Beat Punks

by Victor Bockris

  BOCKRIS: Why did Keith write the letter to Allen Klein? Why didn’t Mick Jagger write it?

  FAITHFULL: Are you mad?

  BOCKRIS: It’s interesting that Richards did that.

  FAITHFULL: Yes, of course. Richards is … He didn’t go as far as he might have; if he’d done the right thing he’d have said, “Give her the money and the credit.” Of course he couldn’t do that.

  BOCKRIS: Do you feel that when you perform songs by Lennon and ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’, by Dylan, that you are collaborating with the songwriter?

  FAITHFULL: In a way, because I do change it. Just by doing it. I feel very close to the people who wrote these songs. I must admit I feel they wrote them for me. I do feel that they are mine.

  BOCKRIS: Well, what about ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’?

  FAITHFULL: That’s definitely mine.

  BOCKRIS: Nico’s story, of course, is that Dylan wrote that song for her.

  FAITHFULL: Well, I expect he did. I don’t care. But actually it’s mine. I once went to an Otis Redding concert in London. I went with Keith Richards, and it was a wonderful show. It was announced that Redding was going to sing a song that he had written, and he sang ‘Satisfaction’. Incredibly brilliant. We went backstage, me and Keith Richards – I don’t call these people Keith or Mick anymore, I give them their full names – and I said to Redding, “How could you say that you wrote ‘Satisfaction’?” And it was fascinating. Otis Redding insisted, and did not back down, that he wrote it. Now, that’s not similar to my situation with ‘Sister Morphine’, but it is a bit how I feel about all sorts of other things. And I believe that he was right; I understand what he meant.

  BOCKRIS: You are compared with Edith Piaf and Lotte Lenya, but neither of them were English.

  FAITHFULL: The reason, and it’s quite valid, is because of my mother. You see me and you see how my accent is – I’m very English. But actually my mother is Austro-Hungarian and straight from that tradition. My whole cultural background is Europe, not England. My mother danced in Berlin just before the war, saw Max Reinhardt; and my uncle, her brother, knew Brecht and Weill. As a young dancer my mother wasn’t great friends with them, but she knew them.

  BOCKRIS: Would she tell you about them?

  FAITHFULL: Oh, yes. But then I got completely caught up in America. Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Billie Holiday were my goddesses. And it caused me a lot of pain, because I had this thing that I wasn’t good enough because I’m white. I didn’t know what to do about that. It’s terrible, hating yourself for being you. And then I discovered country music, and that helped, because I realized there is white soul. There are white groups, and you can do it if you’re white. So I calmed down a bit. Then slowly I began including European things and realizing that they too were white blues and white soul. There is a lineage. And I fit in. And of the English singers, the one that I loved is Ruth Etting.

  BOCKRIS. Who would you say are your greatest three or four influences as a vocalist?

  FAITHFULL: Billie Holiday, John Lennon, Hank Williams, and Piaf.

  BOCKRIS: Does the British culture of the Forties and Fifties explain the brilliant explosion of music that happened in Britain in the early Sixties?

  FAITHFULL: It was so repressed; it wasn’t like that in America at all. Marilyn Monroe and Lenny Bruce. Charlie Parker. There were a lot of things going on. We didn’t have shit.

  BOCKRIS: Do you think that the music of the Sixties was predominantly a working-class explosion.

  FAITHFULL: It was wonderful. That was the best thing about it. I remember being on tour, my first tour. I was seventeen, a silly little middle-class girl, and so arrogant. I was just so grand you wouldn’t believe it, grand as only a beautiful seventeen-year-old can be. I thought I was too good for anything. And there I was in this bus with these guys [Faithfull performed alone but toured with three or four bands, including The Hollies]. They were charming, they were from Manchester – and now they’re all great geniuses, Graham Nash and all these people. But they were actually the first human beings I had met, apart from my mum, that is. And my brother was a human being.

  BOCKRIS: I remember the grayness of that time, when one could burst into tears spontaneously, just walking around England, particularly on a Sunday.

