The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [154]
Who were your early musical inspirations?
I recall growing up with Leonard Cohen records and going, “I wish that was me he was writing about.” I wanted to be Suzanne, I wanted to live down by the river. Not being old enough to know what I wanted to do, I just wanted to be the girl in the Leonard Cohen song. Or the girl in [Bob Dylan’s] “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.” Or the girl in “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” All these girls riding the Jersey highway in a Bruce Springsteen song.
And then I came around. “No, no, no. I don’t want to be the girl. I want to be Leonard Cohen!” We had Blue, the Joni Mitchell album, when I was growing up. That was very helpful. Once I was on PCH [Pacific Coast Highway], and Joni was smoking Newports in front of me, getting a protein pickup at the 7-Eleven in Malibu [California]. I was just like [her jaw drops]. I didn’t say anything. I was just, “Oh, my God!”
What happened once you got turned on to punk rock?
My grand plan was to write this intensely primal record—go into my room and learn Led Zeppelin I through V, play all those things perfectly, and then come out and make the perfect rock record. That was my plan, if I’d been alone, utterly masculine and totally oriented.
I was into Brian Jones, the type of person who would start a band and kick everyone’s butt. But all through the Eighties, it was a goddamn nightmare, hearing things from other women like, “Well, I can borrow my boyfriend’s bass. We can open for my boyfriend’s band. I can’t make practice tonight because I have to meet my boyfriend.” Ugh!
How much of your early music with Hole, especially that version of Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” [a.k.a. “Clouds”] on ‘Pretty on the Inside,’ was your revenge against dysfunctional hippie parents?
It is interesting that you’ve picked up on “Both Sides Now.” Because we used to be forced to sing that in the fucking Volvo in unison. I felt so humiliated by it. It was a major dis at my mother, as much as I love Joni Mitchell.
But just like the baby boomers had to grow up with Dean Martin touting booze, we had to grow up with this idealization that was never going to fucking come true, and it turned us into a bunch of cynics—or a bunch of drug addicts. None of my parents’ friends ever died from acid overdoses or marijuana overdoses. But the popularity now of IV drug use—it’s something that my generation does. And to become an icon of it is something I fear. And it was something Kurt feared most.
He called me from Spain. He was in Madrid, and he’d walked through the audience. The kids were smoking heroin off of tinfoil, and the kids were going, “Kurt! Smack!” and giving him the thumbs up. He called me, crying. That’s why he would tell people, “No, I’m not on it.” Because he did not want to become a junkie icon. And now he is.
How free of drugs are you at this point?
I take Valiums. Percodan. Don’t like heroin. It turns me into a cunt. Makes me ugly. Never liked it. Hate needles. When I did do it, it was like [holds out her arm and turns her head]. I have used heroin—after Kurt died.
You’ve been doing one of Kurt’s unrecorded songs during the encore on this tour. How many of those songs exist?
There are three completed, finished songs. And there are ten others, and then there’s all the riffing. There’s one song called “Opinions” that was a couple of years old. It was from the era when he was in Olympia, Washington, between Bleach and Nevermind. The other one goes, “Talk to me/In your own language, please” [she sings the lyric and guitar riff]. The third one, I can’t sing. It’s too fucking good. Every part of it is really catchy. He was calling it “Dough, Ray and Me.” I thought it was a little corny.
It was the last thing he wrote on our bed. The chorus was “Dough, Ray and me/Dough, Ray and me,” and then it was “Me and my IV.” I had asked him after