Original subtitles

Downloaded from YTS.MX

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX

You're always looking for sexy.

Everyone's always looking for sexy.

I'm always looking for sexy!

But...

smart is sexy.

It is as if I know

how wonderful this person, this talent is.

I'd rather see a bit of a miracle, and then...

just encourage it to keep being miraculous because

the thing about people,

especially when they're young and coming along,

is that they're racked with so much insecurity.

They don't know how fabulous they are.

He seemed to be at the pulse of the underground

in New York City. He was always, sort of,

in that world of Lou Reed and Iggy,

the whole Warhol gang.

He was sort of the mayor of New York City,

when it came to that.

Danny's a connector, like a fuel line in a car,

which is, by the way, one of the most dangerous places,

a place where things are liable to... erupt.

He's been the handmaiden to the gods,

he's been midwife to

some of the most important people in music.

I remember the first time I went to his house,

and I found the "Wall of Fame."

And he said, "Yeah, here's Janis and Patti..."

Various stories,

denigrating or otherwise, about all of them.

And then there was a picture of me.

You know, in a mirror, putting my make-up on.

I was really overwhelmed.

Somehow I was preparing my first trip to New York,

Danny said, "Stay with me."

Really, Danny was my introduction to New York

and the East Coast.

And Danny was the first person

to explain to me the importance of a cover of a magazine.

That meant something. We just put any random thing on a cover.

He said, "No, no, no, when you do that,

it signifies great importance."

So that was another revelation to me, so...

You know, kinda just...

Danny was an early teacher.

Danny was one of those people who was into rock 'n' roll

and the rebellious edge that it had,

and he chose to work with

the most rebellious of those people.

His art is knowing how to place people within a context,

and that context, within the culture.

All of the bands that were in Danny's universe,

whether he worked with them or not,

had a great, great influence because

they were doing something that nobody else was doing.

They created themselves out of the stuff of...

dust.

He speeded up the evolution in a tremendous way.

Nothing was ever the same after that.

This music went on to take over the world.

I was born in Brooklyn.

My father was in and out of the war,

so there was a lot of grandparents and aunts.

There were four sisters,

and their idea of sinning as teenagers,

was to go out and eat shrimp in a Chinese restaurant.

God bless that generation.

That's how they defied...

tradition and parent control, they ate shrimp.

And I grew up with them, so they were sort of

four "Auntie Mames" in a way.

My life was mainly my hobbies, I had no friends.

I went to school like everybody else, I got all A's.

I took a lot of amphetamines cause my father was a doctor,

so I've been taking amphetamine every day

since I was ten.

But so was everyone else,

my mother.

There was a bowl of Desoxyn on the dining room table,

like people would have M&M's, I don't know what Italians have,

but we had Desoxyn and Dexamine.

I always went against the grain,

whether it was because I was a little faggot,

which everyone else knew but me,

or whether it was because I didn't like

my parents' tastes in anything.

Oh, it's Daniel's Bar Mitzvah!

This is quality. This is high class.

Okay, there's my mother and my father,

and my little brother. The traditional...

kiss...

The traditional pomade.

My brother.

Isn't this mortifying?

Now, the main thing at a Bar Mitzvah is all kids.

Then, it was just a few kids, and I hated kids.

They had to scrape the bottom of the genealogy barrel.

Oh yay, hurray! Aren't they nice?

It's amazing to have something like that, isn't it?

Forest Hills!

Home of the Ramones, right?

When I was a teenager, and I was at Penn...

there was no right table.

I was in the wrong table from the get-go.

The wrong city, the wrong school.

My best friend, Steve Levine, said,

"You have to see this singer." And it was Nina Simone.

♪ Say love me and leave me And let me be lonely ♪

♪ You won't believe me, but I love you only ♪

♪ I'd rather be lonely than happy with somebody else... ♪

She would come and sit with the guys from Penn.

She was so, I'd say insecure, but she was humble.

"Do you really think I'm good?" kinda thing.

"You think what I'm doing will work?"

Well, I don't know, we were 15!

As long as it's good enough for then,

you can't think of what noise this is gonna make

in the history of history.

And that was part of our little crowd, trying to escape,

the "Penn penitude," "penal-atude."

Other schools looked so sexy compared to

all the Jew finance majors at Penn.

Yeah, I had straight A's.

I was sixth in my class of a thousand...

and the youngest.

One of our immediate crowd was a flaming faggot

who loved to get fucked.

So I knew all the juicy ways, what they did.

The night I graduated college, we went out to celebrate,

and one of the things we did

was to go take a look at the promenade in Brooklyn Heights.

They said it was very cruisy so we went up and looked at it.

You know...

I'm 19, I graduated college,

and I stood there, and I did everything he said they do.

Like, you look, and you wink and nod, and all...

It's like you do a silent "Hello, sailor,

would you like to come over?"

This is what they say!

Whoa!

I felt compelled to tell him on the way back to his house,

"I've never done this before."

Of course he said, "Oh, it'll be all right."

So I always thought I would fall in love at Harvard,

but I didn't know how to fall in love at Harvard Law School

where everyone was 23 and wearing a suit and a tie.

No one had sat next to me in Property

or Civil Procedure

that I wanted to go and have a coffee date with.

So I had to call Keith.

"I haven't be able to meet anyone like us."

I don't know what I said.

I don't know what word I used.

Homosexual, I guess.

"Are there homosexuals in Boston?"

And he said, "Yes, there are two bars in Boston,

The Punchbowl and The Napoleon Club."

I met people like Donald Lyons and Hal Peterson

and Harold Talbot,

real aristocrats of the mind and spirit.

I was in the 99th percentile on the law school aptitude test,

no one could believe it 'cause I was flaky.

I stopped going to class, it was so boring,

and I hung out with a bunch of dissolute faggots,

shoplifted a lot, charged a lot,

ran around Harvard Square in a camel's hair coat

and fucked a lot.

That's what I always wanted to do was fuck at Harvard.

And I got a big chance to do it, so I did it.

Coming back to New York and moving

to Greenwich Village where...

You know, I stayed in this hotel and out the back window was

lesbians, literally, having pissing contests.

Really, you think that's just a word,

but they really were doing it.

They would press their pussies, pissies,

and see how strong they could make it,

so they could pee further.

That's what it means, isn't it? It's always what it means!

But dykes could do it too and...

Oh, God, welcome to Greenwich Village, so...

I had nine years of that before the Stonewall.

When I got to New York and I met Danny and Jackie Curtis,

it was all gay, but it wasn't homosexual.

It was really gay, I guess,

the definition of gay was just ha-ha.

So what?

When you talk about Danny being out,

he was never in.

We never came out to our parents,

what's the point of that?

Why would we want to upset those old people for?

You know?

We were okay, we don't have to bother them with it.

You know, so gayness was not a point of reference,

it was certainly not a definition.

There was a columnist named Lee Mortimer,

who'd disclose and expose

gay bars in New York.

It's like finding a protestant in Spain.

They really were rooting them out.

I didn't feel harassed by the police,

but I didn't confront them

like they did at the Stonewall either.

Fuck it!

We had a good time and...

we all had to fuck each other 'cause it was like lesbians.

It wasn't like we could go to the Firemen's Ball.

And with the gay liberation came

all these gay firemen and stuff like...

Oh!

You know, that's nice, be happy, but...

I mean, I didn't wait my whole life for firemen to come out...

as a group. Who cares?

I was in search of crazy people.

I'd just come from three years in Philadelphia.

What else would I want? Christians?

I want my people with insanity in their blood.

It was the same Sunday that inThe New York Times magazine

the lead story was the soup cans.

That was revolutionary.

I thought that was really...

pushing the bucket, or whatever you...

Cutting the envelope because

everything good starts off being hated

byThe New York Times.

Andy was sitting...

on the sofa with Gerard,

and there was a woman crawling around the floor screaming,

"Andy, I love you, I love you!" It was Ivy Nicholson,

it was Andy's girl of the year, she was in love with him,

and when she got close enough, he'd kick her in the chin and

she just moaned and

went over to one of the windows and started to climb out.

I said, "Oh, my God! That woman is going to jump!"

And I put my arms around her.

And then I said, "There, there, you know,

don't do something so silly." And then...

I dunno, she took a sleeping pill,

or someone gave her a Quaalude.

And then as we were leaving,

someone said to me, I thought it was Andy,

"Boy, we were all hoping she would jump!

You sort of spoiled it for everyone."

I was uncool by saving this person's life at a party.

But the lesson is,

it's sort of an upper class thing,

you don't get all excited about anything.

