If you could transport yourself to a particular era or music scene, what would it be?
Well, I’ve experienced plenty of scenes. But as I’ve often said, I would give up all of my albums just for a chance to see Howlin’ Wolf in person one more time. That’s what I think about more than anything else, those moments where you lose yourself, in an intimate setting where there’s nothing between you and what the performer is putting out there. You know, I was at the Bruce Springsteen show in 1974 that John Landau wrote about, the one where he wrote afterwards, ‘I’ve seen the future of rock and roll.’ I didn’t see the future myself, but I did see kids who knew the words to every single song and it was powerful. This was a tiny club on Harvard Square, but it wasn’t a Harvard Square crowd, it was working class kids from Cambridge and Somerville.
In your essay about Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Stoller explains why they were able to keep writing hits while most songwriters generally had such short careers. “None of them had the ability to withstand pain like we do,” he said.
The secret of a lot of creative work is plain old persistence. There are lots of talented people, but most of them fall by the wayside, not because they’re not sufficiently talented, but because they don’t stick with it. That’s what every artist I’ve written about has in common. To call it a work ethic is not sufficient. It’s putting everything they have into their work. Even a wild person like Jerry Lee Lewis is a consummate perfectionist — he gives himself over to the moment. He went all out to reach that point of no return.
So, okay, Jerry Lee Lewis — his career was famously derailed when it came out that he had married his 13-year-old cousin. Other artists in your book, including Chuck Berry, have been abusive towards women and had other well-documented behavioral problems. How does this affect the way you write about them or enjoy their music?
I think that you try to portray people as they are and don’t try to whitewash the bad sides. You don’t want to be either their judge or their defender. We’re all faced with this in life, with friends, maybe even ourselves. None of the people I’ve written about have been saints, but what draws me to them is the dimensions of their art. I think of somebody like Merle Haggard—in the two or three times I’ve written about him, there are things that he’s done that I don’t think anybody would be thrilled about, but you can’t just want to tell the story with the white picket fence and the roses growing on it. These are living and learning stories. I don’t see the point of creating a prosecutorial mandate or something.
By this point in your career, you must have a crazy record collection. I assume you’re a vinyl guy?
You know, I’ve never been a collector. I’ve owned records, of course, but it was never about chasing after particular things. That was never my interest. And, actually, I just sold all but a hundred of my records.
You unloaded your records?! Why?
At a certain point, you no longer want to accumulate. You want to deaccession, like a library. I didn’t want my possessions to overwhelm me. Selling them was actually kind of a wonderful experience. These two guys came down from the Record Exchange in Salem and we spent four or five days going through everything. It was 5,000 records.
Damn. How did you decide which 100 to keep? Are they the crème de la crème?
No. It was almost random. Several albums by Bobby Bland, Those Prison Blues by Robert Pete Williams. But it’s not like they’re collector items. They just had significance to me. Mississippi John Hurt’s first album is another, I remember where I bought it. This little folk shop that sold guitars and records on Auburn Street in Harvard Square, across from a typewriter repair place, remember those? If you want to start rating records, which I don’t, it may not be the best, but it was such a thrill to find it. That’s a feeling I won’t forget.