ALSO BY NEIL STRAUSS
Emergency
Rules of the Game
The Game
The Dirt
WITH MÖTLEY CRÜE
How to Make Love Like a Porn Star
WITH JENNA JAMESON
The Long Hard Road Out of Hell
WITH MARILYN MANSON
Don’t Try This at Home
WITH DAVE NAVARRO
How to Make Money Like a Porn Star
WITH BERNARD CHANG
This digital edition first published by Canongate in 2011
Copyright © 2011 by Stately Plump Buck Mulligan, LLC
The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
First published in the United States of America by HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022
No names or identifying details have been changed to protect anybody
Illustrations by Siân Superman; ad design by Bernard Chang (with Gonzalo Montesdeoca) & Meat and Potatoes
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 85786 116 0
eISBN 978 0 85786 121 4
Designed by TJ River & Jen Montgomery at Meat and Potatoes
In memory of Johnny Cash, Curtis Mayfield, Alex Chilton, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Ike Turner, Lucia Pamela, Ernie K-Doe, Antoinette K-Doe, Arthur Lee, Mark Linkous, Timothy Leary, Jimmy Martin, John Hartford, Otha Turner, Rick James, Raymond Scott, Patrick Miller, Josh Clayton-Felt, Chet Atkins, Rick Wright, Ali Farka Touré, Roger Troutman, and Bo Diddley, all of whom died between the time of being interviewed and the publication of this book.
And for all those who are going to die afterward.
As through this world I’ve wandered,
I’ve seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six gun,
And some with a fountain pen.
—Woody Guthrie, “Pretty Boy Floyd”
Contents
I’ve shot guns with Ludacris, been kidnapped by Courtney Love, made Lady Gaga cry, shopped for Pampers with Snoop Dogg, gone drinking with Bruce Springsteen, tried to prevent Mötley Crüe from getting arrested, received Scientology lessons from Tom Cruise, flown in a helicopter with Madonna, been taught to read minds by the CIA, soaked in a hot tub with Marilyn Manson, been told off by Prince, and tucked Christina Aguilera into bed.
This is my job.
Since I was eighteen, I’ve been under orders from magazines and newspapers to step into the lives of musicians, actors, and artists, and somehow find out who they really are underneath the mask they present to the public.
Yet for two decades, I’ve been doing it wrong. Newspapers and magazines are service industries, catering to the daily or monthly needs of a public that wants to be told what’s new, what they should know about it, and what they should think about it. And in catering to that need, I didn’t do justice to reality. Because no matter what happens during an interview, once it ends, a writer’s loyalty is to the pressure of an immediate deadline, the style and tone of a publication, and the priorities of an editor. And an editor’s loyalty is to a publisher. And a publisher’s loyalty is to stockholders and circulation figures and advertising revenue. Somewhere along the way, the subject gets lost.
So to put this book together, I went back to my original interview recordings, notes, and transcripts and selected the best moments from the three-thousand-something articles I’ve written over the years. But instead of looking for the pieces that broke news or sold the most magazines or received the best feedback, I searched for the truth or essence behind each person, story, or experience. Often it came from something I’d previously ignored: an uncomfortable silence, a small misunderstanding, or a scattered thought that had been compressed into a soundbite. Other times it came from something more dramatic, like an emotional confession, a run-in with the police, or a drug-induced psychosis.1
Although I spent weeks working on some of these stories, what I realized is that most of the time I was waiting for just one moment of truth or authenticity. After all, you can tell a lot about a person or a situation in a minute. But only if you choose the right minute.
Here are 233 of them.
When I met Strokes singer Julian Casablancas at 19th Hole, a dive bar near his apartment in Manhattan, he was wearing the same outfit he’d worn for the past week: a green work shirt with the words “U.S. Garbage Company” over the pocket and faded black pants. On his wrist were three fraying colored paper bracelets: one from a Kings of Leon concert a week earlier, another from a Stooges show two weeks ago, and