I thought, "That suits me fine."

That's it!

I was not worried about being uncool anymore...

because I knew all it took was to do nothing.

That's the whole model of what that world was saying.

"You're better of doing nothing.

Look at it, and let the looking at it

become the thing that you're doing."

Once you're in those silver-aluminum rooms,

you were in the world.

It was like going through the looking glass,

it was action central, people were coming to you.

What a good way to be in New York.

It's the reason anyone comes to New York.

A point of contact with, like, whatever is happening,

recognized and creative, and all that.

That was The Factory.

That was as in as you could get.

So then it's career time. I'm living in the village and

going to have a career in publishing,

and I'm gonna start at the bottom.

So I sold books at Double Days.

Then I got a job through an agency at Liquor Store Magazine,

the monthly magazine that goes to all owners

of all liquor stores in the United States.

The day of the assassination,

we were all sitting around the receptionist's desk.

She had a radio.

I'm like paralyzed and the boss came back from lunch and said,

"What's going on here?"

Someone managed to get out that

the president had just been killed.

And he said, "Hmm, too bad they didn't get his brother."

I decided to have a party because it was one week later.

The Warhols were there, the San Remos were there,

and also all the people from Harvard, and they sorta all met.

The only thing that we had to drink was

vodka and grapefruit juice,

which is just wonderful 'cause it's cheap,

and it's potent

and no one knows what the proportions are.

You can just turn them up, or turn them down.

No one on earth can tell, until you see the effects.

It's like a silent, tasteless poison.

In the middle of the evening, the door opened and

Nico came in, dressed in

tattered levis and tattered levi jacket.

She came in with two men.

One of whom was a Chilean count,

and the other who was an English dandy.

And the room of beautiful people just turned.

She walked over to the table,

and on which there was a punchbowl,

and...

dipped the ladle in and threw her head back and just...

Man, showstopper.

That's how I met Nico.

She crashed my party, then she got...

She was in New York so

she and the Warhols picked up on each other.

She began to sing with The Velvet Underground.

Being in the world of

New York in the 60s was transcending everything to me.

I was with people who were smart and

sexy and famous and brilliant and talented and

I had...

what I had always wanted was a pool from

where I could find friends.

That's what motivates me is to be in the right crowd.

In 1964, Tommy Goodwin, everyone's favorite,

most beloved, beautiful guy,

drove down to New York from Cambridge, and he said,

"Can my friend, Edie, stay at your apartment tonight?"

I guess it was the first place she stayed when she moved here.

I think she was going to model then, or something,

she was into something fashiony.

Then she met Andy, and then she changed her hair and

she changed her look.

I remember the first time he said

he was going to do a screen test with her.

And I thought, "What?" You know,

"Gee, she's just another pretty face."

And then, we saw the screen test like two days later,

and it was just a revelation for everybody who was there.

Because Andy had seen what she'd had,

that she was bigger than life.

And that's what a star is,

someone who can stand the spotlight

and continue to surprise and delight her audiences.

I mean she always attracted and was attracted

to the most brilliant and crazy people.

And a lot of these people were probably mostly gay,

but they were in love with her.

I mean seriously in love with her.

- Andy was in love with her. - Really?

Oh, yeah, definitely, he was as in love with her

as any man can be with any woman.

Whoever you were, next to her, you were strong in a way.

'Cause she was so weak in so many ways,

and she was so strong in so many ways.

I don't know, people are just born,

they just keep turning up in every generation.

So Paul came down and...

It was his first night ever at The Factory and Andy was...

Had the camera pointed at

the center of this group of people and...

he said to Paul, "Oh, you know anything about movies?"

And, "Oh, I can't get all these people in the picture.

I don't know what to do."

And Paul said, "Well, there's the thing called a pan,

and you, very slowly, you know...

move the eye piece, whatever, what you're looking through,

until you get all the people in."

"Wow, we didn't really think you could really do that.

I've always seen it in movies, but I didn't know how to do it.

Oh, thank you."

And this is how he learned to make movies

as if he made movies,

This is a good metaphor

for everything, we just pretended there was no...

known way of doing it,

and maybe someone knew a known way of doing it,

and admit what we don't know.

And be proud of what we don't know.

And make a virtue of what we don't know.

And...

turn a lack of expertise, lack of virtuosity, into...

an asset.

So I was wondering,

when was the first time you ran into Cale or Reed?

It was when the Velvet Underground was playing

at the Café Bizarre.

They were terrific and very strange and wonderful.

They immediately became my favorite band.

John was very intense and poetic and Welsh.

Lou was very arrogant and difficult,

and you must remember, everybody in New York

was in love with Lou Reed.

That crush on Lou was an energy that

fueled a great deal of what went on in and around the band.

It became...

corrupted...

by the presence of a lot of extraneous elements,

like a psychedelic light show.

I really think that's the reason that the band didn't go

the route of rock 'n' roll success.

John and Lou and Nico who were so intense and incredible,

were covered over with flashing polka dots.

I used to tell Lou and John all the time,

"Why don't you get rid of that fucking light show?"

And what was their response?

They shrugged.

That was their response to anything.

If someone said that to me, I woulda shrugged too.

Andy was inspirational in conveying to him

the importance of work.

And I think Lou would tell you this himself,

I don't mean to put words in his mouth, but he would say,

"How many songs did you write today, Lou?"

And Lou would say, "Six."

Andy would say, "Ooh, that's not enough.

You have to work harder."

It was difficult to prove your legitimacy.

Everyone was a freak if you were associated with Andy Warhol.

Unless you were Andy himself,

then you were just considered some underground drug trash.

Erase these bananas and whip dancers from your mind,

and listen to songs

from one of the greatest songwriters of all time.

Then there was an ad inThe New York Times,

"Expanding Teen Magazine seeks writer/editor.

Young, hip, knowledge of pop scene, some experience."

I thought he meant the pop art scene.

So I wrote a letter to the box atThe Times.

It was all about how I believed in great, beautiful people,

and I loved kids.

And also I dropped a lot of names like

Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick,

I thought that's what he meant.

So I went in for an interview and

I turned his head around, I guess.

How did you feel once you were

right in the middle of pop music?

Hey! What? To go see a band, five cute boys at once?

As Pat Hartley used to say,

"You bet your fucking ass I'm a groupie!"

So I thought, well, you know, "Hey,

The Velvet Underground, my favorite band.

I know all about it. What do you have to know?"

Of course back then,

you really didn't have to know very much.

It was the year that everything wonderful was happening.

It was '65, '66, which was

The Doors' first album, the Mamas and Papas' first album,

Aftermath from the Stones,

I never liked the Beatles,

but they had some album, and that was okay, Revolver.

There was all these first albums, or watershed albums,

that didn't sound like anything else in the world.

You just knew this is the place to be!

Everything that you get in the music business is,

when you first get in,

is just given to you by press agents.

The first one I met was a woman named Connie DeNave.

Her assistant took me to, guess where, Brooklyn!

These three women came out in bright yellow dresses,

and I went crazy.

That was my first maybe rock 'n' roll-go-crazy moment,

like, I lifted off my seat.

♪ Whenever I'm with him

♪ Something inside's

♪ Still burning

♪ And I'm filled with desire

♪ Could it be a devil in me

♪ Or is this the way love's supposed to be? ♪

♪ It's like a heat wave

♪ Burning in my heart

♪ I can't keep from crying

♪ It's tearing me apart...

I was earthquaked

by Martha and the Vandellas.

Boy, if that's what this is about,

it's gonna be a fun business.

The Rolling Stones were giving a press party

in the form of a boat ride. I got there late.

My photographer was the reason I was late

'cause he arrived with no film and we missed the fucking boat!

A limo pulled up and Gloria Stavers got out.

She was my archrival then,

she was like way number one in the field.

This guy in a rowboat came up and said,

"You two guys want a ride to that boat?"

It'll be...

$20.

I said, "Gloria, you wanna go in it?"

She said, "I wouldn't pay 20 cents

for the fucking Rolling Stones,"

and got back in her car and drove away.

The boat docked.

A beautiful girl got off, carrying a camera.

It was Linda Eastman, her photographs were so great.

And we became best friends.

She had this quality that...

I find in... In Libra females.

It's that men have a tendency to dance for them,

to please them.

She always had that quality,

she took the best pictures of pretty people.

And I wanted to write a lot about The Byrds.

And Cass Elliot and The Velvet Underground.

The publisher was very canny,

and he investigated London literary agencies,

and bought a bunch of interviews

that Maureen Cleave,

a journalist and a friend of The Beatles,

had done in England.

