Legendary Music Journalist Lisa Robinson

00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkin. This is broken record liner notes for the digital age. I'm justin Richmondton. Pioneering rock journalist Lisa Robinson will never run out of stories. Over the past forty years, she's interviewed everyone from John Lennon to Lady Gaga, to Jay Z and Emineh. She even sat down with an eleven year old Michael Jackson years before he became the King of Pop. Lisa's career started in the nineteen seventies when she embedded on massive world tours with led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones. In the decades since, she's partied with Bowie, dined with Beyonce, and talked Through the Night with Joni Mitchell. And today's interview, Rick Rubin reminisces with Lisa, an old friend about her storied career. She has a lot to say about everything, including how she and her husband, music producer Richard Robinson, practically lived at CBGB's in the mid seventies, and why she felt compelled to write her latest book, called Nobody Ever Asked Me About the Girls, which features excerpts from interviews she's done over the years with Bette Midler, Rihanna Adele, Janelle Mooney, Stevie Nicks, and so many more. Here's Rick Rubin and Lisa Robinson. How are you Rick? I miss you? I miss you too. How are you feeling? Do you see where I'm sitting in front of what do we sit? What is it? That is a portion of my original cassettes and my CDs? The Richard made backup copies of five thousand hours of digitized interviews. That is only a portion, that's not a virtual background, that's real in there are the John Lennon, Michael Jackson, Led Zeppelin, Adele, Rihanna Beyonce, I mean, Rommi, Madley, Croft, King, Princess, everybody from nineteen seventy two to the present day. And that is only a portion of them. And Richard also put it on a computer. We backed it up on another computer. I backed it up on three external hard drives that are in three separate secure locations. And I just want to get rid of all of it. Richard swear to god, I have four storage spaces that I have been storing all of this shit. Not my tapes, but posters and memorabilion t shirts and Annie's pictures and Bob Bruin's pictures and original photos from cream rock scene, hit Parador four storage spaces fifty thousand dollars a year for over twenty years. So that's over a million point three that I've invested into holding on to all this crap. And then I have more in my house, more in my office across the street, and every rock book that ever has been published about popular music, the blues hip hop that I'm still holding on to all this, I mean, eight thousand vinyl LPs. It's ridiculous. This is my life. What's your first memory of music? Growing up? Sneaking out of my house at the age of twelve to go Stee Colonious Monk at the five Spot. Literally growing up in Manhattan, how did you know to go? Because my parents were left wing Jewish intellectuals, so we grew up listening to like What He Got three and Lead Bailly and Pete Seeger and sort of left wing music. And I started listening to jazz under the covers, and I would here Mars Davis, Dilonious Monk, John Coltrane, and it just sounded like another sexy world down there, and so I knew they were performing in New York in the Village Van Garden five Spot and I just snuck out of my house to twelve, probably looking like a fool maker up black dresses, high heels, hair on the top of my head. I don't know how I got into these places, but I did. And I remember seeing Monk at the five Spot. I'm just seeing Miles Davis and John Caltrane, all these people. And then I became a huge Rolling Stones fan. I just loved them. I didn't like the Beatles that much. I thought they were too white or I don't know, too cute, whereas the Stones to me, were sexier. And I write about this. They're one of the few things that I mentioned about men in my new book, which is called Nobody Ever Asked Me about the Girls, because nobody ever asked me about the girls. You know, over the past forty years, everyone would say to me, what's John Lennon really like, what's Michael Jackson really like? What's David Bowie really like? What's m and M like, what's Jay Z like? And you know, people ask you about the people that you've worked with. In my case, it was people I interviewed, and no he ever asked me about the girls. And at some point I heard Tina Turner on Richard's radio show on wn WFM, and it just drove I heard Navid Staples, Tina Turner, all this black music, irma Franklin doing Piece of My Heart, which I thought and he thought was better than Jonas Joplin, and that just changed my life because I met him three months later, we got married, and it kind of opened a door to a career that he sort of invented. And I barged through my whole first personal experience with popular music or interviewing people as a job. Richard sent me to interview Tommy James, of Tommy James and the Chantels of Crimson and Clover and all that. He was so coaked up and sweating and he had a shag short truce rug. I'll never forget. You could barely open the door to get into the apartment. And this was my first interview ever that I did. I probably still have to tape somewhere here. And I was lucky and that he was one of the very few evolved men who mentored me and encouraged my whole career. And I just barged through that door. He opened it. I barged through it. What do you remember about Tommy James. Just what I told you, he was coked up. He made very little sense. I mean, actually he was allegedly coked up. I don't want to get sued. He just seemed weird. I don't think i'd ever seen anybody on cocaine. I mean since then, of course I am, but I wasn't used to be babbling in the sweating and that was probably one of the main reasons that I never did it once in my whole life, because I've been around so many bands who indulged in cocaine, and I talk enough as it is, so I didn't need to have any further encouragement. I just