In a 1971 issue of ‘Rolling Stone,’ you reviewed an album by the German actress and singer Lotte Lenya, and at the end you wrote, “It was hard for me to face up to being a girl. I thought girls were dumb. But Lotte Lenya showed me how high and low-down you can shoot being a woman.”
She was pretty tough. I only saw rare footage of her doing “Pirate Jenny,” but she was pretty strong. And when I was a teenager, I listened to Nina Simone, another strong female. But in terms of women I could relate to, there weren’t too many. I related to Lotte Lenya, but I related more to Bob Dylan. I loved Billie Holiday, but as a performer I related more to Mick Jagger.
What were some of your seminal rock & roll epiphanies?
I grew up with the whole history of rock & roll. I was a little girl when Little Richard hit the scene. I remember the first time I heard Jim Morrison on the radio: “Riders on the Storm.” We were in a car, me and a friend of mine. We stopped the car—we couldn’t go on: “What is this? What are we hearing?” I remember that sense of wonder.
When “Like a Rolling Stone” came out, I was in college—I think I was a freshman. It was so overwhelming that nobody went to class. We were just roaming around, talking about this song. I didn’t know what Dylan was talking about in the song. But it didn’t matter. It needed no translation. It just made you feel like you weren’t alone—that someone was speaking your language.
What was your vision—musically, lyrically, spiritually—at the time you recorded ‘Horses’? It was a pivotal album in its time but does not sound at all dated today.
Part of that is because it came out of five years’ work. The opening lines—“Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine”—I wrote in 1970. “Redondo Beach” was an early poem. The process of doing a record happened organically from years of improvising, gaining a voice and gathering my ideas.
But the early intention, right from my first performance with Lenny at St. Mark’s Church [in New York] in February of ’71, was merely to kick a little life into what I perceived as a dead poetry scene. It seemed self-absorbed and cliquish. It didn’t make me feel expansive or beautiful or intoxicated or elevated at all. I was trying to kick poetry in the ass.
People felt that I was stepping on hallowed ground, being irreverent. But I didn’t care because the people who were supportive were cool. What do you care when 80 percent of the poets in America were against you but you have William Burroughs on your side?
Did you read at rock & roll shows in the early days?
Sometimes I’d get jobs opening up for other acts. The New York Dolls would play with three or four other bands you never heard of, and I’d have to open the whole night. Nobody wanted to see me. I had no microphone. I’d just yell my poetry. And these guys would yell, “Get a job! Get back in the kitchen!” I just shot it back at them. But as I started developing with Lenny and Richard [Sohl, Patti Smith Group bassist], we got sturdier, and our thing started to get more defined.
I seriously worried that I was seeing the decline of rock & roll. It was stadium rock and glitter bands. It was getting square from Peter Frampton on up. So I started aggressively pursuing what we were doing. But still not self-motivated—I don’t care if anybody believes me or not. My design was to shake things up, to motivate people and bring a different type of work ethic back into rock & roll.
Was there a defining moment when you sensed that real change was imminent?
Seeing Television. On Easter of 1974, Lenny and I were invited to the premiere of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rolling Stones. It was such an exciting night. I had my Horses clothes on; I looked like Baudelaire. I was so thrilled to be asked to see the premiere of a movie. I’d never been to one.
After the movie, Lenny told me he had promised to go down to CBGB to see this new group. It was about midnight, and there were like fourteen people there. We saw Television, and I thought they were great. I really felt that was it, what I was hoping for: to see people approach things in a different way with a street ethic but also their full mental faculties. Of course, Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell—he was in the group at the time—were both poets.
Then we started working together. They opened for us at Max’s Kansas City; I think we did eight weeks together at CBGB. They were really heightened nights. Sometimes I see 8 mm footage that somebody took and think, “God, did I have guts!” Because I wasn’t much of a singer. But I had bravado, and I could improvise.
What is it like for you to perform “Piss Factory” [her 1974 debut single] now, twenty-two years after you recorded it? Even though you wrote it as an expression of your own adolescent frustration, the poem still has a potent, contemporary resonance.
It’s important for people to remember the crap they had to go through. Teenagehood, to me, is the toughest thing in life. Maybe some people loved their teenage years; I found them really difficult.
But it’s not a negative piece. It’s not about the factory or those people in it. They’re all minor characters. What it’s really about is the human spirit. I was saying that as a young person, I still had desire—desire to do well. Perhaps some of these people in the factory lost all desire. I can understand how that can happen. It can be a rough life. But I also know that it is possible, as long as a person has a breath in their body, to feel alive. What “Piss Factory” is about is: someone who in the midst of the dead felt alive.
As I read it now, it doesn’t matter whether I relate or don’t relate to the whole scenario, which happened a long time ago. I’m still a human being with desires, hopes and dreams. In that respect, I haven’t changed much.
What did they make in this factory besides piss?
