Interview With Dave Marsh, part 2

By Scott Woods

Scott:   You wrote a lengthy piece in the late '70s--it's in Fortunate Son--about pop music in the movies, the piece about The Buddy Holly Story...

Dave:   Yeah, the thing I did for, one of the movie magazines--Film Comment.

Scott:   I'm just wondering if there's any recent movies in which you were, say, astounded at the way pop music was used. There have been a lot of music-dominated movies recently.

Dave:   [pause] The way that the rock & roll scene is portrayed in Cameron's movie, Almost Famous is tremendously accurate, emotionally, and even down to--people can say what they want to say about those characters, but I knew people like that, particularly the women, who to me are what that picture's about, which is about nurture at various levels, and it's more about the women than it is the men--to me. So, no, the picture that comes to mind is, believe it or not, Crouching Dragon because it in some way... A friend, my co-editor at Rock and Rap Confidential, Lee Ballinger said--he described it to me as a hip-hop movie, but without the music, and that's right. It was astounding how they didn't use pop music. [laughs] It was astounding that they could avoid it. But I don't think... We know certain things about music, now. Right? Science is beginning to tell us things about music, and one thing it's telling us is that music seems to be the art that's most deeply imbedded in humans. That in fact it pre-exists humans, that there are no human societies that are without the art of music. That there was music before there was cave painting, there was music probably, it now seems, there's a fairly good chance that there was music before there was fire--controlled fire, cooking. [pause] That's pretty amazing. And yet, primates are visual animals. I still think that music videos and music in the movies are basically tails wagging dogs.

Scott:   Does High Fidelity fit into that? [pause] Did you see High Fidelity?

Dave:   High Fidelity's like the tip of the tail wagging the tail that wags the dog. [laughs] You know? High Fidelity was like, I used to know those people; Almost Famous was like, I used to BE those people. And I liked High Fidelity quite a lot. And I thought it got to a couple of things that are worth getting to, including Marvin Gaye. That thing at the end, I mean, whatever my doubts may have been, that resolved them. Especially--I saw it later on Pay Per View on TV, and I realized well, actually, he doesn't sing the song ["Let's Get It On"] particularly well. And at that moment, at least the first time I saw it, he could've been Marvin Gaye. And that's a truth about music that, with the utter demise of Top 40 radio, or any kind of music radio, which somebody who's not a fanatic can listen to--take it for granted that all pop music fans under 17 are fanatics--that's a truth that... where can you be surprised any more? I'm not really gonna be surprised on Napster because Napster requires a volitional act to find the thing. One of the reasons why I probably still DO this stuff is the possibility for surprise. Even if that means listening to all twelve discs of the Carter Family box set on Bear Family. And the one thing I got out of it, aside from stuff I already kind of knew, the one shock of surprise I got was hearing them sing "Are You Lonesome Tonight" in an arrangement NOT terribly far from Elvis's, which had never been released before. And, you know, you also have to at that point, you have to go think about what would Peter Guralnick make of this? How inauthentic of the Carter Family to sing an Al Jolson song--that's what he thought about Elvis. So, that was like my great, oddball discovery, but that's everyday, or you're looking for that everyday. *I* am. So I'm not an alcoholic, but I am a junkie for that.

Scott:   Can you single out your all-time favorite musical moment in a movie?

Dave:   There's that unbelievable moment in American Hot Wax where Alan Freed plays "There Goes My Baby," that's an unforgettable one, just absolutely a killer. But I don't--that's not how I relate to the stuff, I relate to the stuff as sound. I don't relate to it as lyrics, I don't relate to it as score and composition, I relate to it as sound. So my visual memory of music has as much to do with watching Atlantic and Motown map labels spin around on a turntable, or album covers or something, but it isn't movies. But it ain't mainly visual. Visual memory of music for me is the exact spot I was standing in the first time I heard "96 Tears"--that I remember!