  FAITHFULL: Well, we all experienced that directly, in those times, on those tours. They were really hard work, and of course there were no days off. We worked on Sundays. And there were all these laws – you couldn’t do this and you couldn’t do that. We couldn’t get our work done because these stupid fucks were doing this stuff. [English licensing laws required halls and bars to close early on Sundays, and local police enforced them.] You’d hear the roadies and the band going on about it, in a very normal way, and it was incredible, really.

  BOCKRIS: Jonathan Cott quotes you as saying that you are firmly resisting the “long tradition of female singers who immolated themselves on the altar of their art.”

  FAITHFULL: Well, that’s very important; I’m very conscious of that. I’ve found that when you are in a real state like I was, the question is, can therapy damage your art? It’s been a problem ever since therapy began. Mary-Louise von Franz, who was Jung’s student, talks about this fear that the artist has of therapy and immature work. Her thing is that the great healing force for this kind of immaturity is work. And this is what people like me, like anyone else in that state, can’t take. They can’t bear the thought of a disciplined work regime. And yet this is the one thing that will really help you. And then she says that it is very common for neurotics to be writing about their own problems. They get an opportunity to work them out. But what happens is that they never do. There it is, you fuck it up again, and you have to go back to the beginning. Then you keep writing about the same thing again and again, and you never get past that. This is where therapy can help. She says the most interesting thing is that there are enough pseudo-artists in the world. If therapy is going to destroy somebody’s art it may not have been such great art anyway. And good therapy will not affect it at all. It won’t make it better and it won’t make it worse. The artist will work past therapy and go on. I accept that. If what I do could be crushed by therapy, then it wasn’t worth doing.

  BOCKRIS: There are so many young girls these days who aspire to be pop stars. What advice would you give to a young girl thinking she might go for this?

  FAITHFULL: Don’t count on fame – that’s not the point. It’s not important. The celebrity and the glamour come naturally. That part is simple: you just get a make-up artist and a stylist and a publicist. The really important bit is the commitment to life, the commitment to people. And to the work involved. Madonna is a highly disciplined, serious artist. Trust on a very deep level that everything will be O.K. And don’t despair. The great tragedies, the big self-destructive tragedies, happen in a split second, when the human being gives up and thinks, I can’t do it. It’s too much for me, I’m gonna cop, I’m gonna check out. That is an illusion. It’s actually a hallucination. It’s not true; it’s gonna be O.K. Just hang on.

  BOCKRIS: The Blazing Away album was described as “a form of autobiography as resonant as any literary equivalent.”

  FAITHFULL: [Laughs] It was?

  BOCKRIS: That was the press release. Were you consciously putting together a set of songs to make an autobiography?

  FAITHFULL: This is hard to talk about without getting very pretentious. The questions for me were, ‘Why did all this happen?’ ‘What is all this about?’ ‘What have I got here?’ ‘What is it?’ Then suddenly came the question, ‘What have I got to give?’ And people had been writing to me, asking me to write my autobiography. And I said no. But I knew that there is something in my story – people have told me that it is such a transcendent thing, although I wouldn’t call it that myself. I wanted to turn all that into something life-enhancing, because I have quite a bit of offstage guilt about being such a negative role model. I’m forty-four now, my son is twenty-four, and I’ve had continu
al criticism from old-guard addicts who feel I’ve let their side down and all that shit. And I’ve had to question my responsibility to others and the example I’ve set.

  BOCKRIS: One could say the album is an autobiography of your image, perhaps, more than an autobiography of you, yourself.

  FAITHFULL: Yes. And that is what I’d be much more comfortable with, because I’m very aware of that; I remember doing it. I remember making a decision to project a persona for people to have. I’m not saying this was wrong and this was right. I’m not going to judge it myself. That’s why I don’t want to say that it’s transcendent, it’s degraded, blah-blah-blah. I am very cautious about saying there is any kind of message. I know, because I’ve heard it, that there is something in that record. I call it a vibration. In my actual life, personally, there is a lot of grace. There really is. I know that, and that must have spilled over into the work.

  BOCKRIS: The way you deliver your material has an edge of joy to it that gives it a positive blast.

