The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [35]
What was the production deal?
I was producin’ myself, you see? In other words, it was a contract within a contract. I got paid the regular top artist scale as an artist, but also the producin’ end of it was where the extra money came from. That was where, out of every dime I got seven and a half cents, and that’s pretty damn good, man. That’s besides the artist contract, you know.
Did your involvement in drugs almost knock you out in music?
No. No. No. Nope. I can’t say that.
Heights in music were reached during that stage?
Exactly. So I mean, obviously, I couldn’t say that, could I? You know, like I say, I ain’t never gonna lie to you. It didn’t knock me out or wasn’t about to knock me out. My thing was that when my kids started growin’ up—I remember one day my oldest son, he was one of the baseball players, they were havin’ a little reception Thursday night and they were giving out these little trophies, and I was supposed to go, and what happened, I had a recordin’ session that night. I was doing the sound track for The Cincinnati Kid, and I did the singin’ on that, as you remember, but what I did, I went by there with him to this banquet, and I had to leave before the thing was over, and he cried. And that hurt me. I started thinkin’, here’s a child. It means so much to him for his father to be at this banquet. And I started thinkin’ that suppose that somethin’ happened, I get put in jail and somebody comes along and says, “Oh, your daddy’s a jailbird.” Remember now, he’s gettin’ up there in age, now. He’s a little man, you know, and he gonna cry about that. I figure the next thing he’ll do is haul up and knock hell out of ’em, and now he’s gonna be in trouble all over me. And I said, okay, I’ve had enough—it’s a risky business, it’s a dangerous business, anybody knockin’ on your door, you gotta double-check to see who it is.
That all came to a head right around ’65 [when Charles was arrested for heroin possession]?
That’s right. Right then. I just felt that it was a bad scene, and really it just was a bad scene. I got involved in it—my situation is, I was young. I was about maybe seventeen, eighteen years old or somethin’ like that, it was a thing where I wanted to be among the big fellas, like cats in the band, and these guys would always go and leave the kid “till we come back,” you know. And I wanted to be a part, so I begged and pleaded until somebody said, “Okay, man, goddamn it, come on, all right.” And they took me, and there I was, so they were doin’ it and I wanted to belong, you know. I mean, this is really how it started, and once it started, there it was, you know. But I never got so involved in it to the point where I was out of my mind or didn’t know what the hell I was doin’, you know. Like, I heard of people havin’ habits of sixty dollars a day or one hundred dollars a day. I never had nothin’ like that.
How much did you take per day?
Oh, I probably spent about twenty dollars. Never got above that.
What did you learn through the Viennese psychoanalyst?
Who?
The psychoanalyst that you were supposed to have seen for a couple of years?
What did we talk about? Nothin’. Like, and he’s not a psychoanalyst. I mean, what he was, was a psychiatrist. He had no influence, say, as far as my doing or not doing anything. I went there and said, “First of all we’re gonna get one thing straight. You don’t have to convince me not to do anything. I’ve already made up my mind, I ain’t gonna do it, and it’s finished.” And so, when we saw each other we just talked in general about just whatever popped up, and hell, I think I probably talked to him more about his practice, what the hell he was doin’, than about myself.