you're involved in your family. It's a great joy when I'm with, say, Steve. We don't hang out that much. So it's a tremendous joy when I am with him. It was a great joy being with Clarence. He was hilarious. One of the funniest guys on the planet, and someone who enlivened you when you were around him. And then what you did together was so deep. So you never questioned your friendship or your allegiance to one another. It doesn't mean you're going to have dinner every day.

You write that Steve's opinions could be destabilizing in the band. How so?
He's a powerful man, so his opinions count greatly. He's also more free-swinging than I am. If you're at the head of an organization and you're trying to give it continuity and collective power, a strong personality can be disruptive. But that's been a part of our relationship our whole lives. I believe I've played the same role in his life, and I need somebody who will do that.

You expected Wrecking Ball to make a bigger splash, and you concluded that people aren't looking to rock for that kind of statement anymore.
Rock, at the moment, it's not the prime vehicle for communicating those particular ideas. There's a sort of mixture of pop and hip-hop that dominates the airways and is the current carrier for cultural comment.

How do you feel about that?
It's just the lay of the land. Pop always moves on and transforms itself. There's great music being made now. Kanye West makes terrific records. Kendrick Lamar is incredible. You wouldn't want things to remain static or to have a lasting hegemony on cultural comment. But there's somebody in a garage right now with a guitar, probably, figuring out some different way to reinvent it, some different place to take it. That's always going on.

With the benefit of hindsight, why was rock & roll so powerful a transformational force in your life – and in the world at large?
There was an explosion of the id that had been repressed, first of all, previously to a great degree. So when you had Little Richard and Chuck Berry and Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, there was this thing that had been contained suddenly exploding onto the airways, into the world, giving you permission to live with part of your spirit and your body that had been in many ways denied previously. It also came along at a time when people were questioning religion. So there was a secular-spiritual side to it, based in bliss and joy and a personal transcendence of circumstances. It was caught up in the dead center of the American dream, the dream of success and fulfillment. So it was just a powerful, explosive force that came along at a time when history almost demanded it.

And when you needed it too.
I was born at the right time.

Just Music-No Categories-Enjoy It!
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JoeBala

Issa Rae on Making Black Experiences ‘Regular’ Events on TV

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Photo: Andre Wagner

“I still feel regular. I’m not going to lie,” Issa Rae tells me when I ask her how it feels to be the first black woman to helm her own TV show on HBO.Regular is a word she returned to a few times when describing her artistic approach, but by the end of our conversation, I felt as if Issa Rae were the definition of the popular term black girl magic, and not at all Insecure, as her new show is titled.

“When I first saw my face on a billboard I pulled over and took pictures and did dances, but really, I’m always working on what’s next. I’m 31 now so I kind of know myself and have a group of friends that I love that are outside of the industry, and I just feel like this is still a job at the end of the day. It doesn’t define me.” Ironic, considering her show centers on a young black woman struggling to find her identity.

She describes her upbringing in Potomac, Maryland, as a time of rich exposure to different kinds of people that helped develop her worldview. “I wasn’t really aware of my blackness even though I was around people who were Indian and Jewish, et cetera. They were just my friends. It wasn’t until I moved back to Los Angeles and reflected on those times that I was like, ‘Oh!’ I really wasn’t aware of my blackness as much because nobody else would have talked about it. In terms of trying to figure out what was the definition of blackness, and if I didn’t fit that definition — that stuck with me for years.”

Her way of connecting to black culture was through movies — classics likeLove & Basketball, for which she would later do a tribute episode on her first award-winning web series, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl. “At 16, I just remember looking at [Love & Basketball] wide-eyed, wanting to watch it again immediately afterward and feeling like, ‘Okay, I could do this,’ because it was in my neighborhood and it was just super black but notabout being black, which I love — it was just regular.”

In high school, Rae started taking acting seriously. “I had a really great drama teacher who was super encouraging. Then I stopped taking it seriously in college. But when I finally got behind the scenes in terms of directing, producing, and writing I realized what it could be for me,” she recalls.

Photo: Andre Wagner

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During her freshman year of college at Stanford, her dad pressured her to study political science. She also took African-American studies and began examining black works of art, slowly building up the confidence to do her own thing. Inspiration struck when a classmate recognized there were no plays at Stanford with characters of color, and proceeded to write a hip-hop opera on her own. “I remember watching it and thinking, That’s dope. The next year I said to myself, If she can do it, I can do it too.

Dorm Diaries, a show she put together with friends, was what she has called her “lightbulb” moment, showing black people in everyday situations while not focusing inherently on their blackness. “I was trying to break into the industry traditionally by writing and entering contests, and quickly figured it is really a ‘who you know’ industry. And so I put out this web series for fun and people from other colleges watched it. It probably had a couple thousand views but it was a huge deal to me just in terms of realizing I had direct access to an audience to make stuff and put it online.”

After college she founded Color Creative, an organization to help other writers of color get the tools to succeed in Hollywood. While working at the Public Theater, she tried making independent films, but in a terrible turn of events, was robbed of all her equipment and scripts. “I laugh now, but it was devastating at the time because, coupled with all my writing projects, I had original tapes of film that were gone.” She made it one more year in New York but eventually moved home to live with her parents in Los Angeles.

Photo: Andre Wagner

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“At the time I was watching a lot of Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Officeand kept thinking, Where are the black people? I love that kind of humor and there’s such a separation between what is considered black humor and what’s considered white humor. I knew I had a smaller camera [than before], it wasn’t as good, but I knew how to edit and I thought, Let me just see what other projects I can do and keep writing. That was when I came up with the idea for Awkward Black Girl and proposed it to my friend to play the lead.”

In her 2015 book of essays, also titled The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, she bemoans, “How hard is it to portray a three-dimensional woman of color on television or film? I’m surrounded by them, they’re my friends, I talk to them every day. How come Hollywood won’t acknowledge us? Are we a joke to them?” As far as seeing more diversity on the small screen now, Rae says she is more optimistic. “I’m seeing how the tides are changing and how people like Shonda Rhimes and Mara Brock Akil are changing things. In addition to my peers, Justin Simien (Dear White People) and Lena Waithe (Master of None) are trying to put black people and black stories at the forefront. I feel like I’m always getting closer to a position where I can really try to make a change.”

Photo: Andre Wagner

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When I ask her about the prevalence of bits like Jimmy Kimmel’s skit abo... the Emmys that have become a recurring joke at award shows, she gets more serious. “You’ve got these old executives that need to die off, or be replaced. And little by little that’s happening.” Shows like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Family Matters, and A Different World are coming back in new forms with Black-ish, Empire, Atlanta, and Power, but there’s no denying that television has a long way to go to get back to how pro-black it used to be. “I look back on Living Single and how I took that for granted because there are no more shows like that. That was the original Friendsand it was just black people. And Girlfriends paved the way for what we’re doing now with Insecure.”

Insecure follows Rae’s character, also named Issa and loosely based on her, on her journey through young adulthood. “It’s me if I didn’t know what I wanted to do and if I made different decisions. A lot of the characters are based off of friends or people I know.” Along with juggling Insecure, her passion project Color Creative is what she says will contribute to changing the scope of Hollywood. “For me it’s just to give other writers and creatives the opportunity to have experience, which is the No. 1 reason that stupid, racist Hollywood executives give for not hiring people of color.”

Photo: Andre Wagner

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In hindsight, she says, a young Issa Rae had unrealistic goals. “In my mind I wanted to win an Oscar by the time Matt Damon and Ben Affleck did (Damon was 27, Affleck was 25), but with no script. I thought that by 25 you have to be a millionaire, and for what? I wasn’t doing enough work to get there, but I was setting myself up for disappointment. I’ve learned to work at my own pace and stop comparing myself to others, that’s the biggest advice I’d give.”

Is she nervous for the premiere? “On a scale of one to ten … I’m a seven. And the other three is because I have other television projects, film ideas — just the opportunity to work with HBO and other content creators, I don’t feel like I have this one idea and it’s the end all, be all.”

When I ask her about her definition of what blackness is now, she quickly says, “I don’t have one. I just feel like it could be anything. There’s no limit to what blackness can be. It’s like I’m black and if you try to tell me any different, like, fuck you, what do you know? You know? There are no issues or questions on my end at all. What I do is for the culture, and I’m so proud of the culture.”

Lead image photo: Joseph Coat $2,940 at Joseph, Saint Laurent Sweater, $396 at the Outnet, Agnona Pants, $475 at the Outnet, Khiry Earrings, $295 at Khiry, Cartier Ring pre-owned, $1,995 at Vestiaire Collective.

Photos by Andre Wagner, makeup by Joanna Simkin, hair by Felicia Leatherwood, styling by Lindsay Peoples.

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Reply #10 posted 10/17/16 7:22am

JoeBala

Carole Bayer Sager: Playing her song

“That’s What Friends Are For” was a huge hit in 1985 for Dionne Warwick and Friends ... and for lyricist Carol Bayer Sager.
Fans never seem to tire of playing her songs, as we hear now from Rita Braver:

Her face may not be familiar, but her songs certainly are, such as Carly Simon’s

“Nobody Does It Better”; Melissa Manchester’s “Don’t Cry Out Loud”; and Dionne Warwick and Friends’ “That’s What Friends Are For.”

Dionne Warwick - That's W...ds Are For by DionneWarwickVEVO onYouTube

Carole Bayer Sager has been writing memorable lyrics for more than half a century.

When asked what she feels makes a good lyric, Sager replied, “A good lyric for me is one that touches me, and therefore I feel it’ll touch you.”

At age 69, she tools around her lush Los Angeles estate in a custom-designed cart; and she’s got a home studio full of gold and platinum records, sung by the likes of Neil Diamond, Barbra Streisand and Celine Dion.

“There’s more records but I ran out of space,” Sager laughed.

But, she says, growing up in Manhattan, she was a chubby, insecure kid with a domineering mother: “She told me she had to sew two Girl Scout uniforms together for me to get into one, at about that awkward age of 12,” Sager recalled. “And she had a picture of me on the refrigerator, like that, and it said, ‘You sure you want this fatty?’”

Music was her refuge. She wrote songs all through high school and college, but took a job as a teacher … until 1966, when a song she and a friend had written, “A Groovy Kind of Love,” became a hit!

Watch The Mindbenders perform Carole Bayer Sager and Toni Wine’s “A Groovy Kind of Love”:

The Mindbenders - A Groovy Kind Of Love by guido bernedo gómez on YouTube

“I got a check in the mail, and it was for $34,000. And I went, ‘I’m teaching school and I’m making $5,200 a year!’ And what I was struck with first was the inequity -- I wrote that song so quickly, and teaching school is hard.”

She started writing full-time. But it would be almost a decade until she hit the charts again, teaming up with a then-little-known singer-songwriter named Melissa Manchester.

Melissa Manchester - Midnight Blue by mioboxes on YouTube

Braver asked, “What was it like to have a hit again after nine years?”

“It was great,” Sager said. “It was so great, it just felt like, wow, I’m so glad I kept doing what I love.”

But Sager’s personal life was another story, as her marriage to businessman Andrew Sager (whose name she still uses) unraveled. She threw herself into writing, and then in 1975 a mutual friend suggested she try working with a young award-winning composer, Marvin Hamlisch. He told her he had been commissioned to write a song for the James Bond film “The Spy Who Loved Me.”

“And I said, ‘You know, if I were writing a Bond song, I have a really good title -- ‘Nobody Does It Better’? And he said, ‘I love that.”

Carly Simon - Nobody Does...o Loved Me by Carly Simon onYouTube

Sung by Carly Simon, the song got an Oscar nomination. So did their theme for “Ice Castles,” called “Through the Eyes of Love.”

Melissa Manchester - Look...(Subtitle) by Javier José Silva Hernández on YouTube

Sager and Hamlisch became a couple, and together went on to write a hit Broadway musical with Neil Simon. “Unbelievable,” Sager said.

Based on the quirky romance between Sager and Hamlisch, it was called “They’re Playing Our Song.”

They're Playing Our Song ...ony Awards by MrPoochsmooch on YouTube

And Sager borrowed the title for her new memoir, “They’re Playing Our Song,” published by Simon and Schuster (a division of CBS). It details her breakup with Hamlisch.

carole-bayer-sager-theyre-playing-our-song-cover-244.jpg
SIMON & SCHUSTER

“We were friends at the beginning, and it was easy to be friends at the end, ‘cause neither one of us were heartbroken. We stayed friends until the end of his life.”

But the next chapter of her life was more complicated: Her relationship with famed songwriter Burt Bacharach, nearly 20 years her senior:

“I think I fell in love immediately with the way he speaks,” she said, imitating the half-whispered rhythms that, she says, “pulls you in, holds you there dangling.”

They were married in 1982, and there were plenty of good times: the Oscar they won for “Arthur’s Theme” (written with Peter Allen and Christopher Cross); the birth of their son, Christopher; glamorous pals like Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor; and the Grammy for “That’s What Friends Are For.”

But Sager says, the bad times soon outweighed the good, the years with Bacharach described as being in an abusive relationship without any physical signs of abuse.

“Yes, ‘cause he couldn’t give me what I needed. I didn’t have the self-esteem to say, ‘This isn’t working for either of us.’”

Braver said, “In one of the most honest things I have ever read in a memoir, you write that at one point he actually told you that sometimes when you touched him, it made him feel ‘sick, almost nauseated.’ That must not have been easy to write.”

“It was horrible,” Sager said. “And it was horrible to hear. I was crying. I don’t think he thought he was hurt -- I don’t know what he thought.”

“You think he’s a narcissist, that’s what you say over and over again.”

“He once said to me, ‘Hey baby, what do you want from me? I’m a selfish guy.’”

Bacharach ultimately left Sager for another woman, and they divorced in 1991.

Sager did not give up on love. In 1996 she married Bob Daley, a former CBS executive who went on to run Warner Brothers and the Los Angeles Dodgers.

“I think I know her better than anybody in my whole life. I know everything about Carole,” Daley said. “And I love her.”

“Warts and all!” Sager added.

Braver said to Sager, “You always said you feared that you were unlovable. Do you think he’s changed that for you?”

“Absolutely,” she replied. “I do feel loved.”

And a new passion for painting has helped her cope with some old issues: “I started to paint the foods I couldn’t eat, that were forbidden foods as a kid, and all the foods I’d like to eat!” she said.

But she hasn’t given up the art of music. “Stronger Together,” a song Carole Bayer Sager co-wrote, closed out the Democratic National Convention in July.

Stronger Together DNC 201...ca Sanchez by Stronger Together on YouTube

“I do feel so extraordinarily grateful that I got to do what I love to do in this life, and I was rewarded for it,” Sager said. “I would have done it for nothing.”

And ending worthy of a love song.

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Reply #11 posted 10/17/16 7:40am

JoeBala

NEW AGAIN: JANET JACKSON

MATTHEW ROLSTON

10/13/16

You might have noticed that Janet Jackson has been pretty absent from the music scene in recent months—and with good reason: at the age of 50, Ms. Jackson is expecting her first child with her husband, Qatari businessman Wissam al Mana. The official confirmation comes after months of speculation following the abrupt cancelation of her world tour in April and the pretty unambiguous hint that she was taking time to start a family. Sorry Rhythm Nation, but it looks like first-steps and tummy-time are going to be the extent of choreography that Jackson will be planning for a while.

To celebrate Jackson's baby news, we're reprinting her feature from Interview's February 1987 issue. At the time, she was still the fresh-faced baby sister of Michael, only just beginning to distinguish herself from her famous family and cement her place in music history after the release of her breakthrough albumControl a year earlier. With a charming shyness far removed from the "diva" image she was soon to embody, Jackson discusses coping with her newfound fame, life at home with the Jacksons, and her relationship with "crazy" brother Michael. —Frank Chlumsky


Janet Jackson
By Lisa Robinson



Not only did Janet Jackson take charge of her musical career last year with the extraordinarily successful album Control, she also stepped forward as a confident young woman by coming out of the sheltered life provided by her famous family—her protective parents, Joe and Kathyrn, her eight older brothers and sisters, and in particular, her superstar brother Michael. Working with producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis (ex of the Time) in Minneapolis, and encouraged by A&M Records' A&R chief John McClain, Janet made an album that contained four Top Ten singles (including the Number One "When I Think of You") and some of the sexiest music made in 1986 or any other year.

Janet had been in show business since she was small, performing with her brothers and then starring on sitcoms like
Diff'rent Strokes and Good Times. But things started to change in 1984, when a stint on TV's Fame coincided with her 18th birthday and a brief, ill-fated marriage to a member of another family singing group—James DeBarge. "A lot has happened to me in the last few years," says Janet. "Even I've been surprised at how much I've changed."


