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You were once asked about the messages in your songs; or, rather, the lack of messages.

No, it was a matter of getting material I could handle. Remember, I got to first feel the music, do somethin’ with the song. And that’s why you have a song like “America.” I wasn’t tryin’ to just say the country is all bad because it ain’t all bad. I love this country, man. And I wouldn’t live in no place else. You understand. My family was born here. My great-grandparents were born here. I think I got as much roots in this country as anybody else. So I think when somethin’s wrong, it’s up to me to try to change it. I was sayin’ that America is a beautiful country. It’s just some of our policies that people don’t dig.

You said onstage that “I Gotta Do Wrong” is “the story of my life,” that “I gotta do wrong before they notice me.”

Well, I kind of think that what I meant was is that it seems that out of all the pleading that a people can do, all the crying out and all the conversations, you know, we’ve had that for years and years and years, and nothin’ really happened. They said, well, those people are happy, and they’re smiling and dancing, and so they must be cool. And nobody paid them the mind, until the people began to do wrong things. And, of course, what I was really saying is not that this was anything to be proud about. I was saying that it’s something to be ashamed of, that you got to do wrong before a country as rich as we are—we’re the richest country in the world. We got more money and we got more of everything. I don’t care what any other country’s got for the most part, we got that, and the chances are, nine times out of ten, we got more of it on top of it. And it’s a shame that in order for our leaders to really pay us some attention, we gotta go and burn this down, and we gotta go and break into this, and we gotta go and picket this, and we gotta go and stand on this lawn—that’s pitiful.

Everybody who’s in power—unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like they want to do anything unless they’re forced to it, unless they are made to feel shame about it. And when I sing this song—I gotta do wrong before people notice me—I’m not braggin’ about that. I’m saying that that’s a pity. It is, it’s sad, man.

TRUMAN CAPOTE

by Andy Warhol

April 12, 1973

In 1972, Rolling Stone asked Truman Capote to cover the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. tour. But months later, Capote was unable to produce a story. The magazine asked Andy Warhol to interview Capote, and the resulting cover story was billed as “an audio documentary,” with small talk and numbers from the tape recorder’s counter included.

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[Leaving the Oak Room. Outside—Central Park South]

000

Truman: Why don’t we go for a walk in the park? We’ll go visit the yak. In Breakfast at Tiffany’s that’s all Holly Golightly ever used to do, every time she got what she used to call “the mean reds.” She used to go to visit the yak in the zoo. . . .

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[They pass the horse-drawn carriages lined up on the periphery of the park.]

Truman: Somehow, I could never bring myself to ride in one of those because I identify with the horse . . . Do you identify with animals, Andy? I know you identify with cats, because you used to keep twenty. . . .

[Truman sees a newspaper.]

Tim Leary’s going to Vacaville. Vacaville is maximum security, but it’s the best-run prison and the nicest —

Andy: Do you know that I just saw him in St. Moritz? The zoo’s that way. I saw Leary Christmas Eve. Isn’t that nutty? . . . The zoo’s over there. Isn’t that the zoo right over there?

Truman: No, no.

Andy: No, no. The zoo’s over there . . . But it was so strange to go to somebody’s house and there’s Timothy Leary.

Truman: I thought he was on his way to Afghanistan.

Andy: Dig. No. He was with a pretty beautiful girl who’s really in love with him.

Truman: He was just like Meyer Lansky without money. The man did escape from prison in California, rightfully or wrongfully for whatever his offense may have