They made baby buggies. I was a baby-buggy bumper-beeper inspector. [Laughs] You know those beepers on the buggies? I had to beep them to make sure they worked. But I kept getting demoted. I actually liked my lowest job—I had to inspect the pipes they used for the handles on the buggies—because I could take my copy of [Rimbaud’s] A Season in Hell down in the basement and read.
How long did you last at the factory?
I only worked there in summers. I wanted to make money to go to college. It was just a schoolgirl thing.
But it wasn’t written with a thought for anyone other than myself. That’s why it’s got that energy. When I wrote that piece, I didn’t have any compassion for anybody else. I was fresh from having lived it, being ridiculed by those people, pushed around and roughed up.
Now I look at those same people with some compassion. I can imagine what their scenarios could have been: Maybe they were divorced, had five kids to take care of, nothing to look forward to. But I was sixteen, and I was concerned with myself.
Your new book about Robert Mapplethorpe, ‘The Coral Sea,’ is an almost mystical narrative written in an elegant, romantic style of prose, unlike any of your other published work.
That’s because hardly any of my Eighties work has been published. I spent every day of the Eighties working on my writing, and I actually wrote . . . I hate to call them novels, more like novella-type pieces. And this particular work comes out of that. One morning I’d just sent Jackson off to school; it was about 7:30 in the morning, and the phone rang. I knew what it would be. It was Robert’s brother; Robert had passed away.
I was watching A&E at the time. They had a long series on the Romantic poets, so I was deeply into Shelley and Byron. At the time he called me, I was actually watching the movie version of the opera Tosca, but when that was over, I was going to get my Romantic-era dose. I knew Robert was dying; I was on vigil that night. I had wept quite a bit in those last two years. So I just sat there and then became immediately energized. I felt rushes of energy, nearly chaotic. But I kept it together and started writing. And I didn’t stop. Every morning after Jackson went to school, while Fred was sleeping, from March to May [1989], I worked on this.
The book describes a young man, M, undertaking a final journey before his death, but it does not recount Mapplethorpe’s art or life in a literal sense.
No, it’s encoded. It’s not really about Robert, who had AIDS, and how he battled it. It encodes his process as an artist and things I knew about him, his childhood. The uncle in the piece is [his patron and mentor] Sam Wagstaff. Robert was very into the surrealists, Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst—the idea of objects in boxes, making altarpieces. So the passenger M is also much like that.
Was it hard for you, after Mapplethorpe’s death, to see him demonized by conservative politicians and right-wing activists who targeted the explicit sexuality in some of his work?
I thought it was ludicrous. If Robert was alive, he would have found it annoying. But he would also have been heartbroken by the idea of [Senator] Jesse Helms introducing Robert’s pictures of children—he photographed children beautifully and in no unnatural way—as examples of child pornography. He would have wept over that.
Robert didn’t like controversy. He didn’t do his work politically. He was a pure artist. When he photographed two men kissing or a man pissing in another man’s mouth, he was trying, as Jean Genet did, to portray a certain aspect of the human condition nobly, elegantly. I know the kind of man he was. If someone said, “This picture of a cock offends me,” he would have taken it down and put a flower up. Because to him they were the same photograph. And they were. Robert’s photographs of flowers were very evocative.
He had no problem with labeling his work. The small body of S&M photographs that he had, he put in a portfolio called X. He agreed with stickers that said one had to be over eighteen to walk into a room that had this work. It was not for everybody—he knew that.
You often use the word “work” when referring to your art. For someone who has been characterized as a bohemian poet and singer, you have a strong, focused work ethic.
I always have. I really developed a high work ethic through Robert. He had the strongest work ethic I’ve ever seen. Until practically the day he died, when he was almost paralyzed and half blind, he was still trying to draw. And my parents have strong work ethics. They both worked hard all their lives.
People think, “You romanticize all these indulgent, decadent French artists.” I never romanticized their lifestyle, their waste. What I truly loved about them is the work they do. If someone had a great, romantic, self-indulgent life but did crappy art, I wouldn’t be interested.
Do you miss rock & roll stardom at all—even just a little bit?
I didn’t really experience a lot of that. On our last tour of Europe [in 1979], we were extremely popular, so I did see all the fame and fortune and fawning that I needed to see in a lifetime: paparazzi, people cutting my hair and pulling my clothes off. I felt like Elvis Presley for a month or two.
Fred’s motto around the house—which I actually put in “Gone Again”—was “Fame is fleeting,” which he took from General Patton, which General Patton took from Alexander the Great. And to strip oneself of all that is quite interesting. It’s somewhat humiliating and painful at first, but once you do it, it’s very liberating.
I don’t look at all those things with contempt. I appreciate it when young bands say they were positively inspired by our work. And I’m proud that I can actually say, “Yes, for a brief period of my life, I was a rock & roll star.” I cherish that.