LISA ROBINSON: So much has been made of the fact that the Control album was like a coming-of-age for you. Were you at all nervous about the way it would be received?

JANET JACKSON: I was nervous about the way the public would receive it. At the same time, I was trying to write about subjects I thought girls could relate to, to let them know that they weren't alone, that other people have problems as well. Especially people in this business. People feel that this line of work is so glamorous and there's no heartache and nothing ever happens to you and you just have a great time. People tend to look at you as something not human.

ROBINSON: Had you really led that sheltered of a life? Are you as shy as has been said?

JACKSON: I'm shy, although I'm not shy with my friends and family. I was sheltered, and there's good and bad to that. The good was not getting into the drugs and the alcohol and the really sorry stuff, and the bad was finally coming out into the real world and trying to deal with it, which was hard for me. My first time dealing with all that was when I was on Fame and when I got married.

ROBINSON: Were they at the same time?

JACKSON: They were at the same time. I was on Fame in 1984, then I moved out of my parents' house, and then I got married.

ROBINSON: Before you were married, were your parents nervous about you living alone?

JACKSON: They were really frightened for me, because there's so much going on today, and my being the baby of the family didn't help any. But I wanted to get out in the real world more. Being around kids on Fame opened me up so much that when I would be around my family, they'd say, "Jan, you're so outgoing now." Actually, I'm not really that outgoing, but everyone in my family is so quiet.

ROBINSON: Do you think that they're quiet, or insulated, like your family exists in a world unto itself?

JACKSON: We were very close, in a world of our own. Every once in a while we would have friends over, but we would never go to other friends' houses and play. My parents were strict. They weren't as strict on me as they were with the others, but my mother didn't want us to get on anyone's nerves... Go to someone else's house and drive their parents crazy. Another thing was they didn't want us to get into a lot of things that a lot of kids—if they're not careful—can slip into.

ROBINSON: Were you all very religious? Are you all Jehovah's Witnesses?

JACKSON: Not all of us are, no. I study once in a while. But my parents never pushed us into anything. Until we were 18, my mother would make us go with her to Kingdom Hall, and when we turned of age, she let us choose what we wanted to.

ROBINSON: Did you go from door to door with The Watchtower?

JACKSON: I did that twice.

ROBINSON: What was that like? Did people slam the door in your face?

JACKSON: A lot of people make fun of it... I would get upset if they slammed the door in our faces; I think it's very rude. Even if you don't want to hear about it, I don't think that's the way you should treat a person. And I'm not just saying this because my family is in this religion. If it was another religion coming to my door, I wouldn't do that to them.

ROBINSON: Your mother is religious, and here you are, being very sexy on your album and in these videos. What does she think about all this?

JACKSON: See, I don't find myself sexy. I think it's a really nice compliment, but I don't find myself sexy. I consider it sassy. The only thing I would say is sexy is "Funny How Time Flies." My mother loves the song, but not the moaning at the end.

ROBINSON: But even with all the little nuances, the implication throughout the album is that you know more than people might expect you to. Tina Turner doesn't think she's sexy, either; she thinks she just jolly and fun.

JACKSON: Well, to be honest with you, that's what I think I am: a lot of fun—a lot of fun to be with. And I like to have a lot of fun. I just don't see myself as being sexy. It's more sass—more attitude—than sex.

ROBINSON: Don't guys act differently around you now?

JACKSON: I'll meet a guy now, and the next thing I know they'll be sweating and their hands will be shaking. And I feel so bad—I don't even know what to say to them. Then there are other guys who come on too strong, and they're just all over you. The nice ones are the ones who are in-between—the ones who aren't scared and who aren't all over you.

ROBINSON: Do you meet enough guys like that?

JACKSON: A few. I wouldn't say enough. There are a few.

ROBINSON: How long were you married to James DeBarge?

JACKSON: A little more than a year.

ROBINSON: What about that story that John McClain encouraged you to annul your marriage?

JACKSON: No... I've known John since I was a baby; he used to change my diapers. He's like part of our family. When I was going through my problems with James, I would talk to John on the phone; he was always there for me and very supportive, but that story is not true. I just never really got a chance to see James, and that was the major problem.

A lot of people thought I was selfish to annul the marriage because I couldn't see him the way I wanted to, but some people can work for many hours and then come home and act fine. I can't do that. I feel that when two people are married—not that you have to totally give up your career—you have to spend time with one another, get to know each other more, just share things with each other. And at that time, I had to leave at fur in the morning to be on the set of Fame to start shooting at six, and I wouldn't get home until nine-thirty at night. Sometimes we'd shoot on the weekends, James would be in the studio at night, and he'd be getting home when I'd be getting up. It just wasn't working well at all. I do want to get married again, and I want to have kids. And this time, I really want to do it right. I don't regret anything that has happened, and I don't think it was because I was young. I don't care what age you are, it's a great responsibility that you have to take, and you have to be ready for it. When I do get married again, I'm just going to take time off.

ROBINSON: Do you think you can't have a boyfriend without being married?

JACKSON: No, I date. But the few times I have been out, people said I was with James, and we were getting back together.

ROBINSON: It wasn't James though, was it?

JACKSN: No, it was Rene...

ROBINSON: Does he look like James?

JACKSON: I don't think so, but a lot of people do. They think he looks like a DeBarge, but I don't think so.

ROBINSON: Is he tall, thin, with a mustache?

JACKSON: Yeah...

ROBINSON: Do you see James at all?

JACKSON: Yes, once in a while. We talk, and he comes by and visits my mother, or brings me a gift. I spoke to his mother a while ago, and she says that he hasn't gotten over it. But he's dating now...

ROBINSON: Does that make you feel strange?

JACKSON: The only thing that bothers me is that the girls come up to me and say, "I'm dating your ex-husband." I'm happy that he's dating girls and getting out.... I feel he's gotten over it, though. I just think his mother wants us to get back together again. She's such a sweet lady.

ROBINSON: Is it too much of a distraction to be in love for you to still concentrate on work.

JACKSON: Yes, and it's a really bad thing. I want to give all my attention to that one person and that person only. I want to spend all day, all night with that person, and that is it. I wouldn't care if the world ended. That's why now, when I date different guys, I just have to stay away—and not let myself fall. Because if I do, it's over. It's very hard trying to have love and a career at the same time. For those who can, great, but I can't.

ROBINSON: Why did you move back to your parents' house?

JACKSON: Well, I was going to move from the house I was in into a condo—something smaller—but my mother kept saying, "You know, if you want to move back here, you can." I said, "Thank you, Mother, but that's okay." Then she called back again and said, "You know, it's no problem at all if you want to move back; your bedroom's always here. Even if you get married, we can come back here. You don't have to move out just because you're 18. You can still be 55 and live here." The third time she called back and just said, "Janet, will you please move back home?" So I said okay. It's fine with me—I can come and go as I please. Parents will be parents, but they've learned to let go. I like it, because La Toya and Michael are there.

ROBINSON: Do you see each other much, or do you tend to pass each other in the hallway? Do you all sit down to dinner together?

JACKSON: Once in a while we'll do that. But everybody is so busy doing their own things. We'll pass each other in the hallways, or sit down and talk, or watch TV together.

ROBINSON: There are so many rumors about your house. It's made out to be some sort of Disneyland mansion.

JACKSON: That's because we have the Tivoli lights—the whole house is lined in these little lights. It's pretty, and it does kind of remind me of Disneyland.

ROBINSON: Do you read all of the stuff that's written about you and the family and Michael? Do you laugh when you read it?

JACKSON: I used to read it and cry. But I laugh now.

ROBINSON: Where do you see those magazines? Do you buy them?

JACKSON: Yes, but sometimes I just find them lying around the house, not knowing who bought them—whether it was one of the workers of whoever. It's so silly. If people want to know the truth, why don't they just come to me and ask?

ROBINSON: But they can't get to you, and they certainly can't get to Michael. Obviously lots of things written are just made up. But it's hard, too, when there's a kind of wall around your family. You've all been famous for years—Michael had the biggest selling album ever. Surely you can understand the curiosity.

JACKSON: Sometimes I think they just want to be mean. But I guess it's just something that comes with being in this business. Michael told me when you hear bad things about yourself, just put your energies into something else; it's no good crying about it. Just put it into your music—it'll make you stronger.

ROBINSON: Did you laugh when you read that you said Michael was a "weirdo"?

JACKSON: Yes. I probably just said, "Oh, Michael's crazy" ... like silly, fun. He's very quiet, but every once in a while he says something that's really funny, and I'll say, "Oh, he's crazy." ... Like a lot of fun to be around. And it was taken as his being "weird."

ROBINSON: But people do think he's weird, what with all the redoing of his face....

JACKSON: You know, so many stars do that, but the press picks on certain people. I think if more people could afford it, they would do it, too. I see nothing wrong with it. The thing is, you have to feel good about yourself. You can't worry about pleasing other people; you have to please yourself. And against is a sad thing; I don't see anything wrong with staying young looking as long as you can. Some people don't care, but for those who do....

ROBINSON: What about those pictures of Michael in that hyperbaric chamber?

JACKSON: You know, I never asked him about that. I don't know what that was....

ROBINSON: Well, it's not in the house, is it?

JACKSON: [laughs] No, if it were in the house, I'd know it. But you know, knowing Michael, if he was doing something like that, it probably had to do with his voice.

ROBINSON: What sort of things do you do when you're not working?

JACKSON: I like to read. Autobiographies. I've been trying to get a hold of Yes I Can, by Sammy Davis Jr., but I can't find it anywhere. And I've been reading about Dorothy Dandridge. I love her.

ROBINSON: Would you want to play her in a movie?

JACKSON: God, I'd love to. Just like Marilyn Monroe is a lot of girls' idol, that's how I feel about Dorothy Dandridge. And she any Marilyn were very close friends. She went through a lot, and people told her that she couldn't do certain things, but she didn't let that bother her. She said in her mind that she was going to do them and that nothing was impossible, and she did it. It was so sad... She died from drugs, and drinking as well.

ROBINSON: Is that something that you know you're never going to have to worry about getting involved with?

JACKSON: Yes. It's not even a temptation. I've never tried pot; I've never tried anything. As far as drinking, I've had a Brandy Alexander... They're so incredible, but they don't affect you until you stand up. I was out once and had wine and I got sick to my stomach, and I vowed I would never drink again.

ROBINSON: Is there any liquor in your house? Your family doesn't drink....

JACKSON: We have wine and champagne when we have dinners, or when guests come over. Otherwise, we have juices and sodas and things. And we have brandy for when people are sick.

ROBINSON: In your songs "Nasty," you say something about "nasty food." What's nasty food to you?

JACKSON: Our ex-housekeeper used to cook squid with the head on and the eyeballs all squished.... We have a cook as well, but some things this ex-housekeeper would cook, and I wouldn't eat it. I like fish, but I don't like it with the eyeballs and the head. I can't take that.

ROBINSON: Do you really have all those animals at your house?

JACKSON: People say it's a zoo; it's not a zoo. We used to have lots of snakes, and we used to have pet rats. I had two snakes; on ewe named Muscles and one we named Revenge. The owner of the pet shop let me keep them for a week and decide which one I liked best. I liked Muscles, but I decided to take them both back because they eat rats. So, I took them back, and two days later Michael bought Muscles and brought him home. I would take Muscles to school—

ROBINSON: Excuse me?

JACKSON: To school, to show him to the kids. I loved him so much, he would sleep on my bed.

ROBINSON: This was what kind of snake?

JACKSON: A boa. They're known for squeezing not biting, just squeezing people to death. But I trusted him. I would let him sleep on my headboard.... I don't know why, it was just the vibe I got from him. We did a lot of things together, but then he died. We got another snake, but I don't play with him as much. I guess I just miss Muscles. We also have all types of birds—two black swans, white swans—a llama, a dog, two deer, a giraffe named Jabbar.

ROBINSON: Are they Michael's animals, or the family's?

JACKSON: Well, I'd say the family's, because sometimes when he'd go to get them, I'd give him money to pay for them.

ROBINSON: Do you carry money?

JACKSON: No.

ROBINSON: Credit cards?

JACKSON: No. I wouldn't want the responsibility. I'd lose the card. I lose things all the time. I used to lose my license all the time before I put a place in my car for it.

ROBINSON: What's the story behind the key you wear in your ear.

JACKSON: Oh, it's a secret. It was given to me by a friend and I promised never to tell. I'd never be forgiven if I did.

ROBINSON: Is there a lot of competition in your family? After all, most of you have record deals.

JACKSON: No, there's no competition, no jealousy. There is envy.

ROBINSON: Are you envious of Michael getting all those awards?

JACKSON [laughs] For all those Grammies... God. Just for having that Thrilleralbum... I said, "God, you make me sick. I wish that was my album," but then we laugh about it. I would say there is a lot of competition, but not within our family; it's with other artists. But when I say "envy," I mean like when I have an album like this one, my sisters with it was theirs, but they're not jealous-they're happy for me. When Michael had all the success with Thriller, we were all so happy and supportive. At the Grammies, I was screaming the loudest. I was so happy for him, I was jumping.

ROBINSON: Why do you think that out of the whole family you and Michael have had such huge success? Do you think its talent, or luck, or an accident? Or just the right time, right place?

JACKSON: That's a hard question. I do know one thing: Michael and I were the closest growing up—until the Off the Wall album, when we started growing further apart. He was on the road, and the came the Thriller album, then another tour, and, by that time, I was married and out of the house. But of everyone in our family, he and I would think alike the most. We used to do everything together. and we used to love to draw. When he would go away, he would send me big boxes of drawings and paintings. It never had anyone's name on it, but I knew who it was from.

ROBINSON: Being in your family, do you think there was ever a chance of doing something other than music?

JACKSON: Yes. I wanted to be a jockey. I'm serious. First time I got on a horse, I loved it. That's what I wanted to be, but my dad asked me to start performing with my family. I can't even believe he asked me, because I was so shy when I was little, and I can't believe he took a chance with me. I remember being so little and looking out at that huge audience; I was really scared that first night. And I remember my brother Randy telling me, "Don't be scared, Jan, don't be nervous—it's okay. After this first night, you won't be nervous at all."

ROBINSON: Aside from the technical end of it, what did Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis do for you as producers? Emotionally, did they give you confidence to step out a bit? Did John McClain do that?

JACKSON: John helped by being there for me. I would talk to him all the time, and I told him I wanted to start singing again and what I wanted to do for my career. He gave me drive and inspiration and a lot of confidence. Jimmy and Terry did as well, and I sat with Jesse Johnson and talked for hours about everything and it just helped me a lot. It helps to get things off your chest, and then for people to give you encouragement and to let you know that you can succeed, and to keep pushing you. I have so much more confidence in myself now than I ever did before.

ROBINSON: Do you think that if the Control album hadn't been such a hit you still would have had that confidence?

JACKSON: Yes. I would have kept trying. And I still have certain goals that I want.

ROBINSON: Like what?

JACKSON: Like Grammies... Other awards... an Oscar one day....

ROBINSON: Are you aware of how much money you have, or is that all handled by other people?

JACKSON: That's one thing I've learned. You have to do that yourself and not let other people do it for you. You have to stay in control of that, because before you know it, someone else will take it. You'll be left with nothing, and they'll have everything.

ROBINSON: But your father manages you, no? So you know you can trust your family....

JACKSON: It's family, but I take out my dad's percentage. After all, even though he is my dad, he's my manager and he works for me. He knows this, too. A lot of things have changed since we've gotten older.


THIS INTERVIEW ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN THE FEBRUARY 1987 ISSUE OF INTERVIEW.

PARKER POSEY

CRAIG MCDEAN

09/30/16

Parker Posey is known, legitimately, as Queen of the Indies, but does that even cover it? Her presence in the films of the Sundance generation is indeed majestic and crucial, both elevating the films themselves, including Party Girl (1995),Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused (1993), Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming (1995), and Greg Mottola's The Daytrippers (1997), but also linking them as pieces of a whole, a canon. Within the films, though, her performances have the quicksilver kiss and danger of mercury. She is often hilarious and always unpredictable—whether as the chaotic basket case who imagines she is Jackie Kennedy in The House of Yes (1997), the kooky heroine of Hal Hartley's Fay Grim(2007), or the boring ditz in Christopher Guest's masterpiece Best in Show(2000). It's a breathlessly exhilarating thing, watching her, sensing that she too has no idea where the performance could take her.

