The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [10]
I didn’t think about it. It was just there. I never did any singing. I never even conceived it. I thought I was going to be a writer or a sociologist, maybe write plays. I never went to concerts—one or two at most. I saw a few things on TV, but I’d never been a part of it all. But I heard in my head a whole concert situation, with a band and singing and an audience—a large audience. Those first five or six songs I wrote, I was just taking notes at a fantastic rock concert that was going on inside my head. And once I had written the songs, I had to sing them.
When was this?
About three years ago. I wasn’t in a group or anything. I just got out of college and I went down to the beach. I wasn’t doing much of anything. I was free for the first time. I had been going to school, constantly, for fifteen years. It was a beautiful hot summer and I just started hearing songs. I think I still have the notebook with those songs written in it. This kind of mythic concert that I heard . . . I’d like to try and reproduce it sometime, either in actuality or on record. I’d like to reproduce what I heard on the beach that day.
Had you ever played any musical instrument?
When I was a kid I tried piano for a while, but I didn’t have the discipline to keep up with it.
How long did you take piano?
Only a few months. I think I got to about the third-grade book.
Any desire now to play an instrument?
Not really. I play maracas. I can play a few songs on the piano. Just my own inventions, so it’s not really music; it’s noise. I can play one song. But it’s got only two changes in it. Two chords, so it’s pretty basic stuff. I would like to be able to play guitar, but I don’t have any feeling for it.
When did you start writing poetry?
Oh, I think around the fifth or sixth grade I wrote a poem called “The Pony Express.” That was the first I can remember. It was one of those ballad-type poems. I never could get it together, though. I always wanted to write, but I always figured it’d be no good unless somehow the hand just took the pen and started moving without me really having anything to do with it. Like, automatic writing. But it just never happened. I wrote a few poems, of course.
Like, “Horse Latitudes,” I wrote when I was in high school. I kept a lot of notebooks through high school and college and then when I left school for some dumb reason—maybe it was wise—I threw them all away. There’s nothing I can think of I’d rather have in my possession right now than those two or three lost notebooks. I was thinking of being hypnotized or taking sodium Pentothal to try to remember, because I wrote in those books night after night. But maybe if I’d never thrown them away, I’d never have written anything original—because they were mainly accumulations of things that I’d read or heard, like quotes from books. I think if I’d never gotten rid of them I’d never been free.
A question you’ve been asked before countless times: do you see yourself in a political role? I’m throwing a quote of yours back at you, in which you described the Doors as “erotic politicians.”
It was just that I’ve been aware of the national media while growing up. They were always around the house and so I started reading them. And so I became aware gradually, just by osmosis, of their style, their approach to reality. When I got into the music field, I was interested in securing kind of a place in that world, and so I was turning keys and I just knew instinctively how to do it. They look for catchy phrases and quotes they can use for captions, something to base an article on to give it an immediate response. It’s the kind of term that does mean