And they had

Paul McCartney saying,

"It's a lousy country where anyone black is a dirty nigger!"

Whoa, that was nice.

And John Lennon said,

"I don't know what'll go first, rock 'n' roll or Christianity!"

"We're more popular than Jesus."

And here I was with this magazine,

I was competing with16, I didn't wanna do,

you know, how nice is Herman to his family,

or you know, something, or this secret of Paul Revere's

you know, favorite color.

I just wanna do something different!

I said, "Well, let's just, hey, put it out.

See what happens, maybe we'll get famous."

Ha-ha.

If I had said, "We're more...

"Television is more popular than Jesus,"

I might've got away with it.

I just happened to be talking to a friend, I used

the word "Beatles"

as a remote thing, not as what I think,

as Beatles as those other Beatles,

like other people see us.

I just said they are having more influence on kids and things

than anything else, including Jesus.

But I said it in that way, which is the wrong way. Yap-yap.

The magazine came out on the eve of the Beatles tour,

in the summer of 1966.

Some proper little Christian teenager saw...

this thing about Christianity, the word "Christ,"

whatever gets these people juicing or drooling, whatever.

I just cannot understand

why I have to share this country with them.

- And she got all in a thing... - Socialist experiment?

Twat steaming and ran to a disk jockey in...

Don't you know, there's three States it could be?

In Alabama.

And he got outraged,

and he went on the radio on his show and

called attention to...

this blasphemy

on the part of the beloved Beatles because...

Remember, guys didn't like them because they looked like

girly-girly with that hair!

If you, as an American teenager,

are offended by statements from a group of foreign singers which

strike at the very basis of our existence,

as god-fearing, patriotic citizens,

then we urge you to take your Beatles' records,

pictures and souvenirs, to the pick-up points

about to be named,

and on the night of the Beatles' appearance in Memphis, Aug 19th,

they will be destroyed

in a huge public bonfire at a place to be named soon.

Stay tuned to WAQY for further developments.

They were playing stadiums and giant things,

it was 10 days in America, I think,

and they flew into Memphis,

and someone, as they say, looked out the window and said,

"Wow, there's snow on the ground!"

Wow, it's Memphis, you know,

the beloved city of Elvis and Sun Studios.

And they got closer, and someone said,

"That's not snow! It's the KKK!"

The Beatles made a statement in all the newspapers that

they're getting more better than Jesus himself and

the Ku Klux Klan, being a religious order,

is gonna come out here,

the night that they appear at the coliseum here,

and we're gonna demonstrate with...

different ways and tactics to stop this performance.

We're known as a terror organization, I think we have...

A terror organization?

We have ways and means to stop this

if this is gonna be the case, yeah.

What ways and means?

Oh, I don't wanna say this but there'll be a lot of surprises

on Monday night, I believe, when they get here.

What did I do...

really?

I didn't have to put Jesus Christ on the top of the page,

and the word nigger on...

When's the last time you saw the word nigger

on the cover of a magazine for 11-year-olds?

For anybody?

Anybody! He's saying it like...

that's bad to call someone a nigger.

You know, what's wrong with that?

I didn't love them that much,

but I certainly loved them more than Jesus.

You know, I mean, they're more important to me

than to Jesus, right? I mean than Jesus was.

What did Jesus ever fucking do for me?

If you think I did that to be...

To cause them trouble.

No.

Only but in the sense that...

it's about time...

You know...

Look at Lenny Bruce, it's about time

more people got in trouble for saying the right things.

Look what Dylan is doing.

You know, it's all emerging now.

I wanted to make some trouble,

I didn't want them to have to live through a week of...

death threats.

I wouldn't want that for anyone!

Mm, mm...

Uh...

I wouldn't want them to be killed.

But I think some death threats would be...

I can think of some people who could use some death threats.

You know what the happy ending is,

lightning hit the radio station, in Alabama and it fell down.

Is that the ending to the story?

That's true. Isn't that great?

So anyhow, the real end is that many years later when I...

for a while...

was acquainted with Paul socially

because he was married to my dear friend,

Linda Eastman McCartney.

And I said to him once,

"You know, Paul,

remember with the magazine, with the "more popular..."

"Yeah."

I said, "That was me."

And he said, "So you're the one."

Because they really did never perform again.

After that Sunday night at Candlestick Park...

So you, Danny Fields, broke the Beatles up?

- No, I didn't! - That's what you told me!

No.

Don't be backtracking now that we're on the air!

Look, if you had to sell a candy bar in 20 words or less.

I want to ask you if you think that prediction

was accurate, by the way.

I don't know what'll go first, rock 'n' roll or Christianity.

Somehow I think it's rock 'n' roll.

The first time I heard they had a cute lead singer was

a friend of mine named Pat Hartley who was a movie actress,

and she came screaming into Max's one night and said,

"Ooh, there's the cutest lead singer of a new group

playing at Ondines called The Doors,"

at which point I said,

"Yee, I promised their person I would go in and look at them!"

And there was this little small audience,

and you could stand or sit or just mill around,

and then there were maybe two dozen people paying attention.

Steve Harris: I came from the Dick Clark era.

If you saw somebody that was really attractive,

Dick would play it.

Jim Morrison, when I saw his picture, I said,

"If he could read the phone book on key,

you're gonna make millions."

I met Danny when I went to see the group rehearsing.

And I said, "I'm the New York

press agent for The Doors."

He said, "How wonderful, a press agent!

We've never had a press agent connected...

But who decided

that you were the press agent for The Doors?

I did!

He kind of appeared to be a hippie yenta.

I told Jac that I met somebody that knew everything,

and could wind up, with his knowledge,

going after specific types of acts.

So I went up to Elektra and I said hi,

and they said, "Oh, boy, are we happy

to have a press agent, we've never seen one before!"

And I said, "I'm glad to be of help.

By the way, I must say that

they were doing one very intriguing song last night."

I said, "It was real catchy."

So they played me the first single,

which was "Break On Through", I said, "That's not it!

Something about a fire."

"Oh, 'Light My Fire',

oh, that can't be a single, it's seven minutes long."

And I said, "That's too big, can't you cut it down?"

And they said, "You can't cut down a song, that's heretical.

You can't do that."

Finally, they figured out it could be cut down,

and they remembered that I was the first person

outside the company

who suggested that they really try to cut it down.

And, of course, with the release of that song,

that became a different record company.

Then they called me up from Elektra

and asked to come and work for them

as a full-time to create a publicity department.

Danny was plugged in to another part of the scene,

the part of the scene that was bubbling under.

But also he stayed up later at night,

and that was a big plus for us

because then Elektra was on the street

while I was asleep.

We had great plans for him in our heads then because

the buzz was starting to invent him as a major sex object.

Gloria had seen pictures of him,

was intrigued with his record and his photographs.

This was my next thing, I was gonna go to California

to set up a phone call between him and Gloria.

This is how expense accounts worked in those days.

I flew to California to set up a phone call.

People in California, it was a joke then, but it was true,

they would do one thing a day.

And if you asked someone what they did, they would say...

"I washed my hair today."

Long pause, and that was it, and you would say, "Oh, I...

You know...

Made a salad.

That wasn't because of drugs?

No, I think they were all just winding down so fast

and finding that... Everybody did this,

then nobody would ask anybody to do anything more.

And I saw them perform in San Francisco, it was very jolly.

And I went backstage.

I was horrified.

It was like a sort of statue, just sitting there,

and there were all these groupie things.

Dirty girls.

Just rags and dirt, and things falling off them,

and too much eye make-up and a dopey, glazed look.

I was concerned that this was bad for his image.

What if a photographer got this?

Gloria had told me that they're always supposed to be alone.

Alone is sexy.

You're never supposed to see them with a girl.

I made him make the call to Gloria,

she asked him her questions, I got on the phone with her,

she said, "That was very interesting, I look forward

to meeting this young man."

And then, as we were about to leave,

I had a little electric bulb in my head.

And I said, "Say, Jim, I'm staying with a...

an interesting chanteuse called Nico, up in the Hills."

And I thought I would bring him up there,

and then he would fall in love with Nico,

and then he would see the error of his ways,

in letting all these slimy, little groupies...

And he would never settle for a woman

less beautiful, or mystical or exotic than Nico.

And since there weren't too many,

then he would never have too many girlfriends,

and my plot would be on its way.

We finally got up to the house.

And Nico was standing in the doorway.

And he just looked at her,

and she looked at him, and then they both

cast their glances downward.

