The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [52]
Have you got a name for the new album?
I think I’ll call it My Old Neighborhood. Either that or Ride My Llama. It’s weird, I’ve got all these songs about Peru, the Aztecs and the Incas. Time travel stuff. We’ve got one song called “Marlon Brando, John Ehrlichman, Pocahontas and Me.” I’m playing a lot of electric guitar, and that’s what I like best. Two guitars, bass and drums. And it’s really flying off the ground, too. Fucking unbelievable. I’ve got a bet with Elliot that it’ll be out before the end of September. After that we’ll probably go out on a fall tour of 3,000 seaters. Me and Crazy Horse again. I couldn’t be happier. That, combined with the bachelor life . . . I feel magnificent. Now is the first time I can remember coming out of a relationship, definitely not wanting to get into another one. I’m just not looking. I’m so happy with the space I’m in right now. It’s like spring [laughs]. I’ll sell you two bottles of it for a dollar fifty.
ORIANA FALLACI
by Jonathan Cott
June 17, 1976
It wasn’t so long ago that advice-to-the-lovelorn columnists and love advocates in Hollywood movies used to suggest that all a woman had to do to get a man interested in her was to cajole him into talking about himself all evening, thereby flattering him and bolstering his sense of self-importance. In your interviews you seem, almost unconsciously, to have taken this piece of folk wisdom and pushed it very far down the line, using it in order to expose your grandiloquent subjects for what they really are.
I’ve never thought of that. Neither in my private nor my public life have I ever thought in terms of “seducing” somebody, using what are called the “feminine arts”—it makes me vomit just to think of it. Ever since I was a child—and way before the recent feminist resurgence—I’ve never conceived of . . . I’m very surprised by what you say. There might be some truth here, but you’ve really caught me by surprise.
What you’re talking about implies a kind of psychological violence which I never commit when I interview someone. I never force a person to talk to me. If he doesn’t want to talk, or if he talks without pleasure, I just walk out; I’ve done that many times. There’s no courting or seducing involved. The main secret of my interviews lies in the fact that there’s no trick whatsoever. None.
You know there are many students who write about my interviews—in Italy, France and America, too. And they always ask me how I go about it and if I could teach them to do it. But it’s impossible, for these interviews are what they are, good or bad, because they’re made by me, with this face, with this voice. They have to do with my personality, and I bring too much of myself into them to teach them.
I was struck by a moving moment during your interview with Mrs. Gandhi where you talked about “the solitude that oppresses women intent on defending their own destinies.” You mention that Mrs. Gandhi, like Golda Meir, had to sacrifice her marriage for her career. And I got the feeling that here you were somehow also talking about your sense of yourself.
The first difference between me and them is that I never give up. Marriage is an expression that to me suggests “giving up,” an expression of sacrifice and regret. I never wanted to get married, so I didn’t make that sacrifice—it was a victory for me. The solitude I was referring to wasn’t a physical solitude. Nor was it, for instance, for Indira Gandhi, because