Jann Wenner traces how the 1960s baby boom’s disillusionment—fueled by Vietnam, Kennedy’s assassination, and Jim Crow hypocrisy—sparked rock’s countercultural rebellion, with Rolling Stone (founded 1967) and Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo journalism like "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" exposing systemic truths. Wenner critiques the racially biased "war on drugs," contrasts nuclear energy’s potential with climate-driven uninhabitability (e.g., Arizona’s heat), and slams political inauthenticity, from Obama’s strategic silence to Trump’s unfiltered lies. Both agree truth and civic action are vital, yet Rogan’s raw transparency clashes with Wenner’s guarded media legacy, revealing how power—whether in politics or fame—distorts integrity unless actively resisted. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, I think I start my life, my book out at a time in the 50s, in the Eisenhower era, where none of all of this, what we see today, was conceivable.
I mean, let alone carrying around telephones in your pocket or being able to talk to people, you know, on your wristwatch.
I came along in the 50s with the post-war baby boom and it was the largest population cohort in American history and it became the most educated, the best educated, and also the wealthiest because America was going through this great boom of financial boom after winning the war.
And when we came of age, In the early 60s, I turned 21 in whatever it was, mid-60s.
As we grow up, we kind of discovered that America wasn't what they told us it was going to be.
That life, liberty, and a pursuit of happiness, which I believed in deeply, it wasn't that way.
In fact, first off, we were running this segregation system, Jim Crow.
Blacks, people, human beings, were kept in the most worst circumstances, and it was an outrage to see that.
And then all these other things started to become apparent, the hypocrisy of the society we were in, and that's the stuff that Dylan was writing about.
And boom, boom, boom, all of a sudden we're in a war.
Our young, beautiful president is assassinated.
The dreams we were told, the American dream, weren't quite true.
So it created this...
Crucible, which made us a further, even more unusual generation.
I mean, a generation raised, unfortunately, to not trust the government and to think the government's doing wrong in Vietnam and all these things.
It was disillusioned.
So that's how we grew up and it made us more rebellious than ever and more skeptical and in a certain way deeply committed to To human justice and human rights and to caring for people and the things I think became the dominant themes of my generation and music that desire to do good in the world, to make the world a better place.
I think the change in culture in the 1960s was one of the greatest changes in human history and such a shift from the 50s to the 60s.
I mean, you know, I always, I attribute it to a lot of things, the Vietnam era, the, for sure, the war, like, galvanized a lot of people to understand the dangers of not understanding really what's going on with the government and what the country's really all about.
but also psychedelic drugs, which is really a huge part of it.
But one of the points is our parents, my parents grew up at a time when we fought, the United States fought a world war for justice, democracy, defeated the bad guys, was victorious.
The army started integrating America.
More European fathers are coming home.
My generation, our generation, grew up with the war in Vietnam, a war we were ashamed of.
Didn't want to fight.
It split the country in two.
I mean, so we didn't have an entirely different experience.
But your point that in this crucible, as we got old, I mean, as we started our young maturity and going to college, two giant things happened.
The emergence of rock and roll and the emergence of drugs.
And I've got a third, which is the emergence of technology, starts about then.
So psychedelics were tremendously important in my life to me.
I write about it openly in the book.
You know, why cover that up?
I mean, I took a lot of acid when I was in college.
I learned lots from it.
It changed my worldview.
It deepened my love of rock and roll and deepened my love of just the natural world around me.
You know, just, wow, everything's so cool and so precious and so unusual.
Every little bit of it.
Yeah, it's a wonderment enhancer.
I was trying to figure out how to say it.
I said, well, I thought in a way it gave you the sense of the oneness of everything and the preciousness of everything.
And it's hard to describe all that philosophical stuff.
Everything is interconnected.
I mean, such a fundamental level.
But this was also the message of music.
And two things.
It just overpowered me and changed my life and made me want to, in the end, start Rolling Stone and bring that news to the world.
Well, Rolling Stone magazine, particularly then, was such an important part Of the counterculture because there was no voice in mainstream media that was equal to it.
There was nothing like it.
There was no voice that, you know, spoke to the young people that were dissatisfied with the way things were going.
Let alone, at the time, you would go to jail if you were gay, you know, if you had caught having sex with a man, or that you could not drink out of the same water fountain as a white person if you were black.
I mean, anyway, Farfield, what— So, music was the only medium that young people could speak to each other and could communicate with each other and share values and ideas.
And that was kind of the power of it.
And we called it, Ralph, we called it the tribal telegraph.
You know, the music was the glue that was going to hold the generation together.
And we were the only place other than the jukebox.
And Top 40 radio where you could hear anything of this music or hear about it or read about it or participate in it.
And so we became one of the more powerful means of communication for the generation and certainly this great way in which rock artists could communicate with their audience, you know, and John Lennon or Dylan could stay what was on their mind or what their intentions or how they wrote a song or be taken seriously.
And Rolling Stone was like a letter from, was this love letter from home for, or this letter from home for so many people that I meet today and that I've met all through on people saying, I lived in this small town and you were the lifeline or you were, you know, you meant everything to me in my life.
I mean, I had these kind of grandiose ideas that it would be the best magazine in the world, of course.
It would sell zillions of copies, of course.
I mean, but I had no idea what success really was going to be, how you defined it, either financially or spiritually or emotionally or if it's in the world of magazines.
You know, it was just like...
I was on my trip, and we put it out with volunteers, so it wasn't like a professional operation.
We were kids.
I'd never done it before.
I knew nothing about the business of it, but people liked it, and it just quickly started growing and growing and growing and growing because it was good, and it was about something we all loved.
It was about music.
It was the only place you could read about something that was so passionate to me.
I mean, I... That Berklee experience of taking LSD and going to all the shows every weekend with the Airplane and the Grateful Dead and Janus and all the groups that were then powerful for me.
I mean, really.
I wanted to be a part of that.
Listening to the Beatles and the Stones, I wanted to be a part of that.
In a lot of ways, what the internet is today and this sort of new independent voice, that sort of Rolling Stone was like that for that culture in that era.
There was no other message like that that was out there in mainstream media.
And it was kind of like one of the biggest stories in American history and the mainstream media was missing it, which was the boom, the Cultural Revolution, in which we thought culture, consciousness could be the most powerful way of changing society.
And while it's not the same as guns and gasoline, it's had a powerful, huge effect on what America is, what America stands for, and what America looks like.
It's not that it's changed it entirely over, you know, in 50 years, it's entirely different.
Change is always evolutionary, but it's made a huge change.
And it was one of the most important periods in our history.
And again, you guys were really the only ones that were covering it in a way that represented how the young people felt.
And, you know, there's so much of your magazine that's tied into...
I mean, I know you walked around here, you saw the Hunter artwork.
There's so much of, you know, when people think about Rolling Stone, a lot of people think about the early days.
They think about Hunter.
You know, they think about when you guys covered his run for sheriff.
I mean, that was a giant moment in culture, too, that this...
Fucking madman was running for sheriff and the panic, the moral panic that people had about, oh my god, what if this guy actually becomes a sheriff and takes up all the streets and locks up all the drug dealers who are actually selling drugs?
If they were selling bad drugs, he was going to put up stocks in the main square and you'd have to be in a stock like in old Williamstown, Massachusetts or something.
He wanted to that big sod the streets and rip up all the asphalt and make anything grass, which was a good idea.
Rename the city from Aspen to Fat City.
On the theory, Hunter came over that it would be more difficult for land developers to sell something called Fat City Estates than Aspen Estates, you know?
And then you couldn't – the police had to be unarmed and then there would be a giant parking lot out of town that you could park at and nobody – other than residents, residents could not – non-residents couldn't hunt or fish.
But he came close to winning.
And this was in a very wealthy resort town that was starting to have a hippie population.
When we published his piece about that, and it was the first thing he did for Rolling Stone, it was called Freak Power in Iraqis.
Or the Battle of Aspen.
So it got such serious attention.
And other press and film crews from New York and all of you are going, oh, ho, the hippies are going to try to take over the ski town.
Well, let's see what happens, you know.
So much press came in.
It just raised the stakes.
It became quite a serious showdown campaign at this wealthy resort, which they came very close to winning.
But two things about Hunter just off the bat.
Hunter became just the DNA of Rolling Stone.
I mean, his spirit, his thinking, his sense of adventure, his sense of fun, his commitment to a better America were great.
At the heart of what we did, and these were the same things that I felt.
And so we became very fast friends.
I mean, we just locked in almost immediately that we saw something special between us, that we...
We did together.
He could write and I could edit.
