The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [31]
I guess I was too small to really care that much. I knew there were things I liked to watch. I used to love to look at the sun. That’s a bad thing for my eyes, but I liked that. I used to love to look at the moon at night. I would go out in the backyard and stare at it. It just fascinated the hell out of me. And another thing that fascinated me that would scare most people is lightnin’. When I was a kid, I thought that was pretty. Anything like brightness, any kind of lights. I probably would’ve been a firebug or somethin’.
And there were colors. I was crazy about red. Always thought it was a beautiful color. I remember the basic colors. I don’t know nothin’ about chartreuse and all—I don’t know what the hell that is. But I know the black, green, yellow, brown and stuff like that. And naturally I remember my mother, who was pretty. God, she was pretty. She was a little woman. She must have been about four feet eleven, I guess, and when I was twelve or thirteen, I was taller and bigger than my mother, and she had this long pretty black hair, used to come way down her back. Pretty good-lookin’ chick, man [laughs].
A lot of people have asked you to define soul. I’d like to get a definition of beauty.
If you’re talkin’ about physical beauty, I would have to say that to me beauty is probably about the same thing that it means to most people. You look at them and the structure of their face, the way their skin is, and say like, a woman, the contour of her body, you know what I mean? The same way as I would walk out and feel the car. Put my hands on the lines of a car, and I’d know whether I’d like it or not from the way the designs of the lines are. As I said, I was fortunate enough to see until I was about seven, and I remember the things that I heard people calling beautiful.
How about beauty in music?
I guess you could call me a sentimentalist, man, really. I like Chopin or Sibelius. People who write softness, you know, and although Beethoven to me was quite heavy, he wrote some really touching songs, and I think that Moonlight Sonata—in spite of the fact that it wound up being very popular—it’s somethin’ about that, man, you could just feel the pain that this man was goin’ through. Somethin’ had to be happenin’ in that man. You know, he was very, very lonesome when he wrote that. From a technical point of view, I think Bach, if you really want to learn technique, that was the cat, ’cause he had all them fugues and things, your hands doin’ all kinda different things. Personally, outside of technique, I didn’t care for Bach.
Did you try to catch up with high school or college after you left school?
No. When I left school, I had to get out and really tough it, as you know, because my mother passed away when I was fifteen. I didn’t have no brothers or sisters. But my mama always taught me, “Look, you got to learn how to get along by yourself,” and she’s always tellin’ me, “Son, one of these days I’m gonna be dead, and you’re gonna need to know how to survive, because even your best friends, although they may want to do things for you; after all, they will have their own lives.” So at that point I started tryin’ to help myself. So what do I do to help myself? The thing I can do best, or figure I can do best, anyway. And that is sing or play the piano or both.
What else did they teach you in school that could have been applied to a career?
Well, I don’t know where I would have used it, but I can probably type as fast as any secretary. Well, not any. I can type about sixty to sixty-five words a minute, somethin’ like that, when I wanna. Then I can make all kinds of things with my hands. I can make chairs and brooms and mops and rugs and pocketbooks and belts and all kinds of things like that. So guess if I had to, I would go and buy me some leather. I love to work with my hands, and I’m sure that’s what I would do had I not played music, you see, because it’s the kind of a thing that you can use plenty of imagination in it, you know what I mean? And so I know how to do various