The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [193]
I was a bright kid, all right, early on. Then, in my teenage years, I went through a sort of awkward phase of thinking I was stupid. My schoolwork goes to shit; I can’t concentrate. I started to believe the world outside. Music was my revenge on that.
I got the sense that it was kind of a dead-end situation.
Its blandness—its very grayness—is the thing you have to overcome. We had a street gang that was very vivid—very surreal. We were fans of Monty Python. We’d put on performances in the city center of Dublin. I’d get on the bus with a stepladder and an electric drill. Mad shit. Humor became our weapon. Just stand there, quiet—with the drill in my hand. Stupid teenage shit.
Just to provoke people? Performance art?
Performance art. We invented this world, which we called Lipton Village. We were teenagers when we came up with this, a way of fighting back against the prevailing boot-boy mentality.
Were there a lot of fights?
Oh, yeah. The order of the day was often being beaten to within an inch of your life by roaming gangs from one of the other neighborhoods. When they asked where you were from, you had to guess right—or suffer. The harder they hit us, the more strange and surreal the response.
I mean, myself and my other friend, Guggi—we’re still very close friends—were handy enough. We could defend ourselves. But even though some of us became pretty good at violence ourselves, others didn’t. They got the shit kicked out of ’em. I thought that was kind of normal. I can remember incredible street battles. I remember one madser with an iron bar, just trying to bring it down on my skull as hard as he possibly could, and holding up a dustbin lid, which saved my life. Teenage kids have no sense of mortality—yours or theirs.
So that was your teen rebellion?
I don’t know if that was rebellion. That was a defense mechanism. We used to laugh at people drinking. We didn’t drink. Because people who spilled out of the pubs on a Friday night and threw up on the laneway—we thought we were better than them.
You were the smart-kid clique?
We were a collection of outsiders. We weren’t all the clever clogs. If you had a good record collection, that helped. And if you didn’t play soccer. That was part of it.
Now, when you look back, there’s an arrogance to it; it’s like you’re looking down, really . . .
At the jocks?
At the jocks, at the skinheads, at the boot boys. Maybe it’s the same arrogance my father had, who’s listening to opera and likes cricket. Because it separates him.
You wrote an extraordinary song about your father, “Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own.” When I spoke to Edge, he said that you’re turning into your dad.
He was an amazing and very funny man. You had to be quick to live around him. But I don’t think I’m like him. I have a very different relationship with my kids than he had with me. He didn’t really have one with me. He generally thought that no one was as smart as him in the room. You know that Johnny Cash song “A Boy Named Sue” where he gives the kid a girl’s name, and the kid is beaten up at every stage in his life by macho guys, but in the end he becomes the toughest man.
You’re the boy named Sue?
By not encouraging me to be a musician, even though that’s all he ever wanted to be, he’s made me one. By telling me never to have big dreams or else, that to dream is to be disappointed, he made me have big dreams. By telling me that the band would only last five minutes or ten minutes—we’re still here.
It seems there’s some power in this relationship that’s beyond the ordinary father-son story. You were probably one of the most difficult children to have around.
I must’ve been a bit difficult.
He was trying to raise two children without a mother. And here you are, unforgiving and unrelenting, showing up at all hours, in drag and with all