But I don’t need it now. Nor do I want it. That’s youth’s game. And quite a game. It can be an admirable, even treacherous game. But it belongs to youth.
DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON
by P.J. O’Rourke
November 28, 1996
At the time you were writing ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,’ you implied that things had gone wrong with the Sixties, that it was a flawed era.
Well, the truth of the matter was, there was Kent State, there was Chicago, there was Altamont. The Sixties was about the Free Speech Movement long before it was about the flower children. I was more a part of the Movement than I was of the Acid Club. But you knew that something was happening. You have to remember that acid was legal. [Ken] Kesey was a leader of the psychedelic movement. Berkeley was a whole different thing. The music was another thing. There was the Matrix [club], Ralph Gleason, everything.
I had the best time of my life in the Sixties, and I rail and curse against it because I miss it. But when we really get to talking about it, and when I really get to remembering what actually happened, I recall that it was a horrifying period.
But we really had the illusion of power—the illusion of being in charge. Which was quite liberating. We did drive one president out of the White House.
You have given a pretty negative depiction of the effect of drugs in your work. Basically, nothing happy happens to people when they take drugs. Instead, it’s Edge City. There’s a lot of stuff that you’ve written that Nancy Reagan could have used—“Kids, this is what’ll happen.”
Whether it’s negative or not, the reality of it is, you start playing with drugs, the numbers aren’t on your side for coming up smelling like roses and being president of the United States. I did at some point describe the difference between me and, say, [Timothy] Leary’s concept—you know, that drugs were a holy experience and only for, you know, the drug church. I am in favor of more of a democratization of drugs. Take your chances, you know. I never felt that, aside from a few close friends, it was my business to advocate things.
Do you think there’s anything interesting about drugs for making art?
Yeah, totally interesting. But it took me about two years of work to be able to bring a drug experience back and put it on paper.
And not make it sound like a script for ‘The Trip’ with Peter Fonda.
To do it right means you must retain that stuff at the same time you experience it. You know, acid will move your head around and your eyes, and whatever else you perceive things with. But bringing it back was one of the hardest things I had ever had to do in writing.
You can kid about it. But to really put it down on paper, to be honest about it . . .
Well, that’s what Vegas is about. It’s about the altered perceptions of the characters. To me, that’s really the bedrock of the book—their responses to one another’s questions. It’s like in the Three Stooges, that story where they were out in the rowboat in a lake and it sprung a leak. And the boat was filling up with water. So they decided to bash a hole in the bottom of the boat to let the water out. Now that’s drug reasoning.
How do you write about it?
Well, you know, I wrote it in the process. I wrote it by hand at first, in notebooks. And in fear. Oscar had left me there with a pound of weed and a loaded .357, and some bullets in his briefcase.
And no money.
I couldn’t pay the bill. And I was afraid. And I was waiting for the right hour to leave the hotel through the casino.
And earlier I’d slowly, you know, moved stuff down to the car, small amounts, in and out. But there was one big, metal Halliburton [suitcase] that there was no way to get out. I was trying to pick the right time to leave. I remember at 4:30 in the morning, a poker game was going on, nothing but poker games. I just walked through the casino nonchalantly carrying this big Halliburton. I was afraid. I was afraid of taking off, you know, in a red car, on the only road to L.A. I was afraid the whole time. I was in bad enough condition as it was. And, you know, I’m jumping a hotel bill out in Las Vegas and then trying to drive to L.A. in a red car.
Not entirely sober.
That’s not your best way to go—a stolen gun, a pound of weed. There was this big bulletin board on the edge of Las Vegas: attention, twenty years—for marijuana.
For me, the key moment of the paranoia was the enormous, frightening sign outside the hotel window. Oscar wants to shoot it. But you say, “No, let’s study its habits first.”
We’re feeding off each other. There’s a knock on the door, and somebody says, “Well, it must be the manager ready to shoot our heads off.” And the response from the other person is to immediately get a knife, open the door and slit the [guy’s] throat.
But can yo
u be productive on drugs? I mean, we know that drugs definitely give you different viewpoints, looking at the world through a fly’s eye and so on.
Without the drugs, we would not have gone to Las Vegas. Well, we would have had completely different experiences. The logic of the whole thing was drug logic, and it was the right thought. But drugs get to be a problem when the actual writing time comes, except just as a continuation of the mood.
What do you tell people who say they want to become writers?
Ye gods, that’s a tough one. I think that one of the things I stumbled on early, as really a self-defense mechanism of some kind, was typing other writers. Typing a page of Hemingway or a page of Faulkner. Three pages. I learned a tremendous amount about rhythm in that way. I see writing really as music. And I see my work as essentially music. That’s why I like to hear it read out loud by other people. I like to hear what they’re getting out of it. It tells me what you see. I like to have women read it. If it fits musically, it will go to almost any ear. It could be that that’s why children relate to it.
The Rolling Stone interviews Page 39