Scott:   Do you still place as much emphasis in your own life on singles--as opposed to albums? Because you kind of make an argument in The Heart of Rock and Soul, uhh, for singles, I guess.

Dave:   [pause] It'd be like valuing horses and still driving the car. There aren't so many horses around any more.

Scott:   Do you mean specifically Top 40?

Dave:   Well, a single is a different thing now. It's not, or often as not, it's not a commodity in the same way that it was when--you know, I caught just the last moment of--that book [The Heart of Rock and Soul got written at the last moment practically that it could've been written, and then everything kind of blew apart for reasons of formatics and reason of record business economics and broadcast formatics, and a million things blew it apart, right? But to me I guess the thing is--it tends to be that the records that I have high regard for will tend to have a song or two or three that--particularly the rock records--that will just galvanize them for me. This Everclear record was that with that, whatever it's called, Songs From An American Movie. That for me is, like, totally, like, a smash. Not whatever the single is--which I think is "AM Radio"--but this other thing. So that galvanic response is still there. I don't think--it's not laid out in such a simple fashion any longer. I am neurologically incapable of listening to music radio in the United States. It's like, I would just get out of the car and either kill myself, or beat somebody up. [laughs] It's literally true that I almost never listen to music radio.

And yet, it's funny, because just the other day I actually switched over from AM to FM, which I hardly ever do, but everything I had in the car was boring--everything on AM was boring. And I was kinds dancing around the dial, and I found some Supremes record followed by a Bobby Womack record, and then I dialed into one of the college stations and they were doing something interesting with some singer-songwriters who I think are interesting right now, and then I just got out of the car and I was just confused--it was like, "you mean you can actually do this again?" Then I thought, oh God, more information, and who needs more information in [pause] Babylon?

Scott:   Okay, I just want to get your thoughts about a few genres and artists--forgive me if you've written about some of this stuff in Rock and Rap Confidential recently. Curious to know what you think of D'Angelo, and some others who I place in that same vein--Erykah Badu, Jill Scott.

Dave:   Well, I think that's a place where you really notice the decline in vocals and vocal harmonies--at least I do. D'Angelo in particular strikes me as doing, or trying to do, for instance, Sly Stone's act and not quite getting it. I was pretty disappointed by that record [Voodoo. I... I love R. Kelly, though, 'cause R. Kelly's doing the Marvin Gaye thing and really getting a lot of things right, I think. So I don't know where you would put the boundaries on it, but for me the person that's really doing it is Kelly.

Scott:   Yeah. I'm in 100% agreement with you.

Dave:   You know, the D'Angelo thing is--it's cold! But people tend to like, right now, some very cold--some music that strikes me as very cold and brittle.

Scott:   I find that that music sometimes kind of comes with a little bit of an agenda, that people--the sort of rootsy, I don't know...

Dave:   Well, I think that, I would go you one better and say--I would go all the way to Macy Gray and say that. I'm not of the opinion that, outside of hip-hop there's a whole lot of great r&b being made right now. I just don't think that there is. I think that there are things, and I think that there are things in gospel music in particular that may bode well for popular music depending on who sells out, and when. [laughs] People can talk about Erykah Badu and Me'shell Ndegeocello, or, I used to call her Me'shell Unpronounceable--I used to call her Unspellable / Unpronounceable actually. Maybe even Unlistenable--I don't like her much. Those kind of people--if you're going to listen to that music, let alone some tuneless, really out-of-key fingernails-on-the-blackboard type like Lauryn Hill, then what you really oughta do is you gotta deal with how good people like Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey are, because they're better at it.

Scott:   Yeah.

Dave:   It's as simple as that. The material may not be always as good, but I tell you something: You give Erykah Badu--who actually I've come to like some--you give her, or Jill Scott, or any of those people the same song as Whitney Houston, Whitney Houston will beat them over the head with it and leave them in the gutter, bloody. There are some other people--there's TLC, who I like a lot, En Vogue, Mary J. Blige--there are people around doing things that I find interesting, but in the end, when I want a contemporary black vocal music thing, I always listen to a hip-hop record, and these days that would start with Outkast. Or Eminem.

