Please Kill Me

Patti Smith was a poet. I think she elevated rock & roll to literature. Bob Dylan elevated it. Morrison’s wasn’t poetry. It was garbage disguised as teenybopper. It was good rock & roll for thirteen-year-olds. Or eleven-year-olds.

There was no rapture or romance involved. It was just about getting your rocks off at that moment, because going out with girls was still about getting involved and all that shit. With guys it was just easier.

So I tried it, but I was a miserable failure. I remember I was actually sucking this guy off once, and he said, “Man, you’re not into this.” I went, “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry.”

I thought, What you gotta do is play your own simple blues. I could describe my experience based on the way those guys are describing theirs …

So that’s what I did. I appropriated a lot of

their vocal forms, and also their turns of phrase—either heard or misheard or twisted from blues songs. So “I Wanna Be Your Dog” is probably my mishearing of “Baby, Please Don’t Go.”

stars, what’s in store for them, realistically, is a lot of spoilage, denting, and banging around, exploitation, being used up, and ruination.

That was an actual job title then: “company freak.” He told them what was good and what wasn’t, but mostly what was cool.

And I began to cry, like I’m crying now, because I’m a real pushover for memory. So I walk up the stairs to the second floor, which is the third floor in American language, and there was this little guy, just sitting there crying. So I sat down opposite him. And I cried, too.
And when the song was over, I said, “I can’t tell you what that meant to me, because I’m from Kentucky, and I know my family is listening to Jim Reeves right now. Hi. I’m Leee Childers.”
And he said, “Hi. I’m Sid Vicious.”

Oh, everyone was very well behaved. They literally behaved just the same as other people all over England were behaving on Christmas. They just looked weird, that’s all. Caroline was having the Christmas pudding in her basement—”the ground floor,” in her language—and so they had just set it on fire and everyone was standing around waiting for it to burn before they served it. And I heard Jim Reeves drifting down through the stairwell singing … Jim Reeves songs.
Who’s Jim Reeves? Oh you little rock & roll neophytes! Jim Reeves was one of the great country singers of all time, killed in a plane crash in 1964. He sang, “Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone/Tell your friend you’ve got there with you, you’ve got to go.”

The thing that makes art interesting is when an artist has incredible pain or incredible rage.