And we were very partners in a very real sense of the world.
After we first met, there was never a question of whether or not we would not work with each other.
From now on, we worked together.
And he was always overseeing What we were doing at the magazine, with ideas, stories, and writers, and he felt very committed to making the magazine a success.
Hunter is a...
I love Hunter.
And to this day, I miss him terribly, terribly.
And I wrote in my book, I said, well, wherever Hunter ends up, I want to go there too.
Yeah, the documentary, the Gonzo documentary, that was the first time I ever really got to see you talk about him.
And, you know, you're kind of the glue that holds that documentary together because you're sort of the rational observer that was there during all the wildest and most mad times.
He had, I mean, everybody loved to be with Hunter.
I mean, you couldn't get enough of being with Hunter, you know, and including me after having Hunter for so much.
When you're with Hunter, when you were with Hunter, you were, like, felt you were going to have more fun and become close to the edge of craziness and danger than you were ever working in your life.
You know, just getting in the car with Hunter.
You know, he would always have to do something that would scare the piss out of you.
You know, U-turns in the middle of a snowbound highway and one night we were driving from Cambridge to New Hampshire to visit Norman Mailer for some strange reason.
We had spent the night in Cambridge and we had taken some acid.
And we got on the road, head full of acid, driving up in the middle of the night to Maine, and it's all mountain roads.
And so we go along, and then all of a sudden, like Hunter would turn the headlights off.
And I mean, you have mixed feelings at this point.
By this time, I developed this sense that I'm safe with Hunter, no matter how crazy he is, he knows what he's doing all the time, which he did.
So, on the other hand, he liked the idea of freaking people out.
So I would go, ah, oh, Hunter, stop it, stop it!
And it would just make him happier to know that I was freaking out.
So it was partly just to keep him going.
But then I realized what he was doing is he was looking ahead to Ben's and memorizing the curves ahead so they could turn off the lights.
Which is risky in itself.
But we got to Mailer's.
We were visiting some colleague of ours who was staying in the Mars' house.
We had the night before taken us and made a tape on an old cassette tape of screaming, like an exorcism, you know, screaming in the house.
in the morning and set the tape deck in the kitchen of the house, punch it so it starts with the screaming at the top volume, and run out the door, and don't come back.
Well, he loved to do that.
We'd steal restaurant signs.
I mean, there's all sorts of madness and crazy.
And it was fun, you know?
And it was innocent.
It was like being a kid, you know?
In part, Hunter was a big kid.
But also, you know, he was just a wonderful guy.
And of course, the funniest writer ever.
I enjoyed.
His copy would come in.
I just laughed my head off at some of the things he'd say.
I mean, you believe and believe such a person took place, but that was a faithful portrayal of an individual.
And lucky me, he got to be my closest friend for many years, and we worked together so closely and all the time for many years.
Johnny got him really well.
Johnny loved him.
He wrote Vegas in, I think it was 1970, I think, was about the time.
70 or 71. No, 70, because 71, 72 was a campaign trail.
He wrote that.
When he was writing, he started writing it in my basement in San Francisco when he was staying with us.
He was on assignment to do something else, some serious thing about the Chicano uprising in East Los Angeles.
In the middle of that summer, he had to go to Vegas to cover a motorcycle race for Sports Illustrated, and they wanted like a 200-word caption, but he never turned that in.
Instead, I started writing this piece about going to Vegas saying, it begins, we were somewhere on the edge of Barstow when the drugs took hold.
And then the image of this red Cadillac in a trunk full of animals, uppers, downers, guns, you know, just madness.
But that piece was so strong in two parts.
It was a novel, you know, a short novel.
Clearly, it became regarded as a classic of American literature today, up with kind of like Huck Finn or Catcher in the Rye, stuff like that.
You know, interesting, another story about the kind of adolescent spirit in all of us, of men who just can't give up being little boys and cherish that wonderful freedom and A sense of fun that none of us ever like to give up, really.
It ignited this appetite for chaos in people that were dissatisfied.
With the narrative that they had been told about the life that you were supposed to live and the way you're supposed to go about things and You know and then the 70s was just such a pivotal moment too because they had legalized They had made all psychedelic drugs illegal and there was this water that was being thrown on this movement and so quickly It sort of evaporated so quickly that the shift between the 50s and the 60s was kind of paralleled between the shift of the
About the complexity of life and all things going on in your head.
The two great Dylan albums, Bringing All Back Home and Highway 61, are about chaos.
At the end of the 70s, The 80s was the era of Reagan.
I mean, once you have Reagan leading a country, things change.
You know, the mood is different.
The values of society seem different.
In the 70s, we had either a full-scale rebellion going on against Nixon, you know, which was an exciting time to be alive and seeing the Watergate hearings and just sort of triumph and all that stuff.
And then Carter, as the end of the 70s, you know, the first real rock and roll president.
And who Hunter had a great love of and who Carter loved him.
There's a great moment in the documentary where it talks about Hunter being at Carter's speech and going back to get his tape recorder and recognizing that this is a very unusual moment.
He was going up there and Carter was talking about the quality of justice and talking about his spiritual ideas that he got from Reinhold Niebuhr, if I pronounce that correctly, and quoting Dillon.
Very unusual for politicians.
And it was an accident.
It looked like Teddy Kennedy was going to run for president then to be the nominee.
So Hunter was following Teddy around and Teddy had to go to Georgia to be a guest of honor at the law school there for Law Day.
And Carter spoke and gave this remarkable thing.
You don't hear politicians talk like that.
Then, anyway, you didn't.
And Hunter was knocked out.
And we kind of got aboard the The Carter campaign wrote about it.
Hunter almost, you know, kind of became a part of it in a way.
And between Hunter's coverage of the McGovern campaign and the Carter campaign, particularly McGovern, it put Rolling Stone on the map in a way, although we'd done big stories and broken things before.
The idea that the rock and roll magazine was covering national politics.
And furthermore, the guy doing it was best known for covering motorcycle gangs.
Plus, sweating all the time because he's boozing.
That riveted everybody.
And it brought real attention to us because Hunter wrote the best coverage of the campaign.
The best stuff about the candidates, the best about the political strategy.
And all of a sudden Rolling Stone was part of the annual big national story.
Competing with the New York Times and everybody else head on and he beat them all.
Also, it was the first time that 18-year-olds were allowed to vote was in 1972. And so that made it extra interesting to young people.
And also, there was a war in Vietnam.
That's a big background.
I mean, that makes everything...
It's a standout, a high relief.
But also, Hunter was extremely funny.
You don't have to know anything about politics to read those pieces.
They were so funny.
I mean, these things, coming up with Senator Muskie was shooting EBITDA gain on the campaign.
I mean, literally, people would come up to you and say, is it true about EBITDA gain?
Come on.
You know, Ibogaine being a drug from the pineal gland of some exotic South African animal that enables you to stand still without making a movement, but your functions of breathing still for 24 hours, and Muskie was having a problem with this drug?
I mean, if people ask me, or Hunter would give away his credentials to some wild-ass hippie, didn't bribe them on the campaign chase, it was a prankster.
I mean, you just couldn't have asked for anything better.
As I say, that year of the campaign coverage, I just had the best time.
Occasionally I'd go out and meet him on the campaign trail.
The late nights were hysterical.
But the filing of the copy when he'd write this stuff, and you just couldn't understand where the hell did this idea come from, you know?
Because then it was also as it was writing the most accurate stuff about where the campaign stood and the mood inside the campaign.
So he was the leitmotif for the candidate himself, McGovern, who called him the sheriff all the time.
And everybody working on that came, some campaign who became friends over the years.
I mean, it's really the music kind of that went along with that very special campaign because McGovern was a very special man, a very really human, good man.
And, of course, heavily defeated.
I mean, there was a lot of sourness, you know, if you think it was funky when Trump got elected.
Well, one of the fascinating things about Hunter's coverage was the fact that he would mix in fiction, like the Ibogaine thing, but he would mix in fiction with reality without a wink.
Like it was very hard for some people to understand, you know?
We were writing about the Watergate trials or hearings or something at that, and he was saying, at midnight, a vampire jumps, you know, a vampire with wart strings coming from the nose, leaps from the west balcony.
Leaps from the west balcony of the White House, you know, roaming the grounds looking for chows to eat, you know, and it's the spirit of Nixon then is peering outside Martha Mitchell's van.
I mean, Annie, who lives today, is considered the world's greatest living portrait photographer.
These days, she was...
The last several years, she saw a portrait of the Queen of England a couple of times as her official royal portrait.