They stared at some imaginary spot

on the floor in between them.

And I tried to start a little chatteroonie.

And I saw this was going nowhere,

this was some kind of thing they were acting out.

And I came back about an hour later,

they were still in the exact same positions,

they hadn't moved.

And they hadn't said anything?

They hadn't said anything.

This is their way of acknowledging,

"You're a beautiful, special, poetic person," I suppose...

Edie was after... I had some pills with me,

I always traveled with a little drug case then.

I hid them...

somewhere under a bed, under a mattress,

between two blankets and another mattress,

and she got them. She found them,

and she took about half of everything that was there.

I don't know how she did, when she was in the room,

but she did and she was magical.

She was having an affair with Dino Valenti, he wrote,

"Come on, everybody,

shine on your brother,

let's love one another..."

And the evening wore by. and the day wore by,

and he and I went up to the room,

and we started smoking a lot of hash.

I started making a major speech to him about

"I have these things in mind for you

and life is a roller-coaster and stardom is a trip and..."

I didn't know what I was doing, I was just sounding like

every movie I had ever seen

about what's in store, and play the game.

He would just open his palm about every five minutes,

and asked for another drug.

Incredible amount of hash.

About six hits of orange sunshine.

Nobody in those days

got scared about taking too much?

I was scared! I thought he was gonna die!

I had never seen...

This was like...

Enough drugs for me and

everybody I met in two weeks in California!

But you kept giving it to him?

I kept giving it to him, he wouldn't answer.

And I would say, "What do you think about that

flight of brilliance, Jim."

"Got any more acid, man?"

In the middle of the night,

David Neuman came running into my room and said,

"Oh, my God, you have to see what's happening!"

She was in the courtyard.

She was crying and screaming, and he was naked

up on top of this house.

And he was walking on it, like jumping over the gaps.

Totally naked.

Jesus, what if he falls off?

Am I gonna lose my job? It's all I could think of.

Who cared about him?

She came flying into my room and threw herself

on the bed and she was crying hysterically.

I never found out what had happened, I mean,

"He is so evil, oh, he is so evil."

"Oh, Nico, calm down and go to bed, he's just stoned."

I went to his car and I took the keys out of the ignition,

and put them under the floor mat.

The next morning dawned,

and he said, "Give me my car keys!"

And I said, "No, you're in no condition to drive."

He was not smiling because

it totally reversed everything that he stood for,

and everything that he tried to project.

Nico and Edie suggested we go over to

some friend of theirs house who had a swimming pool.

We got to this house, he didn't have a bathing suit.

So I went through this pile of bathing suits and I said,

"Here, Jim, this looks like it will fit you. Put this on

and then we will go swimming."

"Where's my car keys, man?"

I said, "We'll find them later, put this on."

That's when he took off his thing and he got naked,

and I saw his cock, which was very big.

What do you mean very big?

It was long.

It was like a salami, it was long.

We all drove back to the house.

We found that all the dining room chairs

had been put on the table,

and there was a still fromChelsea Girls,

on the back of it, it said, "Jim, your ass is mud.

Call us and get to rehearsal fast."

I said, "Have you looked under the mat of your car?

Perhaps you put the keys there, as so many people do."

And he gave me a look like, "Oh, so that's where you hid them."

And he got them and he drove away.

And he hated me from that point on.

He was constantly trying to get Jac Holzman to fire me.

- Why? - From Elektra records.

Well, cause I had kidnapped him.

Jim got really pissed.

And he called me, and he said,

"Keep Danny Fields away from me!

And I'm gonna call Jac now."

The only person I knew who wasn't a big fan of Danny's

was Jim Morrison.

If you get to close to one of your artists personally

that when you have to sit down and have

a hard talk...

it's tougher to do.

But we needed someone to stay close to that group.

And you felt Danny was too close?

No, I have no idea.

In his later days, he is said to have become nicer.

However, when I went to visit

his widow to give her my condolences,

the lovely Pamela, who didn't live long after that.

And the dog kept jumping on me, and she told me it was Jim,

and I went...

And he vomited on me.

I swear to God it's the truth, I have witnesses.

- He won't die. - The reincarnation.

No, he doesn't need a reincarnation,

he is incarnated at all times.

This is a song that we...

We first sang together in a hotel room in Newport.

That's right.

That's right, at the festival.

- Yeah. - It was.

- We sang it all night. - I know!

♪ Yes, I loved you in the morning ♪

♪ Our kisses deep and warm...

Danny was one of the people that just flipped out

over Leonard Cohen's music.

He just thought it was wonderful.

And we all were at Newport learning,

"Hey, That's No Way to Say Good-bye."

And Danny was singing,

and we were all, of course, drinking and carousing

and having a great time.

I decided to take acid, 'cause I was near the water

and I always found that when I tried it in the city,

I'd start hallucinating over an oil slick.

"Whoa, those colors."

So I thought, you know, nature is better.

I didn't realize I would end up in the hotel room of...

two super-human or extra-human, projective artists.

And I'm on the floor, exploring E = MC2 over H.

She looked over me and she said,

"Oh, I have to show you the sunrise on the cliffs."

Because, you know, she's a Taurus, she's the earth mother.

And...

She's there to respond to the needs of people who she's with.

And she took me out,

they propped me up and put me in a car,

and we drove out to the cliffs.

And Leonard and I...

just stood and laughed and talked about everything.

Anybody who will take you for a walk

by the ocean when you're on acid

is saving probably both lives.

He was part of the fabric

of what was going on culturally in the city,

not just music.

But the cultural involvement of

people who were against the war, and people who wanted to see

a more loving culture and

create different kinds of music and different kinds of events.

I didn't hang out with the fast, druggy crowd.

He really understood that I was not

the real folksinger deal,

I was something else that very few people really understood.

I think that went a long way in his being able to really

do things with my records, and with me as an artist,

that were appropriate.

And that took me to the edge and pushed me over,

but not too far.

What the company freak was supposed to be

a liaison primarily

between both the artists and the younger community,

and the communications area, the writers and editors.

Having not existed before,

it's up to the person who takes it to invent it.

And then it becomes not a job but a role,

as McLuhan defined a role, versus a job.

A job is something which can be replaced by a machine.

In the summer of 1966 in Los Angeles,

I met the legendary Billy James,

an executive at Elektra Records, Hollywood.

He sat barefoot on his desk.

He was the coolest guy of all.

And so he became a role model, I guess still is. God bless him.

Billy James: The world "freak" is defined

in my OED as a sudden or causeless

turn of the mind,

or disposition of mind that is subject to such humors.

I also thought of the jester,

and then I thought of Mercury, I thought of the messenger.

And then I thought of the Jungian archetype

of the eternal boy.

There is the...

somehow different aspect to the freak.

And it sometimes creates harmony among one's colleagues.

And sometimes it creates discomfort.

I thought there should be a drug album

because, especially Elektra,

they had all, when I was in college,

they had recorded these lusty university songs.

Beery, kinda drink, drink, drink.

And Cook That Beer, or whatever you do to it.

Why not have a smoking song?

So how do you do it?

And then I was in Washington Square and I saw David Peel.

♪ ["I Want To Get High"

by David Peel & The Lower East Side plays] ♪

David Peel: Okay, I met Danny Fields in 1968.

He had a way with words that made you wanna become part of,

whatever he was doing.

He brought me to Max's Kansas City

after the show, and he bought me a steak dinner.

How could I say no

to a steak dinner when I'm used to eating...

pizza all my life on the streets?

And I told Jac Holzman about it, and saw a big crowd...

♪ I like marijuana, You like marijuana... ♪

I said, "Well, there it is," and

"Up against the wall, motherfuckers!"

and Jac thought, "Well this is indeed avant-garde,"

and then looked around and said, "Hmm,

light poles, hmm. We can do this, live!"

We were allowed to plug into

the outlet at the secret bottom of a lamp post in New York

to power the Nagra tape recorder that we had out there.

Some cop came up and said, "You can't do that."

We showed him our fancy

$600 order and that was it, and we recorded

David Peel & the Lower East Side in one afternoon.

In a way, the Have a Marijuanaalbum,

was this to the establishment.

And we had this gigantic marijuana leaf on the cover.

William S. Harvey thought it was a terrible idea and...

We had a bet, he said it wasn't gonna sell 10,000,

and I said I think it'll sell way over 100,000.

And it sold probably 600,000.

In 1968,

I became a DJ at WFMU,

two nights a week, four hours a night.

This is Danny Fields, this is WFMU-FM,

freeform radio from East Orange, New Jersey.

