The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [131]
But there were a couple of teachers who had a big impact on you, weren’t there?
I had a great third-grade teacher, Miss Simon, who was just a peach. She was the first person who made me think it was okay to draw pictures. She’d say, “Oh, that’s lovely,” and she’d have me draw pictures and do murals and all this stuff. As soon as she saw I had some ability, she capitalized on it. She was very encouraging, and it was the first time I heard that the idea of being a creative person was a viable possibility in life. “You mean you can spend all day drawing pictures? Wow! What a great piece of news.”
She enlarged the world for me, just like the sailors did. I had another good teacher, Dwight Johnson. He’s the guy that turned me into a freak. He was my seventh-grade teacher, and he was a wild guy. He had an old MG TC, you know, beautiful, man. And he also had a Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle, the fastest-accelerating motorcycle at the time. And he was out there. He opened lots and lots of doors. He’s the guy that got me reading deeper than science fiction. He taught me that ideas are fun.
You turn fifty next year. How does that feel?
God, I never thought I’d make it. I didn’t think I’d get to be forty, to tell you the truth. Jeez, I feel like I’m a hundred million years old. Really, it’s amazing. Mostly because it puts all the things I associate with my childhood so far back. The Fifties are now like the way I used to think the Twenties were. They’re like lost in time somewhere back there.
And I mean, here we are, we’re getting into our fifties, and where are these people who keep coming to our shows coming from? What do they find so fascinating about these middle-aged bastards playing basically the same thing we’ve always played? I mean, what do seventeen-year-olds find fascinating about this? I can’t believe it’s just because they’re interested in picking up on the Sixties, which they missed. Come on, hey, the Sixties were fun, but shit, it’s fun being young, you know, nobody really misses out on that. So what is it about the Nineties in America? There must be a dearth of fun out there in America. Or adventure. Maybe that’s it, maybe we’re just one of the last adventures in America. I don’t know.
AXL ROSE
by Kim Neely
April 2, 1992
What’s your earliest memory?
My earliest conscious memory was of a feeling that I’d been here before and that I had a toy gun in my hand. I knew it was a toy gun, and I didn’t know how I knew. That was my first memory. But I’ve done regression therapy all the way back, just about to the point of conception. I kind of know what was going on then.
Can you talk about what you’ve learned?
Just that . . . my mom’s pregnancy wasn’t a welcome thing. My mom got a lot of problems out of it, and I was aware of those problems. That would tend to make you real fucking insecure about how the world felt about your ass. My real father was a pretty fucked-up individual. I didn’t care too much for him when I was born. I didn’t like the way he treated my mother. I didn’t like the way he treated me before I was born. So when I came out, I was just wishing the mother-fucker was dead.
Talking about being conscious of things that happened before you were born might throw a few people.
I don’t really care, because that’s regression therapy, and if they’ve got a problem with it, they can go fuck themselves. It’s major, and it’s legit, and it all fits together in my life. Everything is stored in your mind. And part of you is aware from very early on and is storing information and reacting. Every