So Annie goes from our loft in San Francisco and the Rolling Stones tours and so forth, running around the Allman Brothers or Hunter or whatever, to being the official photographer.
I mean, she's so good.
But again, she brought to the magazine an identity that...
Along with Hunters and a bunch of kind of hard-charging newspaper guys that I had hired from three different newspapers were kind of the backbone.
Tom Wolfe, Annie, Hunter, this newspaper, and a couple of college kids I hired as editors.
And we had a Rock'em Sock'em ten years there in San Francisco before moving to New York and did things like the Patty Hearst kidnapping, the John Lennon interviews, the Silkwood case, caused the demolition of the Northern California narcotics squads, investigated them, and a bunch of other stuff.
Which formed Rolling Stone.
And Hunter was the spiritual ringleader of it.
Everybody wanted to be like Hunter.
Everybody wanted to write important stuff.
Nobody imitated him.
Everybody knew better than that.
But to be as good a writer, to be as good as a reporter, to do meaningful, important stuff like Hunter, that That was the foundational spirit of Rolling Stone, was that stuff.
Not that they didn't know each other, but also we were really close with Bob Arum.
I mean, he could have gotten it, but I just think he got frightened of it.
He got lazy, too much drugs, those things.
And, you know, since we worked here, it was Saul Lessom.
He'd come to New York.
We'd always get together.
I'd always see him in Aspen, but it just became frustrating.
We'd sit down and talk and have a big, long session all night about what we'll do next and this and plan and come up with our ideas and laugh our heads about them.
But then it wouldn't happen.
I'd go back and he just couldn't follow up.
But finally, I think in the 90s, He did two of the best pieces he ever did for us out of the blue.
One was called Fear and Loathing in Elko, which he started to write because there's a snowstorm in Aspen, which shut down Aspen for about 10 or 12 days, during which time he couldn't get his hands on the cocaine.
And he started to write this really beautiful piece, you know?
And it was hysterical.
It was like very dark compared to Vegas.
But it was like Fear and Love, Elko, where he runs into Judge Clarence Thomas in the middle of this desert who just had a car accident.
And Judge Thomas is running a whorehouse in Elko, Nevada.
And it goes from there.
And it was, again, hysterical.
It was like old times.
It was great.
Then you'd find one last piece about Roxanne Pulitzer, which was beautiful.
Beautiful piece.
It was so funny.
And it was really, you know, it was about rich people living in Palm Beach taking tons of blow.
And blow was, you know, the right assignment for Hunter.
The assignment really wasn't So much about the Pulitzer case as it was about what blow does to people.
And this is something he knew about.
But it was painful.
I had to talk with Hunter, of course.
It was in my book about trying to get him to go to rehab, but willing to pay for it, do whatever necessary.
I said, you know, I appreciate it.
He wouldn't get angry at me.
He said, I appreciate it.
I know what you're trying to do here.
And I thought about it.
I'm a drug addict, an alcoholic, and that's what it's going to be.
Frankly, if I didn't take drugs, I would probably have been an accountant.
I have the mind of an accountant.
But he remained lifelong friends.
You know, it was a very sad day when he died and very upsetting and, you know, but, you know, he always knew I had his back and vice versa.
I think he felt if he was the guy who ordered Gary to cease and desist, he would be really disliked for having stepped in and squished a really popular cartoon character.
I think also it was Hunter, to another extent, enchanted by the idea of Hunter himself as a cartoon character.
I mean, Gary used to put me in that cartoon strip in relationship to Hunter and not in relationship to Hunter for doing different things.
And while there's always a little bit of put-down involved in it, you know, nonetheless it's, like, totally enjoyable and fun to pick up the Sunday papers.
Gary is a friend of mine and I liked his comic strip.
I thought he's great at that and did an important service in a certain sense for that era by bringing the so-called counterculture or beatnik culture, whatever you want to call it then.
To a more serious audience and explained it in a way that was kind of wholesome and funny without being dangerous.
Gary was a divinity major at Yale and kind of square.
And married Jane Polly.
I mean, it could be square.
And I like Jane.
But he brought that message to the adult audience well.
I was coming to – John used to come out, fly out to stay with me in San Francisco every weekend after Saturday Night Live, come out, decompress for a few days, go back to San Francisco.
So when I go back to New York – Is it Johnny?
John Belushi.
OK. And he was in the hospital one time.
And his leg was up in a sling.
He insisted I come by as soon as I land.
He had just done a samurai skit and fallen off the stage at Saturday Night Live and broke his leg.
And I go visit my hospital.
Of course, he reaches up into his sling, into the cast.
And inside the cast, he burles out a bottle of Coke.
So...
You know it's gone too far.
And I thought cocaine, in the end, and I again say so in this book, was a real waste of time and real destructive.
I mean, I embrace LSD. Rolling Stones was on a crusade for the legalization, decriminalization of pot for virtually the beginning, going after narcotic squads and drug laws and on army just with so much space to this hideous Laws that locked up innocent young people,
particularly black people, for the crime of smoking pot, a victimless crime of smoking pot, which was so much less dangerous than just drinking.
But people go to jail for years.
In any case, we advocate for that.
I think LSE is a good drug for lots of people and properly used.
But cocaine and speed are just kind of a waste of time.
You don't really get much done.
You end up going around in circles.
I say in my book, if I could take it back, I would take back all that.
Cocaine.
I also quote Jimmy Buffett in the book, who's another good friend, who I thought had the best line about saying, there is nothing worth talking about after 2 o'clock in the morning.
And that's it.
So, I mean, waste of time and waste of, you know, opportunities to have wonderful, you know, eck.
Mm-hmm Kinnison, I mean so many of them they were they were into coke, but I was very fortunate that when I was in high school a good friend of mine his cousin was selling coke and I watched him deteriorate rapidly.
He was doing coke every day and he was selling it and him and his girlfriend just they had an attic apartment and they would hide in this apartment and I went to visit him once and it was like I I'd known him before.
He did coke, and then I knew him afterwards, and it was like a person who had been bit by a vampire.
They become physically addictive, unlike marijuana, which, I mean, I guess could be psychologically addictive, but there's the physical addiction part of it.
Was very bizarre to see.
And it affected other people that I was around, too, at the time.
And at that time, I was very straight-laced.
I didn't do any drugs or partying or anything.
And I remember thinking, that is something I never, never want to be a part of.
Well, it gives you confidence and reinforces bad ideas, which I think the last thing a super popular person wants is confidence.
That's the last thing you need in your life.
You got plenty of that.
That's why you're there.
You don't want to reinforce that and feed that demon, which is one of the things that I think is...
Very powerful about psychedelics and about marijuana because it erodes all of these cultural expectations and all these thoughts of who you are and what you are and all these egocentric ideas and it leaves you with this like sense of like just vulnerability and that's what marijuana does.
It gives you this vulnerability and connection and just it gives you what you need.
And also, again, no real blueprint as to how to do it correctly, especially when you do, you know, people kind of, I mean, people certainly get out of control with drinking, but there's sort of a blueprint for how to handle drinking.
I just thought in my book that to be honest about drugs, that The tendency of people who write about this era, young people in general, is to kind of leave the drugs part out of it or maybe acknowledge it slightly or acknowledge inhaling or something.
But it would be dishonest to tell the story of this generation without telling the story of drugs and that amount of use that took place.
In the 20s, with the jazz age, it was bootleg gin all the time.
There was talk about gin-soaked age.
and not unequivalent to what we're in now.
It was a prosperous period and technology with the invention of the radio and the automobile and the fashion change.
Anyway, but to be honest about shows, you have to honestly say pot's cool.
That's good.
What the real role of acid was, come to really understand and denounce cocaine.
But I told the stories of it as if this is the way we live because it was the way we live.
And I would be lying to whitewash it.
And I'd be lying to say that coke was a terrible drug.
And I'd be lying to say LSD was anything but super positive for me.
And share those lessons with people.
I was...
Asked once by the head of the Partnership for Drug-Free America, which was then the leading anti-drug thing in the country.
They were famous for their commercial, This Is Your Brain on Drugs, with the egg in the pan frying.
I was doing a gun control program at the time, big public relations, public service campaign, and I asked this guy for some advice.
So he said, I'll give you advice, but you have to look at our commercials and give us a critique.
So I said, okay, I'll do that.
So I look at those commercials.
I go back to the peak.
The problem with the commercials is, which is how these athletes are going out there and winning varsity championships.
And meanwhile, the drug kids are in a corner in a hallway smoking.
The drug kids look like they're having the most fun.
You're not scaring.
These are ads for drug use.
You're crazy.