Going backwards up the half-hour are the Beach Boys of course

and "Good Vibrations."

Pearls Before Swine, "I Shall Not Care."

Silver Apples, "Program," the Righteous Brothers...

"You've Lost That Loving Feeling."

Lot of us will be out at the Pavilion next Wednesday night

to see the MC5,

The Stooges and David Peel & the Lower East Side.

WFMU has been the first to play any of their records remember.

As we go into the next half-hour again with Otis Redding, Cream,

David Peel, Captain Beefheart,

The Byrds and The Rolling Stones.

Bob Rudnick was of our world.

He was brilliant and funny and Jewish and crazy and

he wrote an alternative column called "Kokaine Karma" with Ks

in theEast Village Other, with Dennis Frawley.

And they had a radio show on WFMU.

He taught me a great deal.

He steered me in directions of political activism

that I thought were simply ludicrous, but if he liked them,

I knew they had a little style as well, and he was right!

The MC5,

they had fabulous clothes and physiques,

and they were all 6 foot 2.

They had amusing politics and great hair.

Here, I was coming from an Andy Warhol crowd in New York,

and we were the most effete people in the most effete city

in the most effete crowd.

And I was so effete.

I was just poised for...

Being slammed with something

that was full of blood and lust and sweat

and cum and smell and vigor,

and they had it.

Rob Tyner: Brothers and sisters!

The time has come for each and every one of you to decide

whether you are gonna be the problem,

or whether you are gonna be the solution!

That's right!

It takes five seconds,

five seconds of decision,

five seconds to realize your purpose here on the planet.

It takes five seconds to realize that it's time to move!

It's time to get down with it!

Brothers, it's time to testify and I want to know,

are you ready to testify?

Are you ready?

I give you a testimonial, the MC5!

I saw them at the Detroit at the legendary Grande Ballroom.

It was great, everyone jumped up and down,

there were thousands of people there.

They had great costumes, they twirled, they jumped,

and they landed, and that very same weekend,

Wayne Kramer, who I always loved,

a great guitar player with the MC5 then said,

"If you liked us, you'll really like our little brother band,

The Stooges."

I heard the music coming from just down the hall,

and I got just transfixed.

And I've been listening to music my whole life,

and this is a new take on the word music.

The Stooges had left the stage,

I got to the back of the room when this guy said,

"Hi, I'm Danny Fields, I work for Elektra Records.

You're a star."

I thought, "Oh, he's probably just...

wants to party or hang out or pick me up, or something."

You know, I...

I felt a little of that,

and then we talked to him for two minutes after,

and I knew, "No, this a real sharp guy."

We couldn't play "Johnny B. Goode."

He wasn't gonna look at the Ramones and think

that there was any problem because

they couldn't play "Johnny B. Goode" either!

They couldn't play it fucking either, you know?

I'll bet Metallica can't play it either, you know?

You know? So...

Whereas somebody else might want to address that issue,

he didn't see it that way.

And this was a guy who would look at something

that nobody else was really ready to see and he'd say,

"People could enjoy this, people should enjoy this.

This should be everywhere!"

Wayne Kramer: We were in the basement at Translove

where John had his office.

Danny got on the phone with Holzman.

John Sinclair: "I'm gonna tell him they oughta sign you guys."

I said, "Great, Danny!"

"Hey, go get 'em, baby!

Tells them he saw the MC5, they were spectacular,

and then they had their little baby brother band with them,

called The Stooges.

And he says, "I think we ought to sign both of them."

He says 20 for the MC5, 5,000 for the Stooges.

And John said, "Yeah, that's sounds like a good deal to me."

"Okay, it's a deal, all right. okay, see you back in New York."

That was it, it was done,

all by Monday morning at 10 o'clock.

It was done. Here I got...

two of the greatest bands in the history of the world

with a phone call.

For the Stooges to get signed to a record contract

at a major label after about...

Oh, I don't know, not a year of existence...

Never really having a tune.

It was just unbelievable that this would happen, you know.

And I always thought, 25,000,

we could pay off all of our debts,

we could pay off our equipment.

And then everybody got a leather coat, you know?

Yeah!

Yeah, come together!

Come together!

Thank you, thank you. Come together.

Thank you kindly.

We hope you all did come together.

I wasn't cynical about him because he was too cool.

He wasn't...

obnoxious like most music business types.

I didn't know that there are powerful economic interests

that control how a band ends up in the newspaper,

or a band ends up on television.

Those were the kind of things that I wanted to learn

from Danny Fields.

Like all that publicity about The Doors,

"You made all that happen, huh?"

And he said,

"No, man, I didn't make that happen.

You know, they did that."

Which is of course, the brilliant publicist way

to answer that question.

He was from the underground,

the bohemian quarter, you know,

the arts and weirdness and drugs.

But I mean, he schooled me.

We really liked each other!

And he saw something in me that...

I was this raw intellectual from Detroit,

who wanted to do some sensational shit.

I just saw him as a guy

who knew everybody and knew how this shit worked.

Our idea was to take over the world, you know, so...

First, starting with the music business.

Totally out of our way.

White Panther program is

cultural revolution by any means necessary,

including rock 'n' roll, dope and fucking in the streets.

People were wary then, it was getting serious.

There was a moratorium,

and the marches were getting more serious.

The country was getting more divided.

It was now getting out of hand, you could see it in Chicago.

And the MC5 called their parent organization

the "White Panther Party."

They had a minister of defense,

I don't know many rock 'n' roll bands that had

a minister of defense.

People carried machine guns around the house!

♪ Kick out the jams, motherfuckers ♪

Jac Holzman suckered us

into putting "motherfucker" on the record.

He urged us to do that.

Of course, we've got a single version,

♪ Kick out the jams, brothers and sisters ♪

"No, man, come on, nobody'll give a shit!"

And I said, "They're not gonna like this,

we're out here in Detroit.

I know they aren't gonna like it."

They don't like it now when it just comes out on the stage.

They're really aren't gonna like it in vinyl.

They put out the David Peel album.

♪ Have a marijuana, motherfucker ♪

"Great, if they don't have any problem with his 'motherfucker,'

they're not gonna have any trouble

with our 'motherfucker'." We told them,

"Let the single go up the charts "before you release the album."

'Cause the album's gonna have the real version of

"Kick out the jams, motherfuckers" on it,

but, see, they won't be able to stop us then

'cause we'll have a hit record!

The minute the single started going up,

they rushed the album out.

Kids were arrested in record stores for selling the album,

and parents are freaked out.

Then Jac Holzman says,

"Is it okay if we put out a clean version

'cause we're losing money."

We had problems with a chain called Hudson's.

And then the MC5 took out an ad

in the local Detroit alternative newspaper,

which said, "Fuck Hudson's!"

And stuck the Elektra logo on it.

Everything that was an Elektra product,

including Bach and Mozart, came back.

We said, "You can't do that."

They said, "Jac, we thought you were part of our revolution."

I said, "No, I'm interested in documenting

what you do with music in the context of that."

And they said, "We're not comfortable."

I said, "Well, fine."

The MC5 should have been Grand Funk Railroad.

They should have been the big, fast-moving,

hard-rocking, rabble-rousing,

mid-western band that Grand Funk Railroad became.

When you're on the front pages of the paper,

you can be making the best music in the world,

but no one will pay attention to you for that,

they just wanna know how much you vomited,

and what dirty words you used and what trouble you made.

People like Danny are not even producers.

I mean there's not a quantity of work that is measurable

that comes out of them every day.

They're here for the hallelujah moment.

Danny jumped up and down and said,

"You've gotta sign this band, you've gotta sign this band."

And we saw nothing,

it was one of these things that's a...

It's a prayer.

The Stooges were

difficult in that they did not have songs written

and Iggy was strung out.

Danny screamed, "How come you don't have any songs?

"Go to the hotel tonight and write songs!"

So "I Wanna Be Your Dog", "1969",

all that came out of one night's production.

John Cale: Cool Song, take one.

John Cale was a very talented musician,

and I thought the juxtaposition

of a really experienced musician in the studio with them

would either agitate them or inform them.

They got along pretty well.

And then the problems with Bill Harvey started.

He heard this, and he said, "Are you gonna put that out?"

And I said,

"I don't quite understand it, but it's interesting."

And he said,

"Well, you put that out, you're gonna ruin your label."

And I said, "I don't think so."

People who had to say something about them say,

"This is not music."

It's the same thing they said of rock 'n' roll!

To say that was the worst thing you could say.

Doesn't deserve to be called music.

