BOCKRIS: Have you ever been in a dangerous situation with drugs?
RICHARDS: No. I don’t know if I’ve been extremely lucky or if it’s the subconscious regulatory thing I’ve gotten, because I’m not extremely careful, but I’ve never turned blue in somebody else’s bathroom. I consider that the height of bad manners. I’ve ’ad so many people do it to me and it’s really not on, as far as drug etiquette goes, to turn blue in somebody else’s john. You suddenly realize that somebody’s been in there for like an hour and you ’aven’t ’eard a sound, and I think it’s such a drag, because I think it’s a drag when people do it to me, thumping on the door: “Are you all right?” “Yeah! I’m having a fucking crap!”
But people do do it. I mean, if somebody’s been in the john for hours and hours I’ll do it, and I know ’ow annoying it is when I hear the voice comin’ out: “Yeah, I’m all right!” But sometimes I’m glad I’ve done it, because we’ve knocked the door down and there’s somebody going into the last stages of the colors of the rainbow and that’s really a drag. The ambulance comes and … clear everything up. Because you can’t pretend ’e’s just fallen ill or something.
BOCKRIS: Rock is like drugs in a way, because people listen to it to cure their pain. Rock music makes you feel good, brings you out of yourself under any circumstances at all.
RICHARDS: It will do that for you in a way. Maybe why drugs are so associated with rock music is that the people who actually create the music no longer get that feeling from rock unless they’re actually playing it. I mean, they can’t put a record on and just feel good anymore because it’s just so much to do with part of their business. So you turn to other things to make yourself feel good. It’s a theory [laughing]… I don’t know. That’s my excuse, anyway.
BOCKRIS: But in a way, you’re addicted to the guitar, right?
RICHARDS: Yeah. There’s another thing. Now maybe it’s because rock and roll’s such a tight formula. The most important thing is, because the formula is so strict, it’s the variations that come about within this format that are the things people turn onto. Because it’s the same old thing again, but there’s one or two slightly different ways of doing things that make one record stand out different from another. And it’s when you’re into it to that degree of trying to find …
BOCKRIS: How much do you think you keep being successful because you work so hard?
RICHARDS: I think it’s probably got more to do with it than even we realize, because it’s very easy to be lazy when you don’t have to work. I’ve found it’s very dangerous for me to be lazy. I develop lots of nasty habits, which are not good for me, whereas if I keep working – and in a way it’s just like a compulsion – I’ll keep myself together. The minute I relax and let it go, I just sort of drift. I can drift into anything. I’m fair game!
BOCKRIS: Well, I know Mick is, but are the rest of the members of the band into working like that?
RICHARDS: Yeah. Charlie loves to be at home, but that’s his own little battle, ’cos he also likes to work. If Charlie could find a way of being on the road every night, but also being at home, he’d do it. Ronnie lives for nothing but playing, and that’s the way Mick and I have always been. What we’ve got to push for now is a way to work regularly and to work a lot more varied venues in a lot more varied places, to get off the old warpath.
For instance, if they lay an American tour on us tomorrow, I can name 90 percent of the cities we’re gonna go to. Rock and roll tours don’t go to Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, North or South Dakota. They don’t exist as far as rock and roll’s concerned. But it can’t be that people in there are not interested. They’ve got radio stations, and the same records are number one. It comes down to the agents and promoters who are totally into country music in those areas. So the only people who go there are country musicians.
It’s amazing to me that in America, in this day and age, they can still keep these very rigid separate circuits. They are slowly breaking down, but I remember 10 or 12 years ago in America the black circuit was just totally separate. But the amazing one is the country music one, which is still rigidly separated from anything else. And for music which is in lots of ways so similar … when you come down to the basis of it and trace where it all comes from, one of the major influences on rock is white country music. That’s 50 percent of it. The other 50 percent is black music. And the fact that those two just … it’s apartheid, you know, so they’re not white, they’re rednecks.
