The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [137]
Now I see that two of the best days of my life were the day I picked up the guitar and the day that I learned how to put it down. Somebody said, “Man, how did you play for so long?” I said: “That’s the easy part. It’s stopping that’s hard.”
When did you learn to put the guitar down?
Pretty recently. I had locked into what was pretty much a hectic obsession, which gave me enormous focus and energy and fire to burn, because it was coming out of pure fear and self-loathing and self-hatred. I’d get onstage and it was hard for me to stop. That’s why my shows were so long. They weren’t long because I had an idea or a plan that they should be that long. I couldn’t stop until I felt burnt, period. Thoroughly burnt.
It’s funny, because the results of the show or the music might have been positive for other people, but there was an element of it that was abusive for me. Basically, it was my drug. And so I started to follow the thread of weaning myself.
For a long time, I had been able to ignore it. When you’re nineteen and you’re in a truck and you’re crossing the country back and forth, and then you’re twenty-five and you’re on tour with the band—that just fit my personality completely. That’s why I was able to be good at it. But then I reached an age where I began to miss my real life—or to even know that there was another life to be lived. I mean, it was almost a surprise. First you think you are living it. You got a variety of different girlfriends, and then, “Gee, sorry, gotta go now.” It was like the Groucho Marx routine—it’s funny, ’cause it runs in my family a little bit, and we get into this: “Hello, I came to say I’d like to stay, but I really must be going.” And that was me.
What was it that woke you up to the fact that you were missing something or had a problem?
Unhappiness. And other things, like my relationships. They always ended poorly; I didn’t really know how to have a relationship with a woman. Also, I wondered how can I have this much money and not spend it? Up until the Eighties, I really didn’t have any money. When we started the River tour, I had about twenty grand, I think. So, really, around 1983 was the first time I had some money in the bank. But I couldn’t spend it, I couldn’t have any fun. So a lot of things started to not feel logical. I realized there was some aberrational behavior going on here. And I didn’t feel that good. Once out of the touring context, and out of the context of my work, I felt lost.
Did you ever go to a therapist or seek help like that?
Oh, yeah. I mean, I got really down. Really bad off for a while. And what happened was, all my rock & roll answers had fizzled out. I realized that my central idea—which, at a young age, was attacking music with a really religious type of intensity—was okay to a point. But there was a point where it turns in on itself. And you start to go down that dark path, and there is a distortion of even the best of things. And I reached a point where I felt my life was distorted. I love my music, and I wanted to just take it for what it was. I didn’t want to try to distort it into being my entire life. Because that’s a lie. It’s not true. It’s not your entire life. It never can be.
And I realized my real life is waiting to be lived. All the love and the hope and the sorrow and sadness—that’s all over there, waiting to be lived. And I could ignore it and push it aside or I could say yes to it. But to say yes to part of it is to say yes to all of it. That’s why people say no to all of it. Whether it’s drugs or whatever. That’s why people say no: I’ll skip the happiness as long as I don’t have to feel the pain.
So I decided to work on it. I worked hard on it. And basically, you have to start to open up to who you are. I certainly wasn’t the person I thought I was. This was around the time of Born in the U.S.A. And I bought this big house in New Jersey, which was really quite a thing