You know, I'm sure Wagner heard that and

anybody who did something fabulously different.

Lenny Kaye: "If 1967

was the year of The Beatles and 'Get Together'

If 1968 was the year of The Band andBeggars Banquet

then 1969 might well be the year of The Stooges.

You might not like it,

but you can't escape it."

Lenny Kaye, August 10th, 1969.

Obviously written two minutes before I went up to Woodstock.

If you were on the fringe, and trying to understand who you are

and you heard this bleat of sound.

To me, these bands are a lot about yearning.

They're about finding their place in the world,

finding your place in the world.

You listen to The Stooges, "I Wanna Be Your Dog", and you

can get those three chords in a second,

and then all you gotta do is

just keep turning the amplifier up,

turning it up.

It was a beautiful explosion of noise.

And the fact that Danny was behind both of these bands,

is, to me, a thing of wonder.

It's like someone who talks you into buying

a painting that you don't get, an impressionistic painting.

You just don't get it at all.

And later you find it has achieved

notoriety and value that you never would have imagined.

When you're starting out in show biz,

part of what you do to figure out

who you are and how you can operate is...

You put yourself somewhere where

people who know more than you can react to you.

He had an interesting spread

between the world of teen vacuity

way over to your very hard-core social deviants.

He was on location with us in the Tropicana Motel

in Los Angeles.

There were The Stooges making Fun House...

Andy Warhol,

Paul Morrissey, Joe Dallesandro, Jane Forth,

and the entire cast ofHeat.

Danny gave me something that...

I don't know if he was the first one to ever give me this but

he let me try something called cocaine.

And I tried it and I thought, "I don't feel anything!"

And then three days later, I found myself...

crawling in through his bathroom window at the back of the motel,

taking all of his stash, you know.

And that was the sort of buddy I was.

I was a very bad, bad buddy.

Look, we did so many terrible things

to blacken Danny's reputation,

and just destroy his faith in us.

And we would show up

very, very late for gigs, or not at all.

Or once we were...

The band was playing the intro riff,

and I was having sex on the bathroom floor

of the men's room with a groupie.

"Wait, I'll be right there!

Tell them to just keep playing there!"

And on and on and on.

And then there were times when I was shooting up.

And...

not fun to talk about it anymore,

but, yeah, that happened and there he was...

trying to get somewhere in his life.

Yeah, I got... I finally scored my methadone.

- Yeah. - It's not a thing that

you're supposed to have all the time.

I thought that he would expect

you to just keep taking that?

No, it's... You know...

It's pretty easy to kick with methadone, it really is.

I've kicked three fucking times with it but every time...

started again.

Why do you start again?

I don't know, I couldn't even answer that.

They were fucking up, I didn't know what to do.

It was not something I was equipped to deal with.

There's no...

You cannot...

cope with heroin use in someone you're working with,

or as a partner, or you're dependent on.

That's the worst drug in the world.

And if it's someone you love,

it's tragic, but you're helpless,

and everything is gonna self-destruct.

Boy...

I think when I said enough was when The Stooges rented a truck

and they went under one of those highway overpasses where it says

"If you're over 12 feet tall, don't come under this thing"

And they destroyed the truck.

The top was shaved off.

They destroyed everything in it,

all the instruments and stuff which they were liable for.

They destroyed the overpass!

So when I got a bill from the city of Ann Arbor

for whatever it costs to repair a concrete highway bridge,

that was enough.

So no, no, no, this is a sign.

I'm so proud of the way

that Scott Asheton, our drummer,

drove the 12-foot U-Haul

under the 10.5 foot underpass.

The top of that U-haul literally peeled back

exactly like Popeye's can of spinach.

Gladly handed

Iggy and his music and his dancing

and his band and his antics and his bills

to David Bowie.

I'm happy to do it, he didn't keep me on board.

I got out when the going got tough.

Otherwise I could have said,

"I'm giving up everything in my life, and..."

I have to pee, I have to...

"...giving up everything in my life for Iggy

and sweeping everything aside,

and I'll move into a cheaper apartment and

get a different lifestyle,

and stop using drugs 'cause they're expensive and...

It'll all be for Iggy." Well, I didn't.

I don't know if I could have!

I was staying in Danny's house,

and he had gone out to Max's, and he started calling me.

"You really should get down here,

David Bowie is down here and...

You could do yourself some good, he wants to meet you."

And I was watching Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,

repeatedly on the verge of tears

as I saw Mr. Smith confronted by the foul corruption

of the status quo and the people in charge.

But finally I thought...

"Okay."

They started talking

so fast about...

"One thing I hate most in the world, music."

And...

I was so glad to just say...

They hit it off such big time because they're both so smart.

- Hello. - Hi.

- Who's this? - Danny.

- Oh, Danny! - Yes, hello.

Hi, are you at the Tropicana?

Yes, I am. Who's working for you?

Warner Brothers, but they aren't very bright.

No, I'll see, we should be able to get you something.

Yes. I need to work.

Yes, I want you to work.

- How's the weather? - Beautiful.

- Yes? - Yes, it is.

How's the weather there? It's cold, huh?

- Hmm, a little. - Yeah.

Okay, I'll talk to you later, darling, okay?

- Yes. - Give my love to Paul.

Okay.

Call me here if anything comes up.

I'll see what I can do out here and

I'll call you back to let you know, okay?

- Yes, please. - Okay, for sure, I will.

- Okay. - Okay, baby, be good.

You too, bye-bye.

Danny was close to the entire Andy Warhol crowd.

And one day he brought Nico in, and I knew who Nico was.

And she brought in her little harmonium,

and she sat and she played.

♪ Lord of lunacy

♪ In the moon of the frozen beyond... ♪

And as usual, he sat there when I'd bring up an artist and...

"Like, well, I guess so!"

You know, here comes...

Get me John Cale on the phone once again.

Was it off the wall? Unbelievably so.

But so what?

It's not gonna be an expensive record to make

and she's an interesting artist, and let just see what happens.

And she sat...

And read books of poetry looking for a title.

And she found it in Wordsworth,

"The marble index of the mind gone..."

something or other. And she liked that phrase.

She was... a poet.

Danny was having continual problems with Bill Harvey,

and Bill Harvey came to me one day and he said,

"Either Danny goes or I go."

He called me into his office,

blamed me for circulating this water cooler rumor about

his daughter's pregnancy.

Then he started punching me in the head,

and saying, "Get out, get out!"

I said, "I know he's an irritant to you,

I think he has value...

But I probably am not gonna fight you on this one."

And I didn't.

And it was probably the correct decision for the business,

but it wasn't quite the correct decision for my conscience.

Danny has always been...

the sand in the oyster around which

you hope to grow a pearl.

And that was my last day there.

It was best to leave

after your boss punches you in the head.

I wouldn't stick around.

I was not wanted.

Saw The Cockettes at the Palace Theater in San Francisco,

and of course I loved them, they did "Pearls Over Shanghai".

Then they were coming to New York,

so I found out who the promoter was,

who was bringing them here, and I said,

"Well, let me be their press agent."

Fayette Hauser: Every single time I saw him

in the office at the Anderson, he was on the phone,

corralling every single person

who had any fame and glory in the city at the time

to come to this opening, and they did.

They sat there stone-faced, waiting for a performance

that was more polished

than the kind of instantaneous, anti-theater rave

that we were communicating in San Francisco.

The famous one is, Angela Lansbury stood up and said,

"Let's get the fuck out of here!"

And the audience began to flee.

But Danny, unphased, went forward with it all

and got us as much press as possible.

Art needs a translator like that.

Danny was a catalyst for a lot of people.

Some people can be artists, can be great,

but they can be floating in the sphere,

unrecognized or unknown.

He would bring the artist into the society and

put them on a platform and define the platform and say,

"Here, this is the artist that you need to pay attention to."

At that point, as at many others, I needed a job.

And my best friend, Steve Paul,

said he needed a personal assistant

and someone to drive him around.

His dream was that the Winter brothers were gonna be

unstoppable, inevitable,

on television, on parades and in Super Bowls.

Because what could be better than two albinos!

Whoa, think of the visuals.

One of them is the world's fastest blues player.

Is that... That's an oxymoron.

The blues is...

So I don't how you could be a fast blues player but anyhow...

And the other one was a keyboard player,

and he wore the piano around his neck.

It was the most ungainly thing I've ever seen,

because it was this big, long...

diving board.

And it sort of gets a life on its own.

When you turn one way, it goes the other.

Imagine this thing.

And you're...

And you're playing it.

Guitars are stupid-looking enough.