Which is perhaps why she has found such a comfortable home within Guest's troupe of brilliant improvisational comedians. They make for the perfect co-conspirators, and Guest's premises—like this month's Mascots, on Netflix, in which Posey and the gang play competitive mascots—an invitation for her best work.

Posey was born in Baltimore and raised in Louisiana and Mississippi, but one can hardly think of her, or her pal the artist, actor, and musician John Lurie, as anything but through-and-through New Yorkers. In July, just as Posey's second film with Woody Allen, Café Society, was opening in theaters—on the way is a caper film with director James Oakley, The Brits Are Coming—the two Big Apple icons talked about summer in the city, about running errands, and auditioning for Woody.

PARKER POSEY: Hi, John.

JOHN LURIE: Parker!

POSEY: Sorry if it's loud. I'm getting a bubble tea. [laughs]

LURIE: You're out on the street?

POSEY: Well, I'm actually on the sidewalk. I just saw the Woody Allen movie today. I'm doing all this stuff that I could've done last week, sporadically. Where are you? Are you on your island?

LURIE: Yeah, I'm on my island.

POSEY: Where is it again?

LURIE: I'm not saying. It's a secret.

POSEY: Oh, okay. [laughs] Are you painting?

LURIE: You don't get to ask me questions.

POSEY: I'm sorry. [laughs] I'm sorry I missed you when you were in New York. In January I had all these resolutions. One was to join social media, which I did—and I started writing a book. So I've been absorbed in that.

LURIE: What's the book?

POSEY: I guess it's kind of memoir writing. It's an adult coloring book as well. [Lurie laughs] I've done a lot of crafts in my day. I learned how to do pottery, yoga ... and I just wanted to share and talk and write. It felt really good to kind of find my voice and say stuff, and to be funny, hopefully. I don't think my agent really gets it.

LURIE: This is your acting agent?

POSEY: No, he's a lit agent, and he's also a neighbor. I have a country house and an apartment in the city and two mortgages, which is crazy. And I was beginning to think that I'm going to have to sell the farm, you know?

LURIE: Oh, so you're selling the farm?

POSEY: No, I'm not.

LURIE: Wait, hang on, we're supposed to be talking about the movie Mascots, right?

POSEY: Oh, okay. We could talk about that, but this is Interview magazine; we can just, like, have a conversation. I could hang up now, and they'll print what we said so far.

LURIE: And that was it? And that was enough?

POSEY: [to someone else] My pants are ripped in the back? Oh. Thank you very much. [to Lurie] I have a rip in my pants now.

LURIE: Wait, you're on the streets in Manhattan, and someone just told you that you had a rip in your pants?

POSEY: [laughs] Yeah. My underwear is hanging out. Okay. It's flower-pant Monday. I have these flower pants that I got at a flea market in L.A. They're cotton; they're so comfortable. I've had them for years, and I patched them, and, well, I think I'm going to have to patch them again. The rip isn't too bad now, but when I start walking, it's going to get worse, John.

LURIE: [laughs] I don't know how I can help you from here.

POSEY: You can't. There's no way. So did you get to see Mascots?

LURIE: Yeah, I saw it. It seems like these movies are fun to do.

POSEY: I guess they are fun. I mean, its own kind of fun, right? You get an outline. All the dialogue is improvised on camera, so everything is dependent upon chemistry and instinct and not being scared, finding your own space in your own world that you are creating for Chris [Guest]. And he gives a lot of space for that. So I got to dance in this a little bit.

LURIE: That's right. Is that you doing cartwheels towards the beginning of the movie?

POSEY: That's me!

LURIE: With the armadillo head on? I was sure it was a stunt person because there was a mask on.

POSEY: Oh, thank you so much! I'm so flattered.

LURIE: I'm kind of jealous. You're really doing that?

POSEY: [laughs] Totally.

LURIE: Wow.

POSEY: I know.

LURIE: [laughs] You should've taken the mask off then. I just assumed it was a stunt double doing that.

POSEY: I did take the mask off. But I don't know if the camera was rolling then.

LURIE: Oh, it's really like that? You don't know even know if the camera was rolling or not? That was impressive.

POSEY: Thank you. But we can't talk about the end.

LURIE: We can't talk about the end?

POSEY: About my character! I don't want readers to know ... It doesn't matter now though, does it? I wanted to dance as the armadillo so badly. And I still had to come up with how she would move, what her routine was. I worked with my friend Jack Ferver, the performance artist, and the choreographer Ryan Heffington, who came in to do all of the mascots. I had a lot of say. I wanted Gary Numan music. I wanted Laurie Anderson strangeness, early electronica, and a kind of steampunk thing. And, you know what, I could still do it. But I'd get in trouble if I go on the road as an armadillo. I might get run over, John. I might get run over.

LURIE: [laughs] Did you guys have to work out together, you and [co-star] Susan Yeagley?

POSEY: Oh yeah. Because she's not really a dancer, she was really stressed out. We rehearsed, and she just burst into tears. She's like, "I have two left feet. I can't." But I love her so much. We had such great chemistry and such a good time, and that's the other thing. You get so close to these people that you're acting with. Some of these scenes last, like, 15 minutes. And it's so disappointing when you see the final cut. You bring so much of your life and your story, and then it's just whittled away, you know? Chris likes his movies to really fly, to leave the audience wanting more—which is the rule of comedy. So his movies are kind of short. I like a three-and-a-half-hour documentary. I like Frederick Wiseman, Grey Gardens[1976] ... I'd love these movies to be so much longer than they are. You should see what Jane Lynch and Ed Begley Jr., and Michael Hitchcock and Don Lake come up with, by the minute. They're just improvising. It's like watching a quartet. And everyone's fucking funny! It's so wonderful to watch that. I could watch it for hours.

LURIE: Do you all go and watch dailies?

POSEY: We did on [Waiting for] Guffman [1997] and Best in Show, because we were on location. But on this, everyone just went home, so we didn't have that. But when you're on set, you kind of sneak in and watch Jane Lynch do a moose howl, or ... What sound does a moose make?

LURIE: I don't know. [laughs]

POSEY: It was like a honk. I don't know.

LURIE: I don't think moose make any sound. Do they bellow?

POSEY: [laughs] Maybe. She gave the moose a sound, and it was so strange and funny. I'm surprised it wasn't in there. And people need that now! You want to see Jane Lynch make a moose sound to liven up our days, you know?

LURIE: Have you ever seen a moose?

POSEY: No, I haven't. Have you?

LURIE: Only once. It was amazing. Up in Massachusetts or New York somewhere.

POSEY: Were you out in the wild?

LURIE: No, I had a house I used to go up and paint in the summers, up in Stephentown, New York. I was driving back from visiting somebody in Albany; it was just twilight. I sort of heard it and thought, "What is that?" There was like a boom. I slammed on the breaks, and it was right in front of me ... Gigantic. When I was up in Maine doing Fishing With John, I thought we'd see moose all the time, but I never saw one. I've never seen a bear either. Have you ever seen a bear?

POSEY: No, I haven't seen a bear in person. I've seen deer. I have lots of woodchucks on my property. And bluebirds. Foxes.

LURIE: So there might be bear.

POSEY: Yeah, there are! But I don't think really big ones would live in that area. I like bears. I like bear people. I like bear-type men.

LURIE: There's a place where they have bear clubs. Do you know about this?

POSEY: Of course! I went to one with a girlfriend of mine ... What a happy bunch of adorable, loving gay bears. I hope I don't get in troublefor saying that.

LURIE: Yeah, I wonder. [laughs] I can't tell anymore.

POSEY: They're going to come for me. Are you kind of a bear guy?

LURIE: I don't know what that is. Does that mean just hairy?

POSEY: It's like hairy and ... nice? Like, a bit soft.

LURIE: No, I don't think I'm a bear person.

POSEY: I don't think so either. You're more of a lounge lizard.

LURIE: That would be one thing you could say. [both laugh] Should we talk about acting?

POSEY: Do you want to talk about acting?

LURIE: Well, I was wondering if you ever did anything that was really hard to do.

POSEY: Oh John, you don't know! It's all, like ... Yeah, it's hard.

LURIE: No, I mean, I don't mean to insult it like that. I know that with the fishing show people went, "Oh, that looks like it was so much fun and so easy," and I was just like, "You must be out of your fucking mind." It was so hard.

POSEY: [laughs] There's so much that's left up to chance, right?

LURIE: There's so much to do, and so much that can go wrong.

POSEY: I love Fishing With John so much.

LURIE: That was great to do.

POSEY: You should have a website that sells it.

LURIE: Sells the fishing show? But Criterion does it, so ... yeah.

POSEY: That's amazing. They're a big deal.

LURIE: They're a great company. If everybody was like Criterion, my God, we would have so many good movies. I mean, it's just the business of this stuff that stops me from doing it, because the people are so creepy.

POSEY: I would love to do something like Fishing With John. Did we talk about Agnès Varda when we were in San Francisco? Are you a big Agnès Varda fan?

LURIE: We talked about her. I didn't know who she was, and I made a note, and I never looked her up.

POSEY: You would like her. There are documentarians and then there are storytellers. We have a lot of stuff now where we don't really see the spirit or the essence of the person in the story, which is what you did in Fishing With John.

LURIE: Is it weird for you to do something that's for Netflix that won't be in the theaters?

POSEY: I haven't really given that much thought. It will be in the theaters for a few weeks.

Just Music-No Categories-Enjoy It!
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Reply #12 posted 10/17/16 7:43am

JoeBala

LURIE: Oh, it will?

POSEY: Yeah. But it had a different feel than a studio. There was one huge marketing day with pictures and video of all the mascots, and I was like, "Wow, a lot of people are working here." We've got, like, 50 people just in the publicity department. And that's kind of what we're up against—it's a lot more people around making decisions. I mean, everyone was nice; it just wasn't the intimacy we had on Waiting for Guffman. That's changed. I can see why you don't want to make movies.

LURIE: Well, it's not that I don't. I mean, there are so many things I want to do.

POSEY: You can make something with your iPhone.

LURIE: What I want to do more than anything is just avoid any creepiness from here on out. Like, if I put out a book, if I put out another album, if I make another TV show ... I've dealt with enough crap. It's just all out of balance somehow.

POSEY: Yeah. It's overshadowed, the art. We're in a really argumentative, black-and-white-thinking culture right now. There's not a lot of time to take things in. I mean, I loved your paintings, and you're doing that. You're like, "I'm going to paint, and if you like it, you can buy it." That was so inspiring to me [laughs] and inspired me to get to writing. I made an app this year that's really silly and fun, kind of silent-film-like. I did it with my friend Jack [Ferver] and Vinny DePonto, a magician, but he prefers "mentalist," and [multimedia artist and director] Rob Roth.

LURIE: How was the Woody Allen film? That's your second one with him?

POSEY: Yep. And I just saw it. I was a little breathless from it actually. It's very romantic, and Kristen Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg are just so lovely in it. And no one can write like him and portray these very grown-up feelings in this way. It's gorgeous to look at. Vittorio Storaro shot it, and this is the first feature he's shot in digital, and what he did with the digital effects is stunning. It looks like a painting. Didn't you meet Woody Allen once?

LURIE: Yeah. I was actually going to be in one of his movies.

POSEY: When was this?

LURIE: Oh, it was the '90s, the first Gulf War. It started that day. When was that? '91? But then it didn't happen. Did I tell you this story?

POSEY: I think you did but I, of course, don't remember.

LURIE: It was after Down by Law [1986]. I got all this attention and I had an agent, but I wasn't really interested in acting; I was just doing music. I was taking the first vacation in my life and my agent said, "Woody Allen wants to meet you." And I said, "Oh, can you send the script?" They said, "No, nobody can see the script." I said, "I'm out in Long Island." "Well, you're going to have to drive back in." And then you go, and you're in this gigantic room—I mean, the size of a basketball court. And it's everybody you can think of, people like Chris Elliott, Penn & Teller ... There are hundreds of people in the room, and you know who everybody is. And you wait and wait and wait. And then they call you into this little room the size of a bathroom, and it's him and the producer and the casting director, Juliet Taylor. And they're talking to you at the same time. So I pay attention to Woody. He says, "Well, we're going to make this movie, and we think it's going to be really interesting, and thank you for coming into see us." And that's it. And then they usher you out. So two years later, I get another call from my new agent, "Woody Allen wants to meet you," I said, "Oh forget it. I'm not going to bother." I told him what happened last time, so they got me this private meeting up in his apartment. And I wait out in the foyer [laughs], and I go in, and they're all talking to you at the same time exactly like the time before, and he says, "Well, we're going to make this movie, and we think it's going to be really interesting, and we just want to have a look at you, thank you for coming, bye." I'm like, "You know what? Don't ever call me again." And I start to walk out because I no longer wanted to have anything to do with him, and I am sure it was because of this that they gave me the part.

POSEY: [laughs] And what was it?

LURIE: They wouldn't tell me what the part was, and I ended up having this thing with my eye, and I had to go to the hospital, so I couldn't do it.

POSEY: I broke my ribs before I worked with Woody. Wow. That's a really funny story. What was the thing with your eye?

LURIE: I had a sinus infection, and then they went to drain it, and the guy punctured something in my eye so I almost lost my eye. So then I'm in the hospital, and I get those—remember Merlin Olsen flowers?

POSEY: Mmhmm. [laughs]

LURIE: The tiny metal thing of flowers—with a little note from Woody: "So sorry you're sick. Maybe we can work together another time."

POSEY: Aw.

LURIE: I had my friend come and take a photograph of me with the IVs in my arm, looking as sick as possible. I turned the photo into a postcard with a line on the back and sent it to him. It said, "Dear Woody, wish you were here." [Posey laughs] I never heard from him again.

POSEY: [laughs] I'm sure he loved that.

LURIE: I don't think so. I saw him at a Knicks game once, and his face sort of lit up in recognition, and then he quickly looked away. Anyway, this can't be in there.

POSEY: When are you back in New York?

LURIE: I don't know. I'll stay here for as long as I can. It's unbelievable here right now. It's just so gorgeous.

POSEY: So nice. Well, call me when you come back.


JOHN LURIE IS A GRAMMY-NOMINATED MUSICIAN, ARTIST, AND ACTOR, WHOSE WORK HAS BEEN EXHIBITED AT P.S. 1 CONTEMPORARY ARTS CENTER IN NEW YORK. HE LED THE GROUP THE LOUNGE LIZARDS AND WROTE, DIRECTED, AND STARRED IN THE TV SERIES FISHING WITH JOHN.

TOM HIDDLESTON

STEVEN KLEIN

09/28/16

What a time to be alive—especially if you happen to be one Tom Hiddleston, alumnus of the prestigious Dragon School, of Eton College, Cambridge, and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art; that Tom Hiddleston—star of stage and screen, recently removed from a romance with megawatt dream girl Taylor Swift.

For Hiddleston, life is so good that it comes with a few too-good-to-be-true conspiracy theories—the best of which goes something like, Hiddleston, at 35, is a front-runner to replace Daniel Craig as the next James Bond, and PR teams staged his relationship with Swift in order to elevate his star power. As if he needed the help.

Hiddleston's star has, of its own volition, and powered by his plentiful talents, been in perpetual rise since he was cast as the mythological baddie Loki, a recurring character in the ongoing Marvelverse of films, in Kenneth Branagh'sThor (2011). Cinephiles may likely remember the actor most fondly as the centuries-old vampire/rock'n'roller in Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive(2014) across from Tilda Swinton. But talent scouts would have noticed Hiddleston's work far earlier, in a variety of theatrical and television roles—alongside Branagh in the BBC's Wallander, for example—platforms where he has continued to thrive, all the way up to and including Susanne Bier's miniseries adaptation of John le Carré's The Night Manager this year, in which Hiddleston starred as a field agent, spying on the world's most sinister arms dealer.

Next year, on the strength of two monster-sized blockbusters (Thor: Ragnarokand Kong: Skull Island)—and, maybe, okay, that very buzzy relationship—Hiddleston's star will likely settle up there in the upper firmament where the A-listers live. Whether or not that ascent will bring him to Bond or beyond, the intrigue will likely follow him wherever he goes. In August, while filming in deepest underest Australia, Hiddleston got on the phone with his friend and Marvel-mate Benedict Cumberbatch to talk about the perils and potential power that comes along with the public eye.


BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH: Like all interviewers, I should first of all thank you, Tom, for taking this time.

TOM HIDDLESTON: [laughs] Thank you, Benedict. We should just thank each other for our time. For the rest of our lives.

CUMBERBATCH: And then, in typical British fashion, we should just apologize for everything as well.

HIDDLESTON: I'm sorry for disturbing you.