And I was kind of like, I felt I was giving a secret away to the enemy.
But I thought, I said, do your problem with partners for drug use?
You can't tell the truth about pot.
Until you can tell the truth, nobody's going to trust you about anything else.
The problem with the war on drugs is it's been fought by people who are not on drugs.
They don't understand what they're talking about.
This is your brain on drugs and you're showing eggs?
That's the last thing you should ever show to someone who's hungry.
That was the stand-up comedy bit that so many people had.
Bill Hicks had a great bit about it.
Like, you got any hash browns?
Like, what the fuck are you doing?
You're cooking eggs for people that famously have the munchies?
It was so stupid and it was also there was so many of those did you ever see the ones that were done?
I think it was in the 80s or the 90s There was a man and a like kind of a young sort of curious not knowing what's going on guy Talking to this old no-nonsense guy and they're they're eating dinner at a restaurant And he's saying if you buy drugs you support terrorism.
He's like what?
Well, how was that?
It's just it's a fact You buy drugs, you support terrorism.
And that's the whole commercial, is this guy just saying this one thing with no fact.
I mean, it's a clear thing that you could get away with sort of before the internet.
You know, it was like a narrative they were trying to push.
But it was one of the dumbest things, because it's this guy who's like, they're eating a steak restaurant, he's like eating salad or something like that.
Well, that was one thing that Rolling Stone did cover, too, is the difference in the discrepancy of the laws.
Between crack cocaine and regular cocaine about how if you got arrested for crack, you would have far steeper penalties, far longer sentences.
And one of the things that Dr. Carl Hart, who's a guy out of Columbia who's famously discussed, is like, it's the exact same drug.
The only thing you've done with this is criminalize black people, criminalize poor people, people of color, and people that would be more likely to use cocaine so you could arrest them and lock them up for much longer sentences.
And I tried to make that point in my book, not by, you know, a lot of political lecturing and something like that, but just showing what we covered and what we wrote about and how we went about those things, what we advocated for and the way it all...
I thought if you took Rolling Stone, the history of Rolling Stone, and looked at America through the eyes of Rolling Stone, the prism of Rolling Stone, kind of a cultural history of...
Our times in rock and roll and all the great characters and the people we met, the scientists and the environmental scientists and the writers and the presidents and particularly the rock and roll people, you get a real true understanding of What happened during this whole period?
I'd never read anywhere before.
And then I would use my own development as a narrative device.
I didn't think my own story was that interesting, per se.
I'd read a factual, heavy-duty history of the civil rights laws and this, that, and the other thing.
Cultural history of the times, seen through my eyes, and how much fun it was, and how much fun we had.
And I didn't want to in any way shrink from the fact that all these big issues were at stake, which we revolved, but we had a great time.
A yippie was a thing formed by two revolutionaries, Abbie Hoffman and a friend of his, which tried to promote a demonstration at the Chicago Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, which turned into the riots.
But, you know, I just think you guys captured that.
You captured all of it.
You captured all of the chaos and you did it in an honest way.
And you did it in a way where I don't think the writers that wrote in Rolling Stone would have ever had the kind of freedom to capture things the way you allowed them to be captured.
Yeah, well, there's always a dismissal of the previous generations, because the new generations are moving in a different direction, or at least expanding.
They're learning from the lessons of the past and what they didn't like about their parents' generations, and they're expanding.
You know, it's just today it's hard to track because there's so many voices and there's so much going on.
And there's also this fear that things are actually rolling back in the wrong direction, like this overturning of Roe v.
Wade.
That scares the shit out of a lot of people.
And the talk of overturning same-sex marriages, that scares the shit out of a lot of people, too, because they really are worried that some of these people that Don't like this progress and don't like the freedom that people are enjoying today.
And they want to pull things back and they want to control people more.
And what the Republican National Republican Party says is so retrograde, is so out of step with America, is so cruel.
In every one of those policies you cite, there's cruelty at the basis of it.
Every economic policy they advocate comes at the expense of the poor people, whether it's abortion, Welfare, medical care, these big expenses like tax policies, it's never the expense of the rich, it's the expense of the poor.
And these people are supposed to espouse Christian values.
I find that the most un-Christian party in the United States is this Mean spirit.
I mean, take away people's rights.
Let's restrict what people do.
Let's control their lives.
I mean, it's terrible.
And that spirit has always existed in America in various forms and places over the years.
We've had the Ku Klux Klan and we had the Civil War and we've had Father Coughlin and McCarthyism and stuff like that.
But never has it been so mainstreamed as Trump has been able to act as a champion.
I just didn't see how people can live with themselves.
And I think everything we're worried about in the future of America, including anti-environmentalism, including your fuels to face the facts of science, they were ruining the planet.
Well, I think the fear is that we're going to deteriorate the country economically while trying to fix it environmentally and that there's got to be like a more sensible approach to it.
I think that every economist that we know of, that we respect with intelligence, says that the opportunity to create all this new manufacturing, to go green, to commission rebuilding of America is an enormous economic opportunity.
If we deficit-financed $1 trillion, $2 trillion to rebuild the energy infrastructure, you create more jobs, more opportunities.
Yes, you have to train people.
Yes, there will be dislocation of jobs and all these things.
But I don't think it'll go fast.
Your pal, Elon Musk.
I mean, that's new.
That's creating jobs.
That's all positive stuff.
That can be replicated and the government is trying to replicate it with tax breaks for companies that do all this kind of stuff, batteries.
That can be done around the world.
That can be done here first and foremost.
Skipping the fact of If we don't do it, what do they say about life is better than the alternative?
They're less frequent and more destructive because they contain more water in them, more wind in them, due to the heating of the Caribbean.
In fact, the Caribbean is about two degrees, three degrees warmer this summer than it was last summer.
But it'll happen.
I mean, these things randomly strike, and they're more destructive.
All it takes is one of those hurricanes.
It was a 12-feet wave coming into Fort Myers.
It'll happen in Miami or it'll happen in Virginia.
We've covered this extensively in Rolling Stone, and I know my stuff, and we've had it on this subject.
Pay attention to a lot, and it's no joke.
I mean, it's nothing you can think is going to reverse.
These things are too powerful.
We do things as men, as humans, like build seawalls that can hold back and deal a lot with that.
We're too vulnerable.
The forests of the West.
The rainforest, which is being cut down by Bolsonaro in Brazil or in Congo, they're just going to now open that up.
We can't be doing this anymore.
Honestly, it's a hard thing to see Global warming.
Carbon is an invisible gas.
It's hard to grasp that as an enemy.
But we can no longer burn up the Earth itself, the stuff we pull out of the Earth, the coal, the gas, all this fossilized stuff that's been here for a couple of million years as the Earth became what it is now.
We're burning it up and putting it back where it came from, in the atmosphere.
You know, I mean, one of, you know, we could end up with about 500 million people left on Earth living either pole.
And whereas France, which has like 50% or something, or maybe more of its power come from nuclear, they never have had a nuclear accident, and they've had nuclear for 50 years or more.
They've never had an accident because they got one reactor in shape, and they decided to replicate that reactor all throughout the country.
Every new reactor was in a newly built design that cost twice as much because you had to redesign the entire thing.
The money that's being allocated for the environment or for any of these things, they're passed with only Democrats voting for them and Republicans voting unanimously against them, whether it's voting rights, whether it's women's rights, whether it's abortion.
The entire congressional Republican Party will vote against abortion.
I think that they want to keep their jobs as senators or congressmen.
And they live in fear that the people of the majority Of the minority of the Republican Party that controls and goes to primary elections, because it's always on both ends, the activists who are really ideologically driven, whether Republicans or Democrats, can control the primary.
And they're afraid they'll lose their jobs, because if you say, I'm for abortion, they'll turn out this huge thing.
And Trump will come down the road and start screaming at you, too.
And they've been blackmailed by Trump, by this.
You're not going to get re-elected.
I think...
These things we're talking about are all moral issues.
The survival of the earth is a moral issue.
The right to abortion is a moral issue.
The right to marry who you choose is a moral issue.
The right to have equal rights if you're black are a moral issue or if you're a woman.
And I think there's much more morality in the Democratic Party, which is more liberal.
But every time you read about a money scandal or a sex scandal, nine out of ten times, it's a Republican representative.
It's the guy with his hand in the till or in the hoochie, you know?
The theory that all parties are the same and that it's not going to make any difference to our lives and Democrats are as bad as Republicans, I think that's nuts.
So you think – well, I think socially, Democrats, at least in spirit, what they're trying to do, at least on paper, what they're trying to say – Is more in line of like this idea that you're talking about with the original Rolling Stone, the hippie movement, more in line of expanding rights and giving people more opportunity and giving people more freedom.
I think that's – when you talk to like a liberal or a progressive ideologically, that's what they're hoping for.
Like that's whether they're captured by money at the highest levels, which I think they kind of all are.
Until you remove money from politics, we're always going to have a problem with special interest groups that are financing both sides.
And I think there's a long record of Democrats accepting just – I just mentioned Joe Dodd and the $620 million siphoned off for the drug war into the defense industry.
But if you look at what – and money will always be – there's ways to reduce money in policy.
But the Republicans bought you the Supreme Court decision to let corporate financing back in, which is why now elections are so expensive.
I think it's always going to be—but let's look at fundamental fairness.
Is it right for billionaires to pay no taxes or effectively very little taxes, some of them, and the working man gets tax bills?
I mean, the inequitable—the distribution of wealth is so inequitable.
And then on top of it, we ask the poor, the middle class, to pay enormous medical costs.
That they can't afford without giving any really much meaningful aid to them, you know?
We ask that the carbon industry continue to pollute.
And their pollution, by the way, located always in the poorest area of a town.
It's where the refinery is, all this stuff.
These are Republican agenda items.
These are all on record as...
Let's take legalization of marijuana.
It's an official part of the Democratic Party platform.
Because one of the things that they talked about during the campaign was decriminalizing marijuana and exonerating people that were in jail for nonviolent drug offenses.
Well, the thing I go on about, because it's a political season, is the Republican Party.
I know you're not supposed to talk politics or whatever, but as a party, they're a roadblock to the kind of America I believe in, which is a progressive America, a liberal America, a compassionate America.
That says to its poor people, you know, we'll help you.
We'll provide you medical care.
We'll make sure you get food.
We guarantee you the right to life, which includes health care, liberty, your own personal life, and happiness, you know?
And I think those should be the founding principles of America, and I think they should be offered to everybody, not just to the super wealthy or the mid-wealthy or people like myself.
No, I don't see that from enough people in general, period, especially people that are already doing well.
I think particularly those things you talked about, I mean, my thought is education, the fact that people are so bored, just burdened with debt when they get out of college.
You can never escape that debt.
That's a fucking – that's a crime against humanity, the fact that they've decided to make that one debt – the one debt that you kind of have to take on.
Most people think when you get out of high school, you have to go to college, and it's going to cost you some money, especially if you don't have a scholarship.
Biden's fear legal action, excluding these borrowers, might make it harder for anyone successfully sued to stop it, but that's practically an admission.
The whole program is legally dubious.
Thursday, Department of Education said borrowers with privately held federal student loans will no longer qualify for President Biden's one-time loan write-off program.
So this is borrowers with privately held federal student loans will no longer qualify.
Indeed, just a year ago, the Education Department admitted it lacked the statutory authority to forgive student loans en masse.
Yet then, Team Biden, under pressure from progressives and hoping to boost Dem's hopes in the midterms, suddenly announced a huge forgiveness program, claiming it had the authority after all under post-9-11 HEROES Act.
First of all, I'm not going to accept the factual accuracy or...
The general theory of anything that, as I read, imposed the poster or the Fox, both Murdoch, super Republican, totally prejudiced, totally discredited.
This is a remarkable reversal that will affect the fortunes of many student loan borrowers.
The U.S. Department of Education has quietly changed its guidance around who qualifies for President Biden's sweeping student debt relief plan.
At the center of the change are borrowers who took out the federal student loans many years ago Both Perkins loans and federal family education loans, FFEL loans issued and managed by private banks but guaranteed by the federal government, were once the mainstay of the federal loan program until the FFEL program ended in 2010.
Today, according to federal data, more than 4 million borrowers still have commercially held FFEL loans.
Until Thursday, the department's own website advised these borrowers they could consolidate these loans into federal direct loans and thereby qualify for relief under Biden's debt cancellation program.
All loans eligible for student loan pause are eligible for relief, including loans held by ED and guarantee agencies.
ED assesses whether to provide relief to borrowers with privately owned federal student loans, including FFEL, Perkins loans, and is discussing with private lenders.
In the meantime, borrowers with privately held federal loans can receive this relief by consolidating these loans in a direct loan program.
All eligible borrowers will have until December 31st, 2023 to submit an application for debt relief.
So what does it say?
Thursday, though.
Here it is.
Scroll down lower, please.
Thursday, though, the department quietly changed that language.
The guidance says now As of September 29th, 2022, borrowers with federal student loans not held by ED cannot obtain one-time debt relief by consolidating these loans into direct loans.
To survive the challenge by Republicans in courts, as to whether the law is constitutional or not, whether it can be done under the authority that you presided precedently, they've pulled back on some.
Meantime, the other half is still eligible.
So while they haven't gotten everything, they've gotten at least half or 30 percent or 40 percent, 20 or 70 percent are still eligible for loan relief.
This is passed by the Democrats.
It's been challenged by the Republicans, and the reason it's been pulled back is to make that challenge go away or be less potent in court by those things that they thought might be questionable constitutionally.
Giving them loans to go to Alpha University which happens to be in Hoboken and exists on mail order universities and stuff like that.
It wasn't called Alpha University.
But my larger point is this and the larger point is that The money for education, which, as you said, is a ticket to society, to productive society, and for lower education in a public school system, we will not spend that money on education.
Instead, you've got people worth $100 billion.
You've got dozens of people worth $100 billion.
That money would be better spent On the purposes of society that we want, which is we want an educated and employed and productive population.
Whereas people who are making income of $100 million a year, let alone $10 million a year, should pay – start paying at a rate of 50 percent and escalate up.
So if you're making a billion dollars – Escalate up?
What people are terrified of is these laws getting enacted and then watching this same sort of scam play out now under the guise of it being progressive and...
I would see, you know, concert promoters who are super wealthy ask for relief because they didn't need relief.
But anyway, I think that you're going to have to, in all big spending, whether it's government or corporate, accept a certain amount of fraud or leakage or shoplifting.
I mean, that just comes with the territory.
People may need to shoplift and there's evil people and scam artists and you try and do your best.
But in a system this big, you can't be perfect.
Even though you can't be perfect, you can do a lot of good.
And is it better to not help people who are starving or living on food stamps or can't get education for their kids to help them and accept a certain level of fraud?
And you can also pass laws that call for inspector generals and effective prosecution of people.
I mean, again, the Trump departments looked over every – they didn't care about it.
At all.
They cut the tax services.
They wouldn't let them hire more people just to audit people.
I mean, that's not fair.
So I'm all for people getting rich.
I'm for people making a lot of money.
But there's a point at which you can't do anything with your money.
Matt Tybee, I got this idea reading his stuff he wrote at Rolling Stone at the time.
He said, this vast private wealth that's being held in investment banks and Switzerland and corporations and billionaires, it is the least productive use of capital in the world.
This is money being held privately, not being used to serve any useful purpose.
Improve health, an educational system, Good, decent lives for our workers, starving people in foreign countries.
This capital is the least productive use of our human wealth.
Do you think it's just that when people get money, they want more money, and then they get into a position of power and they want to do whatever they can to keep that money going and keep it rolling?
And the idea of being altruistic or being generous and trying to – for the greater good of the country gets lost.
And I think about it a lot but I can't figure it out and then I think in my own personal situation and say, well, do I – even though I'm not up in those levels at all – Well, would I give up the money?
The question is where does it go and who's going to manage it?
That's the real question.
What people are terrified of is the reallocation of wealth by people who are not good at managing anything.
They're worried about the idea that you're going to do this, but then it's just going to penalize the people that are out there hustling and doing their best and trying to get ahead.
And it's going to incentivize people that have already become accustomed to this system of pilfering money.
And there's stock things and IPOs and all this stuff and tax breaks they've been getting and not paying any taxes at all.
So I think it's already being pilfered by those people.
So stop them from pilfering it.
Let the smaller guys pilfer it.
But also, I think that...
Who pays to spend some money?
The government is the instrument we have, and we can choose our government, and we can expect that it's going to do a pretty good job, because our government, by and large, now does a pretty good job, whether it's fire departments, police, the Pentagon, a health system.
We run an enormously amount of complicated things, some of them well, some of them bad, because every bureaucracy can get What else do you have besides democratically elected government to choose from?
Autocracy, as in China, which distributes money fairly well.
But I don't trust a billionaire to be that person to judge what they're going to endow, what wing of what hospital, what their name on it.
Because when you get to be a billionaire, That wealthy, something changes, I think, in most people.
I mean, in 99% of people, you think you're smarter than everybody.
You think you've got the world figured out.
I'm surprised how many wealthy, wealthy, super wealthy people I've met who don't understand politics and political power because they have no sensitivity for the people or other things.
I mean, everybody who gets that wealthy thinks they're really smart.
I think where people get confused and scared is that they don't see a clear path.
They don't see a path that makes sense.
They don't see a leader that speaks in a way that resonates, that really seems like a person really just does want better for people.
They see people that are speaking to their special interests and they're just saying all the right things and then when they get into office they do the same shit that everybody's helped done and, you know, fund the military-industrial complex and get us involved in interventionalist foreign policy and make it more and more dangerous in the world.
And I think what I've learned growing up and getting an older person, what I've learned from watching politics and watching all these movements is that change is gradual.
And very few people are perfect.
Take a center we have from New York.
Chuck Schumer.
On the one hand, like he sponsored this campus legislation.
He's going to try and do everything he can to bring back the rights to abortion.
On the other hand, he's a major acceptor of contributions from hedge fund guys, from all the banking in New York and stuff that...
It's all about keeping their tax rates, keeping that damn 14% tax, the tax investment fund is what it's called.
I'll forget the name in a second.
So he's good and bad.
I mean, which good do you want?
Which bad do you want?
And we have to look for the balance of good.
I think, for instance, Joe Biden is a more populist-oriented president for people, for Ma.
I mean, his heart and sympathy runs to helping people, you know, versus, you know, that he has been a part of voting for the Defense Department every time.
I just can't expect perfection, is what I'm saying.
I've always had this philosophy that the best way to make the world a better place is to have less losers.
How do you have less losers?
Give people a better chance.
Give people a better opportunity.
And one of the things that's always frustrated me the most in this country is that we have all these places that are economically disenfranchised and filled with drugs and crime and we've done very little to fix that.
I just think that the fear that many people have is how is this going to be accomplished and how is it going to be allocated and how do we keep people from profiting off of this philanthropic notion?
I don't think you can keep people from profiting and I don't think maybe – Stealing, you can try, but still – but even profiting, I mean I think what we need is a much better regulated capitalist economy.
I think that capital is a wonderful way to harness the human spirit for ambition and accomplishment and even – and for personal wealth and gain, which are all legitimate human feelings.
But I think having it available to people to understand that there is a different way to look at the world and that you're on this ride for a short amount of time.
You know, you say you're 76, I'm 55. We, you know, we don't have much time left.
It's a quick ride.
And you spend so much time just trying to accumulate numbers.
And that doesn't help anybody.
It's not what this thing is supposed to be all about, and it doesn't enhance your experience on the ride, which is really what it's supposed to be about.
Do our best to enhance the experience for ourselves and for others.
And when you're just trying to enhance it for yourself, and you're around other people that are doing that as well, and that's all they concentrate and think about, then that becomes the mentality that you operate under.
I think that's a real problem.
I don't think drugs are the only solution, but I think there's a real pathway through psychedelics that allow people to understand that you're just a part of a pattern and that this pattern is not mutually beneficial and it's definitely not beneficial to people that are disenfranchised.
It's not beneficial to people that are stuck in a bad situation.
And that the best way forward for everybody, including the wealthy, is to make the world a safer, happier, healthier place.
And what's the best way to do that?
Well, definitely allocate more money towards fixing places that are traditionally disenfranchised and historically disenfranchised.
Or can't you look at Trump and say, Donald or Mr. President, whatever you call him, just do the right thing for these poor people who are suffering down there.
You could let all these people out of jail, by the way.
You don't have to just let your political conspirators or— How do I express it?
These are ideals I still believe in.
I feel I've tried my best.
I've done my part.
I'm off the stage now.
I still do what I can.
I'm happy now.
I feel grown up and no longer full of FOMO or ambition to have more money or to achieve more.
I wanted to say that in the book because the book in part does look like a recitation of these fantastic places and people I've met and vacations with people I've met and great concerts I've seen.
There's so much fun in the book.
And I wanted to – I didn't quite capture that level of insecurity I'd always feel, you know, behind some of those things.
I wasn't at that backstage or somehow that – it looks like it's all kind of natural and easy.
And to see these places that hang with the most talented rock artists of our time and go to the White House and sit in the Oval Office and interview the president and try and grill them as best you can and just feel your...
A part of that, but you don't know that when it's happening.
It's only when you look back at the end and put it all together do you realize, Jesus, I was at that place and that place and how it looks and it seems sort of, you know.
I was excited about going to the White House or working with Hunter or working to the Stones concert tonight or listening to this record.
But...
It either came so easy or there was so much of it that I never thought, oh, I mean, I think, oh, man, having that time of my life, I'd sit there, I can't believe it.
I'd be places, listening to music would make me cry.
It was that special.
But I never thought, oh, I'm at the one world shaking event here.
But if I hadn't been to a place for a year and all of a sudden was at the Bruce show, I would be unbelievable.
I would be going out of my mind.
You know, with...
And I still go out of my mind when I see the Blue Show, but I get to see a lot of them.
So, I don't know, I still thought, like, am I like Zelig, you know, showing up at all these places, like the Invisible Man or like in Forrest Gump and he's always right next to Johnson or something like that?
It's like that a little.
I mean, when Jerry Brown was running for president, he was using an office in New York for his headquarters, the convention.
He wasn't going to win that thing.
But I went down to the convention with him and stand on the podium, you know, with him as he's giving his speech.
And then he leaves.
I stay on the podium for a while when Clinton comes on and stuff like that.
And I wasn't allowed to be there.
I kept my backstage pass, which they take away from me.
Stage pass, which they take away from me as soon as you're done.
They want a stage pass.
But I end up staying there for an hour or two hours saying, wow, this is amazing.
What a place to be or be in the campaign trailer with the Carter people at the moment.
He goes to the top of the nomination.
They're passing out cigars.
I know I'm in someplace special.
I get them to sign the cigar thing and go, wow, how can I be at that?
Or on the other side, like one year after the Academy Awards, that party afterwards, a small party, Michael Jackson comes in and sits next to me and sits down.
We start chatting because I had some other business with him.
Just to try to get into the mindset of a person that's living this very, very unusual life.
I mean, to say that he didn't have anything to say, he's a human being that's experiencing something that no one will ever understand because this is pre-internet.
He was one of the biggest stars the world had ever seen.
If I said to him, the really legitimate question is, what was it like to be a child star and at age seven have your father manage you and tell you what to do?
He would then have to open up.
He'd either do one or two things.
In my scenario, he would say, oh, it was wonderful.
We had such a wonderful time of giant privilege and we had the opportunities to travel around the world.
My dad was a loving, wonderful thing.
All bullshit.
Or the legitimate answer, which I don't think you'd get out of him, which is, it was tough.
Our dad beat us.
We didn't have school life.
I had no friends.
I was constantly on the bus with this, that, and the other thing.
That's the truth.
That would be interesting.
He'd explore his feelings.
He wouldn't, I swear to you, I don't think he would have gone there.
Let me give you an example.
Before doing the interview, I was in research.
I called up Diana Ross, who I know, and said, come to lunch.
Let's have lunch.
I want to talk to you about Michael because I'm going back to you at this interview.
I want to pick you.
Now, the word, the story, the official story of Motown was...
She discovered the Jackson family in Indiana and brought to the attention of Barry Gordy and was kind of like a mother figure to him.
So Donnie says, you know, that was all a lie.
That's not true.
I didn't discover it.
I've never been there.
I barely know him.
In fact, you know, I mean, I tried to look him up a couple of years ago and I went to the ranch to see him and I had to sit around for two hours and finally just left.
It was a giant myth.
And Michael, I think, was leaving this giant myth.
And he had to believe that his relationship with boys was entirely innocent, which it wasn't.
Did you read any of the stuff that the doctor who went to jail for anesthetizing him when he died, that the doctor said that he was chemically castrated by his father?
Do you know about these young boys that were taken into the opera and turned into castratos?
That that was how Michael preserved his voice, that he was chemically castrated when he was younger, and that's why he had that very high-pitched voice and no muscle mass, and essentially he was a eunuch.
There's only a few recorded recordings from castratos, but that was a practice, that they would take young boys and castrate them to preserve their voice and raise them through this singing.
And that was what gave Michael Jackson that incredibly feminine, but yet also very unusual voice.
I mean, somebody just asked me, is it proper to listen to Michael Jackson's music today?
Knowing me, knowing, I just say, of course.
He was one of the genius artists.
What good does it do you to deprive yourself of his music?
Anyway, is it possible?