That was Steve's dream.

That's okay, but you can see that was a little dispiriting.

I do wanna take credit for

the Edgar Winter's album that made Steve Paul rich.

And us rich, which was called,

They Only Come Out at Night, and it contained

the enchanting hit, "Frankenstein".

Eight minutes of one riff.

And it was huge!

Just like you get time to go to the bathroom,

or you can make a doodie,

you put on a sandwich to roast in the microwave.

You could do all these things, while that song was on,

it was very handy.

Someone had done a shoot of Edgar

looking up at the ceiling so his hair was falling down his back.

Steve asked me to advise him,

"What do we do with this person?"

"Turn him sideways!"

You know, he ain't ever gonna be cute.

At least turn him sideways,

and make it look as if he's blowing in the wind.

That's the little things I do to make trouble that...

if they happen, no one knows, so that's my life story.

So what's the name? What's that career called?

A nudgy?

Modern Lovers in 1972 were a very hot band.

Steve Paul and I recorded them and chased them and

we used to hang out with them and go to

saunas at motels and I would save the towels that

Jerry and Ernie sat on. Cute people!

Jonathan Richman: He would come up when

The Velvet Underground would play,

and they would play in Boston a lot.

We would talk about The Stooges a lot.

And Danny brought me to see them live in Ungano's.

And I had all these drawings of myself in different positions

'cause I was in the center of the world.

I showed Iggy and The Stooges

Here's a picture of me

up on the roof of the Howard Johnson's,

and those are the trees, and that's the '57 Thunderbird,

and there's the universe

in relation to myself and everything.

The Asheton brothers and Dave Alexander said,

"Let us look at that too."

So they look at my complicated drawing

where I was the center of the world and everything.

They looked at each other and said,

"Give up, man."

I say to Iggy, "I've got so much more to say to you!"

And I'm shameless, you know,

and Iggy, bless his heart, you know...

said, "Oh, I've got a good idea.

I'll talk to you from the stage!"

And I went, "Okay!"

I said, "You know what I wanna be,

I wanna be a rock 'n' roll star."

Danny says, "Jonathan, don't say that."

I said, "Why not?"

He says, "Because people will laugh at you."

I go, "Yeah, and?"

It's the truth. And we would argue.

And we'd have fights about all kinds of things like that.

He was trying to be nice.

He was trying to help me out.

One of them albinos was playing at a high school and

Steve Paul figured,

"Now we'll see how good the Modern Lovers are,

so we'll have them

open for either one of these unappealing artists."

The audience wasn't thrilled with us exactly.

It was a mutual lack of communication.

But that wasn't disheartening, that was show biz.

They wouldn't have liked the Second Coming

if Jesus had flamed up on the stage there.

They were waiting for albino Texas blues guitarist

and nothing, certainly not The Modern Lovers,

who were quirky and kinky and Harvardy.

They could have been killed by projectiles.

And if someone had a poison dart gun,

all The Modern Lovers would have been dead.

So to me that's like, "Hooray!" Must be doing something right.

So that ended our quest to be associated with them.

Who knows what would've happened?

Who knows?

Danny Goldberg: I guess when Danny

uses the word inventing,

he means, that through his credibility and enthusiasm,

he puts someone on a map

that they wouldn't otherwise be on.

His opinion influenced...

most of the journalists and PR people.

He just had the best taste,

and a way of expressing it

that made you want to seek his approval.

He doesn't think about money as

the main definition of success.

He thinks about greatness as he defines it.

And if he thinks something is great, it's great,

and whatever anybody else thinks,

they're just idiots if they don't agree with him.

So that's incredibly inspiring in terms of

somebody's commitment to their own taste

and clarity and vision.

It's not the way to get rich.

I never turned down quick money, but I wasn't looking for it,

and you have to pay for money.

Steve Paul and I were both asked to see Aerosmith.

He hated them as people,

and I didn't love them as anything.

Someone could have said,

"Oh, they're gonna be great and famous and big stars

and sell a gazillion records,

and make millionaires out of everyone."

I would've said, "I don't care, good, let it happen,

let someone else do it."

They flew people to Boston to see them.

Lisa and I were there, of course.

And afterwards, there was a big dinner

at a cool restaurant in Harvard Square.

The band came in, and the first thing,

she looked at me and said,

"Ew, he's wearing what he wore on stage to the party!

Ew!

I don't want to get too near him!"

And...

you know...

It's kinda like that's one way of saying what I felt.

It's a way of saying what Steve Paul felt about them.

Legs McNeil: I think what's great about Danny

is that he's kinda undefinable.

Danny believes that love is kind of like art, it's perfect.

And sex is this dirty thing...

It's kinda like money and sex are down here,

and art and love are up here.

And he has a kind of a...

a real conflict with that.

I mean I look back and...

What am I thrilled by?

Something I did? No.

The best times?

When they were happening,

I didn't think, "Oh, I'm living in the best time."

They didn't seem so then.

You don't say that, on that...

When you think about it, or look at pictures of it,

"Oh, my god, what a beautiful place!

"What a beautiful time of day, what a beautiful person!"

Five important people in my life died last year!

Five! I think, I'm losing count now.

In one year. What?

You know...

My Achilles heel was...

everything took too long to happen

and I couldn't stick around for it.

I wasn't gonna stick around.

Mara Hennessy: He becomes overly attached

to the illusion of self, his creation,

Danny Fields.

And I think that that's a lot of pressure,

it's a full-time gig.

So he lives with a...

A kinda sense of inadequacy about his life, I think.

He feels like he needs to do something he hasn't done.

I'm not sure, but I think it's really basic...

existential despair.

I think it's like the dark night of the soul,

that he goes back to over and over and over again.

His whole apartment is anthropomorphized.

He's got all the files and all the things that he's saved,

and the photographs,

there's spirits of all the people he's loved

and known everywhere.

It's out of love that he has that stuff.

He's very romantic, wanting somebody to blossom.

And wanting somebody's

spiritual, creative,

intellectual development to be fulfilled

as much as you want your own, and helping them do that.

He does that for so many people. That's loving.

Gloria Stavers, then at16, who had been my supposed rival,

I never got near to what she did,

asked me to be her personal assistant at16 Magazine.

That lasted until her final fight with the publisher.

And the magazine then fell to the co-editorship

of me and the brilliant Randi Reisfeld.

Danny did absolutely bring a sense of fun.

It was going to be about David Cassidy,

and it was going to be about Davey Jones,

but he also would be interested in exposing the readers

to the Ramones,

or what was happening on the hipper New York scene.

You went through a phase where you had the Beatles,

you had the Monkees, you had David,

Bobby Sherman, the boom days...

But then harder-edged rock 'n' roll took over,

so Danny made Alice into sort of a teen idol.

I said, "There's so many rock heroes,

so many Peter Pans, where's Captain Hook?"

The great thing about16 Magazine was that

it was Donny Osmond was the devil and I was the angel,

which was kinda funny to be on the cover of16

with Donny Osmond.

'Cause we couldn't have been further apart.

Somehow Danny kinda liked that juxtaposition of the two.

You know, the opposites.

I think that he loved glam rock, punk rock and horror rock.

Iggy was the punk rock guy,

I was sorta the glam/horror rock guy,

Bowie was this space oddity/glam guy.

Danny was in the middle of all of it,

almost orchestrating it.

And those are the guys that...

They are always in the wings,

but they're always the most effective people.

He was always helping us, and pushing us.

Max's was our after hours,

before hours place to be.

The New York Dolls were our band,

but because they wore lipstick

and had that attitude on the cover of their first album,

they were slammed nationally.

Patti Smith and Robert Mappelthorpe

knew about Max's, but they were terrified.

It seemed so impenetrable and so in,

especially the back room, everyone was so cool.

We'd say, "They're are those cute people again.

Which is a boy, which is a girl?"

If one of them is a boy, we should be fucking him,

and if one of them is a girl, you should be fucking her.

They're just standing there,

they look like they want to meet us.

Let's bring them in and fuck them.

At one moment, I just went up to them:

"Sit down, you're here all the time, why don't you sit down.

Have a cup of coffee, it's free."

Hey, it was Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe in infancy,

cultural infancy and...

as opposed to Jim Morrison, she was a good poet.

And he was adorable and everyone fucked him.

So that was their kick-off.

With the Patti Smith Group,

our sense of punk was more one of attitude.

Nobody knew what the heck we were doing.

Patti would come out and do a few standards,

and then I'd scrub away on guitar,

and we'd do some rock oldies and then some noise.

Danny says, "I know a really great piano player."

