The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [71]
By the time of my fourth album [Blue, 1971], I came to another point—that terrible opportunity that people are given in their lives. The day that they discover to the tips of their toes that they’re assholes [solemn moment, than a gale of laughter]. And you have to work from there. And decide what your values are. Which parts of you are no longer really necessary. They belong to childhood’s end. Blue really was a turning point in a lot of ways. As Court and Spark was a turning point later on. In the state that I was at in my inquiry about life and direction and relationships, I perceived a lot of hate in my heart. You know, “I hate you some, I hate you some, I love you some, I love you when I forget about me” [“All I Want”]. I perceived my inability to love at that point. And it horrified me. It’s something still that I . . . I hate to say I’m working on, because the idea of work implies effort, and effort implies you’ll never get there. But it’s something I’m noticing.
How aware were you that your songs were being scrutinized for the relationships they could be about? Even ‘Rolling Stone’ drew a diagram of your supposed brokenhearted lovers and also called you Old Lady of the Year.
I never saw it. The people that were involved in it called up to console me. My victims called first [laughs]. That took some of the sting out of it. It was ludicrous. I mean, even when they were drawing all these brokenhearted lines out of my life and my ability to love well, I wasn’t so unique. There was a lot of affection in those relationships. The fact that I couldn’t stay in them for one reason or another was painful to me. The men involved are good people. I’m fond of them to this day. We have a mutual affection, even though we’ve gone on to new relationships. Certainly there are pockets of hurt that come. You come a little battered out of a relationship that doesn’t go on forever. I don’t live in bitterness.
I’m a confronter by nature. I have a tendency to confront my relationships much more often than people would care. I’m always being told that I talk too much. It’s not that I like to, but I habitually confront before I escape. Rather than go out and try to drown my sorrows or something, I’ll wallow and muddle through them. My friends thought for a long time that this was done out of some act of masochism. I began to believe it myself. But at this time in my life, I would say that it has paid some dividend. Be confronting those things and thinking them through as deeply as my limited intelligence would allow, there’s a certain richness that comes in time. Even psychiatrists, mind whores for the most part, don’t have a healthy attitude toward depression. They get bored with it. I think their problem is they need to be deeply depressed.
My relationship with Graham [Nash] is a great, enduring one. We lived together for some time—we were married, you might say. The time Graham and I were together was a highly productive period for me as an artist. I painted a great deal, and the bulk of my best drawings were done in ’69 and ’70 when we were together. To contend with this hyperactive woman, Graham tried his hand at several things. Painting. Stained glass. And finally he came to the camera. I feel he’s not just a good photographer, he’s a great one. His work is so lyrical. Some of his pictures are worth a thousand words. Even after we broke, Graham made a gift of a very fine camera and a book of Cartier-Bresson photographs. I became an avid photographer myself. He gave the gift back to me. Even though the romance ended, the creative aspect of our relationship has continued to branch out.
This is the thing that Rolling Stone, when it made a diagram of broken hearts, was being very simplistic about. It was an easy target to slam me for my romantic alliances. That’s human nature. That hurt, but not nearly so much as when they began to tear apart The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Ignorantly. I couldn’t get together, in