  FAITHFULL: But you see, that grace has nothing to do with me. I think that as human beings we are just different aspects of God at play. We all have it. All we need to do, really, is clear the channel, that passage, and it shines right through. It’s a radiance that all human beings have. All I’ve done is just clear the channel. And I reflect it back. I’m just giving it back. That’s the job.

  Susan Sontag revealed a characteristic openness to new experiences and generations by granting me this interview to High Times. In going after unexpected subjects for the magazine I was often surprised by how many of them said they had agreed to do the interview because it was for High Times. They wanted to reach that generation. Luckily when the piece came out, although the magazine did blow up any quote she made about drugs, making her look like a major user when she hardly ever used them at all, Castro was on the cover. That went some way toward cooling the vibe when I delivered the magazine to her doorman.

  9

  Susan Sontag: The Dark Lady of Pop Philosophy

  Among American intellectuals, Susan Sontag is probably the only Harvard-educated philosopher who digs punk rock. Sontag became famous in the Sixties when her series of brilliant essays on politics, pornography and art, including the notorious ‘Notes on Camps’, were collected in Against Interpretation – a book that defended the intuitive acceptance of art against the superficial, cerebral apprehension of it, then fashionable among a small band of extremely powerful, rigid intellectuals who, for example, dismissed such American classics as Naked Lunch, ‘Howl’, On the Road, Andy Warhol’s film Chelsea Girls, etc., as trash. With the impact of her concise arguments, Sontag was immediately labeled the ‘Queen of the Aesthetes’, the philosophical champion of pop art and rock and roll.

  Since then she has written many more essays, a second novel, edited the works of Antonin Artaud (founder of the Theater of Cruelty and an early mescaline user), made two films and undergone radical surgery and two years of chemotherapy for a rare and advanced form of cancer. Thus Susan Sontag continues to live on the edge of life and death, an unusual address for an intellectual essayist but essential for anyone who aspires, as she does, to tell the truth about the present.

  Her first book in seven years, On Photography, was greeted this winter with the familiar violent controversy. Most reviewers treated it as an uncompromising attack on photography itself – everything from photojournalism to baby pictures – and a complete desertion of her Sixties art-for-art’s-sake position for the lofty ground of analytical moralism. As Sontag makes clear for the first time in this interview, On Photography is not about photography at all, but the way it is put to use by the American system. Thus On Photography remains true to Sontag’s main idea of her task as a writer: to examine the majority opinion and expose it from the opposite point of view, putting emphasis on her ‘responsibility to the truth’. The method has proved explosive.

  Sontag decided to give us an interview instead of attending a Ramones gig at CBGB because she thought it would be fun. She spoke intriguingly for hours about famous dopers she’d known (Jean Paul Sartre, a surprise lifelong speed freak, among them), grass, booze, punk rock, art, the Sixties and – always – truth.

  VICTOR BOCKRIS: I’ve been told that you don’t give very many interviews.

  SUSAN SONTAG: No, I don’t. Sure.

  BOCKRIS: Why are you giving this one to High Times?

  SONTAG: Well, I’m giving this one because I haven’t published a proper book in seven years. I’m giving an interview because … because it’s High Times. I was intrigued by that, sure. I thought, well, that’s odd. I hadn’t thought of that. And also because I’m going away, so it’s a little bit hit-and-run. And I suppose in a way I have been hiding.

  There is a crisis you go through after a certain amount of work. Some people say after a decade, but when you’ve done a lot of work and you hear a lot about it and discover that it really does exist out there – you can call it being famous – then you think, “Well, is it any good?” And, “What do I want to go on doing?” And, of course, you can’t shut out people’s reactions, and to a certain extent you do get labeled, and I hate that.

  I find now that I am being described as somebody who has moved away from the positions or ideas that I advocated in the Sixties, as if I’ve reneged. I just got tired of hearing my ideas in other people’s mouths. If some of the things that I said stupidly or accurately in the Sixties, which were then minority positions, have become positions that are much more common, well, then again I would like to say something else.