BOCKRIS: Have you thought at all about doing a concert tour like Dylan’s Rolling Thunder? Is it totally impossible for you to do that still?
RICHARDS: No. I think that’s the way things have really gotta go. I can’t see going around forever playing bigger and bigger baseball parks and superdomes. I think audiences have gone about as far as you can go with it. In fact, I think a lot of people probably don’t go because they just can’t stand to go to those places.
BOCKRIS: When you get off these exhausting tours, what do you do?
RICHARDS: Aaaahhh, that is the weirdest time. Yeah.
BOCKRIS: It must be a real difficult transition.
RICHARDS: That’s my problem period. If I don’t find something to do right away, that’s when I’ve found that I’ve been getting incredibly lazy, but also incredibly restless because you’re so used to being hyper every day, and suddenly you’ve got nothing to do and you think “Aaah … nothing to do, great!” And you sit back for five minutes and then you say “Phew!” You’ve got nowhere to go, and you walk around the room ten times and it’s … it’s … WEIRD!
BOCKRIS: Do you hang around with each other or does the group completely separate?
RICHARDS: These days everybody just fragments too, so suddenly you’re alone from all these people who you’ve been incredibly close to for two or three months. Sometimes Ronnie and I are with each other for five or six days on the trot. Other people have been to sleep six times and we’ve seen six dawns. You can’t even remember the last time you slept because you’ve got this memory …
It’s funny, you know, when you sleep everything is so neatly put into compartments of that day and that day, and I did that on that day, but if you stay up for five or six days the memory goes back into one long period with no breaks at all, and days don’t mean anything anymore. You just remember people or specific events.
BOCKRIS: If you all keep in good shape, do you think you have another 15 years?
RICHARDS: Oh yeah. I hope so. There’s no way to tell. We know a lot of the old black boys have kept going forever. A lot of the old roots boys, the old blues players, and as far as we’re concerned they’re virtually playing the same thing. They kept going till the day they dropped. They still are. B. B. King’s close to 60. Jimmy Reed died last year, and he was going to the end. Chuck Berry’s still going. Muddy Waters just had one of his biggest albums ever. Howling Wolf kept going to the very end. Sleepy John just died last month: he was preparing to go on a European tour … I mean, Elvis was the one that I would have said, but he happened to have went early.
It’s a physical thing. There’s no denying that there’s a high fatality rate in rock and roll. Up until the middle Sixties the most obvious method of rock and roll death was chartered planes. Since then drugs have taken their toll, but all of the people that I ’ave known that ’ave died from so-called drug overdoses ’ave all been people that’ve ’ad some fairly serious physical weakness somewhere.
Brian was the only one amongst us who would ever get ill. He was the only one of us who missed some gigs because of health, and this was before he was involved with any drug at all, and a couple of other guys I’ve known that have died from overdoses weren’t particularly strong physically, and they probably went a lot quicker because of the fact that they were on drugs. But they’re not people who you would have said would have lasted forever anyway. Meaning, I guess, that a lot of the time drugs just accelerated what’s going to happen anyway.
BOCKRIS: At this point do you believe anythi
ng’s going to get better, or do you think the Stones might not be able to continue doing what they’ve been doing?
RICHARDS: I can’t see any real obstacles in the way as long as the Stones don’t just sit on their asses, as long as we try and do things that we think are beneficial for all concerned.
BOCKRIS: So you don’t worry about members of the group getting fucked up?
RICHARDS: No, not now …
BOCKRIS: I mean, you’ve survived so much.
RICHARDS: Exactly. The thing is that whatever’s happened, nobody’s ever felt alone. If anything’s happened, somebody’s always rallied around, and not just the Stones. Friends, other bands, other musicians and just other people generally, people not connected with the music business, just friends and people we don’t even know, but you find they’ve been taking an interest in you. We all feel that as long as you don’t feel isolated and completely cut off from everything, you’re okay.
I feel very hopeful about the future. I find it all very enjoyable with a few peak surprises thrown in. Even being busted … it’s no pleasure, but it certainly isn’t boring. And I think boring is the worst thing of all, you know, anything but boring. At least it keeps you active.
