Everyone Loves You When You're Dead. Neil Strauss
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Her tour manager serves her white wine and chicken strips, which she dips copiously in ketchup. She discusses her recent diagnosis as “borderline lupetic,” which means that she is at risk of developing lupus, the autoimmune disease her aunt Joanne died from before Lady Gaga was born.
So what changes did you make in your life once you found out?
LADY GAGA: I make much more of an effort now to minimize the drama or the stress in my life. I take care of myself. I drink and I still live my life, but I could never let my fans down. That would kill me to have to face that extra obstacle every day to get onstage. It’s completely terrifying, so I’m just really focused on mind, body, and soul. And also, Joanne—I believe that her spirit is inside of me. So, you know, my closest friends have told me that it was just her way of peeking in to say hello.
That’s an interesting way to think about it.
LADY GAGA: And I’ve got her death date on my arm.
Next to the Rilke quote?
LADY GAGA: Yeah. She was a poet and a writer, and I guess I truly believe that she had unfinished work to do and she works through me. She was like a total saint. So maybe she’s living vicariously through a sinner (laughs).
Minutes later, the bus stops in front of a hotel to pick up Lady Gaga’s assistant and continue to Manchester for the next concert.
I’ll let you get to Manchester. Let me see if I missed anything.
LADY GAGA: What are you saying? You got way more than anyone. And you saw two shows. I feel raped (laughs)!
You have given me a lot of good stuff . . .
LADY GAGA: Use the stuff that’s going to make me a legend. (To her tour manager:) I want to be a legend. Is that wrong?
It was the opportunity of a lifetime. I’d just started working at the New York Times, and my editor asked me to interview Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin. According to their publicist, it would be the pair’s first in-depth interview together since the band broke up fourteen years earlier.
As I timidly entered Plant’s hotel room two weeks later, he lit a stick of White Light Pentacles incense as Page took a seat on the couch next to him, both flaunting leather pants and long billowing manes. I sat across from them and asked my naïve questions about their lives and career, and they responded flippantly but honestly. I knew the story was going to turn out great. But then, forty minutes into the interview, I looked down at my tape deck and noticed I’d accidentally plugged the microphone into the headphone jack, which meant that all I had was forty minutes of blank tape. I reached for the microphone and surreptitiously tried to rectify the problem—and was instantly caught.
ROBERT PLANT: Gosh, what’s that you have on top of the microphone?
Oh, it just had a protective covering, which was scraping off.
JIMMY PAGE: Microphones have protective coverings these days?
PLANT: Have you been getting any of this?
I think it’s fine.
PAGE: Where were we?
PLANT: God knows. It doesn’t really matter, because it’s gone.
We were talking about, if John Bonham hadn’t died, would you have continued making music as Led Zeppelin into the eighties?
PLANT: I don’t know. Was when John died the right time to stop? Maybe 1980 was already a bit late to stop. Maybe we should have stopped before.
PAGE: But anyway, we couldn’t have carried on without John. We had been working as a four-piece in such an integral, combined unit for so long that to get somebody in to learn those areas of improvisation just wouldn’t have been honest to any of us, and certainly not to his name.
PLANT: That’s where the Who went wrong, really. And they went wrong with a hell of a thump, because they got a drummer who was so inanimate.
There have been a lot of books written about your backstage antics, but is there one story that’s your favorite?
PLANT: Oh, who knows? You can’t be specific about anything so far back. You should ask maybe some of the cast who aren’t in this room. Maybe some of the housewives from Des Moines. Why don’t you go to Schenectady and see if you can find the girl who stood by the Coke machine when [Jeff] Beck stuck his Telecaster through it?23 I mean, there’s loads of people who’ve got stories to tell just waiting to be on the Letterman show.
Does it bother you that your crew has divulged so many of these stories?
PLANT: I don’t think we really ever saw the crew. In fact, I don’t even know whether we had one. Who knows? Maybe whatever was in those books was written about somebody else completely. If you’re not there to refute it, it just rolls on and becomes some kind of legend, and I don’t know whether that’s good or bad.
PAGE: (Groans.)
PLANT: I really spent a lot of time personally, while Jimmy was doing all this damage, reading books on Celtic literature and the Welsh Triads. I was the youngest guy in the group. I was a Catholic.
PAGE: Any other excuse?
PLANT: My arms are folded because I’m insecure.
I’m sure a lot of the carnage started just due to the newness of the situation of being on the road.
PLANT: The carnage?
PAGE: Rape and pillage?
PLANT: No, it started, I think, in Norway and Sweden in about the year 620. The only thing we did was we didn’t bring the same hats. And also you got really shitty record deals in 600 AD.
PAGE: That’s why there were horns on their hats then.
PLANT: That’s right. Well, they never got any fucking royalties. But I think the thing is that Ahmet Ertegun24 was still telling lies back then. As the horde came ashore in Northumbria, cutting the throats of the holy men of the cloth, Ahmet was going, “I’m going to give you twelve percent.” (Refills his tea.) You want a cup of tea?
I’m good.
PLANT: So who have you interviewed lately that made you go, “Wow!”
Most recently, it was probably Carl Perkins. He’s in his sixties and the coolest guy I’ve ever met. He doesn’t even have to try.
PLANT: I think that’s another thing you learn as you get older. Sometimes people try so fucking hard to be somebody else in an attempt to be cool and be loved. But there’s not an original shape for any of us, really. Not you as a journalist nor me as a singer nor him as a guitar player.
Did you ever meet Elvis?
PLANT: