Indiana Alumni Magazine
Gathering No Moss
A new book by Anthony DeCurtis, MA'77, PhD'80, contributing editor at Rolling Stone, collects his interviews with 38 music and film legends
By Daniel S. Comiskey
Illustration by Dan May
Anthony DeCurtis has met Johnny Cash. He has met Paul McCartney, Keith Richards, and Bruce Springsteen. In fact, you would be hard pressed to come up with a cultural icon that DeCurtis hasn’t met. The incredible part is that he gets paid for it.
In a new book titled In Other Words, DeCurtis assembles interviews from a 25-year career writing for Rolling Stone and The New York Times. While most of the interviews have been previously published, the book provides new material — including context — that adds much to the conversations. “If I had to pick a favorite, it would be Keith Richards,” DeCurtis says. “Keith entirely lived up to everything I had imagined about him. He told me about the problems he was having with Mick [Jagger]. His candor was incredible.” Of course, not all of the interview subjects were so amiable.
“Whenever I’m asked about the interview I enjoyed the least, I immediately bring up this 1985 encounter with Van Morrison,” DeCurtis writes. “He would wait before answering each question, as if he were turning it over in his mind to discover its secret, malicious intent.”
Even when sparring with a singer/songwriter, DeCurtis is sensitive enough to keep sensitive subjects at the table. He traces his interviewing and writing talents back to his days as a Ph.D. candidate at IU. Although he was studying American literature, the author was moonlighting as the popular music critic for the Bloomington Herald-Telephone. In 1980, he worked up enough nerve to write a letter to Rolling Stone asking for an assignment.
“I was too naïve to know that this wasn’t going to work,” he says. “So it worked.” Having contributed to the magazine ever since, DeCurtis still believes it’s the best in the business. “There’s a lot more competition now,” he says. “Any stand you walk by is creaking under the weight of music magazines. But there’s a level of thought and discrimination at Rolling Stone that still doesn’t exist anywhere else.”
While the magazine typically gives DeCurtis room to flesh out his interviews, a certain amount of editing still takes place. In Other Words provides those interviews in their entirety — in some cases, adding 40 percent to the piece.
“In the book, I wanted the interviews to be more casual,” DeCurtis explains. Among them are long conversations with actors, directors, and authors, as well as musicians. These include Woody Allen, Al Pacino, and Don DeLillo among others. “I still get nervous,” DeCurtis admits about meeting icons of music and film. “The ones who make you most nervous are the ones who had an impact on you as a kid. My mantra is ‘Be excited later. You have work to do.’” Both his enthusiasm and his focus are apparent in the new book. As you’ll see in the following excerpts, In Other Words contains more than a few laughs. But the real appeal of it is the way the subjects, particularly the songwriters, warm up to DeCurtis once they realize he’s done his homework. This guy knows music.
TEXAS MUSIC, SPRING 2003
Lucinda Williams
What’s your sense of what’s going on in the world right now? Where do you start? That’s what I wrote “American Dream” about. That song was a reaction to the knee-jerk patriotism that was going on after September 11, with all the little American flags all over the place. I had so many mixed feelings about all that. I mean, it’s a great country and I do love it, but we still have problems. I’m overjoyed at the whole anti-war movement. I haven’t seen that kind of activity in 35 years. So that’s a good thing. Then there’s also an apathy that I see among younger people that’s disheartening. I was at a party the other night and there were three guys standing there, and we were talking about who voted and who didn’t. And two of the guys said,“Oh, I never vote. What’s the point?” And the other guy said, “I always vote.” So I ended up hanging out with him — I don’t go out with guys who don’t vote!
Well, that should incite a rush to the polls. I hate that kind of apathy, and that’s what I’ve seen over the past 15 or 20 years. I’ve always wanted to write more topical songs in the way that [Bob] Dylan did, and people like Phil Ochs and of course, Woody Guthrie. But it’s so hard. Steve Earle’s good at it, but I’ve found it difficult.
But your songs do seem to suggest the impact of larger events on the lives of individual people. Human politics, that’s more what I do. Individual lives and compassion for another person. It seems that things have gotten to be like every man or woman for him- or herself: “As long as I have mine, the hell with everybody else.” That’s what I find so disturbing. And that starts with the individual. I guess maybe that’s my statement.
RECORD, OCTOBER 1985
Van Morrison
Do you write things that you don’t think of as songs? Yeah, I write some prose.
Do you have plans to do anything with that, or is that just for yourself? No plans at the moment. Not really.
>Do you try to play or write every day? That’s not the way it works. I try when I have the time. I have a lot of business things that take up most of my time. That gets in the way. So whenever I’ve got space, I try and write. But there’s not a lot of space, because I’m dealing with a lot of business.
Business like interviews? No, like calling lawyers to find out where the money went, then calling another lawyer to check him. All that kind of stuff. That’s on a weekly basis, and sometimes a daily basis. All the phone calls take up a lot of time — “I’ll call you back” in different time zones, and all that. It’s a lot of work.
Obviously your lyrics are really important to you, but part of the way they communicate is the way that you sing them, your vocal style. It seems that a lot of times you’re almost rebelling against … What? Tell me something. Tell me something. I’ve been wondering this for a while. I just realized maybe I should ask somebody: Why is it that people ask me these certain questions? Journalists are always asking me different questions than they ask, I notice, other people in my profession. I’ve been trying to figure this out for a while. It seems like the interviews that I do, people ask me … I mean you ask me completely different questions than you would ask [Bob] Dylan, for instance.
ROLLING STONE, OCT. 6, 1988
Keith Richards
Obviously, a whole mythology has been built up around you. You must walk into situations all the time where people expect you to be “Keith Richards.” How does that affect you? I try and disillusion them, because I don’t have an “act.” It’s impossible for me. It’s very embarrassing. Charlie Watts, in fact, is a far more honest man than I am — to himself, to everybody. He never even wanted to be a pop star. It makes him cringe. But because he liked music — and loved playing with me and with Mick [Jagger] and knew that it was a great band — he’s willing to go along with it. Chicks screaming at Charlie Watts — to him, it’s ludicrous.
How is your health? You tell me.
You look good. You sound great. I’ve lived my life in my own way, and I’m here today because I have taken the trouble to find out who I am.
The problem, however, is people who think they can live like Keith Richards. That’s what I mean. The biggest mistake in the world is to think that you have to emulate somebody else. That is fatal. It’s got nothing to do with me. If people want to be like Keith Richards, then they better have the same physical makeup. I come from a very sturdy stock — otherwise I wouldn’t be here.
At this point, to what degree is your identity tied into being a Rolling Stone? Well, I’ve always been one, from the start of, if you want to call it, my professional career. And I’ve never wanted to be anything else … I played with Muddy Waters six months before he died, and the cat was just as vital as he was in his youth. And he did it until the day he died. To me, that is the important thing. I mean, what am I gonna do now, go for job retraining and learn to be a welder? I’ll do this until I drop. I’m committed to it and that’s it.
BELIEFNET.COM, FEBRUARY 2001
Bono
During U2’s Zooropa tour, you would often call prominent figures by phone from the stage. In London, you were dressed as the devil character you invented, MacPhisto, and as you tried to call the Archbishop of Canterbury, MacPhisto remarked that religious leaders were some of his closest friends. It’s true. I often wonder if religion is the enemy of God. It’s almost like religion is what happens when the Spirit has left the building. God’s Spirit moves through us and the world at a pace that can never be constricted by any one religious paradigm. I love that. You know, it says somewhere in the scriptures that the Spirit moves like a wind, no one knows where it’s come from or where it’s going. The Spirit is described in the Holy Scriptures as much more anarchic than any established religion credits.
For all that, U2 has often been seen as a Christian rock band. We really [screwed] that up, though. We really [screwed] up our corner of the Christian market. Music is the language of the Spirit anyway. Its first function is to praise creation — praise the beauty of the woman lying next to you, or the woman you would like to lie next to you. It is a natural effusive energy that you shouldn’t put to work. When those people get up at the Grammys and say, “I thank God,” I always imagine God going, “Oh don’t — please don’t thank me for that one. Please, oh, that’s an awful one! Don’t thank me for that!”
ROLLING STONE, NOV. 5, 1987
Paul McCartney
When John [Lennon] was killed, somebody stuck a microphone in my face and said, “What do you think about it?” I said, “It’s a drag.” But I said, “It’s a dra-a-a-ag,” and meant it with every inch of melancholy I could muster. When you put that in print, it says, “McCartney in London today, when asked for a comment on his dead friend, said ‘It’s a drag.’” It seemed a very flippant comment to make.
Because you didn’t deliver an instant eulogy? Exactly. In fact, I really got pissed off at all the pundits that evening who did just that. All these people who were supposed to have been John’s friends. The rest of us were just gaga with grief and sitting at home crying. Anyway, looking back on it with John, you know, he really was a great guy. I always idolized him. We always did, the group. I don’t know if the others will tell you that, but he was our idol. He was like our own little Elvis in the group. Not because of his good looks or his singing, just for his personality. He was just a great guy. Very forceful guy. Very funny guy. Very bright and always someone for us to look up to. What I cherish is that. I know that I sat there and we wrote “Love Me Do.” And I sat there and we wrote “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” and we screwed around with the lyrics. I remember sitting down doing “Help,” and then I’d come in with “When I was younger, so much younger than today,” and he’d have the main melody and I’d do the countermelody. Those moments. That’s what I cherish. No one can take that away from me.
ROLLING STONE, SEPT. 16, 1993
Woody Allen
One of the consistent elements of your movies is the decline from some romantic ideal into an almost unbearably compromised real world. Right. The real world is a place that I’ve never felt comfortable in. I think that my generation grew up with a value system heavily marked by films. There was no television, we didn’t read books. Your values and everything you thought about life, you got from this overwhelmingly powerful image of the movies. You’d go into a beautiful movie theater; even the neighborhood movie theaters were beautifully carpeted, chandeliers, brass, they were gorgeous. You’d go in, and suddenly on some ugly, broken-down, sun-drenched street in Brooklyn on a summer afternoon, suddenly you’re in a totally different world, and there’s a pirate ship off Spain. Then that picture was over. And there were six people living in a penthouse on Park Avenue and going to nightclubs, and all the women were beautiful, and all the guys were attractive, and everybody always had the right thing to say. This is overwhelming when you’re a kid. And it forms your value system, and it’s hard to outgrow.
You’ve always been obsessed in your work with death, aging, mortality, and a lack of moral certainty. How has your attitude toward those issues changed as you’ve gotten older? Well, it’s remained terrible. I’ve always had a very pessimistic view of everything, and I still do. I find it very hard to shake.
Is humor part of what makes it bearable? No, humor is involuntary with me. It doesn’t make it bearable. It’s just something that I can do, so I do it for a living. I don’t feel, you know, that feeling of, “Heck, what can you do but laugh at it?” I feel it’s terrible, and one wants to say, “Why are we laughing?” Does nobody realize what’s going on out there?
ROLLING STONE, OCT. 26, 2000
Johnny Cash
In your life and career, you’ve had something of an outlaw image — the “Man in Black” — and at the same time a deep spiritual concern. Your younger audience in particular seems drawn almost exclusively to the outlaw side of things. Are you OK with that? I’m OK with it. This younger generation, I find they’re very spiritual people. I do spirituals in my albums. I don’t know of an album I’ve released that I haven’t had one or two. Matter of fact, one had a song called “Spiritual” which I thought was a fabulous song. The young people loved it. I think they believe me. And I believe what I say, but that don’t necessarily make me right. [Laughs] I think my daughter Rosanne said that: “My dad believes what he says, but that don’t make him right.” But that’s OK, too. I respect anybody’s right to believe or not believe.
It’s as if one side of your personality lends credibility to the other. You’re not
putting yourself forward as some perfect specimen of rightness? There’s nothing
hypocritical about it. I confess right up front that I’m the biggest sinner of them all. But my faith
in God has always been a solid rock that I’ve stood on, no matter where I was or what I was
doing. I was a bad boy at times, but God was always there for me, and I knew that. I guess I
took advantage of that. To me, it’s not hard to justify. Roy Orbison wrote a song called “My
Best Friend,” and there’s a line in there that says, “A diamond is a diamond / And a stone is a
stone / But man is part good and part bad.” I’ve always believed that the good will ultimately
prevail, but there’s a bad side of us that we have to keep warring against. I do at least. A lot of
people do. 