Scott:   Any recent teen pop stuff that you like?

Dave:   I like this new Backstreet Boys single, "The Call"?

Scott:   I don't think I've heard that.

Dave:   They sent me the single, and I kind of played it and went, ahh, it's got a good beginning, and then it sort of drifts off, and then I heard the ending of it on the radio today and I thought, that's really quite good. And I guess what it is is it's probably too long, like most records are right now. But I loved New Edition, I found New Kids on the Block much more tolerable than most people did. I like that Maurice Starr thing anyway. So, I kind of--I was soft on New Kids on the Block. I'm trying to think if there's anybody else...

Scott:   Britney? Christina Aguilera sort of stuff, or...

Dave:   Mmm, I haven't heard anything by those people that I admired much, I don't know. This is changing so rapidly there's 15-year old kids I know, who, when they were 14 or 12, were listening to what we're talking about, and are now listening to Ben Harper. There's a whole RANGE of teen things that I don't like very much, although I'll tell you that Ben Harper is one of the more exciting acts that I've seen live in the last ten years.

Scott:   You wrote a lengthy piece in Mojo a few years back on Oasis...

Dave:   Was that piece long? [laughs] The concert was long, it was interminable.

Scott:   I think that piece was done around the time of the Morning Glory album...

Dave:   This is what I know about that piece. It was the first time in England, I was told, that anybody had said 'No' to the little brats. And I found that quite amusing. I don't hate their records; being in the same room with those guys, you know... that one guy has John Lennon pretensions, let me tell you something, that guy, watching Neil or Nigel or whatever the fuck his name is up there on stage--not Liam, Liam's just a garden variety, if he had the nerve he'd turn into that kid from the Pogues--but the other one, the poseur, he ain't Jimmy Page, forget about John Lennon!

Scott:   Well I gathered from the piece that you actually like their music quite a bit.

Dave:   Oh I DO like it, I like the records, but one of the things that history has taught us--or it should've--is that people who make good records don't always, or even often, also make good shows. The show I saw was just atrocious, and it was fundamentally disrespectful to, even contemptuous of, their audience, which I found--I was insulted, I was part of the audience, I was insulted.

Scott:   Does all that stuff ruin their music for you?

Dave:   No, they went and made a couple more records and did that themselves. [laughs] I mean, generally speaking, this is an odd thing about me. I've had very intense friendships with people whose music I can't stand. I mean, I was very close to Harry Chapin. And Harry and I just agreed that we didn't agree about the quality of his music. And I miss him. He was a really good friend. It was funny, there was a record store about a block from my house, and I went down there to get something one day, this was in the summertime, and one of the clerks who knew me said, "Oh well, did you hear that Harry Chapin just died in a car accident out on Long Island? I'm sure that's a great day in rock criticism for you," or something. Totally legitimate thing for him to say. And I literally ran out of the store to go home and find out, could this be true?

So there's that. And then, on the other side, there's--after the Albert Goldman book [Elvis came out I wrote something about it in the end-of-the-year issue in Rolling Stone, and Jerry Schilling, a Memphis Mafia guy who I've known for a while, he called me up and he said, "You're very upset by this, I want you to know one thing: You and Elvis would've really liked one another." I'm not so sure. That ain't all on Elvis, obviously. But it don't make no nevermind, because it's very very rare that you go to meet somebody whose music you admire who's as great as whatever conversation you've been having with them in your head for the past however long you've been listening to them, right? And I remember Patti Smith told me this about meeting Bob Dylan. I asked her what that was like, and she said she wasn't sure what it was like because of this conversation that had been going on that he hadn't been privy to. Or some great Patti way of explaining that--this is around the time of the Rolling thunder tour. And I thought, that's a very valuable thing to know, and it applies all the time. I've been very fortunate in the sense that I like the guys in the Who, you know, Bruce is my friend, Sam Moore from Sam and Dave is my friend. Smokey Robinson has always been a fantastic person to spend time with. These are people who I admire immensely, and to have that click on both levels--that's a fantastic thing. But I don't ask it, and I don't...Peter Wolf of J. Geils is another person I should mention, and Jackson Browne, probably, are two more that I'll feel bad if I don't throw in there, and Steve Earle. But, you know, they're separate experiences. Listening to Sting is not having dinner with Sting. Which [laughs]--dinner is always great, listening is a little more of an up and down experience! I mean, I think I probably like it better than many of my colleagues do, but, you know, there are times when it goes over the top for me quite a bit.