BOCKRIS: Do you ever get worried that they’ll finally get you?
RICHARDS: Well, if they haven’t done it by now, no. It must be fairly obvious to everybody now that they’ve ’ad a go with trying. If they try again, I don’t see any real way they can get away with it just because they have been trying to get me and it never works that way.
Terry Southern is one of the great figures to come out of the Sixties. He has drifted into oblivion largely because, rather than being associated with a single group, like the Beats, he was equally at home in the milieus of Hollywood, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles and the Beats. As he explains herein he was a man who did not believe in celebrity or collectives. His individuality is among his strongest characteristics, but cost him dearly in terms of his recognisability. Readers are encouraged to seek out his classic books, Red-Dirt Marijuana, Candy, Blue Movie, The Magic Christian, Flash and Filigree (least known and best), and see his films, from Dr Strangelove in ’62 to Easy Rider in ’69. He straddled that decade and was the greatest satirist of his times. A top draw, first-class act from beginning to end. We need more like him. Look for a forthcoming bio.
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An Interview With Our Greatest Satirist: Terry Southern
In 1989, the day after returning from a book tour in Amsterdam, I drove up to Terry Southern’s beautiful country house, Blackberry Manor in Northern Connecticut.
There he has resided these many years, and from there he has launched comic broadsides on the state of America, ranging from the madcap film Dr. Strangelove to his novels Candy, Blue Movie, and The Magic Christian. His collection, Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes (being reissued this spring by Citadel Press), once prompted Norman Mailer to describe Southern’s prose as “clean … and murderous”, and hail him as the rightful heir to Nathanael West. My mind was full of questions about Southern’s secret writing process as my car came to a halt outside his elegant 1756 house perched between green fields and babbling brooks. A grand scene lay before my eyes when I went inside.
Terry Southern sat in a large armchair before a roaring fire. Books, magazines, papers, bottles, and ashtrays were strewn across the coffee table, atop which a large electric typewriter stood at the ready. Looking like a cross between Voltaire and a roué Mark Twain, the squire rose to greet me, emanating the charm and courtesy of a time gone by. We sat down to a groaning board of exquisitely prepared food, and he remarked, “You’ll find that we know how to entertain our guests here at Blackberry Manor.” Then, turning to his companion, Gail, he said, “Vic thinks it’s an elaborate set-up for some weird intellectual sting.” This serious/comic paradox, this magus of the sexual revolution, is also, of course, a man of letters deeply committed to writing in a fashion that has not been, and apparently cannot be, corrupted.
VICTOR BOCKRIS: As writers, you and I come from different worlds. You – as I understand it, correct me if I’m wrong – are the pure writer who eschews any relationship between successful writing and commercial success.
TERRY SOUTHERN: I think you’re trying to draw a distinction between an artist and a professional. This is the difference between a party girl and a hooker. A party girl is somebody who does it for fun, but a hooker is somebody who does it for money. I’m just talking about the distinction this way so we can limit it to this dichotomy. I’m a party girl. No, I would prefer it, and that’s on record now, if you would say ‘party person’.
BOCKRIS: When you put a message on your answering machine, do you have a very strong sense of yourself?
SOUTHERN: I try to get away from myself. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this T. S. Eliot quote which I used as the prefatory quote in Blue Movie: “Poetry is not an expression of personality, it is an escape from personality. It is not an outpouring of emotion, it is a suppression of emotion – but, of course, only those who have personality and emotions can ever know what it means to want to get away from those things.”
BOCKRIS: Therein hangs the focus of the interview – the conflict between your own being and celebrity.
SOUTHERN: I can tell you quite frankly, that is what put a damper on my keenness about writing: I saw that in the writing lies the trail of celebrity and damnable invasion. The only reason I’m granting this interview is because of my feeling of nonsexual endearment toward you.
