[SynthethicalY]

I read that you met Hendrix in New York.

I met Jimi Hendrix in 1970 when they had a party at Electric Ladyland. I was pretty young, 23 or something. I didn’t have the nerve to go in, so I just sat on the steps. And then he was leaving. He was on his way to England to do the Isle of Wight Festival and he was by himself and he saw me on the steps. He started talking to me, and then he told me all about what he was going to do with the studio and his rock ’n’ roll as a universal language. I was so excited, and then he left and never came back. But I remembered what he said, and I’ve always tried to incorporate his hopes and dreams for rock ’n’ roll into my own philosophy.

One song of yours that is often performed by others is “Dancing Barefoot.” It’s practically a standard. Does it surprise you when a song has that kind of impact?

I’m always real optimistic. I always think every time we do something that the whole world is going to love it. I don’t do things hoping that I’ll stay in a little underground room and that just a handful of hip people will like it. Every record I do, I always have hopes that everybody will like it. I have a big imagination.
It’s often been written that Dylan and the Stones were important influences for you, and also the Beats and other poets. Was the first thing to open your mind music or poetry?

Books. I always wanted to read, and I loved reading. When I was a kid, I read fairy tales and classics and Peter Pan and Pinocchio, and it was just always books. And then when I got older, rock ’n’ roll really took over everything. I loved art. I loved Picasso, the Abstract Expressionists, French film. But rock ’n’ roll encompassed everything: political feelings and poetry, sexuality, revolution. It was all there, and we had such a strong sense of community. We were all sort of listening to the same stuff and being guided and expanded by our music. There was just so much happening, but it all seemed a part of this big collective that had to do with politics, art, poetry.

Were you reading the Beats from early on, or did you find them later?

I didn’t read them until I met them, truthfully. When I moved into the Chelsea Hotel in 1969, I met these people. I met Gregory Corso and William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg and they became my friends and mentors. Then I was doing readings with them. So I was hearing them and listening to them and learning from them, and to this day I’m still mining Allen Ginsberg. But the great thing about the Beat poets is they were doing something new, but all of them were highly connected with the past. They had their mentors, too. To read Allen Ginsberg is to read William Blake and Walt Whitman. To read Gregory Corso is to read Byron, Keats, and Shelley. So these people, as political and groundbreaking as they were, still kept the thread with the great work of the past. I believe in that. That’s how I conduct myself.

That thread seemed to come very naturally to you.

I was given the tools. You look at Jim Morrison, obviously reading Rimbaud, and so was Bob Dylan. You have your blood ancestors and you have your spiritual ancestors, and I think that all of us, some who feel disenfranchised from the world or our families or our community, can always find friends and mentors in this spiritual line.

After the ’60s were over and you began making your own writing and music in the ’70s, did you feel like you were continuing something – or that you were part of something new?

I wasn’t even sure how I felt. I know what my goals were. I had an actual cognizant goal to create a bridge between our past, or our very recent past, and our futures. In ’73, ’74, I felt a floundering. We lost some of our great people – Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison. Bob Dylan had retreated after his motorcycle accident. There were new things happening, and a lot of it seemed very self-indulgent, glamorous. We weren’t growing in the way that I imagined we would grow, and I was very concerned about the state of rock ’n’ roll. It might seem presumptuous, but in that period of my life I loved rock ’n’ roll probably more than anything, and I didn’t want to see it get so decadent. Basically, I just wanted to be some clarion call and to remind the new guard to take over rock ’n’ roll. It’s the people’s art, and I really felt that we needed to step up and not let it get into the hands of corporations and big business and merchandising and rich rock stars.

It also led to another kind of audience. It opened up the minds of those who were hearing it.

Everybody did their part. Now I think we’re on the tip of another interesting time. I feel the same kind of energy brewing as I did then. I can’t say that I completely comprehend it, but I can feel that the new guard is up to all kinds of stuff, and they’ve got whole new tools and a whole new landscape that we didn’t have. They have the Internet. They have file-sharing. They work under the radar of the music business. They’re feeling things out, and they will gather their strength and see that collectively they have a huge amount of power in this world to make political change, to merge really quickly through technology. And if they set their minds to it and decide to make change – whether it’s toward developing new political parties or uniting to make change in terms of our environment or just musically, completely transfigure the landscape – they’re on their way.

You’ve had a special relationship with photography, initially as a kind of a muse for Robert Mapplethorpe and other important photographers.

I was really proud of that. I’ve always loved photography. When I was young, I loved looking at Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and looking at the great photographs by Irving Penn, Diane Arbus, Avedon, William Klein. There are so many great photographers just in the fashion world. And then going out of that, Stieglitz, Robert Frank, Julia Margaret Cameron. I’ve always loved art, and I’ve always loved the idea of the artist’s muse, whether it was Frida Kahlo, being both artist and muse for Diego Rivera, or just the famous models of the late 19th century. To have a place in the canon of muses is a very nice thing. I was the first person that Robert Mapplethorpe photographed, and I was his first model, and I know he liked to photograph me.

You lived together for a while?

About five years.

When he was photographing you, was it always a serious session of “We’re going to make photographs now,” or could it sometimes be casual?

At the Chelsea Hotel, he just followed me around endlessly, taking photographs. You know, he was figuring things out, which he did very quickly. After a short period of time, he knew exactly what he wanted. He wasn’t a snapshot guy. And he wasn’t a guy who did motor-driving. He took 12 pictures or he’d take six. He knew what he wanted, and when he got it, that was it. He never labored. I always think it’s funny when people want to take my picture now and they tell me how much they like Robert, and then they want to take 300 pictures to get one shot. And I always say, after they take the eighth one, by now, the cover of Horses would have been done.

Did seeing how his photographs captured you affect your own perspective? Or surprise you?

No, because I just was the way that I was. I could see how much he cared for me in his pictures. So that’s still something that I see when I look at a photograph that Robert took of me. I know what’s in his mind. I know the aspect of me that he saw in that photograph, that maybe someone else wouldn’t have seen. He was my boyfriend for some years, and then we evolved in different ways and we were best friends.

Recently in Aperture magazine, you published some photographs of your own. How long have you been taking pictures?

I’ve taken pictures throughout the years. After Fred died, I picked up the Polaroid camera and started taking meditative still lifes. It was a way of dealing with the complexity of my feelings or grieving. I wasn’t able to write, because the things that I was processing – losing Robert and then Richard Sohl, my piano player, then Fred, then my brother – I could hardly speak about it. Taking photographs was a very abstract and silent way of dealing with my feelings.

When I started going back on the road, I find when I’m performing and singing on the rivers of the road, it’s very hard to write. But it’s a very good place to take photographs, and especially because you visit so many interesting places. Therefore, I have pictures of Keats’s bed and Virginia Woolf’s desk or Hermann Hesse’s typewriter. I might be in 30 countries in 40 days, so it gives me all of these different points of view. When you’re performing, my concern is how the people are doing. Are they having fun? Are they being challenged? Are we building an interesting night? Are we communicating? So it’s very nice for me to have something that’s just mine, that I can do in solitary. I really just like going off down an alley somewhere, finding a little church or courtyard or child or something and just having a moment that’s mine.