CUMBERBATCH: I'm more sorry than you.

HIDDLESTON: [laughs] How do you feel about ...

CUMBERBATCH: My role as a journalist?

HIDDLESTON: I feel conflicted. [laughs]

CUMBERBATCH: I feel my role here is much more as a real friend than a journalist. There will be no curveballs, I promise. But just to get us started, what is it like donning the hair and horns, working with Chris [Hemsworth] again, and working Down Under with Taika [Waititi], your director?

HIDDLESTON: Well, it's so exciting because I haven't played Loki for four years. The last time I wore the costume was at San Diego Comic-Con in 2013.

CUMBERBATCH: You're kidding me!

HIDDLESTON: The best thing about it, honestly, is working with Chris again. I first met him in Kenneth Branagh's house in England in 2009. We were mere children, in the very beginning of our acting journeys. We made an instant connection, and it's been extraordinary to share the ride with him—this mad journey with Marvel. Anthony Hopkins has been on set this week. And Taika Waititi is magnificent. He has found a way of honoring everything that came before but doing his own thing. And he's so funny. His films—and if you haven't, you must seek them out: What We Do in the Shadows, Hunt for the Wilderpeople—they have this combination of light-hearted, good humor and emotion. They're very moving. Everyone's really happy. Of course, we're just at the beginning.

CUMBERBATCH: How many more weeks have you got to go?

HIDDLESTON: I will be here until the beginning of November.

CUMBERBATCH: Gotcha, you've got a long way to go still. So you're having an Australian winter, which I imagine is pretty bloody lovely compared to an English winter.

HIDDLESTON: [laughs] That's what they keep saying. We're in on the coast of Queensland, and apart from the fact that the sun goes down very early and very quickly, it's been blue skies and sunshine. It's preferable for my Celtic complexion to their summer. I was here in exactly the same place in January doing Kong: Skull Island, which was lovely but incredibly hot.

CUMBERBATCH: That's a neat segue. Let's talk about that, since that was your last outing. You had pretty harsh conditions—I think it was Vietnam where you were filming in the jungle, and then a very hot Australian summer.

HIDDLESTON: Vietnam was unbelievable. I feel so lucky that I got to go with that production, being part of the traveling circus of a big film like that ... We shot in Oahu, Hawaii. We shot in Australia. And we shot in Northern Vietnam, in and around Hanoi, Ha Long Bay and Ninh Binh. And I think what's exciting about this is that there is landscape in Vietnam that very few people have ever seen. And the people I met in Vietnam were overwhelmingly excited. From the minute I landed—Jordan Vogt-Roberts, the director, Brie [Larson], Sam Jackson, Alex Garcia [the executive producer], and I gave a press conference in Hanoi that was hosted by the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam. It was a very big moment for the country. A lot of people we met had never seen production on this scale. In certain places, we helped build roads so that we could get the camera equipment in four-by-four trucks to and from where we needed to go. On the first day, Sam turned up for a very simple scene with very little dialogue, and there were thousands of people who turned up to watch. And then after about an hour they got bored and were like, "Oh, this isn't very exciting. Let's go back to what we were doing." But, for all of us, we were exposed to this extraordinary country of breathtaking beauty.

CUMBERBATCH: Oh, God, I'm not supposed to be writing this down, am I?

HIDDLESTON: Are you transcribing this later?

CUMBERBATCH: I'm just sort of staring out over a very European landscape imagining what you're describing, very far from pen and paper. I feel like I'm in the jungles of Vietnam. But so long as someone else has got that spelling and that's not my editorial responsibility, I'll be very happy. Well, Tom, you're an equally eloquent writer and actor. I remember reading a piece that you wrote, describing the first day of facing this icon of cinema, King Kong. You know, you've got a great reputation as a cineaste. But I was wondering if there was an era of film—if you had a time machine—that you could go back and be a part of? Whether it's musicals or neorealism in Italy post World War II or maybe a Spielberg film in the '80s?

HIDDLESTON: There are two great eras that I still revere. I'm bowled over in awe and admiration by the uninterrupted takes of the dancing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and Gene Kelly. There's no "We're going to fix it in post." I was watching a clip from Swing Time [1936] and ... What's his name in Singin' in the Rain [1952]? "Make 'Em Laugh"? Donald O'Connor! I watch those films in awe. That was a different kind of performance. And the second one is the '70s.

CUMBERBATCH: When the East Coast boys took over L.A. and the studio system? The Scorseses ...?

HIDDLESTON: Yeah. The emotional immediacy and realism and seriousness of cinema then. Taxi Driver [1976], Raging Bull [1980], Apocalypse Now [1979] ...

CUMBERBATCH: I completely agree. They were highly relevant, tackling massive, important issues of their time politically. They managed to find the golden balance between entertainment and art.

HIDDLESTON: That's also when Stanley Kubrick was doing his best work. 2001came out in 1968. Before the moon landing in '69, they felt they'd already been there because of what Kubrick had given them as an experience in the cinema. They actually invented materials with NASA, costuming and props, to have stuff that was ahead of its time. I mean, it's sci-fi driving the boat. And the films that we're making now are still informed by those films, by that extraordinary era. Although, we are guilty of golden-age thinking—an idea from Midnight in Paris.

CUMBERBATCH: At the same time, we acknowledge that, for the past ten years, we've been living in a golden age of long-form TV, which you are now a part of. When The Night Manager broke in the U.K., you could not move for people talking about it. It was just utterly riveting, and just another great jewel in the BBC's crown. How was that, working with Susanne Bier?

HIDDLESTON: I just loved the experience of making it. It always felt as though we were making a six-hour feature. We storyboarded it and scheduled it as one 360-page screenplay, with one director. Susanne was our captain. We shot in Switzerland, London, Devon, Morocco, and Majorca, in that order. It felt like the lion's share of the series took place in Morocco, in Marrakesh, where our Cairo interiors were, and where we shot the Arab Spring riots. We spent seven weeks in Marrakesh and we had to get through so many pages per day, in which I was featured in every frame, jumping between identities—I was Jonathan Pine and Andrew Birch and Thomas Quince and Jack Linden. Someone asked me recently what was it like to go back to television, and it didn't feel like that. The difference is greater for the audience than it is for us, I think. And, strangely enough, speaking of the '70s, The Night Manager was first optioned by Sydney Pollack [in the early '90s], and he commissioned a film script from Robert Towne. Finally the rights went back to le Carré and his sons Simon and Stephen Cornwell. But maybe there is a world where that story is better over six hours than over two. I don't know. How do you feel? You're someone who, for many, many years, has concurrently done television and film. We were riding horses the day after the first episode of Sherlock aired on the BBC—you were falling off horses, training forWar Horse [2011]. I remember when Sherlock became the extraordinary phenomenon that it has become. And since then, you've done three seasons?

CUMBERBATCH: We've done four seasons. And one Christmas special ...

HIDDLESTON: And 12 Years a Slave [2013] and The Imitation Game [2014] and a million other things that I'm not thinking about. It just doesn't stop.

CUMBERBATCH: I am, thankfully, now stopping and have time to talk to you, my friend, which is really nice, even though our words are being recorded and printed. We should have a conversation when we hang up. Sorry about that, but some things are off bounds. I feel that TV and film feed off each other well. It's more in the perception of the viewer than it is of the actor. There are very specific demands, though, in television, and you notice the budget constrictions. It's the time constraint and a purse constraint more than anything else that you notice. But the ambition of the writing and, hopefully, the delivery of it gets better and better because we want to outdo ourselves to keep ahead of a very expectant and hungry public.

HIDDLESTON: What do you think about revisiting a character—like Sherlock or Loki—as opposed to making up a character for the first time?

CUMBERBATCH: I think you have to approach it with the same level of invention. There are things that are a given, that you've already established, and obviously, visually, certain iconic things that can't be completely removed, like a certain hat or a certain coat in my case. I know you battled with the horns, and I wanted to talk to you about that if you're allowed to talk about that. It dies when you don't feel the reinventing. It's interesting. I genuinely enjoy it. I think I wouldn't do it if the writing wasn't so good, if I wasn't being asked to do different things with the character. It really depends on what the obstacles and objectives are. If they're very interesting, then you can bring new tactics to play. And I think the characters are supposed to be an open book, blank canvas. With Loki, the shape-shifting god of mischief can be a number of things. And a consulting detective who suddenly can do kung fu and speak a different language or do sign language ... There are all these untapped resources. As far as going in to do a day's work, I like the familiarity of it. I wonder if it would feel the same revisiting a classic role onstage. Like, if I was to do Hamlet again somewhere else, what that would feel like? Because that's the same lines, those are the same predicaments, the same characters you're playing with. Nothing has changed; it's the context that's changed. Do you have a spiritual dimension to your daily life? If you're hitting problems in a day, do you have a routine? A mantra or something?

HIDDLESTON: You've got to do something, even if it's just to kick-start the day. I use music. And running. I find that, when I'm working, if I start the day with a run—outside, not in a gym, but just me out there in the elements, with only my own legs to propel me forward ... It's something to do with just being in the world and getting out of my own head.

CUMBERBATCH: Are you disciplined about getting to bed as well as getting up early to do that exercise?

HIDDLESTON: You have to be. You can't function. And it varies from job to job.On Kong: Skull Island, we were always outside. My character was a former SAS tracker, so he's sort of an ultimate athlete—I would always be able to just, like, run around and get my blood up if I was feeling sluggish.

CUMBERBATCH: I read Hugh Laurie praising you to the heavens, saying your energy kept the whole unit ticking at times. But do you ever get in trouble with makeup and costume? I remember seeing pictures of you running with Chris at some point in Iceland. And, goddammit, it's only that English smile and charm that you have, that would let you get away with the murder that you must normally get from your makeup artists and your dresser.

HIDDLESTON: [laughs] I don't know, it's not for everyone. It's just how I do it. And the thing about running is, if I run in the morning before work, I feel like I'm ahead of the day. Whatever work I've done in terms of preparation or research or thinking about the scene or the character, it all kind of crystallizes in that moment in the morning. And sometimes I have the best ideas then. I remember when I was doing "Henry IV-Part 1" for The Hollow Crown—a series you've also starred in, brilliantly—we had very little time, and we were about to shoot this central scene between Henry IV and Prince Hal, where Hal is called into his father's court and publicly reprimanded and humiliated for being away with Falstaff. It is an extraordinary two-hander. And King Henry IV has most of the speaking—in this case, Jeremy Irons. And I remember thinking after a certain line that he should hit me. This was January of 2012, and it was on my run through the snow at five o'clock in the morning when I had that idea—that he should just slap me across the face. And that is literally the moment at which Hal is awakened to the weight of his responsibility as the future king. All the weight of this poetry and Shakespeare's words. But it comes with a slap.

CUMBERBATCH: It's a great moment. But it's the same thing, I think, whether it's breathing or meditation or yoga. And running is a great way of doing it. There's something so mobile about you. Not just physically, not the running, but you're very attentive to what's in front of you. Do you have a fear of anything that could get in the way of that? I mean, it's like asking somebody who's seemingly invincible what they fear most. Don't feel burdened to answer. Tell me to fuck off if you want. You can, because I'm your friend.

HIDDLESTON: Thanks, friend.

CUMBERBATCH: Should I tell you mine while you think of your answer?

HIDDLESTON: Tell me yours and I'll tell you mine.

CUMBERBATCH: Passing time. And that is purely from becoming a father, wanting to have a little bit more of it every day, having something outside of me that's more important than me to focus on. That was a rude awakening, the minute he was born. And every time I hold him, to look at something that new and look at this 40-year-old me in the mirror going, "Wow, I really want to be around to see your children."

HIDDLESTON: Mine is similar. Mine is regret. I fear looking back and wishing I had done things I hadn't. It's interesting, I read this extraordinary article about a book, many years ago, by an Australian nurse who is a specialist in palliative care. It was her job to help people on their way out, to ease their pain. So she spent a lot of time with people in their last days and weeks. And she felt so moved by the accumulated experience, because she heard people say such similar things. Weirdly enough, at the top of the list was, "I wish I hadn't worked so hard."

CUMBERBATCH: That's quite big of you to face up to.

HIDDLESTON: A family completely redresses that balance, but how do you deal with that realization in your life? Are you trying to find more time now between projects?

CUMBERBATCH: I'm making more time. And, maybe it's just getting older, but I don't want to miss things. We have the most extraordinary privilege of doing this job, but sometimes being away, on location, I feel like I'm away for much of my own life. I want to be better at staying connected.

HIDDLESTON: The other five regrets from the book by the Australian nurse were: I wish I hadn't worked so hard; I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me; I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings; I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends; and I wish I had let myself be happier. It's an extraordinary list of getting in your own way, isn't it?

CUMBERBATCH: That's a very good checklist for you. That's a very good checklist for me. I think for anyone who works a lot and who's often away from home. I think the weirdness of our job, assuming these imaginary circumstances as someone else in a fictitious world, which you then have to talk about and narrativize in publicity. That is a form of projection that's not all of you—it couldn't be because otherwise there's just nothing left that you do come home to. But how do you get back to that person you are when you've been in public? Is there something in particular that chews you back into who is Tom? Is it home? Is it family? Is it friends? Is it exercise?

HIDDLESTON: I just go home. It's that literal and metaphorical. To London. When I finished The Night Manager, I realized that, for 75 days, I had lived more hours per day as Jonathan Pine than I had spent as myself.

CUMBERBATCH: It does have an effect on you, don't you think?

HIDDLESTON: Yeah. You're putting yourself into this other person's shoes. The best thing I could have done was exactly what I did.
I flew home and I went to my sister's engagement party. I was surrounded by family. And they were so reassuring. And then I just, I live such a boring life. I just potter about, read books I've meant to read but haven't had time.

CUMBERBATCH: I've stayed in your house, remember?

HIDDLESTON: [laughs] Yes. I just potter about and catch up, go for coffee, and read the paper and hang out with my mom and dad.

CUMBERBATCH: You've done wonderful work for UNICEF. I've read what you wrote about your experience on the fact-finding mission about two or three years ago in Guinea, Africa—that sounds like it was a very important formative experience for you. Do you find there's also a responsibility that now you have this public voice?

HIDDLESTON: My personal investment in the character Pine was huge, and Hugh Laurie, who loved The Night Manager and had loved it for 20 years, has gone on record, identifying Pine as a lost soul looking for a cause. And by a simple twist of fate, the week before I was due to start The Night Manager, I went to South Sudan with UNICEF to make a documentary about the effects of the civil war that is taking place in that country, even now. The effect on the innocent children. South Sudan is the youngest nation on the planet. It declared independence from Sudan in 2011. And in mid-December 2013, the president and vice president fell into a serious disagreement, and it divided the nation along ethnic lines. I've made a documentary, which isn't yet released, about the recruitment of child soldiers, which is a contravention of human rights. And I saw a country which was heavily militarized, and I asked myself where did these weapons come from? There is so much poverty and desperation in South Sudan, and yet each side is militarily equipped. How did this come about? And I came back from South Sudan having witnessed, firsthand, the violence from which a man like Richard Roper in The Night Manager profits. And I remember having dinner with John le Carré and telling him about South Sudan, about how powerless I felt, how helpless it seemed that this poor young nation and its inhabitants are being torn apart by a civil war. And so, in a sense, Pine's moral anger belongs to me, too. And le Carré leaned forward and just said, "Use it. Use it." The world I've grown into at the moment is becoming increasingly more disturbing and unsettling. Everywhere there is inequality, everywhere there is division, and I worry about it. I think everybody does. I wish we could be decent to each other. And I've thought a lot about whether I have a responsibility to stand up for what I believe in because I have a platform, because I have a voice. There is a red line where you do have to stand up for these children. They haven't asked for this. And, by the way, I am so profoundly aware of my lack of skill to make any material difference. I am not a doctor. I can't influence foreign policy. I can't build schools. I can't chemically engineer the protein paste that helps people with acute malnutrition. But I can talk about it, and so can you. There's an extraordinary surgeon called David Nott, who went out to Aleppo in 2013, before it was in the news, and treated children and victims of the war in Syria. It was amazing to hear of his bravery, and I suppose, as someone who's been asked by UNICEF to be an ambassador, I feel a responsibility to stand up for those children. Because nobody is. So I do, and it's a delicate balance because I'm an actor. And yet somehow, we're given these platforms to speak from and I've been very inspired by people who have had the bravery and courage to do that long before me.