I suppose.
I don't, I've not really, I think I've heard that before.
How would a guy in Jackson, Indiana, Jackson, no, Gary, Indiana, Michael's father, Joe Jackson, get his hands on the materials and know-how to castrate?
Especially to an incredibly wealthy person that had a lot to gain by enacting that.
If you have the financial mechanism, like, if you think about what is powering the Jackson 5, what's powering Michael Jackson's career, it's his voice.
And the voice that was developed when he was very young.
You know, you go listen to ABC or listen to some of the, you know...
I think the way you get a person like that to reveal themselves is through time.
You would have to have a long conversation with them and then inconsistencies and you would chip away at the veneer.
And you'd probably find something.
At the very least, personally, you would get an experience with a very, very unusual human being that is going through a life that no one will ever understand.
Because it's like Elvis, the Beatles, there's a few people in human history that have achieved that level of fame and notoriety and popularity.
And, you know, we're talking about being captured by fame.
I mean, who the fuck was captured by fame more than Michael Jackson?
What human beings will ever experience what that guy has experienced?
I certainly had all those things because I thought the growing up part was the most fascinating of it all.
And the early experiences and that early fame because that you don't get talked to.
When I did John Lennon in another long – in a long, long interview I didn't.
It was the first interview he ever gave after the Beatles broke.
I mean the first long interview he ever gave.
He was full of pain.
I mean it was – you didn't have to say anything.
He was just spewing it all out and he was so angry about the way fame had treated him.
I mean that they had been trapped.
You know, in this bubble.
And he said, yeah, but inside it was like orgies and whores and junk and, you know, the story's never been told of what happened.
He wanted to, you know, spill that confinement.
I want out, out, out, out, out.
And That was a wholly different experience, you know?
So, I don't think Michael, he wanted to, he knew, if he revealed himself as he did, like, posing naked on the, and for the two versions on which we ran in Rolling Stone, him and the old co-ed naked, It was a way of getting out of this trap of fame.
Saying, oh, well, we're the most famous couple in the world and the biggest pop star in the world.
And part of it was through that interview, he just decided to burst the whole thing wide open.
You know, I'm not going to live with this anymore.
Here are all my secrets.
Here's everything I've got.
We took junk.
We did that and all that.
People use the Rolling Stone access sometimes to do those kind of things.
Like David Cassidy, who had the popular television show, the Partridge family, to get out of that, he posed without his clothes on for the cover of Rolling Stone.
To get out of it, because he was a genuine musician who wanted to be a musician and in a rock band.
Instead, Opportunity knocked and made him a teenage TV star in his Goody Two Shoes show, you know, the Nelson family or whatever.
As soon as he came out, as soon as he looked like he had been naked, he didn't really show him naked, but the sponsors all deserted, ABC wanted him off the air, and he was free.
There was no other way he could get out of it.
Otherwise, he was contractually bound for five more years of being a teen idol.
But, I mean, this parallels to what we're talking about with Hunter and many people that become extraordinarily famous that I find really fascinating because they became famous because of this uniqueness and then they get captured by that and then the public demands...
You know, you have a very passionate audience that go to you and believe in you and respect you and all the things that could make you feel pretty swell-headed.
Like I just talk and have opinions and have conversations with people or do stand-up or whatever I'm doing.
It's just me, you know, which is a different thing.
You know, I don't have a persona necessarily.
I'm not like putting on an act.
It's just me.
And the pressures of it, I mitigate with physical exercise and making the things that I do on purpose far more difficult because it makes the rest of life easier.
And writers are doing what they do and are there being me.
They are also people, in the case of Hunter, wearing a mask.
Michael Jackson's wearing a mask.
John Lennon's got that mask.
I mean, if he, and you don't.
You won't wear it.
I mean, and that's probably where the contradiction starts and the thing you always have to deal with and fight with yourself, and suddenly you realize the mask is more attractive than you, maybe?
But I think psychedelics have helped me tremendously in not having a mask.
And the way to connect with people is also to not have a mask.
I think if you did this over – I mean I've done thousands of these, hours and hours of conversations.
If I had a mask, it would have come off.
That's what my point was about talking to Michael Jackson.
I think if you did sit down with him for long enough, you would at least get an understanding of just the way he communicates, the way he answers questions, the way he deals with situations, the way you just talk to him about the world itself.
Talk to him about things outside of himself, how he views things.
You'd get a sense of how bizarre the journey he's on is.
Because he's in some bizarre rocket ship and some uncharted part of the universe.
But what do you think when somebody says to you, Or if I came in here and said, Joe, I really want to do your show and all that stuff, but do you mind if we turn all the lights off and you can't see me and there'll be some candles on the side?
Does that make me, I mean, doesn't it sound to you like this man doesn't want to be seen?
Well, you know, it was before he was already having some plastic surgery, right?
Because he probably had some distorted perception of his appearance.
And, you know, I mean, just the whole world watching you in that way has got to be very fucking strange to be this young boy who grew up in a completely abnormal way.
Like, he never—I had a normal life growing up.
Pretty normal, you know?
I mean, normal for me.
I mean, not extraordinary.
And for him, everything's extraordinary from the beginning.
And also, you know, maybe there's a sense of uncertainty about his thoughts and opinions and the way he sort of solidifies them is by the music and is through his heart.
And it's Bruce doing covers, not his own material, but doing covers of soul music from about the 70s, the Commodores and the Childs, Motown stuff.
And in modern arrangements, the same arrangements, he recognized the song immediately, but he's singing it so powerfully.
There's so much fun in that record and so much passion in that record and he's never pushed his voice before beyond his own lyrics and what he's trying to say about things to these more simple songs that are beautiful songs but express the deep universal things about love and losing love and my girl doesn't love me anymore and my girl does love me and you know, you lied to me, you know.
The presidency, his presidency was historic, transformational in so many ways, you know, and it was another part of the baby boom, you know, moving up, although he wasn't a boomer, but that sensibility, equal rights.
Also, to see a black man elected president was one of the best things we could say in our lifetime has happened.
Just the sheer symbolism of who we were as a nation.
Was he a consequential important president?
Other than that, he was very competent, very good, but I think that he made a big mistake.
That he wouldn't play politics.
And I think if you're going to be the president, you've got to play politics.
He wouldn't engage too much with his contributors, with the party people, the people who run the party locally in various places.
And he left behind a party that was in weak shape for the next election, the Hillary election.
And a lot of kind of pissed off people who felt they weren't treated right, our friends, the billionaires or less, he didn't want to deal with them.
He didn't want to deal with this ugly business.
But these are the people who give you the money for the campaign.
When he was elected, the senator, the pro tem of the Senate, Pat Leahy, and also Nancy Pelosi and the congressman from Detroit, whose name I forget from him, Wanted to have investigations conducted by the Senate of the Iraq War.
Why did we go to Iraq?
Have full Senate hearings and investigation undercover all that.
He shut it down.
They wanted to do it.
He said, no, I don't want to do it.
I want my administration to get out to a great start and peace and harmony and we're going to be bipartisan and all this stuff, which was a horrible mistake because there was no such thing as that in this lifetime right now.
I think Obama thought somehow he could magically change politics and this kumbaya, not exactly kumbaya, but achieve better president because he himself thought, I am such an excellent Conciliator.
That I have been a community organizer for most of my life.
I know how to bring people together.
By sheer force, my intellectual power and my gift of oratory and all that, I will bring this together.
It's a great notion, but it's completely not in this world.
Let's look back at the history of the modern Republican Party.
Look at the investigations that they've been conducting of Clinton.
I mean, Clinton barely got into office, and all of a sudden they start right after him.
Obama gets into office, and the first thing that happens to him is that Senator McConnell says, my main objective for the next four years is to make sure this is a one-term president.
If you want to get things done, you're going to have to play politics.
I mean, he had people around him who are skilled professionals, including Joe Biden, and he had Nancy Pelosi with him, and Chuck Schumer, a lot of people.
And if you would go back and do it again, would you do it differently?
And what do you think could have been done to bring people together, to be bipartisan, but also To expose some of these things that were critical issues, like why did we get involved in the Iraq War?
Politicians, all of them, except when they're out of office, the presidential candidates I've interviewed, which have been Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, and Obama.
If a candidate makes a spontaneous comment and says, I should have investigated it because, you know, Bush was really – he's a war criminal.
He should have – or Cheney.
One false remark and you've got – you've blown up the world all of a sudden and the newspapers are all in the media and it's a week of your time wasted because you said some harmless kind of thing.
Right.
