Everyone Loves You When You're Dead. Neil Strauss
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to pay him some stupid ridiculous amount of money. Only because he says they all start the same: “You were born in 1930.26 You started playing piano at nine. Your daddy sold thirty-nine dozen eggs to get you to Memphis. Uh-huh. And they bought you a piano by mortgaging the house. Uh-huh. They lost their house so you could keep the piano. Uh-huh.” He’s basically kind of gotten an interview written. It’s about a hundred pages. “Here it is. You write it. It’s the only thing you’re gonna ask me. You’re not gonna ask me anything good and if you do, you’re not gonna print it.” So he just doesn’t do them.
The fans probably wonder what he’s been doing now anyway. They know the past.
KERRIE: Exactly. His manager, Jerry Schilling, you can thank for this. He said, “It’s the New York Times. They’ve been around for a hundred years.” Jerry basically says to me, “You know, I would do interviews every day all day long if people would treat me nice and write good things rather than going back to when my son died or a wife OD’d or I married my third cousin.” I mean, that was thirty years ago. Here he is with a family of twelve years, a brand new career, not a thing wrong with his health. He’s got life insurance for the first time in his career. He’s paid off his debt to the IRS. I mean, you know, things are going his way more than you could possibly ever imagine.
I’m glad I talked to you to get all this.
KERRIE: Jerry probably wouldn’t even offer it. He says, “Well, they don’t want to know anyway. They should be asking me if they want to know.”
Jerry Lee and Kerrie Lewis divorced in 2005. According to the Memphis Commercial Appeal newspaper, he accused her of sleeping with a bodyguard and a Pentecostal minister, and she accused him of being an abusive “washed-up rock and roll singer who was past his prime.”
Every time I’ve interviewed Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, he’s grown a little more coherent. This, heartbreakingly, was him at his best. It took place in Chicago, where the notoriously reclusive Wilson had moved with his wife of three years, Melinda, in order to record a new album, continue recovering from his lost years of drug abuse and mental illness, and escape the control of his former therapist, Eugene Landy. The previous day, Wilson had performed a show billed as the first solo concert of his life.
Are you used to working as hard as you did yesterday?
BRIAN WILSON: Yeah, I was a little bit shook up.
MELINDA WILSON: No. You’re not used to it.
BRIAN: I mean, what am I talking about? It was pretty scary.
Were you happy with the new documentary about you?
BRIAN: Yeah. I thought once in a while my face will have a twist of emotional pain coming out of it, but not too obvious. It’s not like I’m really suffering.
MELINDA: But that was still partially a painful time. It was getting out of those really horrible [Eugene Landy] years. It was just on the tail end of that, you know.
BRIAN: Actually—
MELINDA: I think sometimes it’s easier to talk about it once you’ve been through it and you see the light at the end of the tunnel. But when you’re going through it, it’s kind of rough.
What do you attribute your recent productivity to?
BRIAN: I long to make music. I love music. That’s what it really is. I love music (laughs). I like making it, too. I like making music.
MELINDA: With Brian, it’s totally in his soul. It’s part of his existence.
Several people told me they communicate best with you not in speech but musically. Why do you think that is?
BRIAN: I think I put it off. I put off the vibration, and people can pick it up.
MELINDA: And basically—don’t you think, too, Bri?—in life he’s kind of shy. With music, he can write a song and get the point across and not have to deal with the actual conversation.
BRIAN: Yeah, she’s right, you know. She knows me.
[Continued . . .]
When people watch a film, questions often come to mind that they’d be curious to ask the director if given the opportunity. After watching director Judd Apatow’s Funny People, which stars his wife, Leslie Mann, and his best friend, Adam Sandler, as lovers, that opportunity arose.
What was it like directing your wife in a sex scene with your best friend?
JUDD APATOW: You know, oddly enough, I was giddy that whole afternoon. I don’t know why, but it just cracked me up.
So it didn’t feel weird to watch that?
APATOW: It didn’t feel weird at all. I loved the idea that their sex went straight to cunnilingus.
Hmm.
APATOW: Really, I found it funny. It made me laugh. I’ve watched Leslie have kissing scenes with other people where I wanted to kill myself or vomit. But maybe I have so much affection for both of them that I was happy to watch them play a really intimate, funny scene.
I guess if it was awkward for anybody, it would be Adam.
APATOW: They were both okay, mainly because I was amused. If you notice, though, I didn’t write a full ten-minute scene of lovemaking. And (smiles) I didn’t do a ton of takes.
Jimmy Page answered the door. Standing there was the band’s publicist, who had been walking the hallway for the last hour to break in Page’s new shoes for him. Page then sent him on his next mission: to buy CDs of new bands.
JIMMY PAGE: We want to stay in touch with the underground, but we don’t have time to go to record stores.
ROBERT PLANT: I don’t know. I don’t trust them to buy music for me. These record labels are useless. If I want to have Technicolor sex in an underground club, they won’t know where to take me.
So how has your playing changed since you last performed with Robert?
PAGE: I used chords in the past and tunings, but now I just put my fingers anywhere. So whatever technique I used to have, I try to destroy. The more atonal it is, the better.
What’s a good example of that?
PAGE: The triple-neck guitar? That’s a mandolin, a twelve-string, and a six-string. But I need two pairs of arms for it really. Now I have to make a decision as to what neck to play at what point in time. It gets rather confusing for an old man.
PLANT: Making decisions and playing music is tough, especially when you’ve got a very small pyramid descending over you as you’re playing. Get it?27 I think you can put it down to a sense of humor, actually, the whole thing.
The whole thing?
PLANT: The triple neck! You should have a rubber hand come up and start playing it.
PAGE: If I get enough necks, I can put in a wheel and fit a rim around it, and literally just hold