In between the concerts we made movies, almost every day there was a scene to act in, so that would take up half a day or morning: we worked very hard putting on a concert and making movies simultaneously, no chance to get up and laze around all day and not worry about anything and then jump into another concert. Dylan actually was working on the afternoon of a concert: like going out to Kerouac’s grave in a caravan and sitting there, and then having a concert in Lowell that night. Singing all the night before and having to get up at 10 am or something, a lot of energy.
Since the tour, he’s just disappeared from my vision. Gone back up to heaven.
Patti Smith
I was surprised by Patti Smith’s rise. It’s sort of heartening to see how somebody else could get ahead. I wonder how she’ll do.
I’ve been teaching Rimbaud this year – she idolizes Rimbaud – and I’ve been reading Rimbaud’s late, last letters when he was dying, about how miserable life was and “all I am is a motionless stump” and I’m wondering how she’s going to deal with that aspect of heroism. How will she deal with suffering? How will she transcend suffering and become a lady of energy, a sky-goddess, singing of egolessness? Because so far her proposition has been the triumph of the stubborn, individualistic, Rimbaud-Whitmanic ego: but then there is going to be the point where her teeth fall out and she’s going to become the old hag of mythology that we all become. And I think she’ll be equal to dying. [Laughing] We all are.
(There follows a brief excerpt from an August 1972 interview with Patti.)
VICTOR BOCKRIS: Why are your influences mostly European: Rimbaud, Cendrars, Celine, Michaux?
PATTI SMITH: It’s because of biographies. I was mostly attracted to lifestyles, and there just wasn’t any great biographies of genius American lifestyles except the cowboys. But you can read my book, Seventh Heaven (Telegraph Books, Philadelphia, 1972) and who do you get out of it? Edie Sedgwick, Anita Pallenberg, Marianne Faithfull, Joan of Arc, Frank Sinatra. All people I really like. I’m shrouded in the lives of my heroes.
BOCKRIS: Tony Glover says in his review of Seventh Heaven that you are writing a poetry of performance. What does that mean to you?
SMITH: I think part of it is because of Victorian England, how they crucified Oscar Wilde. Poets became simps, sensitive young men in attics. But it wasn’t always like that. It used to be that the poet was a performer and I think the energy of Frank O’Hara started to re-inspire that. I mean in the Sixties there was all that happening stuff. Then Frank O’Hara died and it sort of petered out, and then Dylan and Allen Ginsberg revitalized it.*
Arthur Rimbaud
He’s a hero to those who know about him because he’s a model of life, and he had extraordinary physical beauty and beauty of mind. In a way he succeeded in possessing the truth in one body and one soul. He succeeded in completely entering his life and acting without looking backward, acting without second-guessing himself or without shadow-making gestures that had no shadows in the sense of self-conscious ego-manipulation. So that, despite his suffering, at the end of his life he seems to have been completely immersed in existence 100 percent. And he may have wound up dying in eternity rather than dying in a shadow world of lies and self-deception. Must read his late letters from Africa.
The only thing is, Rimbaud doesn’t seem to provide a ‘final solution’ to ego or ego’s aggression. What Rimbaud is, is fantastic aggression and charm and intensity and intelligence, and a funny soft-spot kind of sexual humility, and openness to being fucked by life. But his myth seen crudely might lead younger people who don’t have some stable meditation into nonsensical suicides.
Jimmy Carter
I was afraid that he, being a deistic- or theistic-minded person, might take his ego seriously enough to start an atomic war on some moral issue connected with divine principles. As a non-theist, I thought it was somewhat dangerous to have a hysterical theist in the White House. But I voted for him, because I heard that Ralph Nader liked him, and that he had a good record on ecological matters in Georgia. And also because he promised amnesty to the soldiers who didn’t want to fight Nixon’s war.
The story of his success is just an old Burroughs story of a good old boy coming round and talking. He wasn’t that new; he was a governor, they’ve run governors before. How did Wendell Willkie get nominated? How did Stevenson get nominated? I mean they’re all relatively unknown people in one way or another, without a power base. How did McGovern do it? I don’t think that’s so strange. It’s just another governor running for government against a representative connected with Watergate corruption stories.
I think what it means is that a significant portion of the population became disillusioned with the government lineage and simply voted for Carter to provide some relief. Not that they expected anything better. That’s why the vote was so close. Expecting something better would mean a greater movement toward liberating junkies from the thralls of the police state, medicalizing the junk problem and getting the government and the profiteers out of the junk business – both repressing and peddling – and I suppose it would also mean having total rekindling of energy sources and withdrawal from the addiction to petroleum and petrochemical sources, and a more humorous approach to government as theatre.
There might be a little more theatre under Carter, but again there’s a problem, which is he’s got a ceiling which is God. And his highest appeal is going to be God all the time, the way he’s set himself up, and that’s not much of a place to appeal to. It immediately stops all rational consideration of the situation.
His smile was kind of strange for a few days. For a couple of days just before the election, his smile became very sinister.