CUMBERBATCH: It's very easy to be cynical about any kind of interference in things that are beyond our skill set, like you say. We're not UNICEF volunteers or staff in refugee camps. We're not policemen or politicians. But, I suppose, after a certain amount of involvement or research or an affiliation with something, we can make a spotlight shine on people who do do that work, like the people who work for UNICEF on the ground. And that is doing a good thing. I'd much rather be criticized for that than be silent in the face of such extraordinary suffering, which is painfully obvious to all. Whether it be in Syria or in Sudan.

HIDDLESTON: I'm very proud of it.

CUMBERBATCH: You should be.

HIDDLESTON: Once you've seen certain things, the moral compunction drives you to act. And having seen what I've seen in South Sudan, there's no way I can't talk about it. I've mentioned this to you before, but it reminds me of that extraordinary Nobel address by Harold Pinter where he talked about the distinction between truth as a dramatist and truth as a citizen. "Truth in drama is elusive. You never quite find it, but the search for it is compulsive." He says, "Sometimes you feel you have the truth of the moment in your hand and then it slips through your fingers and is lost." But as a citizen, you have a duty to ask what is true and what is false. I remember watching him deliver that, feeling very inspired.

CUMBERBATCH: I agree. How could you deny that impetus, having witnessed it firsthand? I can't even imagine what effect that must have on you. And there's another weight of us being in the public eye, which is this presumption that, because your work and your promotion work is very public, your private life should be, too. And, without getting into a huge debate, I just want to say that I'm not going to ask questions about my friend's personal life just because there are unsolicited photographs of him and a certain someone, in a relationship or together. I'm not going to get into that. So that door is closed, dear reader.

HIDDLESTON: [chuckles] Thank you.

CUMBERBATCH: You're welcome. I know you'd do the same for me. And, going back to this responsibility of being a public figure, you said you felt really grateful for the things that came with that responsibility, these extraordinary experiences. Are there particular thoughts about experiences in your childhood, adolescence, twenties, and now your thirties, that you are grateful for?

HIDDLESTON: I feel so grateful to my mother and father for a happy childhood. There are things I now understand that they were able to give me that are very special. And I think the early years, the first decade of your life, is the most formative in a way. Other than that, I'm grateful for people who have believed in me when others might not have.

CUMBERBATCH: Do you have a drama guru at school or a contemporary who directed you for whom you are particularly grateful?

HIDDLESTON: There was a teacher called Charles Milne. I did a production ofJourney's End at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1999. I was just about to go to Cambridge, and he wrote me a card afterwards that said, "Go to Cambridge and enjoy it. Jump in and enjoy the ride, the experience of it. But maybe on the other side, think about being an actor." And those moments where someone bolsters your self-belief like that, they are very, very rare. And I'm grateful to Kenneth Branagh. He's done so much for me. At a particular time in my life, he believed in me in a very material way. I'll always be grateful to him for that. I even feel grateful for the failures.

CUMBERBATCH: That's pretty good! But I think you've done very well. I wish I'd seen that production of Journey's End. I think you would have killed it.

HIDDLESTON: I think I saw you act before you even knew who I was.

CUMBERBATCH: When was that?

HIDDLESTON: Hedda Gabler. As Tesman. I remember it very well.

CUMBERBATCH: Oh, gosh. Well, I met you not long after that, I think. Because you were going off to do the first Thor film, and I remember there was a party. I won't mention whose party it was, but anyways, point is that we just had a social meet-up and I was like, "God, this guy is flying!" You'd just finished Othello, I think.

HIDDLESTON: How did you feel about joining the Marvel universe?

CUMBERBATCH: I felt it was all about the part rather than everything else. I've been to Comic-Con, and it's a very nice way to give back to the fans that drive these things. It was quite scary. I felt like Pink Floyd. It's just like, "Hello, hi," after the fans are all screaming. That side of it is just phenomenal, and it makes me giggle, and I don't know whether I'll get used to that. I can't wait to see how it expands the universe. I'm also part of your crew! It's an amazing cast of actors. And it's the most fun hard work you'll ever do, I think, as an actor. They really know how to treat you right. And the material is challenging, witty, and a lot of fun to do. Doctor Strange is a complex, funny, but exciting character.

HIDDLESTON: My friend, thanks for doing this.

CUMBERBATCH: Not at all. Take care.

HIDDLESTON: And, happy birthday!

CUMBERBATCH: Thank you very much. I will wish you sweet dreams there on the far side of the world. See you back in London, then.


BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH IS A STAGE, FILM, AND TELEVISION ACTOR. HE WILL STAR AS DOCTOR STEPHEN STRANGE IN MARVEL'S DOCTOR STRANGE NEXT MONTH.

Just Music-No Categories-Enjoy It!
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Reply #13 posted 10/17/16 7:49am

JoeBala

ANG LEE

BRIGITTE LACOMBE

07/28/09

Taking Woodstock is not a movie about music. Director Ang Lee is very clear on that. There is no vintage footage of Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, or Jimi Hendrix playing to a sea of mindzonked hippies. What Lee’s latest film offers instead is an exuberant psychedelic comedy about a young man who, in trying to save his parents’ upstate New York motel, ends up hitting on a scheme that results in a threeday music festival so iconic that even those of us born years after 1969 still feel ashamed to have missed. Taking Woodstock, which stars Demetri Martin as the entrepreneurial son and a ragtag ensemble cast that includes Emile Hirsch as a shellshocked Vietnam veteran and Liev Schrieber as a guntoting drag queen, might seem like rather light fare for the Taiwanese director known for intense dramas like The Ice Storm (1997) and Brokeback Mountain (2005). But Lee proves as agile in a muddy pasture as he is on dangerous suburban ice or homoerotic western horseback. What’s really impressive is that a man who seems haunted by his own Chinese family traditions has been able to capture the nightmares and dreams of American culture like no director since Robert Altman. Schrieber talks to the master filmmaker about how and why he has been able to produce such haunting movies—and why Woodstock means a lot more to the world than simply a rather vivid acid flashback.

Watch Taking Woodstock trailer:

LIEV SCHREIBER: I heard Cannes went well.

ANG LEE: Yes, people around the world seem to be enjoying the film. Except some Americans feel they should see the actual stage. We use the title Taking Woodstock, so they think they’re going to see Janis Joplin and all that. They expect a documentary. So we really have to work to tell people that this is not a concert movie.

SCHREIBER: My friends who were at Cannes saw the film, and they said it was very well received.

LEE: There was applause after your first scene. The jokes come so fast, I figured the audience couldn’t catch all of them. But when you say your last line, they get a chance to applaud and laugh. That was the highlight of the film.

SCHREIBER: There’s really nothing as amusing as a hopelessly unattractive, 225-pound drag queen, is there? [both laugh] Velma was a Korean War vet, and I’ve been thinking about a conversation you and I had, I think during the second week of filming, about the significance of Korea and its relationship to Woodstock as an American event. With all of the saberrattling that’s been going on in North Korea recently, I remembered having that conversation with you about the political and cultural significance of the Korean War, which really is an undercovered war.

LEE: To me, there are two things. When I grew up, in Taiwan, the Korean War was seen as a good war, where America protected Asia. It was sort of an extension of World War II. And it was, of course, the peak of the Cold War. People in Taiwan were generally proAmerican. The Korean War made Japan. And then the Vietnam War made Taiwan. There is some truth to that. So when this hippie thing started to come up, I remember admiring the Americans. They were far out. The music was brilliant. It was pretty cool. On the other hand, you feel this insecurity—like any conservative view—that if America decided to go the other way, what would happen to us? Where is the protection, the foundation? So there is some of that tension in the film. And it’s great because your character was also a bridge between the members of that antiestablishment generation, and those parents who were World War II heroes. You’re in the middle of it, like a big brother. And so was the character Billy, who is a Vietnam veteran. He is an angel to everybody. I needed good actors who could be functional.

SCHREIBER: [laughs] And I thought you hired me because of my legs! I didn’t think it had anything to do with acting.

LEE: It was that, too.

SCHREIBER: One of my fondest memories of filming is when you readjusted my prosthesis so that it sat properly in my ladies’ underwear. [both laugh] Don’t think I’ll ever forget that one! People say to me, “You ever work with Ang Lee?” Oh, yes, I’ve worked with Ang Lee.

LEE: Meticulous. About some things.

SCHREIBER: It’s really remarkable how eclectic your films are. But there are some common themes and one of them—even in Taking Woodstock—is the theme of family dramas. In particular the relationships between fathers and sons. Does that hold a particular significance for you?

LEE: I think so. The way I grew up, women didn’t matter as much, as you might guess. It was all about the father. My father was the center of the family, and everyone tried to please him. After doing about three movies about fathers and sons, I realized that there is a family tree in the Chinese tradition represented by this patriarch character. Everyone, even the women, work to preserve that social structure.

SCHREIBER: You had told me around 2004, after Hulk, that you were considering getting out of film, retiring.

LEE: Yeah, I was tired. I was beat and spent, basically. And my father never encouraged me. Even when I got the Oscar, he never encouraged me. So even though I had gotten an Oscar and had made some movies, now it was time to do something for real.

SCHREIBER: [both laugh] Yeah.

LEE: And he was right, I had just had enough, physically and mentally and perhaps spiritually. And he said, “You’re only 49. Are you gonna teach, finally?” But I said, “No, I’m not gonna give it up.” That was huge.

SCHREIBER: Teaching was a really respectable profession for him, right? He was a principal?

LEE: Yeah. “Get a degree and teach in universities, and be respectable.” He actually had higher hopes for me than that, but I never fulfilled them, I just wanted to make movies. Anyway, I said I wanted to retire and he said, “Are you gonna teach?” I said no. He said, “What are you gonna do, are you gonna set an example for your kids? Put on a helmet and keep on going, go make a movie.” That’s when I decided to make Brokeback Mountain. Two weeks after he said that, he passed away. He was in good health, but while he was sleeping, he passed away.

SCHREIBER: Do you think he finally came to terms with the notion that what you’re doing is actually a wonderful kind of teaching?

LEE: I couldn’t tell [laughs] A Chinese father is a mystery. I couldn’t tell.

SCHREIBER: For me, that’s what’s so remarkable about your career as a filmmaker. It’s so closely observed in terms of family history and this idea of tradition and culture. But there is also this idea of choice. The choice of generosity and compassion. The choice that shows characters and the world in a complex but human light. I think for me that is really the gift of your films.

LEE: Well, thank you. Really, you’ve always asked me very difficult questions.

SCHREIBER: Really? Well the truth was, I wasn’t there to act. I was there to watch. You know, they said to me, “Ang would maybe like to meet with you about this Taking Woodstock movie,” and I said, “Jesus, this Ang Lee guy, I don’t get him. You can never predict what he’s gonna do next. Now he’s doing comedy.” But I went in and I thought, You know, this is gonna be the one opportunity I get to watch this guy work. And I think the things that have defined my career as an actor and as an artist and, in some respects, as a filmmaker have been the opportunities I’ve had to watch great people work. You did this film right after Lust, Caution [2007]. That’s a big departure.

LEE: Yes, I needed levity.

SCHREIBER: That film was so emotionally intense. I thought, Wow, these films are really night and day.

LEE: Well there is night and day in life. [laughs] As artists, we like night more than day sometimes.

SCHREIBER: Someone asked me a month ago how I pick my roles. I was so tired, and when I get tired, I get honest. [laughs] I said that I think I’m reactionary in my choices. In other words, I’ll do one kind of thing, and then as a reaction to that project, I’ll do something else.

LEE: That’s exactly what it is. I tend to feel that we’re slaves to these roles. They play us, we don’t play them. They choose us. And sometimes I am so tired of being enslaved by those obsessions. It’s hard to talk about . . .

SCREIBER: You know I talked to Naomi [Watts] and she told me about Heath [Ledger]’s experience working with you. And other actors I’ve talked to also say, “Ang doesn’t say much.” So I was completely prepared for you to be this very stoic, silent director.

LEE: Was I stoic?

SCHREIBER: I didn’t think so at all! First of all, I found you remarkably goofy. [both laugh] That could have been all the prosthesis adjusting and all that, but I thought that you were very clear about what you were after emotionally. This is a dangerous thing to say, but I feel a need to say it: It’s not very often that directors feel safe relinquishing control. More often than not, directors don’t fully understand everything that’s involved in creating a character. They shouldn’t necessarily be blamed for that. There’s so much on their plate that they are not really in touch with the process of the actor, so they just expect the actor to deliver. But I found in watching you, even from the perspective of miseenscène, that you approached scenes emotionally. Would you say that that’s true?

LEE: I think so. There is more than one way to make movies. To me it has to be led by emotion. That’s the only thing I could trust when making a movie. Emotions serve characters’ purposes. That is their motivation. Or at least it’s my safety net. The times you just don’t know what to do, every day people are asking you hundreds of questions: what should we do about this? The that? If we can’t do this, what about that? You have to have something centered around you, and to me, that’s always emotion. I’m an emotional person; maybe I rely on it. Maybe I’m melodramatic, I don’t know.

SCHREIBER: [both laugh] All of the above. As an actor, emotional truth is the safety net. You wanna give a great performance, but at the end of the day, when you get lost, you fall back on the emotional currency.

LEE: At times I can’t help going for visual comfort. Sometimes a picture fills up your head, and you try to move the actors around to make that visual statement. But it’s tricky if an actor like you asks a difficult question. That would make me work too hard to answer. [laughs]

SCHREIBER: But I found that even with visual statements like that scene that we shot at the lake, with all of the skinnydippers, even that you approached emotionally. I watched you set up that shot that basically moved from us to the naked swimmers. You kept trying to pick up the wind in the trees. It felt heroic. So whatever questions I had about playing it were sort of being answered by the environment.

LEE: You can see how you fit into the visual because you’re talented and experienced. Most actors can’t see that. They are challenged by their feelings. It’s very hard. Sometimes you have to use all of your authority just to say, “Trust me.”

SCHREIBER: What was it like working with someone like Demitri [Martin] who didn’t have a tremendous amount of acting experience and really put himself in your hands for this role?

LEE: There really isn’t an answer for that except to say that it is like religion. Once you commit to it, you see life in movie theaters. You choose a certain path that you think is the way to make the movie you want. You go on that adventure. Once you commit, you just have to have faith.

SCHREIBER: That’s it.

LEE: You have to find the movie somehow with him, or on him, or from him, or on top of him . . . whatever. In the process I think he became quite a good actor.

SCHREIBER: It’s amazing, the parallels between faith and theater. It’s funny because when you read a script as an actor, sometimes you think, Oh, that’s not gonna work. But the truth of the matter is, if you believe in anything strongly enough, it all works! It’s all relevant! [laughs]

LEE: Well, to be honest with you, sometimes good acting is an obstacle to the truth. Like when you said that when you’re tired, you tend to be honest. The better you are, the harder it is for me to break you down, to make you honest. Because you know how to act, but sometimes you forget to react. New actors don’t have that problem. They have a problem with sophistication, of delivering dramatic layers. And they can be tense. Faith helps relieve the tension. My main objective was to intensely relax him, so to speak.

SCHREIBER: That’s why we were doing all that tai chi in the first couple of weeks. [both laugh]

LEE: Anything I could think of . . . You’re called an actor for a good reason. It’s the action, it’s not the result that we’re after. It’s just enjoying the action for no purpose, which is a very hard thing to do. And I think that was what was great about the bands playing at the original Woodstock. The stage was hastily put together, the logistics were horrible, and it was dirty. Musicians complained. But the heart of just being there, that’s what made Woodstock so precious.

SCHREIBER: Being available to something, opening your heart to something.

LEE: Yeah, you wanna be there and get together with everybody and share the experience, just act without knowing the result.

SCHREIBER: It is amazing that it happened on such a grand scale in this country.

LEE: I don’t know that it would happen again. [laughs]

SCHREIBER: What do you think about Obama?

LEE: I hope it works out. These days, people are inspired not without skepticism and there’s not the same type of innocence as there was back in 1969. It’s different. I think people are more sober now.

SCHREIBER: It’s true. But I have to say that, at least for me, and perhaps for my generation, it’s the first time, honestly, I think that I’ve felt sincerely patriotic in a long time.

LEE: My son skipped the first day of the second semester to go to the inauguration. He called us: “I’m there!” [both laugh] “How did you get there?” “Oh it’s a long story.” He said his friend talked him into it. His friend said, “It’s like going to Woodstock.” You have to participate in a historical moment.

SCHREIBER: You have to be in the moment.

LEE: Whether you see the stage or not, you have to be there. As a parent, and as a citizen of the world, I just hope this Obama thing works. If we screw up again, what’s gonna happen to the world? Like, please make this thing work!

Liev Schreiber is a Tony awardwinning actorwho lives in New York.