Scott:   One other person I wanted to ask you about was Beck.

Dave:   [pause] Well, what about Beck? The Jeff Beck group changed my life! In so many positive ways! I mean, fantastic--one of the greatest rock bands I ever saw!

Scott:   [laughs] Okay, I like that answer, we'll leave it at that.

Dave:   Beck is, Beck is...

Scott:   I mean, he's doing some neat things...

Dave:   Beck is doing absolutely nothing that black people haven't done before and better. And even that stuff, that he did fairly well, he only did on his first [major label] record [Mellow Gold]--the other records are, you know, are we gonna seriously sit around and compare this guy and the art of oral montage to... forget about black people, compare his art of oral montage to Frank Zappa?! Compare it to the people who made the Public Enemy records? Are you gonna compare Beck to Dr. Dre?! 'Cause that's what you're starting to do when you're starting to deal in that area, and it's just, it's silly.

Scott:   Not to mention the country blues artists, Charley Patton...

Dave:   Well, the country blues artists, what he's doing is, he's not playing country blues music, he's playing country blues records, and that's a separate thing! And what it is, is--it's like Ry Cooder with the Buena Vista Social Club. You can like that record as much as you want to like that record; if you think that it has something to do with Cuban music, you're wrong. And anybody who knows much about Cuban music will be happy to tell you why you're wrong. I don't think anybody who listens to Charley Patton on a regular basis sees Beck as an heir of Charley Patton, do they? It's all people who don't listen to Charley Patton who say that. It's like, people who listen to jump blues records--when the "swing" thing, the jitterbug thing was happening and they called it swing, it was like--and this happens over and over and over again--and people said, what do you think about it, and I said, I think if I went over and picked out any of the 15 or 20 Louis Jordan discs I've got you'd be embarrassed you asked the question. And it's similar, people ask me what I think about these English kids and the so-called 'electronica' stuff, and the answer to that is, go listen to Derrick May's "Innovator" record and tell me--or Kevin Saunderson's double disc greatest hits, which is fantastic--and then we'll have the discussion. But I mean, do I like Moby? Yeah, I like Moby, Moby's a different thing than that, to me. To me, Moby is actually some strange kind of visionary, who I undoubtedly would hate on sight. But--I'm not a vegetarian.

Scott:   One of the Top Five lists on RockCritics.com is "Five Reasons Why You Should Or Shouldn't Download Music From Napster." It didn't actually get much response, but I did want to read you one guy's response...

Dave:   [laughs]

Scott:   It goes: "Because how the hell else could I have gotten my girlfriend her Christmas present this year (which, by the way, I'm still not done with): Dave Marsh's entire list of the 1001 best singles of all time from The Heart of Rock & Soul? Hardest song to find: Skipworth & Turner, 'Can't Give Her Up (12" Mix).'" That was Michelangelo Matos.

Dave:   Another guy I know, Dean Fiorre, from Connecticut, has just finished getting all 1,001. And Skipworth & Turner was hard for him too he said. The one that was hard--he gave me a list just today--and it was also hard for me--was "Apache" by the Incredible Bongo Band. Which I actually had to find on one of those bootleg breakbeats albums they sold to DJs. There's this record store called Downstairs Up that had, like, singles. One end of it was doo-wop store; and in the other end it was the hottest place for DJs to come and buy the new dance records, and they would also buy their breakbeat compilations. [laughs] Musical paradise! Late '80s. So, yeah, well, that is great!

