Everyone Loves You When You're Dead. Neil Strauss
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу Everyone Loves You When You're Dead - Neil Strauss страница 7
Название: Everyone Loves You When You're Dead
Автор: Neil Strauss
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Музыка, балет
isbn: 9780857861214
isbn:
Your picture is going to be on the cover. Most people with pictures on the cover talk inside.
CASABLANCAS: You are a complainer. You’ve got enough. Work with what you’ve got. You’re a professional. God bless America.
Casablancas picks up a bottle of beer, downs three quarters in one gulp, and slams it to the table. He mumbles something about RCA Records president Clive Davis speaking “like a gay chorus girl,” stands up, and walks to the video game Golden Tee Golf. He turns around and addresses the bar.
CASABLANCAS: Anyone want to play Golden Tee?
When no one responds, he plays alone. Four minutes later, he returns to the table.
CASABLANCAS: Never play Golden Tee when you’re drunk.
He then sits on my lap, kisses me seven times on the neck, and makes three lunges for my lips, connecting once. Before I can wipe dry, he is out the door, rolling himself home in an abandoned wheelchair he finds outside.
[Continued . . .]
If you met the man who composed one of America’s most patriotic songs, what would you ask him?
At halftime one Sunday at the Adelphia Coliseum in Nashville, Tennessee, country singer Lee Greenwood ran out to sing the anthem he had written eighteen years earlier, “God Bless the U.S.A.” The stadium thundered with the sound of tens of thousands of voices singing along, “I’m proud to be an American.”
As Greenwood trotted to the sidelines afterward, a photographer pulled an American flag out of his satchel and asked him to pose with it. “I don’t want to seem cheap or disgrace the flag,” Greenwood responded, declining. “I don’t even sign them anymore.”
Is there ever a moment when you don’t feel proud to be an American?
LEE GREENWOOD: You mean that I don’t believe the lyrics of my own song?
In the moment. Like if you sing “I love my wife” in a song, there might be a moment when you don’t feel that.
GREENWOOD: No, I don’t. I mean, we’ll have arguments like everybody else, but very few and that’s what keeps our union strong. But no, when I’m singing, I believe everything I sing.
What if there’s a president who’s not making decisions you agree with?
GREENWOOD: I don’t . . . You know, the song first of all is not political. And I may not agree with a Democrat who’s in office, but you know, if they ask me to sing at the White House, I’d sing in a heartbeat because he’s the president. Anybody who has military service, I recognize and respect for what they’ve done.
Some people have criticized you for singing about how you’d defend America, but not serving in the Vietnam War.
GREENWOOD: When I went to join the service in the sixties, I had two children. And so I wasn’t picked until they got to my number and it was too late. So that was the reason I didn’t serve. But my father felt it necessary to join the war in 1943. I was a year old and my sister was three. At that time, I guess the government didn’t consider it a threat or a liability if you had children. But when he joined the Navy, my mother never forgave him and divorced him because of it. So I think that’s an issue for me.
So there must be something that bothers you about this country?
GREENWOOD: Inasmuch as . . . I guess it’s capital punishment that bothers me. We don’t want to be barbaric, but at the same time, it used to be an eye for an eye. You killed a person, and you went to jail or you went to the chair. Then you had to kill two or three people to go to the chair. And now it’s mass murder. How many do you have to kill before you have to give up your life? It diminishes the value of one person’s life. That’s why our view on capital punishment, I think, weakens us in the eyes of other nations.
Then there are other countries who think we’re barbaric for even having the death penalty.
GREENWOOD: Yeah, well, I like what the Marines say.
Which is?
GREENWOOD: “It’s up to God to judge bin Laden. It’s up to the Marines to make sure he keeps the appointment.”
After her television performance in Germany, Madonna sat on a couch in her dressing room, wearing a puffy silver jacket and matching boots, discussing the reasons she preferred living in the United Kingdom to America. “English people, they’re not God-crazy like Americans are,” she said. “If I became a born-again Christian, people in England wouldn’t be comfortable with it, but people in America would.” Suddenly, the members of Green Day, who’d also been flown in for the show, filed into the room and her demeanor changed.
Madonna has an unusual way of relating to strangers. She will ask questions—lots of questions. She will pay attention closely and ask good follow-up questions, yet you will get the uncomfortable feeling that she isn’t so much listening as she is allowing you to speak. And so long as you are interesting or able to offer something she wants to learn, she will keep allowing you to talk. But as soon as she’s gotten what she wants or her status as queen is threatened, she will turn ice cold.
“Do you have any kids?” she asked, peppering Green Day with questions.
“Have you ever seen Napoleon Dynamite?”
“What do you do for fun?”
“Do you like dancing?”
To this last question, Green Day singer and guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong replied that the only dance he knew was the “drunken sailor dance.”
“What’s that?” Madonna asked.
He stood up and demonstrated by slouching forward, letting his arms dangle, and swaying drunkenly from side to side. When a string of drool began dribbling out of his mouth, Madonna let him know that she got the point.
It was all fun and games until Madonna decided that it was time to fly back to London and one of the show’s producers told her, “Green Day are going to have to leave before you.” Instantly, her mood changed.
“Why?” she asked coldly. “We were supposed to leave first.”
“Their cars are here, and yours are waiting elsewhere because you stayed backstage longer than you said you would,” the producer explained.
“Well, I’ll just fly back with them,” she said, flustered.
“But they’re taking a car to Frankfurt.”
СКАЧАТЬ