NARGES RASHIDI

MATT HOLYOAK

10/13/16

PHOTOS: MATT HOLYOAK/KAYTE ELLIS AGENCY. STYLING: NIC JOTTKANDT. HAIR: DAVIDE BARBIERI/CAREN USING BUMBLE & BUMBLE. MAKEUP: ROBERTA KEARSEY USING MAC COSMETICS. PHOTO ASSISTANT: LUKE WELLER. STYLING ASSISTANT: ALISSON RODRIGUES. RETOUCHING: THE SHOEMAKER'S ELVES.


Born in Iran, raised in small-town Germany, and based in Los Angeles, actor Narges Rashidi is comfortably trilingual—quadrilingual, even, if you count her "film Turkish." Her most recent film, Under the Shadow, is equally international: the debut feature from British-Iranian director Babak Anvari, it was filmed in Farsi with Jordan standing in for Iran in the 1980s. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, and is Britain's official submission for the "Best Foreign Language Film" Oscar.

Released last Friday, Under the Shadow follows Shideh, a woman living in an Iran under siege towards the end of the Iran-Iraq War. Shideh begins the film in a bad a place: she recently lost her mother, with whom she was very close, and is denied re-entry to medical school because of some political activism in her youth. She resents her husband, a doctor, for the privileges he has been afforded as a man in a patriarchal society, and has little patience for her young daughter, Dorsa, who is convinced that there are malevolent spirits (djinn) haunting their apartment. The film has been called a "horror" movie, but would more accurately be described as a lean, suspenseful thriller about a woman increasingly closed in on by everything around her.


EMMA BROWN: How did you first hear about Under the Shadow and get involved?

NARGES RASHIDI: It happened in a very unusual way. A friend of mine, a fellow actor, Navid Negahban, who used to play Abu Nazir in Homeland, told me about the script. He said that he'd read a script and it was so amazing and there was a part for me. It's the debut feature of a very young director, but he had shot this short film called Two and Two, and we watched it on YouTube together. I watched that before reading the script or anything, and I was like, "Oh my god, this guy is so smart." The short film says so much with so little, and I just loved it. Time passed and I didn't think about it; it just went away. Months later I got an email from Navid introducing me to the producers. I Skyped with Babak Anvari, the director of the movie. He was in London, I was in L.A., and we chatted a lot about the book and my view of it. I met with the producers again in Berlin at the Berlin Film Festival and they flew me to London. On my way back to the airport, Babak sent me a message saying he would love for me to be his Shideh, and that was that.

BROWN: I read that you didn't have that much rehearsal time before you started filming.

RASHIDI: Once or twice a week or, [Babak and I] would jump on Skype and talk about the book and the character and the backstory. He would send me music and books that the character would read—her political view. For me, that made it so easy to get into Shideh's head and the way she thinks. Then I would go back and do my own research and meditate on certain things in her life and past. When we were in Jordan, we knew we only had 21 days and a lot on our schedule, so we weren't trying to figure that out. We didn't have time for it.

Also, I read the script in English. I speak Farsi, but I can't write Farsi or read Farsi, and the movie is shot in Farsi, so my whole family—my father and my sister-in-law—I made them sit down and rewrite the script for me phonetically so I would be able to read the dialogue in Farsi. My dad and I would Skype everyday—my dad in Germany and me in L.A.—and we would go through the script so I'd get the words right. I left Iran when I was very little and we spoke Farsi at home all the time, but it's so different.

BROWN: Were they excited that they could be involved in your work?

RASHIDI: Yeah, they were so sweet. They're always so helpful. I think it was so exciting for them—me making a movie that's in their language.

BROWN: You said you left Iran when you were quite young. Was the time period of the film something that you knew a lot about, or had talked a lot about? Or was it something that your family didn't really want to talk about because it was so traumatizing.

RASHIDI: Iran has gone through a lot of changes with the revolution and lots of new laws, and the war was pretty traumatizing for a lot of people. Everybody has their own stories, but my parents tried to protect me. They're extremely strong, unbreakable people, so I did not feel it while I was living it. I think a part of me for sure has tried to put it away and forget about it. We didn't really talk a lot about it. Not at all, actually, to be honest with you. I have some memories. I remember when the war was going on—it had already been going on for a long time—I fell asleep on my mother's lap and I woke up because of some sounds. I asked her, "What happened?" and she was like, "Nothing. Just go back to sleep. It was just some bombs." [laughs] Things became so normal. Or when we would go down to the cellar to protect ourselves, she would turn on the music and start dancing so we, the children, wouldn't be afraid. These are memories that I have. If I look at pictures from back in the day of all the grown ups, they all look really drained and exhausted. That was something I used a lot for my character—just the visuals. I went to a photo exhibition in L.A. while I was preparing the part. When you look at pictures of people during that time, they all have this exhaustion in their face and their eyes.

It was cathartic to go back to my roots. When when I moved to Germany, I tried to become so German. You learn a new language, you look different, you wear different clothes. As a child you want to be accepted and integrated into this new world. I was so busy doing that that I completely forgot where I come from and where my roots are, and that was a very, very special, beautiful experience—sometimes also a painful experience to go back and relive that in a way.

BROWN: Have you parents seen the film?

RASHIDI: Yes, they have.

BROWN: Was it also cathartic for them?

RASHIDI: I did not ask, but they loved the movie. My mom said she felt herself in it. I guess subconsciously she must have been my muse. There are little things I felt like my mother was a big part of.

BROWN: When did you first become interested in acting?

RASHIDI: Very, very early. I remember one scene in my life where it was just my mother and me in the living room waiting for the others to arrive. My mom had to make dinner, and I just started crying for no reason. She was like, "Oh my god, what's wrong? What happened?" and I just started laughing and said, "Nothing, I just wanted to see if I could act." That stuck with me. Also, I grew up in a very little town in Germany called Bad Hersfeld. It's a very beautiful, cute town, but there's really nothing going on—it's six o'clock at night and everything closes and that's that. But [Bad Hersfeld] has a beautiful, gorgeous, and very well-known summer amphitheater. I would always go up there and watch the actors and go see the plays. I think that's where it all started.

BROWN: When did you decide you wanted to become a professional actor?

RASHIDI: I used to dance. There was a time when I wanted to do musicals and sing, but I was very young—I was 16. Then I got scared when I got accepted to school [for it] and I said, "Okay, I'm going to wait another two to three years—finish high school and then decide." And when I finished high school, I didn't want to do musicals anymore. I got more serious. My dad drove me all over the country to audition for these acting schools and once I had [gotten in], he told me, "So now you know you can do it, why don't you just study economics?" [laughs] I freaked out and I told him, "You don't take me seriously!" I started crying and drama, drama, and then he got it. He knew that there was no way he could stop me. Ever since, he's been very, very supportive.

BROWN: What was your first paid job as an actor?

RASHIDI: It was an American production, shot in Berlin, called Aeon Flux, starring Charlize Theron. I was jumping when I got the call that I got the part. I've got, like, 11 seconds of screen time in it, and my part's name is "Pregnant Woman." I give birth. [laughs] That was my first part. I must have stared at [Charlize Theron] for half an hour with my mouth open because she's so beautiful. There were 300 people on set and it was just crazy.

BROWN: That must be quite stressful as well.

RASHIDI: I was so young and naive and just so excited to be there and have this part that I didn't even feel any of that stress. I was just happy. [laughs]


UNDER THE SHADOW IS OUT NOW IN SELECT THEATERS.

SASHA LANE: STAR RISING

VICTORIA STEVENS

09/30/16

SASHA LANE IN NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 2016. PORTRAIT: VICTORIA STEVENS. TOP AND SKIRT: PHELAN.


Despite the oft-mythologized "plucked from obscurity" origin story at Schwab's or Schraft's or a stretch of Sunset Boulevard, Sasha Lane's fortuitous discovery happened on a Florida beach. Lane, away from home in Texas and partying during spring break in Panama City, was approached by Andrea Arnold, the iconoclastic British director of Fish Tank and Wuthering Heights, as the last, and most crucial component of her next film, American Honey. Arnold's sprawling, sun-drenched saga of a road movie is her first in the U.S., and a kaleidoscopic, freewheeling account of class, sex, and youth. A group of feral runaways crisscross the Midwest in a white van shilling magazine subscriptions, but it is through Star (Lane), an 18-year-old girl grappling with her place in the world, that the narrative takes shape.

Star joins the crew after encountering the scraggly rat-tailed Jake (Shia LaBeouf) in a supermarket, and is soon caught up in the day-to-day of hustling money, getting wasted with her colleagues, and falling into a romance with Jake in defiance of their cutthroat leader, Krystal (Riley Keough), who stays a step ahead of the pack in a convertible, is always counting her cash, and is seen in one scene in a Confederate flag bikini (price tag still attached). Arnold filmed fast and loose—traveling with a small crew and a minimal script, and her cast, much like their characters, made the weeks-long road trip and crashed in roadside motels. Lane inhabits Star with a fierce, visceral pathos in a performance that announces her as a major talent.

Lane has relocated to L.A., and since American Honey's premiere at Cannes (where it won the Jury Prize), she's been on a whirlwind tour with the film. But after filming a short film, Born in the Maelstrom, it was recently announced that Lane would be starring in Stephen Kijak's Shoplifters of the World alongside Ellar Coltrane and Joe Manganiello, based on one night in the life of a group of friends in 1987 after the Smiths announced their dissolution. Interview recently spoke to Lane in New York in advance of the film's release, today.


COLLEEN KELSEY: You met Andrea in a really unexpected way. Growing up, did you ever think of acting?

SASHA LANE: I always thought it'd be cool to portray these certain things, make people feel a certain way. I was kind of fascinated with that, but I wasn't the type to do acting school or theater. I didn't have the best views of Hollywood, so it wasn't something that I was going to try and pursue. But I always said, if someone randomly found me, I would do it.

KELSEY: What were you more interested in?

LANE: I was into psychology and social work and doing something around people.

KELSEY: That's another way to think about acting.

LANE: Yeah, it totally helps with it. I was on spring break in Florida. I just needed to get away for a bit, so I think she found me at a time where it made that connection even stronger. We connected so well. I kind of needed that, which she gave me as far as confidence in who I was, and a chance at something different. That moment was really special. It was kind of a blur. [laughs]

KELSEY: What did you think about the proposition of doing a movie after that random meeting?

LANE: I had nothing left to lose, so it was just kind of like, "Why not?" [laughs] It seemed like it would be something special. It didn't feel cheesy and it didn't feel like something I wouldn't want to be a part of. The woman is a strong character. It's shining a light on these types of people and this type of the world. And she had a really good energy, so I figured she'd do a good job. I met her, I went back to college, finished up the rest of the year early, came out, shot and then had to wait a year, and then Cannes and it's been going since then.

KELSEY: Did you see any of her other movies after you met?

LANE: I watched Fish Tank. I digged it, so I was like, "Cool, I like her aesthetic and music and all that." It was nice.

KELSEY: I interviewed McCaul Lombardi for another story and he was telling me how there wasn't really a script. You guys worked day to day. What was that experience like, going on the road and having this intense bonding experience with everyone, and making a movie?

LANE: It was the best experience ever, but also just really emotionally exhausting. It was cool because it was very freeing. You were just in a moment. You didn't have any other choice but to be in the moment, because you didn't know what tomorrow was going to be like and with all the other different personalities, you could get anything at anytime. It was just this free, crazy living but with a family. That's the America I know. That's how I grew up. I mean, I wasn't in a mag crew, but we do road trips, we hang out in parking lots, and we do all that type of stuff, you know? That's very much what I'm used to, so that kind of also helped playing it.

KELSEY: Was it intimidating to take on this huge role?

LANE: It was a lot of pressure. [laughs] Seeing Fish Tank, I knew they followed her a lot, and they were like, "This is what it's going to be like." Then to just know that. I started seeing that I had days where I was just working alone or, with a select few, and I started realizing, "Wow, okay, you need all of this." It was kind of scary to think that how I'm doing in this film has a lot to do with how it's going to go. That was a little scary, but they gave me a lot of support in my confidence, so I was just kind of like, "Okay, fuck it." [laughs]

KELSEY: Is it a question of technique, or do you just sort of absorb who this person is and try to represent it?

LANE: Everyone has their own way. I can only do something I feel like I'm either passionate about, or that I can connect to, because all I know is real. I like the natural way and I feed off of people's energy, so once you're working with someone, you just bounce off of that. The director and the DP, I like to form a relationship with them, because it's like making music—flowing together and figuring it out as you go.

KELSEY: What was your experience like going to Cannes for the film?

LANE: Nothing will top that. It was so intense and so emotional and so unreal. To walk away and be proud of something that you created, and something that is going to be out there, I think that's amazing. That was the first time we were all back together again. That was the first time I saw the movie. My brother was there. My friends were there. The whole festival, they have like a lot of respect for the filmmakers, the directors, all of them, and they're all there for that reason: to experience these movies. It was very beautiful, and lively, and there was a lot of love, and plus, with American Honey, we make everything fun. So we ditched all of the high-end stuff and just had a great time. [laughs]

KELSEY: What are you hoping to do next? What are your goals?

LANE: I've been reading books and looking at articles, trying to find things that I enjoy in the midst of my auditions and everything. I'm going with the flow of it. I don't really know what I want exactly, but I know as far as the energy I'm trying to put out into the world in hopes to get it back and get those things that I want to be a part of, without me being like, "This is a plan. This is a goal." So, we'll see.

KELSEY: The way that you're talking about the projects that you want to do is coming from a more artistic place. Navigating the industry is huge; is that a big adjustment?

LANE: It's a huge adjustment. I mean, I'm a really anxious person and a really uncomfortable person and a people-pleaser. Putting all those together with this type of industry, it's pretty much everything that makes me uncomfortable and that I dislike. People literally have told me like, "Sasha, you're doing everything that you hate." But to make a film like that and those connections you make and then to meet people who felt inspired or connected to you through film, and you could put your energy across, you're like, "Wow, this is worth it." That's the beautiful part, so I want to do more stuff to where I feel good about it, or else I would not be in this. There'd be no point, you know?

American Honey, within itself and who Andrea is, and who was all involved, nothing is ever going to be like that. But the short I did [Born in the Maelstrom] was a little more like how it will be usually, but it was the stuff I wanted to do. I was really passionate about it and it made me feel more confident in the fact that I can do something outside of something like American Honey.


AMERICAN HONEY IS OUT IN LIMITED RELEASE TODAY


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Reply #14 posted 10/24/16 7:41am

JoeBala

MAHERSHALA ALI

ANTHONY BLASKO

10/20/16

MAHERSHALA ALI IN NEW YORK, OCTOBER 2016. PHOTOS: ANTHONY BLASKO. STYLING: BRITT MCCAMEY/HONEY ARTISTS. GROOMING:JORDAN BREE LONG/STARWORKS.


"I thought it was the best thing I had ever read," says Mahershala Ali of his new film Moonlight (A24). If you've heard any critics talk about Moonlight, which debuted at Telluride and screened at the Toronto Film Festival last month, you'll know that Ali is not exaggerating. Compassionate, intimate, and graceful,Moonlight follows Chiron, a young African American man struggling to find his place in the world. Directed by Barry Jenkins and based on an unpublished play by Tarell Alvin McCraney, the film is divided into three acts, with three actors inhabiting Chiron at different pivotal moments in his life. When we first meet him, he is a silent elementary schooler nicknamed "Little;" in Act Two we find a gangly teenager in ill-fitting clothes. In the final chapter, Chiron is a muscular gangster named Black—at once the closest and furthest from his true self.

Throughout his story, Chiron is cripplingly isolated. His mother has her own issues with drug addiction; his father is never mentioned. His peers mercilessly torture him, singling out his nascent sexuality. One of the few glimmers of hope in his life is Ali's character, a local drug dealer named Juan who goes out of his way to befriend Chiron. "We just all really wanted to do service to [Barry's] story, to Tarell Alvin McCraney's story," Ali explains of the film. "We all feel most alive when we're connected to what we love and what we feel passionate about, and you could definitely see how passionate and how focused Barry was," he continues.

Out in select theaters tomorrow, Moonlight is working its way towards the Oscars, with Ali in the running for Best Supporting Actor. It is the highlight of what has already been a stellar year for Ali. Though he has been working consistently since he received his MFA in acting from NYU, the 44-year-old Bay Area native wasn't widely known until he was cast as Remy Denton on House of Cards. Over the summer, he appeared opposite Matthew McConaughey in The Free State of Jones. Last month, he helped crash Netflix as Harlem villain Cotton Mouth in Marvel'sLuke Cage series and lent a commanding presence to the indie film Kicks.