Scott:   Okay, well let me ask you a question about Napster, you're obviously very pro-Napster...

Dave:   I'm not pro-Napster. I'm pro-file sharing. I'm not pro-Napster. Napster's now part of BMG, I'm anti-Napster, in that respect. If you think that the money that BMG takes in from your Napster subscription is going to people who make music, that would be a demented thought.

Scott:   Okay, well, I was going to ask you as a follow-up question anyway, because I'm a bit confused about it--I'm not really sure what's happening with Napster in terms of the BMG affiliation or takeover. What's the scoop with that?

Dave:   They're gonna take the money. They're gonna charge you money for what you've been getting for free, except that you won't have access to as much music if you pay them the money because they'll only have music that's licensed to them, and what they do with the money is an open question only if you think that suddenly record companies are going to start dealing with artists fairly rather than contractually. So, you know, bye-bye Napster and I ain't gonna miss ya! Something else will come up. They can't stop this--look, the FCC and the big broadcasters think they stopped it, right? There's been a pirate radio movement in this country for the past 15 years, and finally, David Kennard at the FCC just decided that the way to deal with this is we may as well license the low power stations because then we can have some hope of controlling them. It wasn't gonna work, and what it did instead was flush out what the National Association of Broadcasters, how much power they really wield, and determined they are NOT to let you hear anything except the nonsense and evil that they spew. And this is going to be similar. They're gonna think that people are going to go and pay them, I don't know, five dollars a week, ten dollars a month, whatever it comes down to, to go and download just the stuff that they have, and then pay another similar fee to somebody else to download just the stuff that they have, and then they're not going to be able to do the things with it that they've been doing with it, like playing it for their friends who are living in Papa New Guinea, which can only be done by transferring the file to another computer since you're in Tacoma, right? And they think that's gonna work--that's not gonna work! It's not going to work! It's not going to happen. It may very well be that while it's not working, and before the society adjusts and accepts that every time your synapses hum a tune record companies are not entitled to get paid--'cause that's my ultimate theory, that they want to put a chip in your head, and every time you remember a song they'll charge you for it.

You know, people are gonna go to jail. There's no doubt in my mind; I could go to jail! I could go to jail for conspiracy or advocacy or something. But people are gonna, people are gonna go to jail. There's already--there's one kid who's been convicted of a felony, there's this other kid out in I think Oklahoma or Kansas who's being brought up on charges now. This is a very serious thing.

Scott:   Well, let me take the question down to its most basic level: Is music something that people should pay for?

Dave:   That's not the most basic question. The most basic question is: how are musicians going to eat and be sheltered and have health care and be taken care of in terms of their material needs. And that question can only be answered when you start to answer it for everybody else. And, yes, those needs must be taken care of--for everyone. And until that question is joined, it's irrelevant whether people should pay for music. I don't know whether people should pay for music or whether people should pay for donuts. All I know is there is a human need to eat. There is a human need to hear music. If you make it, or try to make it, so that only people who have money can eat or listen to music, or make music, and distribute it--'cause it's all part of the same thing, it's a verb not a noun, as Christopher Small said: "Musicing"--then you're criminalizing people for basic human needs. That's not a good idea; that's a really bad idea. And that is, however, what is happening. What is happening is--I mean, this is even before you get to the question of, when you pay the money to BMG what happens to the money? Does it go to this family that was involved with Hitler? Does it go to some group of shareholders that we don't know who they are? Does it go to a bunch of record executives who, by and large, hate music, or would appear to? Or does it go to the people who make the music. and if it doesn't go to the people who make the music why should anybody care whether it gets paid for? In the end, I don't care whether the Sony building is there in the morning; if it isn't, something else will replace it.

