Everyone Loves You When You're Dead. Neil Strauss

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СКАЧАТЬ 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: We met Elvis in LA. I suppose we were with him for about three hours, weren’t we?

      PAGE: Something like that.

      PLANT: We were there longer than anybody had been known to in living history. He wanted to know who these people were who sold more tickets than he did quicker. He’d met Elton John and he thought all English people were like him, so we got around it. We had a good time, didn’t we?

      PAGE: He was very funny.

      PLANT: He was very sharp, too. Forget the legends and all that crap. He was as bright as you like. Although I loathed that period when he came out of the army. I felt he’d betrayed us, like when your heroes get old and you don’t like them anymore because they’re not hip.

       Is there anyone you’ve ever been scared to meet?

      PLANT: Jerry Lee Lewis, and maybe—what’s that bloke that sings in Guns N’ Roses?

      PAGE: (Laughs.)

       There’s a knock at the door.

      PLANT: Who’s that at the door? Is it the fifty-year-old middle-aged hooker I ordered?

      [Continued . . .]

      After much hemming, hawing, and postponing, Jerry Lee Lewis—not just one of the originators of rock and roll but perhaps its first real punk—agreed to get on the phone just before traveling to New York for his first show there in a decade. It was an odd interview, СКАЧАТЬ