Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [110]
Which gives you a lot to live up to, maybe. From the interview: “People say, ‘Fuck, man, do you realize how big you are?,’ and I’m gettin’ on a plane, gettin’ off a plane, and goin’ home…. Everybody thinks a tour is just one big rockin’ dope sex orgy, and you do meet some incredible chicks on tour, and they’ll do anything to get at you. Like one morning I’m sleeping and the phone rings: ‘Hello.’ And this very breathy voice on the other end: ‘Hellooo.’ ‘Who are you?’ ‘I’m the Blow Job Queen.’ Now, really! So when she said, ‘And who are yooo?,’ I said Geezer and gave her his room number. Next thing I know he's calling me up saying she's in his room and he can’t get her out. So we all go over and say, ‘Please leave,’ and she says, ‘No! Why? I give the best blow jobs in the West. Don’t you believe me?’ We don’t want to hurt her, we don’t know fucking what to say or do, so finally we all threaten to piss on her if she doesn’t leave, and she does.
“People really go weird, man, it's fuckin’ funny at times, like ‘Touch my hand!’ and you go ‘What?’ and they go ‘He's touched my hand!’ and run off in the crowd.” He laughs. “They tend to think of you as a fucking miracle man or something. A great person I met once was Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac. And I asked him why he quit the band and he told that he’d been slogging around for about ten years or so, and when it did eventually happen he said he started completely to lose his identity. And that's what I don’t want to do. I don’t wanta be ‘OZZY OSBOURNE,’ I just wanta be me, like you are you, and live an ordinary life. Now I’m a bit financially secure, I’ve bought my own house, I’ve got my own wife and two kids and that's all I want. I mean, I’m just an ordinary guy making music. I’m very depressed, personally. I’m a fucking neurotic. But people tend to think that we live Black Sabbath. Well, I love the band, I’ve worked through all the stages with it, but I love my home and my family a thousand times more. Because that's reality, that's what I live for. People tend to fucking think that I go home and whip my wife to shreds, you know… I’m not saying I don’t,” he laughs again, “but they think my mother was a vampire bat, and my father was a fucking graverobber. People think that that sort of thing, that and violence, is exciting. Kim Fowley told me, ‘I tell you what you wanna do next man, you oughta go to Mexico and buy a corpse, and take it onstage and stab it.’ And it's getting to that point. We intend to be around for a while, but we don’t nurse any illusions either. Black Sabbath was just a successful thing that happened, you can’t predict how or why, it's just one of those freaky things in life that happens. I can’t go doing this forever. Sooner or later it's going to fizzle out, when fucking Adolf Hitler and the Gestapo start coming after us or something. And then there’ll be a new thing called Gas Chamber Rock: ‘Bring your mother to the gas chamber!’”
Creem, June-July 1972
10A media Satanist, author (The Satanic Bible), and High Priest of the Church of Satan in hippie-era San Francisco.
Eno Sings
with the Fishes
I‘ve never seen anybody make it harder on himself than Brian Eno. He keeps making these beautiful, brilliant records by processes so arcane that discussion of his music often results in the conclusion that he's some flipped-out technological whiz kid or art-school dilettante.
That's how droves are driven away from same beautiful, brilliant albums, a clear case of methodology getting in the way of desired results, i.e. (supposedly), mass communication. But since explication of said methodology is essential to adequate description though not simple enjoyment of the music, I’ll attempt a brief translation: this cat thinks if you know where you’re going to end up, you might as well not get moving in the first place, so he's devised all sorts of little diversionary tactics (Oblique Strategies, he calls them, and has marketed them as playing