Scott:   But the artist has to get some royalties from somewhere, or is...

Dave:   That's not the way the system is set up now. The way the system is set up now is the "creator" of the work is the copyright owner, and the copyright owner in the vast, vast majority of cases, I'd say, in recorded music--more than 90% of cases; a lot more--is a corporation, which, even if it has an underlying contract requiring it to pay royalties is very likely not paying them, and even if it is paying them it's probably not paying them based on an accurate count. Nobody gets to audit at the pressing plant. Nobody in the history of recorded music has ever been allowed to audit at the point of production, which means that all audits are inherently flawed. It's like the IRS just saying, okay, well if you give me all your W2s I'll take it for granted, with every single human being in the United States, that you had no other income. The IRS will not DO that. The reason the IRS will not do that is because the IRS is not stupid. [laughs] So that's even if you're Madonna. Even if you're Michael Jackson and supposedly has a 50/50 deal: you don't know how many records were pressed. Because believe me, if Sony had caved on that with Michael, or if Time-Warner had caved on that with Madonna, there would be major repercussions in the sense that a lot of artists would now be auditing at the pressing plant. They won't let you do it. Can you think of a reason other than self-initiated piracy that they won't let you do it? You should go pass out a questionnaire sometime at the gates of a record pressing plant, see what kind of phone calls you get. They're terrified if you're a union organizer, and more terrified if you want to know about working conditions from a journalistic point of view.

So, the question isn't whether people should pay money for music; the question is whether the present setup is rational, and the answer is, no it isn't. And the further question is, should we set up a whole bunch of systems in the name of protecting creative people that enshrine, more or less permanently, the present setup, and the answer is no we should not! And listen, my wife works in the record industry. My family's income mainly isn't from rock criticism, right? I said I didn't care whether the Sony building wasn't there, right? All human beings have a right to eat and shelter and transportation and health care and all of those things, and that includes Tommy Mottola and Ahmet Ertegun and everybody. Everybody. So, I didn't say I hope the people who run Sony aren't there tomorrow, I hope they are there. Some of them actually love music--actually, Tommy would be one--and I hope they are able to spend their whole life working with what they love. I feel very privileged that I've been able to do it. On the other hand, this is a whole separate question than that. Part of the answer is as long as the social setup remains this complex, yes, you're going to pay for music. But it may very well be that most of the people who are asking that question think that they are getting network TV for free. [laughs] Or that they get radio broadcasts for free: not in America they don't! And actually, even if it weren't an advertising system then they'd be directly paying taxes for it, so nobody gets ANYthing for free.

Scott:   Okay, talk a little bit about editors. I want to know who's the best editor you ever worked for--at a magazine.

Dave:   Well, three or four people come to mind. Let me just sort of take a little moment here because I don't want to leave anybody out. I'll give you a handful of people that I've learned a tremendous amount from in terms of their line editing--you know, their actual editing of text --the assignment part is a whole other thing, and a much thornier issue. People who come to mind are Bob Christgau, Marianne Partridge, Jann Wenner, and Barbara Downey--now Barbara Landau.

Scott:   What makes a really good editor?

Dave:   Well this is what I try to do; this is my theory about it, and different people deal with this in different ways and I would not say that all of the people, with the exception of Christgau, and maybe Marianne on a good day--this is not what Barbara and Jon [Landau] and half of Marianne were after--but what I'm after and what I think Bob's always after, and what I think even Jann's sometimes after is to take something that a writer has done and make sure that the writer has gotten the most out of that that they can. Barbara Nellis, my editor at Playboy, I should also not fail to mention because she can be very good... It's to make sure that the writer is saying as clearly and effectively and, hmmm, whatever that x-factor is, let's say entertainingly, grippingly, however you want to put it, as possible what it is they have to say. There are other things--and this happens a lot at Rolling Stone, where it was sort of like, there were other agendas about what people wanted said, or what people wanted not said, and that to me is a hallmark of... you can't call it bad editing, to me that's just an approach I don't think very much of. It's both the most dreadful process and the greatest one.