  BOCKRIS: Do you feel you have any responsibility for the effect of what you have to say on other people?

  SONTAG: No, I feel I have a responsibility to the truth. I’m not going to say something that I don’t think is true, and I think the truth is always valuable. If the truth makes people uncomfortable or is disturbing, that seems to me a good thing.

  I suppose unconsciously I’m always making an estimate when I’m starting some kind of project of what people think. And then I say, well, given that people think this, what can be said in addition to this or what can be said in contradiction to that? There’s always some sense of where people are, so I do in a way think of my essay writing as adversary writing. The selection of subjects doesn’t necessarily represent my most important taste or interests; it has to do with the sense of what’s being neglected or what’s being viewed in a way that seems to exclude other things which are true.

  But I find myself absolutely baffled by the question of the effect or influence of what one is doing. If I think of my own work and I question what effect it is having, I have to throw up my hands. Beyond these baby statements, “I want to tell the truth” or “I want to write well”, I really don’t know. It’s not only that I don’t know, I don’t know how I would know, I don’t know what I would do with it. I’m always amazed at writers who say, “I want to be the conscience of my generation. I want to say the things that’ll change what people feel or think.” I don’t know what that means.

  BOCKRIS: Do you think that the Sixties’ concept of a new consciousness changing things is rather lightweight?

  SONTAG: Yes. In a word.

  BOCKRIS: And yet, drugs are now more a part of our society than they were in the Sixties.

  SONTAG: Absolutely. There was an article in the New York Times the other day about people smoking pot in public in the major cities, and that being absolutely accepted. That’s a major change. I have a friend who spent three years in jail in Texas for having two joints in his pocket. As he crossed from Mexico into Texas he was arrested by the border police. So these changes are important.

  BOCKRIS: Do you have any feelings about an increasingly widespread use of drugs?

  SONTAG: I think marijuana is much better than liquor. I think a society which is addicted to a very destructive and unhealthy drug, namely alcohol, certainly has no right to complain or be sanctimonious or censor the use of a drug which is much less harmful.

  If one leaves it
on the level of soft drugs, I think the soft drugs are much less harmful. They’re much better and more pleasurable and physically less dangerous than alcohol. And above all, less addictive. So as far as that goes, I think fine. What bothers me is that a lot of people are drifting back to alcohol. What I rather liked in the Sixties about the drug use was the repudiation of alcohol. That was very healthy. And now alcohol has come back.

  BOCKRIS: Do you think drugs encourage consumers?

  SONTAG: What I prefer about soft drugs as opposed to alcohol is that it seems to be more pleasurable; maybe it just has to do with my experience. I’m not terribly interested in soft drugs, but I certainly would prefer a joint to a whiskey any day. I think that I rather like the fact that soft drugs tend to make people a little lazier, and they don’t, at least in my experience, encourage aggressive or violent impulses. Of course if you’ve got them, nothing’s going to stop you from acting them out.

  But I don’t feel that drugs are any more connected with consumerism. It’s just a historical phenomenon that the drug culture became widespread at a moment when the consumer society was more developed. And, on the contrary, in North Africa, in Morocco, which is a country that I know pretty well, the new thing for the past 20 years among the younger, more Westernized Moroccans, is alcohol. They think of hashish as the drug of their parents, their parents being lazy and not interested in consumption and getting ahead and modernizing the country. So the young doctors and lawyers and movers and groovers in Moroccan society tend to prefer alcohol. BOCKRIS: I think it’s interesting that in this society we take drugs a lot, and in other societies they don’t take drugs at all. What’s the difference?

  SONTAG: I think what interests me now, the little I know about it, is that this is now becoming a mature drug society, in relation to, let’s say, Western Europe. This is because we have enough time that people have been taking drugs in different strata of the society; that we’re getting different kinds of drug cultures and even a kind of naturalization of the drug thing; that it’s not a big deal. Whereas in a country like France or Italy, which I know pretty well, they’re about where we were ten years ago. It’s still a kind of spooky thing, it’s a daring thing, it’s a thing that people use in a rather violent or self-destructive way.