We spoke with Ali last week.


EMMA BROWN: I didn't realize that your dad was on Broadway.

MAHERSHALA ALI: Yes, he was. He moved to New York when I was three years old. Are you familiar with Soul Train? Soul Train in the '70s was huge. They used to have this national dance contest and my dad won. He won, like, $2,500 and this red sort of sports car. He ended up moving to New York and he got into dance theater in Harlem. He started working on Broadway and traveling and doing musical theater and shows for about 20 years until he passed away.

BROWN: Was he a self-taught dancer? Had he had any professional experience when he won the Soul Train competition?

ALI: No, he was a self-taught dancer. But once he moved out to New York he started studying ballet, jazz, tap, and contemporary dance. He went to the Dance Theatre of Harlem and studied under Karel Shook, who was one of the best ballet teachers in New York City at that time. Pretty soon—I was about four or five and I remember talking to him—he was in Amsterdam and Japan, traveling the world. He very quickly got into the business and worked as a professional, doing that for the rest of his life.

BROWN: When you were staying with him in New York, did you go backstage at shows?

ALI: Oh, yeah. I traveled with him when I could. There was a show calledDreamgirls, which they recently made a film about, it won six Tony Awards at that time; he did that on Broadway, then he did an international tour of it and a national tour. I would be backstage and I'd memorize the entire musical. I knew several of the actors, many of which have film and television careers to this day, and sometimes I run into them working. But I'd be backstage and hanging out with folks in different cities. I remember going to Toronto as a kid. Once I was out of school in the summer, it just would depend on where he was. Most often I would see him in New York City.

BROWN: I know that you when you first went to college, you wanted to be a basketball player. Was acting in the back of your mind at all having been exposed to your dad's career growing up?

ALI: When I went to school, I had never even imagined being on stage or acting in any capacity. I was writing quite a bit. It's sort of a therapeutic accident; I was writing and dealing with my own personal stresses and things that were going on for me as a teenager. I wasn't sleeping well at all, and just processing some stuff that was going on. So I'd be up all night writing these poems. I eventually started to perform them, especially when I would go visit my dad in New York. And they were essentially monologues. So if anything, I thought I was going to be a poet. [laughs] I used to write these publishing houses and send my poetry to them. I wrote literary agents letters—some of which I still have—trying to see if I could get a literary agent. Sometimes they'd respond to me and compliment me on my poetry, telling me that they didn't really represent poets or whatever, but encouraging me to keep going. I thought I was going be a writer going into school if basketball didn't work out.

BROWN: Do you still write?

ALI: Not really. I'm starting to shift that energy and attention into writing a script and trying to merge the worlds. But I don't write enough, no.

BROWN: Are you a good dancer?

ALI: [laughs] Not the dancer my father was. But I could dance in my time when I was clubbing back in the day. I used to b-boy a little bit, breakdance when I was growing up. Throughout high school, I actually was a good dancer and was in a little competition with a good friend of mine who's in Aladdin, James Iglehart. He's a Tony Award winner, we grew up together, and he's the Genie in Aladdin. When we were in school we were in this little group and performed at some talent show together. I would dance and perform and do little things just at family functions, but that's just what families do in general: put on music, family's sitting around, and people start dancing. Nothing that was really all that serious.

BROWN: So when you graduated from NYU with your MFA in acting, did you think that you wanted to do theater in New York or were you more interested in film and television in L.A.?

ALI: At that time—because the industry is different now—you didn't see people who were able to do television and film. In 2000, when I got out of grad school, it was still a time where people did either/or. So coming out of school, I had hoped to perhaps do theater and film, but with an emphasis on film. Being from California, I didn't really have an attachment to New York like that—I didn't have an issue with leaving New York, because it had always been in my life and I knew it wasn't going anywhere. I had two jobs coming out of school, I did a play: The Great White Hope. I played the boxer Jack Johnson. And I was the lead in this indie film. Then I moved to Los Angeles because New York was cold and it was really too quiet for me at that time. I was out of school; I was hungry. The auditions were trickling in and I was antsy and ready to go. I had just spent three years being in class 12 hours a day, 6 days a week and always doing something, so I didn't understand being out in the real world and things being slow for a month, or only having one or two auditions. That didn't make sense to me. I moved out to Los Angeles, and in a couple of months I ended up booking a pilot. That's how I really found myself in television. I ended up on a show called Crossing Jordan, and I did 19 episodes in the first season. That really is the start of my journey working professionally.

BROWN: Moonlight is such a beautiful film. How did it come into your life?

ALI: I was at my agent's office and several different people came up to me and said, "Man, you've gotta read this project Moonlight. There's a part in it for you. There's several parts in it, but there's a part you'd be good for." There were probably three or four people who mentioned Moonlight just in the time that I was in the office. So there was a real buzz about the project. I was a fan of Barry [Jenkins] because I had seen Medicine for Melancholy—that was made in 2008, and I was living in the Bay Area at the time, so I really connected to it because it's a film about gentrification in the Bay Area. The combination of the buzz that preceded me even reading the project to actually getting to sit down and move through this story and have such a visceral response to it, I was definitely happy to sign up.

BROWN: The film is divided into three acts, and Juan only appears in Act One. Were you sad at all that you couldn't be around for more of the story just because it's so beautifully told?

ALI: [laughs] I think selfishly, as an actor, we always want to do more. But in this case—and uniquely in this case—I appreciate Juan disappearing because of what that allows the audience to feel. What I've heard is that people miss Juan's presence, and I'm assuming especially in that second story when Chiron is going through so much. To have Juan there to support him, I think things would have been so much easier for him. So the fact that we know that there it is, this other person who was a respite for him, a champion, someone who supported and loved him and held him up ... and that that source of light for him is no longer present, I think makes everyone that much more uncomfortable. I believe the film needs that. Not just for the audience, but you also get to see how much of an island Chiron is at that point [during what] most people would reflect on as the most difficult period in their lives. Gay, straight—whatever—adolescents in high school and coming out of junior high, that's such a difficult, awkward period and kids can be so cruel and mean. So to not have Juan at that time, I think it really allows for us to see just how difficult this journey is for Chiron. And these are elements that are pulling from Tarell Alvin McCraney's life and from the life of Barry Jenkins.

I know it's a long answer, but really what I'm saying is that Juan's disappearance really has purpose. In other projects I've been in where I've in some way disappeared for 40 minutes of the film and maybe pop up in the end or die early on, there isn't always a great explanation or reason for it. This feels necessary to me, because I think there's a greater potential to affect the audience and raise the stakes. People really needed to understand how alone this young man feels.

BROWN: What do you think that Juan saw in Chiron that inspired him make this effort to connect to with Chiron?

ALI: I do think that there are people who are able to connect with and empathize with anyone who is going through something difficult, just naturally. I don't think it's a world of effort for everyone. So I think that there is that element of it, where I believe that that's just who Juan is. But I also feel—and me and Barry spoke a lot about this—Juan is a very dark-skinned Cuban, and the vast majority of Cubans in Miami are fairly fair skinned. I think he was looking to assimilate in some way and he consciously adopted aspects of African American culture because that's who he most easily resembled. I think he found a degree of comfort in the African American community, but he's still not African American. So he doesn't totally fit in with either community in Miami. He doesn't really have his tribe. So he recognizes what Little is experiencing—in some way, it's a reflection of his own experience and upbringing, of him not really feeling fully embraced or struggling to identify with who he was. I think it brings them together very quickly. By no means do I think believe Juan was persecuted in the same way that Chiron is—I think that would be a stretch—but I do feel that he definitely connected with how lonely he felt as a young man.


MOONLIGHT COMES OUT IN SELECT THEATERS TOMORROW, OCTOBER 21, 2016. SEASON ONE OF LUKE CAGE IS NOW AVAILABLE ON NETFLIX.

[Edited 10/24/16 7:44am]

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Reply #15 posted 10/24/16 7:43am

JoeBala

NEW AGAIN: DIANA ROSS

PETER STRONGWATER

10/05/16

COVER ILLUSTRATION: RICHARD BERNSTEIN. PHOTOS: PETER STRONGWATER.


In keeping with her 1980 single, Diana Ross is coming (back) out and wants the world to know. In February 2017, the Motown legend will return to the Venetian Theater in Las Vegas for nine nights to reprise her April 2015 residency "The Essential Diana Ross: Some Memories Never Fade." Ross is expected to perform the hits that cemented her as a music icon, from her over five decade long catalog, including tracks from her days in the Supremes and from her solo career.

In advance of tickets going on sale this Friday, and months before lucky audiences can watch Miss Ross perform classics like "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," we're revisiting her Interview cover story from October 1981. The singer, actress, and producer chatted with Andy Warhol about the places she wanted to travel to, her (at the time) three children, and her frustrations with the press. —Natalia Barr


Diana Ross by Andy Warhol


Cover story: Two pop stars lunch at the Carlyle Hotel.

MONDAY, AUGUST 3, 1981, 12:30 P.M., THE CARLYLE HOTEL DINING ROOM. Andy Warhol is lunching with Diana Ross, whose latest album was released this month on RCA. Her single, "Endless Love" (Polygram), recorded with Lionel Richie, has already become the number one song of the season.

Diana, who headed the 1980 Best Dressed list, was perfectly suited for the day in a loose-fitting beige silk top and skirt, with western boots of beautiful burgundy leather adding that Diana Ross dash of glamor.


ANDY WARHOL: Sue Mengers took me to see your show in California a couple of years ago. You were so nervous when we came backstage because you thought you did a so-so show. You give the best shows.

DIANA ROSS: I just really want it to be perfect. I expect excellence from everybody concerned with the show and I know it's difficult.

WARHOL: Could you give a two minute monologue and tell us how it all started?

ROSS: I've been singing since I was really little. I'm from a singing family, but they're not professional singers, only gospel—my grandfather was a minister. I started to sing the music that was out then because my mother used to play it all the time. It was the end of the '50s, the beginning of the '60s. There was Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers, Etta James...What's exciting is that I'm getting ready to do two of those old songs on my new album. We used to sit outside on the stoop and sing. We even used to put our radios and record players outside.

WARHOL: The trendy street is now Columbus Avenue and the kids are out on the street singing away.

ROSS: I really don't think that Detroit was any different than New York of Boston or Philadelphia. Kids always wanted to listen to music outside because that's where they hung out with their friends. It just wasn't an inside thing to do. I lived on the north side of Detroit. Right down the street from me there was a young man by the name of Smokey Robinson. I was very proud to live down the street from him because he was our only celebrity in town. He was singing with the Miracles. His niece, Sharon, was one of my best friends so I spent a lot of time there. So I knew Smokey. I moved from the north side of Detroit to the east side and that's where I met Florence and Mary—the other girls in the Supremes; I met them in church. We were all in the church choir. We started to sing together but we weren't even thinking about singing professionally. The word got around that we were good and then three boys came to my house and asked me if we wanted to be their sister group. They were the Primes. Eddie Kendricks was one of them. The group that they started for us was called the Primettes. As time moved on we changed our name to the Supremes and they changed their names to the Temptations.

The only recording studio was in Motown—it was called Tamla/Motown at that time and we used to audition there because Smokey Robinson was at that studio and Berry Gordy was the president. I remember asking Smokey to listen to my group and he did. For the first couple of years we were just singing background. We used to back up Marvin Gaye; Mary Wells was there then, Marv Johnson, the Marvelettes, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, Junior Walker and the All-Stars... I'm just trying to think of all the groups which were there before we got there. They were fairly successful, everybody was making it. So they signed us on a contract but we never really got a hit until 1960, '61. At the same time we were still in high school and Berry did not want to take us on the road until we had graduated.

WARHOL: You started when you were eleven or twelve?

ROSS: No, I was sixteen. Smokey was really the special part of making us get in to the right door. He wrote the first couple of songs that we released: one was "Breathtaking Guy," one was "Ask Any Girl." And Berry even wrote a couple of the songs that we released. But our first hit record was by three boys who worked at Motown named Brian and Eddie Holland and Lamont Dozier.

WARHOL: They're now on their own, aren't they?

ROSS: Yes, what happened was Brian and Eddie and Lamont broke up and left Motown. The Temptations changed members many different times. We changed members once while I was there and then I left the group and the Supremes continued. The Four Tops were at the company, but everything just started to change. People grow up and things change. That's a capsule of twenty years. After graduation from high school our first tour was a Motown revue and then we went on a Dick Clark tour. Dick Clark was very helpful, as was Ed Sullivan. Then theMurray the K Show was here in town. We used to do the theater circuit when we first started, which was the Apollo in New York, the Royal Theater in Baltimore, the Uptown Theater in Philadelphia, the Howard Theater in Washington.

WARHOL: And the Paramount in Brooklyn.

ROSS: Yes. We were out of school then and that first album was the biggest hit we ever had. We had like three or four hits on it: "Come See About Me," "Baby Love," "Stop in the Name of Love," "Where Did Our Love Go?"

WARHOL: And these were all written by those three guys?

ROSS: Those three guys. But they also wrote for Martha Reeves and the Vandellas. They wrote "Dancing in the Street," "Heat Wave." I think that kind of sound is coming back again. You know, Berry started off with maybe four artists and he built the whole Motown sound. Stevie Wonder came to the company. Berry must have had hundreds of acts.

WARHOL: I saw Stevie Wonder out at the Paramount and he was great. He was playing the harmonica.

ROSS: Yes, when he was really tiny—"Fingertips." I watched him grow up, too. Then Berry left Detroit and moved to California.

WARHOL: We knew so much about you because we had these intellectual lesbian friends who followed you all over the world. They singled you out as the one they really loved. They weren't lesbians then, they turned lesbian five years later.

ROSS: They just kind of opened up, huh? The other day in the recording studio a guy came in to do some arranging for me and he said, "You know I saw you at the Apollo. I remember one of the stage managers who is dead now pointing you out and saying, ‘If Berry Gordy spends time with that girl she's going to be a big star.'" I meet a lot of people who have been with us for 20 years.

WARHOL: During the '60s it was really much easier to go up to Harlem. I went there a couple months ago to dinner and I had the best time. We went all over. There's so much money to be made up there. The restaurants could be thriving with people just going uptown. I think you should invest your money in something up there and really make people come up there again.

ROSS: Once it was such a beautiful area.

WARHOL: I could be still. Entertainment and food up there, it's a whole new world. You can make so much money.

ROSS: I wonder why it stopped. I don't know New York very well. I feel like I'm still such a newcomer here. The last time I remember the Apollo I was working there with Richard Pryor. Everybody knew he was going to be a big star. At that time he was doing dialog about President Eisenhower. He wrote his own things and they were just extraordinary. I remember working with Otis Redding. My mother loved Otis Redding. I have such memories; I keep thinking about all the people I worked with. I was in the recording studio and I was talking to one of the engineers who is 24 and they don't know these people. They just absolutely don't know the people and it just tickles me. I don't feel like I've grown up.

WARHOL: Not that many people who started like you did in the early '60s lasted.

ROSS: I'm still just a baby, just Mick Jagger and me.

WARHOL: It's your figure. How do you keep so skinny?

ROSS: I don't eat very much. Why don't we order, by the way?

WARHOL: You've got the best figure.

ROSS: Actually, I think my body is the best it's ever been in my entire life. All of a sudden I feel more womanly, I feel like I got a figure. I was always really straight up and down, the skinny one in the middle, like that poster at Elaine's of the Supremes at Lincoln Center—it was done by Joe Eula. To me that's really a reflection of the way I was. I was just like a bean pole. Now I'm getting a few curves and I like it. It took me fifteen years. I didn't eat this morning because I wanted to eat now.

WARHOL: You don't have any beauty secrets like exercising?

ROSS: When I'm working I actually forget to eat. I don't eat sweets because I don't care about them. I have no real secrets. I just realize that as I get older I should stay strong so I exercise more now. I use the Nautilus equipment whenever I can.

WARHOL: Do you have that at home?

ROSS: No. But I would like to get it up in Connecticut.

WARHOL: Do you go to a gym?

ROSS: I belong to a club here in town. I jog and I roller-skate. I dance—that's the best exercise. I love to dance.

WARHOL: Where do you dance?

ROSS: I haven't been going out to any place since Studio 54 closed up and that's the truth.

WARHOL: Do you dance at home?

ROSS: Yes, we move all the furniture back and dance on the stage, too. It's not a choreographed kind of thing, it's much freer. It keeps you strong.

WARHOL: Do you have a new show to take on the road when the album comes out?