[Allen suddenly breaks into song:]
Stay away from the White House
Stay away I wish you well
Stay away from the White House
Stay away I wish you well
Stay away from the White House
Or you’ll go to Vajra Hell!*
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Another hero of mine is Chögyam Trungpa. He seems to have carried forward a practical, visible, programmatic practice of egolessness, and provided a path for other people to walk on.
He’s a Tibetan Lama trained from childhood in meditation practices, and he’s translated the esoteric classical meditation practices into Americanese so that it’s available to hippies and middle-class people, and has entered into the American scene in a very energetic way founding the Naropa Institute (in Boul?, Colorado) of which the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics is a branch. He has made space for the nat? perceptions and accomplishments that solidified here already in literature, and he sees some correlations between our own natural intelligence and a kind of spacious wisdom characteristic of Buddhist liberation.
When I first met him I thought he reminded me a lot of Kerouac, partly because of the drinking, partly because the spontaneous shrewdness, partly because of the poetic nature of his talent drinks a lot sake … He says he wants to be reborn a Japanese scientist.
John Lennon
Just about half a year ago, before I went to teach the summer at Naropa, I went up to visit John and Yoko, they were in the kitchen with their baby, in very good shape, following a very strict diet. They gave me a copy of Sugar Blues and warned me about the imperialistic addictive history of sugar. He said one of the reasons he wouldn’t stay in Hollywood was everybody was killing themselves on dope and alcohol, or a lot of musicians, anyway: and he didn’t want to have a band unless he could have a band with musicians in good health.
Paul McCartney
I met Paul McCartney in his house in England in ’66. Mick Jagger was there, reading a book by Elephas Levi – a French astrologer who supposedly taught Rimbaud in 1870; Rimbaud had met Levi in Paris – a book with some astrological or alchemical design on the cover – and McCartney was painting designs on a red velvet shirt, which he gave me as a present when I left.
I told him a little bit about Bla
ke, and he told me a big long story about how The Beatles had first got high on acid, it was a very funny conversation, some friends had given the acid to them in their coffee, and they went out in their limousine to some nightclub, and they stopped on the pavement and were looking down into the nightclub stairwell, and it was all full of garish neon, and it looked like the big mouth of a monster. They didn’t know whether to go in or not. And then there were all these people around when they got out of their limousine, looking at them, so they had to go in. And then once they got in it was alright.
McCartney has a kind of sweetness, a cherubic quality. It’s in his music, too.
* Like a true Beat Punk Patti’s chronology is a little messed up, but she got the spirit right. For a complete account of Patti’s visionary role as a leading Beat Punk, see my Patti Smith: The Biography (The Fourth Estate, London, 1998).
* Vajra Hell is the only permanent, unbreakable hell – total opaque selfhood: refusal of intelligence, refusal of awareness.
This interview with Debbie Harry conducted in 1996 is the most recent piece in the book, and is combined with some vintage material from 1980. There is a lot of continuity in my relationship with Debbie. Talking with her on the phone yesterday was no different than talking with her twenty years ago, except that she is more confident and stronger.
7
An Interview With Debbie Harry
I met Debbie Harry in 1977, and experienced a good deal of her success with Blondie first-hand through 1978–1982. During this time, we wrote the text for Making Tracks: The Rise of Blondie, a book of photographs by Chris Stein, Debbie’s live-in collaborator on Blondie. They wrote the band’s hits together. After Blondie’s break-up in 1982 (under sad circumstances caused largely by a mysterious illness that struck Stein down), I kept in touch with Debbie sporadically. I approached her to do this High Times interview with some delight, since she was just reaching a peak in her solo career thanks to the movie Heavy, in which she starred opposite Liv Tyler, and Individually Twisted, her record with the Jazz Passengers. Harry has been touring with the Jazz Passengers and is finding a cool, new groove to work in.
The interview was conducted at the apartment of photographer David Croland, and in Harry’s own Manhattan apartment. Some of the material, particularly the sidebar conversation with Stein, was recorded but never released during the time we were working on Making Tracks. The new Debbie Harry is in fact no different from the old Debbie Harry inasmuch as she is Debbie – the singer, songwriter, actress and comedienne who will continue to tie us up in individually twisted stitches throughout the ’90s and into the next century.
VICTOR BOCKRIS: What is the most important thing that’s happened to you in the last year?
DEBBIE HARRY: Just this past weekend I had to drive upstate to see my Mom and Dad. I sort of had the same feeling I had at the beginning of Blondie. Then, I had this really wonderful instinctive drive, this guiding momentum, this energy, and I just had to use it. I was so instinctive. Everything was just there, you know?
Then, for a long time I didn’t want any kind of energy like that. But all of a sudden, driving upstate, I thought, Gee, I wonder if I could do that again? And I just had this little feeling in the pit of my stomach that went, Yeah, I could, and maybe I would want to. But who focuses all their drive on work at my age? I was thinking, I want to do that, then I was thinking I’m already doing it.
BOCKRIS: With the Jazz Passengers?
HARRY: Yeah. This technical jazz singing with the Jazz Passengers is more emotional, more delicate. The voice is in a different position within the instrumentation. You have an obligation to be creative and responsive. You have to respond to every particular feeling, because being there in the moment is really important. It’s not just this section four times, the next section two times, then the last section. The parts are woven together, and what somebody else plays and how you respond to that is more like acting.
BOCKRIS: Is the process of writing jazz songs very different from writing rock songs?
HARRY: With the Jazz Passengers, I stepped into a situation that already existed, and then tried to add something of my own to it. That’s different than what I did with Blondie. My Blondie stuff was more personal and direct.
BOCKRIS: How did you get involved with the Jazz Passengers?
HARRY: [Producer] Hal Wilner introduced me to them. Hal called me from London and said, Why don’t you come and sing a track on this jazz album I’m doing? So he sent me the track and I thought, Oh, kinda weird, but it’s pretty good. So I did it. And then from there I started working with them. I couldn’t for the life of me have picked a better situation than the Jazz Passengers to experiment and to sing in a different way and perform in a different way and to know exactly what I wanted to do. It’s very nice for me. It’s like a great period of creative discovery.
BOCKRIS: Was Heavy a good role for you?
HARRY: Getting a real acting part in Heavy was a revelation to me. Being other people is really the best thing for me. Being somebody else. I think the picture turned out well and I think the director, James Mangold, is a brilliant guy. Both of his parents were painters, and he’s wonderful to work with. I was surprised when I saw the film. I had no idea what the pacing would be like. I was really moved.
BOCKRIS: Are you addicted to your work?
HARRY: I guess I am, but I just think it’s the best thing to be productive and to be creative. What else are you gonna do?
BOCKRIS: What is your daily life like these days? When you’re living in New York and you’re not touring, do you have any practical schedule?
HARRY: Well, I swim every day. If I’m not working that night, performing or going to a club to see a band, I’ll get up at about seven-thirty, eight o’clock. I take my dog for a walk and feed the cat. Then I get the newspaper and read it for an hour. I drink coffee and have a pastry. Then I just do phones or tour plans or clean up the apartment. Try to get jobs. Rearrange traffic. I’m trying to organize doing a book of my own again.
BOCKRIS: You want to do your autobiography?
HARRY: Yeah, but I’d like to have more of a sex life before I write it. I mean, the book should be banned somewhere!
BOCKRIS: How recently did you break up with Penn Gillette?
HARRY: A year ago. Basically, we were in a relationship where we planned to meet in airport lounges, which I thought was cool. But then we had trouble on the sex front because he’s kind of big, and it was difficult to find a place to squeeze into, you know?
BOCKRIS: Have you been seeing anybody else?
HARRY: No, not really. Dates here and there. Nothing much.
BOCKRIS: Are you working with Chris?
HARRY: We haven’t really done anything lately, but we did do some rock shows at SqueezeBox [at Don Hill’s, the New York club] last year. And the last record we did, Double Vision, we worked on together. It’s sort of an ongoing thing between the two of us, although we’re not really super-active right now.
BOCKRIS: What do you remember about your teenage years?
HARRY: At sixteen, I found out about pot, which was unbelievable because nobody did it. I lucked out. I had a girlfriend, Wendy, who was a year older than me and she had an older sister who was a real beatnik painter who lived in New York in a loft on Grand Street on the Lower East Side. She had travelled in Mexico and taken magic mushrooms and smoked pot.
BOCKRIS: What was it like when you first smoked grass?
HARRY: I first smoked grass when I was eighteen. It was like an acid trip. I took about three hits off a joint and it lasted for hours and hours and it was great. My whole life just ran in front of me and I realized a lot of things in a flash. I could see a lot of things very clearly. It didn’t answer everything, though. I still had some emotional problems and a lot of pain in my body.
BOCKRIS: Did you go out with a lot of different guys in high school?
HARRY: When I was a freshman, my town had these stifled sexual appetites. It was really awful. No matte
r who you were, if you went out with a lot of guys you would get talked about and people would say you were a whore. It was this big paradox. So I ended up going out with one guy for a couple of months and then another guy for a couple of months. In my junior and senior years, I pretty much had one boyfriend.
BOCKRIS: Were you attracted to a particular type?
HARRY: No. But I was really oversexed. Really charged, hot to trot. Later on, when I got my driver’s license, I used to drive up to this sleazy town near Paterson [New Jersey] and would walk up and down this street there called Cunt Mile. I would get picked up and make out with different guys in back seats of cars to get my rocks off, because I was so horny and I couldn’t make out with anybody in my town.
BOCKRIS: Did you always have this idea of going to New York and becoming a star?
HARRY: There was quite a big jazz scene in 1965 on the Lower East Side when I moved there. I was into music more and more even though I was painting then. After taking my first acid trip, I started painting sound and decided I wanted to be in music. I hung out with bands and didn’t paint anymore. But I had to learn how to feel good about myself, because I didn’t like myself. To break up these patterns, I had to become what I wanted to be and who I wanted to be, and it took a long time. I felt that I was another person inside and that I wanted to come out, that I was in pain and always depressed and feeling terrible. Sometimes I’m uncomfortable within my body. Sometimes I don’t like to feel at all. That’s why taking drugs had a very strong attraction for me, because it made me bodiless, which is very nice.
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