Scott:   So Christgau's one of the great editors...

Dave:   Oh Christgau's great, I mean, fantastic. Tremendous insight into what you're trying to say, really good ideas about what you might do, he'll spot holes in your thinking--his sense of other people's language is not nearly so--at least when I worked with him, which is a long time ago--not nearly so insular as his own writing has become, or at least as I think it's become. No, he's a fantastic editor, just an absolutely fantastic editor.

Scott:   Okay, but you do have--I'm not looking for you to slag some of your contemporaries or whatever, but you obviously have some problems with Christgau. You did that piece on the Pazz & Jop poll a few years ago.

Dave:   Oh I have tremendous problems. I think I basically--first of all, I think he hates rock 'n' roll. I don't even think he makes much of a secret about it. If you actually look at his reviews, he doesn't like rock bands. He said some miserably--I can't think of a better way to put it but bigoted things about, for instance, the heavy metal audience. And I think he's promoted a fairly self-aggrandizing idea of what rock criticism oughta be. So, yeah, I disagree with all those things, and there's no reason to make a secret of it. And he carries on, and I carry on, and it doesn't make much difference to the clock ticking.

Scott:   One last question, it's kind of a pretentious one. Obviously I know you hated Clinton, and I'm sure you're probably happy that he's out of there, so I'm just wondering if you think that an administration as conservative as Bush's will have any effect on pop music over the next four years--or what kind of effect will it have?

Dave:   Well, in this country, all any government, as presently constituted, can do by getting involved in any way, shape, or form with culture, is harm it. Either by narrowing its ideas--its range of ideas--or by actively stepping in to repress it, and I would expect that Ashcroft will clamp down, particularly since he seems to be, you know, the poster boy for sexual repression. I would expect him to clamp down as hard as he knows how on all parts of the entertainment industry that he finds to be involved in sexual expression, and I would expect that to include the parts of rock that intersect with the porn industry, because I think the porn industry will come very very quickly under a real shelling from this administration--that would be my guess. It is a guess.

If there was anything good about the Clinton administration's relationship to the arts, and there wasn't much, it was that after the Sister Souljah crisis, and when Clinton wasn't in need of some much weaker individual to kick, they pretty much let it alone. But, the thing you have to remember is, it wasn't going to be Al Gore/Joe Lieberman's approach--hell, I don't think it would've been Ralph Nader's approach, and I was on Ralph's committee [laughs]--but the Gore/Lieberman people I think would've been worse, in effect, because they were clearly theocrats as much as Ashcroft and Bush are. That was made very explicit at the beginning of the campaign--they were totally intolerant of the entertainment industry and what people who don't agree with the government have to say. They've been very clear about that. So, really, in the end, I think that the biggest difference is that people will fight Ashcroft and Bush, and they wouldn't have fought Gore and Lieberman--they would've just let them do whatever they wanted, and you would've had to shut up because otherwise... you might get Bush! Well now you got Bush, deal with it.

But I also don't think that--it's like trying to stop file-sharing. You're not gonna be able to stop the adult movie industry, you're not gonna be able to stop Marilyn Manson--and if you do, something just like him, only more extreme, will pop up--you're not gonna be able to get rid of Eminem, and ditto if you do. When people say you can't legislate morality, what that means isn't that you can't pass laws against morality, it means that the laws don't work. So they can do whatever they want to do, but that's an area that the government can't win. They can make things very difficult for certain people, and in my opinion they will, but I would be surprised if they were able to achieve very much. But, you know, fear will do. And certainly the spectacle of seeing all these performers, particularly in popular music, race off for the Democratic God Squad and do all that work for them, that was so putrid I'm lucky I survived this election just on a nausea level alone. And the good thing is, Tipper Gore in private life--I like that. Let her go raise more children badly if she must.

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