BOCKRIS: Despite what you think of the life of celebrity, you’ve worked with many of the outstanding celebrities of our times, from Peter Sellers to William Burroughs. You worked with the Beats, with The Rolling Stones, and with film crews on so many classics, from Barbarella to Easy Rider, but you never became associated with any single group. You always remained true to your own person.
SOUTHERN: Well, I don’t think a person should be given credit for something like that. It was probably just because I never came in contact with a group that appealed to me enough. I tried. At one point I actually wanted to be in a kibbutz with Mason Hoffenberg [Southern’s collaborator on Candy]. Mason said, “Oh, we should go to Israel and be in this kibbutz.” So we went on this ship. We had to clean out the furnace of the smokestack. It was the worst kind of work you could imagine, but it was very satisfying because you thought it was going to be an ideal community, one of these Shangri-La-type concepts. The first night this guy came in and he had been robbed. There were forty dollars missing from his foot-locker. So everybody was freaking out. People said, “My God, we gotta get locks on the footlockers.” Then other people said, “No, no locks on our footlockers! That would defeat the whole notion of our unity. If that person took the money, he needed it.” There was an immediate schism, and so we left the ship. The point of the story is that it’s possible for me to admire and to try and join a group like that, but it’s also impossible for me to join a group. You can probably never find a group that was more motivated than that group, but they split apart over a forty-dollar theft and a simple disagreement about whether the person stole the money or needed it. But I’m certainly interested in causes, as I know you are.
BOCKRIS: I am interested in understanding the process of your career. By the early Sixties, when The Magic Christian was published, your novel Candy was a runaway bestseller, but you didn’t get any money from it because of an international-copyright mix-up that allowed millions of unauthorized copies to be published. Did this sour you so much on the publishing scene that you were cynical or detached when The Magic Christian was also successful?
SOUTHERN: What you are failing to realize is that I never had any notion at all that there was any money to be made in writing. Never – except for much later on, when I was approached to write film scripts. Any disappointments I would have had would not have been from the publishing aspect of it. Critical reviews might have upset me, but not the commercial aspect. You’re thinking of it as though my view is lik
e that of some career-minded writer.
BOCKRIS: But to go from writing Candy in 1958 to Dr Strange-love in 1964, and to get the enormous response that you got in such a short amount of time, must have had a big effect on the development of your career.
SOUTHERN: Are you saying that you can’t comprehend creative work that isn’t done to try to please somebody outside yourself? You seem to be – correct me if I’m wrong – ruling out any comprehensible stimuli other than peer-group approval, power, or just money. Don’t you think that some of these things just happen, almost on the level of, say, doodling when you’re on the phone? I have read enough of your work to know that you often write with a sense of delight about something and that you enjoy what you’re writing. I can tell that you would write even if you weren’t being paid. You’re probably the sort of person who might keep a journal. Do you know those people who keep a journal, Graham Greene types, who don’t assume, Oh well, this is going to be published? They’re not going to show it to you and they in fact resent the intrusion if somebody snatches their journal, but great writing goes in there. I think Kafka’s best writing is in his diaries, and he didn’t want them to be seen by anyone. I’m prepared to invent a whole psyche, if you want, in which I’m a man possessed, a workaholic who couldn’t stop writing.
BOCKRIS: What I’m interested in is understanding how you work.
SOUTHERN: I could tell you, as I have told many of my students over the years, that the way to do it is with some sense of method: if you write a page a day, you’ll have a novel a year. How can you miss? A novel a year, wow! A body of work. We’re talking Dashiell Hammett and Nat West. We’re talking George Orwell.
Students want advice about everything. They say, “How do we do that?” And then you have to encourage them to establish a routine, such as the first thing you do is wake up. You wake up and you have the whole thing worked out where you have your coffee – maybe you have a coffee-timer thing so that the coffee is right there ready – and then pow! you sit down at your typewriter and you work for, it doesn’t matter, two hours, three hours, four hours, or just until you turn out one good page. So you’ve got a page a day, and then you’ve got a novel a year.
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