And he introduces us to Richard Sohl.

He's just a beautiful boy,

and we're thinking, "Can he actually play?"

And then he sits down, and phew...

And that was probably the most important thing

for the development

for our band, and for Patti as a singer.

He helped shepherd me as...

a young, questing human into my life.

Forty years later, I'm still playing,

which is a beautiful thing.

And Danny recognized

that element in me before I even had a clue...

who I could be.

The Ramones and their fighting, competitive,

we-hate-everyone-else spirit,

Johnny would yell at Tommy, "You're our publicity guy,

why isn't this guy writing about us?

Why is writing about these fucking beatniks or hippies?"

They were also after Lisa Robinson,

she was the editor ofRock Scene.

And of courseRock Scene was full of, you know...

"David Johansen has dinner in Chinatown"

or, you know, "The New York Dolls buy lipstick."

All pictures, all glam,

nothing about music, it was just all about celebrities.

Everyone was a star.

Lisa and I said, "Ugh...

are you getting bothered by these Ramones?"

She said, "Ugh, they don't stop.

I'm afraid to pick up the phone."

I said, "We have to get them off our backs.

You go see the Ramones,

I'll go see the whatever elses."

She called the next day and she said,

"You've got to see this band, you will love them."

Their songs are all two minutes long,

their whole set is about 14 minutes.

It's what we dream of!

So I went to see them the next time they played and...

it was true.

I Don't Wanna Go Down To The Basement!

Come on, let's do "Loudmouth," all right?

Fuck it.

No, I wanna do "I Don't Wanna Go Down To The Basement" too.

Yeah, I know, that's two against one.

- Oh, really? - Yeah.

Really? Fuck you all!

Take it, take it, let's go! Quick, lively!

♪ 1, 2, 3, 4

♪ Hey, daddy-o

♪ I don't want to go

♪ down to the basement

♪ There's somethin' down there

♪ I don't want to go

♪ Hey, Romeo

♪ There's somethin' down there

♪ I don't want to go

♪ Down to the basement

I decided within 15 seconds

because if it ever takes me longer than that

to know if I like something or not,

I probably don't like it.

I don't want to have to wonder.

It's just gotta

knock me over like...

atomic wind.

This is just everything,

no guitar solos, the songs are over so fast,

they're all so cute, they look great,

I love what they're wearing.

I loved them, they had everything.

I introduced myself to them afterwards and

I said right away, "I want to be your manager."

"We need a few thousand dollars for a drum kit and...

if you come up with that, you can be our manager."

"Okay."

So I flew down to Florida and

went to visit my mother,

"I just discovered this band I really love and

they're going to sign a long contract with me,

and they're gonna make me rich.

I need $3,000." "Okay, if you're sure."

And she wrote me a check and I gave it to them,

they bought what they needed and I was their manager.

Lou Reed: Do you hear the way the songs start?

No bullshitting, and same way they end.

No, it goes at full throttle from beginning to end.

It starts and ends, then the next one,

starts and ends and just goes sailing on.

That's such a great concept!

- That's so intuitive. - It's genius!

No kidding.

Now you hit the nail on the head, they're crazy!

Without doubt,

the most fantastic thing you've ever played,

bar none.

I mean it makes everybody else look so bullshit and wimpy,

Patti Smith and me included.

Wow!

Everyone else looks like a sissy compared to them.

Everybody else looks like they're really old-fashioned.

That's rock 'n' roll. They really hit where it hurts.

They are everything everybody worried about.

Every parent in America would

freeze in their tracks if they heard this stuff.

Everything, you know...

They got them an amp, they got them a guitar.

Now look!

There they are!

Their worst dreams come true.

It doesn't take any talent, all they're doing is banging it,

and look at this.

That is the greatest thing I've ever heard.

Danny, do something I feel like.

My friend, Linda Stein,

she said let's get Seymour to sign them.

So they played for Seymour,

who of course has wonderful taste and heard the songs.

And Seymour was...

consistently...

irrevocably...

unstintingly supportive.

Mo Ostin, who was an accountant for Frank Sinatra,

before he became chairman of Warner Brothers,

Mo's a wonderful man

would say, "Seymour, this band is not selling records,

"Did you ever think of not renewing their options?"

And Seymour would say,

"Oh no, wherever I go, this band goes."

Seymour Stein: A lot of people have great taste,

but are afraid to express it. Not Danny.

Danny was quite explicit about everything.

He really had so much taste, so smart.

But some of his outrageous behavior...

You know, I think...

turned a lot of people off. Not me.

Never.

I loved CBGB, they were packing in crowds

that Hilly never imagined.

It made it all the more

depressing, discouraging and frustrating

that we couldn't get them out of town.

Tommy Ramone: We did an audition for Blue Sky Records

that Steve Paul owned.

And our audition was opening for Johnny Winter.

And it was our first time out of the city,

in Waterbury, Connecticut.

And the curtain opens up, and here are these guys...

playing music from another dimension.

By the third or fourth song,

we take a break, all of sudden out of the audience comes...

We always played

some place where no band had ever played before.

A basement, a loft or a parking lot,

or someone found an abandoned warehouse.

Talking Heads auditioned and Hilly thought they were

terrible enough to play there.

He asked me if they could open for The Ramones.

Johnny was nearby, he was very fussy about that.

And I said, "They want to open for us, what do you think?"

He said, "They really are lousy, yeah, sure."

That was his criteria,

are they terrible enough not to steal any thunder?

Such a pro, so smart, Johnny.

Again,

the Ramones first appearance in London, July 4th, 1976,

outside the Round House,

Paul Simonon introduced himself.

"I'm a big fan of yours, this must be really exciting for you,

you sold our the Round House, you've never been here before."

And Johnny said, "What do you do?"

"We're called the Clash, but we never played

'cause we're waiting to get good enough."

Johnny said, "Wait till you see us tonight, we stink!"

Just get out there and play. Wait till you see us,

you're not gonna ever worry about being good again."

And sure enough, about two weeks later,

they started booking themselves, The Clash, on tour.

You were not allowed to be terrible and great

until these bands came along.

And that was the meaning of that revolution.

By traditional standards of how many notes

can you squeeze into a second like that Van Halen guy,

as opposed to how much power can you get out of a performance,

that was the watershed moment.

Everything interesting since then

has derived from that.

But they got that from The Stooges as well,

who were terrible.

Bands in my life...

They were always kinda doing something like that.

And it was always about the songs.

Every one of those bands had great songs.

If they didn't have great songs,

they couldn't have been great.

There's no question that the Ramones suffered greatly

because the Sex Pistols were so famous

for vomiting and bleeding and scratching and smelling and

tearing down and destroying,

you know, "no future".

So bleak!

And when their records went around to radio stations...

Intuitive, like what do I know about them?

They're trouble. They throw up.

If we play their record, we'll probably have to have them here,

and then they'll throw up on the console.

It's easier! Don't play their record!

And this stigma falls on you.

They're a critics' band.

Critics don't pay for records, they get them free.

And every once in a while they annoy us

by rubbing it in that they all like this band

that we're not able to sell.

The band voted to find new management,

in the hopes of

getting these wonderful songs on the radio.

And I could not fucking in any way blame them.

The Ramones were disaffected teenagers for whom, in fact,

there was, when they were in high school, no future.

But through their work,

they gave themselves a very long future.

They left a legacy of no future people.

Maybe we have a future.

We thought we had no future!

Look at them!

They can't play! They're terrible!

But look! This is exciting! They're big! They're famous!

They can get laid.

Let's start a band!

What more can you do?

Your pied pipers out there.

What? You can't pay the rent with that.

A lot of these bands are going to go on to be U2 and Pearl Jam,

and outsell you by the zillions.

It was the greatest years of my life,

traveling, the adventure...

getting laid...

the audience reaction...

the encore...

fans... getting laid...

You know, I would have been a millionaire,

if I'd just stayed with them, but then again,

I would've had to be their manager for 20 years.

Wow, I always liked to do something new

that no one's ever done before.

Oh yeah, stick with me, and 40 years from now,

you'll be a star.

You'll be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

That's the worst case, but you know,

life isn't long enough to see everything that happens

that we saw beginning or continuing or

we thought was ending.

You know, it takes more time than that when it comes to...

things that will endure.

I have been really lucky to know or be around

so many smart people, and then from that

to have so many smart people be my best friends.

I thought I would never have any friends.

What matters is the people

and the smart people, and the friends people,

and the beautiful people and

animals and dogs and nature and art and...

maybe music belongs in that list somewhere.