The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [164]
Was there a defining moment when you sensed that real change was imminent?
Seeing Television. On Easter of 1974, Lenny and I were invited to the premiere of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rolling Stones. It was such an exciting night. I had my Horses clothes on; I looked like Baudelaire. I was so thrilled to be asked to see the premiere of a movie. I’d never been to one.
After the movie, Lenny told me he had promised to go down to CBGB to see this new group. It was about midnight, and there were like fourteen people there. We saw Television, and I thought they were great. I really felt that was it, what I was hoping for: to see people approach things in a different way with a street ethic but also their full mental faculties. Of course, Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell—he was in the group at the time—were both poets.
Then we started working together. They opened for us at Max’s Kansas City; I think we did eight weeks together at CBGB. They were really heightened nights. Sometimes I see 8 mm footage that somebody took and think, “God, did I have guts!” Because I wasn’t much of a singer. But I had bravado, and I could improvise.
What is it like for you to perform “Piss Factory” [her 1974 debut single] now, twenty-two years after you recorded it? Even though you wrote it as an expression of your own adolescent frustration, the poem still has a potent, contemporary resonance.
It’s important for people to remember the crap they had to go through. Teenagehood, to me, is the toughest thing in life. Maybe some people loved their teenage years; I found them really difficult.
But it’s not a negative piece. It’s not about the factory or those people in it. They’re all minor characters. What it’s really about is the human spirit. I was saying that as a young person, I still had desire—desire to do well. Perhaps some of these people in the factory lost all desire. I can understand how that can happen. It can be a rough life. But I also know that it is possible, as long as a person has a breath in their body, to feel alive. What “Piss Factory” is about is: someone who in the midst of the dead felt alive.
As I read it now, it doesn’t matter whether I relate or don’t relate to the whole scenario, which happened a long time ago. I’m still a human being with desires, hopes and dreams. In that respect, I haven’t changed much.
What did they make in this factory besides piss?
They made baby buggies. I was a baby-buggy bumper-beeper inspector. [Laughs] You know those beepers on the buggies? I had to beep them to make sure they worked. But I kept getting demoted. I actually liked my lowest job—I had to inspect the pipes they used for the handles on the buggies—because I could take my copy of [Rimbaud’s] A Season in Hell down in the basement and read.
How long did you last at the factory?
I only worked there in summers. I wanted to make money to go to college. It was just a schoolgirl thing.
But it wasn’t written with a thought for anyone other than myself. That’s why it’s got that energy. When I wrote that piece, I didn’t have any compassion for anybody else. I was fresh from having lived it, being ridiculed by those people, pushed around and roughed up.
Now I look at those same people with some compassion. I can imagine what their scenarios could have been: Maybe they were divorced, had five kids to take care of, nothing to look forward to. But I was sixteen, and I was concerned with myself.
Your new book about Robert Mapplethorpe, ‘The Coral Sea,’ is an almost mystical narrative written in an elegant, romantic style of prose, unlike any of your other published work.
That’s because hardly any of my Eighties work has been published. I spent every day of the Eighties working on my writing, and I actually wrote . . . I hate to call them novels, more like novella-type pieces. And this particular work comes out of that. One morning I’d just sent Jackson off to school; it was about 7:30 in the morning, and the phone rang. I knew what it would be. It was Robert’s brother; Robert had passed away.
I was watching A&E