They're not, especially in the middle of the campaign, going to say anything that they haven't really thought through or hasn't been pre-tested or vetted somehow.
They're not going to piss off this industry or that industry.
You know, when they're talking about energy uses, they're not going to piss off the agriculture interests by saying this thing about it.
And the minute they say, oh, it's a transitional fuel, then, you know, those states are up.
I mean, you can't really speak the truth anymore.
So I was...
You don't want to ask them questions which they can't answer truthfully.
And you give them the opportunity to answer questions they can answer honestly.
So I ask generally about how do you feel about things?
What was your point of view or purpose?
And not only skip the gotcha questions or the questions that everybody asks every day of the present, when will this bill be passed?
Or do you think there will be peace or whatever?
The kind of daily...
I go in to try and figure out who the person is and kind of take a measure of their thinking and their sensitivity and how they're feeling about things.
Because everything else a president says is vetted or formalized.
You can't be truthful.
But every now and then you get them.
I mean, there was...
I love talking to Clinton because he's always talked like some kind of corn poem from the South.
You know, he's talking about the NATO allies and something.
They were madder than three chickens in a hen house, you know, and he talks Southern about NATO. I mean, what are you, you know.
And Obama, the most honest, I was scheduled to interview Obama for the exit interview and was scheduled to take place the day after the election.
And that night Trump won.
So when I got up in the morning very drunk, Still, I mean, hungover, like about everybody.
I mean, anyway.
I called the White House and said, look, I had to leave at 8 o'clock.
If you want, I'll postpone this interview until next week so you have a chance to deal with this.
No, no.
Obama wants to.
We'll call you back.
Obama wants to do it.
Sorry.
And come on down as scheduled.
So I had prepared, you know, for three days for the interview all kinds of questions, you know, like what do you think the world should be and what advice would you give Hillary, your successor?
What are the big problems you're concerned about?
He had the valedictory lap.
So I had to scramble and create a whole new interview.
But we got to the White House.
I went down with my son, Gus.
It's deserted.
The whole town is gray and cloudy anyway.
It's virtually deserted.
There's nobody there.
There's the Marine Guard at the reception desk and a secretary, and that's it.
It's completely dead.
And then Obama walks out, gets us, coat and tie, you know, like energetic, says, okay, yeah, let's get this done.
Let's go.
Come on.
Go in the Oval Office.
So I'm trying to – the main question now on the table is what the fuck happened?
You know, you want to ask, because now everything was completely up and up in the air.
And danced around, danced around.
I said, well, I said, what do you hope that changes?
He said, well, why are you hopeful?
He said, well, because when you get to the Oval Office, you change.
And you sit here and you look up at that picture of George Washington over that portrait.
It somehow changes you.
I said, well, Mr. President, he is 75 years old or 74 years old.
What do you possibly think is going to change about him?
And make him into a person.
Well, look, Jan, if you want me to get on my knees, get down on the floor and curl up in a ball and start crying about this, I'll do that for you.
Do you want me to do that?
This is not a tragedy.
My mother died of cancer two weeks.
It's a tragedy.
This is an election.
And after that, if you don't like it, you get up and you work.
Great thing to say.
I mean absolutely right.
And also – I mean so states like – versus the tradition of you don't dump on your successor.
He's got to now reassure the country that things are going to be OK. Don't push the panic button yet.
Reassure our allies in particular.
Overseas that this is not going to go off the rails.
There was nothing he could say.
So, I mean, I could have again gone further with the thing.
But he said this.
How can you say that?
And You know, discuss the dangers he represented or the things that might happen or the fears that people have.
But it wouldn't have gone anywhere because he wouldn't be able to speak to it.
I remember early on asking Al Gore when he was running for president, what are we going to do about Drugly's legalization?
Al said, well, I think we need to study it more and, you know, get the scientifics.
And, you know, I'm thinking to myself, this is so tired.
Al, I know, you know, you smoke dope.
You have smoked dope.
Let's not, you know.
But I thought, why...
He's in a position, if he says the wrong thing about this, that he may not get elected.
He may be thrown out wanting to win the primary.
They'll get him so hard.
And I think, what is the point of doing that?
I mean, I know Al well, actually.
I know what he's going to do when he gets in there.
He's going to start moving towards legalization and decriminalization as fast as he can and constrained only by public opinion and other things lifted.
So I don't push it further.
After he lost the election, we had lunch one day at my office about a year after.
He hadn't decided whether to run again or not.
Everybody was pushing me.
He asked me what I thought.
I was very flattered that he was curious about my opinion.
And I said, what do you think?
He said, well, you know, I just...
I don't have the appetite to lie anymore.
You know, I'm tired of this.
You know, I want to be able to speak what's on my mind.
Well, that's the beauty of having a conversation with a person like that.
And I think your approach is very similar to my approach.
You're just trying to get the person to express themselves.
And it's very difficult for someone to express themselves when they're in a job that literally prohibits them from expressing themselves and could inhibit progress, could change the way they view the world and the world views them.
Keep people – reveal a little of yourself but don't reveal – as an artist, if you reveal too much and – Destroy that sense of mystery, then you've lost a little there.
I wish we'd have people who would be almost in office to be more open about debating the stakes and tell the truth about what they think is going on and let that out.
I mean, the media is so nutty, it's always been nutty, that you get punished so hard by the opposition party, the mainstream press, and the internet press, internet people, for speaking out on anything.
You get mocked one way or the other.
It's a premium to say nothing, to be as obscure as possible.
And it comes from the mainstream press just as much as it comes from the internet.
The internet is totally unregulated, and yet it is a public utility, just like television and radio waves and stations, that has been financed, particularly by the government.
The government paid for the internet.
They developed it in the Defense Department.
It was put out there with government.
It's owned by the public.
It should be regulated as a public utility and by the same rules that govern radio and television.
You know, the internet should not be this free, do anything place.
There are rules and regulations about laws, about fairness, about libel, about reckless disregard for the truth, about publishing something with miscellaneous malicious intent, about deliberate lying.
And if it were just governed by the basic rules, By which we regulate the rest of the press.
Free speech.
The rules of free speech, which means that you can't yell fire in a theater, and you can't publish stuff knowingly false, and you can't publish stuff you're doing out of malice.
But don't you think there's also some real benefit to it in that it allows real investigative reporting that's not popular, that's not popular with corporate entities, it's not popular with banks, it's not popular with the military industrial complex or politicians, and you get opinions that resonate with people that would not be expressed in any other way?
The internet, on the other hand, is brilliant at democratization of communication and expressing opinions and making the cost of investigative journalism lower because you have to have somebody with all these high overheads.
The internet's great and I love social media.
But like every other industry in the United States, it has to be regulated.
But if they're going to be in power and they're regulating the Internet, they're going to regulate the Internet in a way that suits their best interests, the same way they do with the banking industry, the same way they do with the environment, the same way they do with energy, the same way they do with everything.
What represents their interests?
You're talking about so much money involved in disseminating information in a very particular way.
Yeah, but it's a disruptive thing that has never existed before.
I think it exists, and I think where we're at is where we're at.
I think we need to move forward collectively as a country with an ethic that respects truth, And that it appreciates opinions and reality and an understanding of things that's not necessarily possible with corporate interests involved in dissemination of information.
When you look at the internet, which is this incredibly disruptive technology, and you see the expansion of Technology in general, that technological innovation just seems to be a part of our culture inexorably.
Where do you think it goes?
Like, what are your thoughts on, like, the metaverse and just the complete integration of technology into human beings' lives?
What scares me is the future that's kind of predicted in Star Wars.
Or I recently read 1984, which is – we're at 1984 now.
I mean if you think about the internet and you think – you have in your pocket a device every day The phone, which tracks you, which can be now turned on to listen to you without you acknowledging, which knows everything you shop, your health history, everything about you, who you hang out with, everything that's possible that you do.
And you cannot live in a connected America without having an iPhone.
The regulation in there now and the last people who are going to regulate these people's property are wealthy people or the internet themselves.
These guys have no interest whatsoever despite the fact they've already got $236 billion in the bank in Ireland like Apple does or something like that.
Those are the inexact facts but that's good.
So government is what we've got and government has done wonderful things and it's done blundering things and we've got a system of checks and balances there, however imperfect, of the three branches so that nothing gets too out of control.
It goes back and forth.
We won World War II through the government.
We lost Iraq through the government.
The government is doing a great job now, I think, with Ukraine.
But on the other hand, we could have had Trump and he would let Russia run all over the place and then be dominant Europe.
We've got to just get out there and run for something.
Go run for school board or go run for municipal.
Just get yourself into some kind of local politics.