ROSS: Actually, it's fairly new. I'm going places I have never been before. In Vegas I'm working at the Riviera Hotel for one ten-day engagement. I'm taking a new show in there. It's not a regular Las Vegas show. I have five horns and they're called the Asbury Jukes. Have you ever heard of the Asbury Jukes?

WARHOL: No.

ROSS: They're an exciting horn group. I am so crazy about them. I have three sexy girls who are going to play strings. And everybody is going to be standing, nobody's sitting. We're all on separate pedestals. I had a new set built. It's all black patent leather. Everything is black and shiny. Last time I did an all-white one, now I'm doing an all-black look. I'm going to do it in Atlantic City, too.

WARHOL: You decide all those things yourself, the whole look of the show?

ROSS: Yes. That's my pleasure. I really feel like it's constantly creating. I don't like it to be boring for me so I keep doing new things. I spend too much money on my sets and my gowns. I think the presentation is important. I don't think people want to see the old show all the time, they want to see a new show. So every time I make a new circuit, a new time around, then I change the show. You can't change the songs; people still want to hear "Lady Sings the Blues" and they still want to hear some of the oldies. What I really want to do here in New York is to work in the park. Not a paid thing, a real summer kind of thing. Maybe next summer.

WARHOL: That would attract millions.

ROSS: I would hope so. I'd like to make a television special from it or something. I think it would be a great idea but then I don't know. What are you going to eat?

WARHOL: I can't read French menus.

ROSS: Do you spend a lot of time in Europe, Andy?

WARHOL: I was going to Germany once a month.

ROSS: I would have thought you'd be going to Paris once a month.

WARHOL: We stop in Paris when we go to Germany.

ROSS: Then why can't you speak French? You should be able to read these menus.

WARHOL: I have people like Bob who do it all.

ROSS: I want to live in Paris for a couple of years. I'm dying to do the Josephine Baker story. I really want to be there and do it. It's certainly my intention to do it. Did you know her?

WARHOL: I met her the last few times she was in New York. I run into her adopted son, Jean Claude Saber. He works for French TV.

ROSS: I just think her life story needs to be done. I think she was an extraordinary woman. To see someone who was basically a showgirl have the kind of lifestyle she had was extraordinary. I really think she made her own lifestyle. Maybe we should get a waiter and order. I'd like a medium cheeseburger and French fries and a small salad.

WARHOL: I'm going to have the same thing, but a lot of ketchup.

ROSSL Me, too. A lot of ketchup, a lot of mustard.

WARHOL: So, the Josephine Baker story is the next movie you're going to be working on?

ROSS: I don't know. I don't want them to make it into a television movie, and I don't want them to make it into a Broadway show.

WARHOL: Have you bought it yet or bought the book?

ROSS: I talked to the girl who did the last book and it's being discussed. We don't know if it's necessary to get that book. I've been talking about Josephine now for almost three years. I would like to do it and I would like to help in getting it done period.

WARHOL: The Motown Story would be a great movie.

ROSS: It's not interesting for us to do our own lives.

WARHOL: Do you get a lot of scripts?

ROSS: Yes, but not a lot of quality. I'm really lucky, Andy, I have my performing career so I can continue to do personal appearances. Most actors have to do a film. But I thought I would wait until I found something I really liked. In the last year there's only been three projects, actually maybe four, that were really quality and that I thought I could do. A lot of my friends feel that I'm wrong to wait. They say I should have done My Bodyguard, but I don't think so. I think I've been right.

WARHOL: The last time you were writing a lot of your songs. Think of all the bucks you could make.

ROSS: I don't know if you do it just for that, Andy. You do it if it's good.

WARHOL: You would be good at writing your own material. You pick the right material. I think you'd write the best love lyrics.

ROSS: It's easier for me to sit with the producers and the writers and I give them my feelings and my thoughts and what I think I feel like singing about and then they go away and write it.

WARHOL: Can't you just do that yourself?

ROSS: It requires a lot of time. It seems like I don't have a lot of time for all the things I need to do. I'm spreading myself fairly thin right now. I have responsibilities to my children. I have a big staff that works for me. And when you have a staff, and I'm sure you know this, you're always concerned with everybody's life all the time. I cannot make a plan to leave town without coordinating everybody who works for me and what they have to do. Who's going to be in New York? Who's going to be at the house? What secretary is going to travel with me? Am I going to have wardrobe, hair?

WARHOL: And having a baby, too... Like Liza [Minelli], she wanted to have a baby and had to pay off all her musicians—it cost her a fortune.

ROSS: Yes, if you have a band you have to keep them on retainer, and that's a big responsibility.

WARHOL: How many people do you have?

ROSS: When I'm traveling I have 19 musicians usually. And now it's more because I just hired the strings and the horns. I have attorneys and I have business managers and staff that goes with each of those. I have my own management company now—I'm managing two groups—so I have the president of that company. I have a nice personal secretary. I really need another assistant. I am going into the merchandising business. It has to do with fragrances and clothing lines and all that.

WARHOL: When is that starting?

ROSS: It's coming soon. They've been talking to me about that for years.

WARHOL: Great!

ROSS: I just feel like I'd like to move in that direction. New York has done that for me. It's something I've always wanted to do. You know, design was my major in school. I designed all the clothes in Mahogany. I always wanted to be a fashion designer and I learned costume illustration in high school. That was an incredible high school. It was more like a college. I'm moving more in that direction, just kind of merchandising my name.

WARHOL: You better trademark your name. If you don't do that somebody could manufacture cheap perfume in Hong Kong and call it "Diana Ross."

ROSS: My problem is that people have been writing books about me. There's a book out called I'm Going to Make You Love Me, and I had nothing to do with it. The guy got all of his data from interviews that I'd done over the years. A lot of things that people write about you are incorrect, but you don't fight about it. It's in the newspaper and you're not going to take anybody to court, you kind of leave it if it's not harmful. But he took all these articles and made it into a book and they're really not facts. I don't know what you can do about it.

WARHOL: I don't know what you can do about it, either. I never understand that.

ROSS: It's not fair that our name can be used in any newspaper, any article connected with anything, and we can't really fight about it. It's like any newspaper that might take a picture of you, bad or good, and sometimes they're awful pictures, and they can use them without your approval and you can't do anything about it.

WARHOL: I guess it's freedom of the press.

ROSS: It's really not fair. You can ruin a person's life. We should have some rights. My name, Diana Ross, is my name and nobody should be able to use that for exploitative purposes but me. People can take your name and write a book about you and they make money off of it. How is the public supposed to know you're not authorizing that book? As soon as you make a big stink about it it only makes the book sell more.

WARHOL: But then when you put out an album they review your albums.

ROSS: I'm not talking about reviews. I'm talking about your personal life.

WARHOL: I know, but they give you something, too.

ROSS: There must be a limit.

WARHOL: I don't think the press should be able to say false things.

ROSS: What's false? It's how they slant it, it's how it's written.

WARHOL: That's why we tape-record everything.

ROSS: I've never been damaged or hurt. It's just that I think it's unfair.

WARHOL: But you told me before that the article on Diane Von Furstenberg inNew York magazine was good...

ROSS: I liked it because I'm crazy about Diane. It's a relationship that's very different; I don't see Diane a lot. So when I saw the article she looked so beautiful and it was talking about her work, too. She set up the interview and it was happening. That's different than someone writing a book about you who you've never met. I've never even talked to this guy. If I do an interview, then I take full responsibility. I figure I'm not going to talk to anyone that I think is unethical anyway.

WARHOL: But what happens is one reporter gets something wrong and it keeps getting repeated because that's how most journalists do an interview, they look up old material. But especially if the age is wrong I let it go by.

ROSS: It tickles me, my daughter said that to me. She said, "Mommie, why is it that every time they say your name they put your age right behind it?"

WARHOL: Your daughters are beautiful.

ROSS: Thank you, Andy. I'm so proud of them. It's the best thing I've ever done.

WARHOL: Are you going to let them perform and sing?

ROSS: I'd let them do anything that makes them happy. They're crazy about the business because they're surrounded by it so much. What's important for me is to give them a well-rounded education and a mixture of people in their lives. They'll make their own choices. I think they would be good in show business. I would never deny them this. I don't know what my life would have been like if I'd never gotten into show business.

WARHOL: Do they sing with you like you did with your mother?

ROSS: They love to come on the stage but I think they love to come on the stage because of the lights. They get on the stage and look at everybody. I'm real lucky. I don't know what their teenage years are going to be like, but I have really good girls. They work well with each other.

WARHOL: They look old for their age.

ROSS: One is nine and the other is eight and I have never babied them.

WARHOL: How old is the other one?

ROSS: She's five. The other night my eldest daughter was sick and she had a temperature. I couldn't figure it out. She's teething. She's still a baby. She's getting her wisdom teeth. I treat them like young women. They really have good reasoning power. Chutney, the five-year-old—my niece Elena was in town and Chutney actually figured out the best thing to do—should she go to camp without her, should she take her to camp, or should she stay home with her? Chutney figured out it would be better to stay home with Elena than try to take her to camp. She had looked at all the choices and she picked one. For a five-year-old that's incredible. I let her make her choice. I didn't tell her, okay, we're going to call the school and Elena is going to go to camp with you for the week or I didn't tell her she had to take her. She made her choice. I guess all parents think their kids are amazing and I think mine are real amazing and real special.

WARHOL: If you move to Paris to do the Josephine Baker story will you take the kids with you?

ROSS: Yes, absolutely. I really think I want to live in a lot of places for at least a couple of years. I don't want possessions to hold me down. I always wanted to live in New York and now I got a chance to be on the East Coast, in Connecticut. And I have a small apartment here in town. I want to live in Paris. I've never been to Israel, I want to go there. I've never been to Africa, I want to go there. I want to go to China. There are some places I want to go not to work, but to really explore and to see for my own education. Have you been to all these places? Have you been to Israel?

WARHOL: Every place you mentioned I haven't been to.

ROSS: China?

WARHOL: No. Halston asked me to go with him and I turned it down.

ROSS: Why?

WARHOL: I just like New York so much.

ROSS: I do too, but you can have a lot of New York and still see what's going on in the rest of the world, I think—like in China.

WARHOL: I'd rather go to Chinatown or Pearl's.

ROSS: I have a lust for life. I'm in love with trees. I love nature and I'm a people watcher. I'm very interested, I wish that I could write about some of the things we were talking about. I should keep a diary.

WARHOL: You don't? Tape-record it!

ROSS: These tomatoes are not at all like my tomatoes I get out of my garden. I have a garden up in Connecticut and we got a zucchini that was like this. We need lots of ketchup and Tabasco, please, and mustard. I'm going to cut my hamburger in half and I'm going to pick it up.

WARHOL: I'm waiting for the trimmings.

ROSS: Andy, you're not a picky eater, are you?

WARHOL: No. Do you take many vacations?

ROSS: No, I don't care about vacations. I go away and I come back real quick because I like my work. I really like my work to consume me. I'm not interested in sleeping anywhere else. I would like to enjoy my life a little bit more so I can really have more fun, but my work is my fun. I keep trying to do something else and really, I'm having a good time. I'm going Sesame Street. We're just now working out what the songs will be because I'd like to do some songs that really mean something to the children. That's going to be fun for me.

WARHOL: Do you try them out on your kids?

ROSS: I try everything out on my kids. If they don't like it, I don't want to do it.

WARHOL: Do you think they're your best friends?

ROSS: Yes.

WARHOL: Do they go out and stay with their father sometimes?

ROSS: Bob [Silberstein] lives a half hour away from us.

WARHOL: He lives in Connecticut?

ROSS: Yes. He has an apartment here in town, too.

WARHOL: Is he still producing?

ROSS: Yes, managing.

WARHOL: What are the two groups you're managing?

ROSS: One is called RPM. One is a guy I have no signed yet because I think he's got a few outstanding contracts. His name is Mickey Free.

WARHOL: How did you find them?

ROSS: I just see them. I see many. I see reggae groups. They send me their tapes. There's so much talent out there.

WARHOL: You don't go to clubs, much.

ROSS: Yes, I do. If there's someone interesting I'll always get the words and I'll see them.

WARHOL: Peter Tosh was at the Ritz and it was so jam-packed that the balcony was just going up and down.

ROSS: I really like that club, don't you?

WARHOL: It's one of my favorites.

ROSS: I enjoy being there. I have my little favorite place over in the corner that I like and I can see everything.

WARHOL: Have you been to the Savoy?

ROSS: Yes.

WARHOL: I saw Stephanie Mills there. She's really talented.

ROSS: She really has come a long way. She's very elegant. On television the other day she said, "I was never linked romantically with anyone except Michael Jackson." It was so cute.

WARHOL: When you come home and you turn on TV and there's one of your movies on what do you think?

ROSS: I have never done that.

WARHOL: You didn't watch Mahogany this month?

ROSS: No, I was out of town.

WARHOL: It's like me listening to a game show and they'll say, who drew the Campbell Soup can? It's so odd to hear your name like that.

ROSS: For some reason, my main movie, Lady Sings the Blues, to me really isn't me. I really can let go of Diana Ross when I see the movie. I'm really objective when I'm watching it. I liked that movie so much. That movie was like magic so that when I'm looking at it I'm really not seeing myself, I'm seeing the actress. I'm seeing another person, not the me of me. I haven't seen Mahogany or The Wiz the way I've seen Lady Sings the Blues.

WARHOL: Do you listen to your own albums a lot at home?

ROSS: No.

WARHOL: What do you listen to?

ROSS: Everybody else.

WARHOL: Do you have music on all the time?

ROSS: All the time, everybody else.

BOB: Does Bob Mackie make all your clothes for the shows?

ROSS: Mostly all, yes. The ladies that work there are really the best. All my gowns are hand-beaded. Most gowns are machine-beaded. I basically do my own designing and they make up what I design. We do it over the telephone now. It's not really Bob any more, it's Ray [Agfahan] and I. We work together.

WARHOL: You use Galanos, don't you?

ROSS: I use Galanos but that's not for stage things; I use him for real special occasions and things—television, special occasions where I know I'm being filmed. But I never really wear his gowns on stage. My stage gowns are more costumey. There's different levels of things that I wear. I would never wear my stage gowns to a party. First of all, all my gowns have trains on them. I make a train that goes on forever. I love long trains and then I stand there and twirl around and wrap myself up in it. How did you like Lady Di's wedding dress?

ROSS: It was beautiful.

WARHOL: I really think she's done so much for virginity. I hope the Pope sent her a big wedding present. She's really bringing it all back.

ROSS: She has such a clean look.

WARHOL: Where did the Prince go on his honeymoon?

ROSS: Where did he go?

WARHOL: Indiana.

ROSS: I don't get it.

WARHOL: IN-Diana.

ROSS: Terrible, bad joke.

WAITER: Would you like coffee and dessert?

ROSS: Let me just peek at the dessert cart. I don't like sweets and that's the truth. Maybe there's some fruit or fruit tarts. Andy, do you want some strawberries?

WARHOL: Oh, not for me.

ROSS: I'll take one heaping helping of chocolate mousse. Just one. God, not that much.

WAITER: Do you want a little whipped cream on it?

ROSS: Yes, just a bit. It's very sweet. Tell me, is this cup a funny shape, or is it just my eyes?

WARHOL: Your cup looks melted-lopsided.

ROSS: I thought it was my eyes. I just wanted to be sure.

WARHOL: Have you been going to Broadway shows at all?

ROSS: Yes, but I haven't been in awhile. I saw Pirates of Penzance andSophisticated Ladies. I went to see Lena [Horne] last.

WARHOL: How did you like Lena?

ROSS: The best. I love Lena. She was beautiful? Have you seen it?

WARHOL: Yes, she is one of the really magic people.

ROSS: I rented a lot of old Mae West movies. I just enjoy watching them so much. I watched My Little Chickadee last night. She is so great. She said such wonderful things. I started doing this on the stage, "When I'm good, I'm good and when I'm bad, I'm better." I love it. I love it so much. There's one she did Sex, I was looking for that one. She said, "I used to be called Snow White, but I drifted." What time is it?

WARHOL: Twenty to three.

ROSS: I'm going out with my decorators to look at chandeliers.

WARHOL: Who is your decorator?

ROSS: Vincent Foucarde and Bob Demmig. We're just getting started.

WARHOL: Are they going to do a lot of faux marbling?

ROSS: I have a round room that I want to do that in. That's the room where I'm going to put the chandelier.

WARHOL: It's going to take three years to hand-paint it. And three albums worth of income.


THIS INTERVIEW ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN THE OCTOBER 1981 ISSUE OFINTERVIEW.

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