The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [30]
There was nothing big in Liverpool; it wasn’t American. It was going poor, a very poor city, and tough. But people have a sense of humor because they are in so much pain, so they are always cracking jokes. They are very witty, and it’s an Irish place. It is where the Irish came when they ran out of potatoes, and it’s where black people were left or worked as slaves or whatever.
It is cosmopolitan, and it’s where the sailors would come home with the blues records from America on the ships. There is the biggest country & western following in England in Liverpool, besides London—always besides London, because there is more of it there.
I heard country & western music in Liverpool before I heard rock & roll. The people there—the Irish in Ireland are the same—they take their country & western music very seriously. There’s a big, heavy following of it. There were established folk, blues and country & western clubs in Liverpool before rock & roll, and we were like the new kids coming out.
I remember the first guitar I ever saw. It belonged to a guy in a cowboy suit in a province of Liverpool, with stars, and a cowboy hat and a big dobro. They were real cowboys, and they took it seriously. There had been cowboys long before there was rock & roll.
What do you think of America?
I love it, and I hate it. America is where it’s at. I should have been born in New York, I should have been born in the Village, that’s where I belong. Why wasn’t I born there? Paris was it in the eighteenth century, London I don’t think has ever been it except literarywise when Wilde and Shaw and all of them were there. New York was it.
I regret profoundly that I was not an American and not born in Greenwich Village. That’s where I should have been. It never works that way. Everybody heads toward the center; that’s why I’m here now. I’m here just to breathe it. It might be dying and there might be a lot of dirt in the air that you breathe, but this is where it’s happening. You go to Europe to rest, like in the country. It’s so overpowering, America, and I’m such a fuckin’ cripple that I can’t take much of it, it’s too much for me.
Yoko: He’s very New York, you know.
John: I’m frightened of it. People are so aggressive, I can’t take all that. I need to go home; I need to have a look at the grass. I’m always writing about my English garden. I need the trees and the grass; I need to go into the country because I can’t stand too much people.
You’re going back to London; what’s a rough picture of your immediate future, say the next three months?
I’d like to just vanish a bit. It wore me out, New York. I love it. I’m just sort of fascinated by it, like a fucking monster. Doing the films was a nice way of meeting a lot of people. I think we’ve both said and done enough for a few months, especially with this article. I’d like to get out of the way and wait till they all . . .
Do you have a rough picture of the next few years?
Oh, no, I couldn’t think of the next few years; it’s abysmal thinking of how many years there are to go, millions of them. I just play it by the week. I don’t think much ahead of a week.
Do you have a picture of “when I’m sixty-four”?
No, no. I hope we’re a nice old couple living off the coast of Ireland or something like that—looking at our scrapbook of madness.
RAY CHARLES
by Ben Fong-Torres
January 18, 1973
You lost your sight at five.
It didn’t happen like one day I could see a hundred miles and the next day I couldn’t see an inch. Each day for two years my sight was less and less. My mother was always real with me, and bein’ poor, you got to pretty much be honest with your children. We couldn’t afford no specialists. I was lucky I could get a doctor—that’s a specialist.
When you were losing your sight, did you try to take in as much as possible,