thought it was always very sleazy, and probably it dates to that initial occasion. Did you listen to his music before you interviewed him? No, I mean I knew about Crimson and Clover, But this is the other thing, you know. I mean, you know, you can create a vibe with someone without ever losting to their music. I mean, my whole thing about interviewing people is I do like to know everything about them, and I have researched everybody, and I listened to every single thing they've ever done. Now I read every interview they've ever done, and then I throw it all away and I just like have it in my head and I go in and it takes a completely different term. The conversation just goes elsewhere, because if you're just talking to people like people, and I've always been interested in people's stories, So I managed to get them to say things to me. Like everybody who I've been talking to for the book keep saying, how did you get these women to tell you all these things that they never told anyone else. The reason I got these women to open up to me, I think was number one. I walked into the room with a certain history, just like you have. You know, they know your work, they know what you've done. When I met Gaga for the first time, she carried on like, you knew Freddie Mercury, you know David Bowie, you knew John Lennon, And so that was an icebreaker right there. And also we had a bottle of wine waiting, and she worked in the room in full Gaga apparition, black lace katsuit, veil covering her face, and she said, are we going to drink? And I said, yeah, but you've got to lift the veil. I mean literally and figuratively, so that was just an unbelievable connection. We were true New York City girls born in the same hospital many years apart. And I just always like to know a lot about the person, but not ask him about that stuff. I just see where the conversation goes. What was the first writing job you had, like an assignment? Was Tommy James the first one? No, I didn't write that up. I don't know what we did with that. I think Richard used whatever coherent quotes he could find. Maybe he used for his syndicated radio show. And he had a little column in a tiny English paper called Disk and Music Echo, and he didn't want to write that column anymore, and he said you write it. And I said, I don't know how to write, and he said, yes, you do. You know how to talk, you know how to write. So I started to write this little column about stuff that was happening in New York. Actually, prior to that, I had written an anonymous gossip sheet which would be equivalent to a blog today, and I called it The Pop Wire Service, and I typed it out on an actual typewriter. I mimiographed it on colored paper. I didn't put a ballline on it. And I sent it to everyone in the music business. Richard knew all of him because he had been working in this business for a few years, and so people started to buzz about it, like who is writing this thing? And how do they know what's going on? And who's going out with you and what's happening In retrospect, it was literally like maybe not as sleazy, but it was a little tmzsh kind of access Hollywood for the day. But anyway, he gave me this column and disco music Deco. I took it over and led Zeppelin, who was considered a heavy metal cheesy heavy metal band in America, saw this column and they were getting terrible, terrible press in America. John Mendelssohn and Rolling Stone. I remember it to this day, and so does Robert Plant. I'd assure you. He wrote about the lemon song that Robert Plants sings, not it's only a dog can hear, And boy, I'm blessed my memory. And so led Zeppelin saw this kind of puff piecy, kind of pleasant, non judgmental, non reviewing, non critical column in disk in Music Echo, and they want a good press in England so their parents would see it because they were getting terrible press in America, so I was asked to go see them. I went to see them in Jacksonville, Florida at a stadium. I mean, they were selling at stadiums, but they were critically getting panned. And the minute I saw them perform, I just thought they were majistic. I just thought they were amazing. I thought they combined hard rock, blues, you know, Eastern music, everything. And so then they invited me to go interview them in New Orleans, and I'd never been there, and so I went and I interviewed them on the roof of the Royal Orleans Hotel, and I talked to Jimmy Page about Money Waters and Hallam Wolfen, Elmore James and Willie Dixon, who they ripped off. And I talked to Robert Plant about incredible spring band in Kaleidoscope and Fairpool Convention in Joni Mitchell, and they were they couldn't believe that a young woman knew about any of these people. And as a result, I went on five doors with them and I thought they were amazing and fantastic. And now here we are, however, many years later, at forty eight whatever, and they're considered one of the greatest bands of all time, but I promised you that when I did my first column on them, they were not. And then I started writing about them for Cream Magazine, and I wrote about Bowie for Cream Magazine, and I became the American editor of the New Music Express in England. I moved up from Disk and Music Echo to that, and then Jagger saw that I was writing all this stuff about Zeppelin that was still favorable, and it was around nineteen seventy four, and he thought he was a dinosaur then because CBGBs was happening and the sex pistols in the Clash and buzz cut, that was all happening in England. And I had one foot in this private plane all access passed backstage Zeppelin in the Stones world, and the other foot every night I was in New York and CBGVS standing in two inches of beer or urine, oh god knows what. And Richard and I just made Roxcene Magazine, which was the house organ along with Pump Magazine of that world. And that was when I first saw the Ramones and Patty Smiths and television and talking ads in Bondi and that just blew me away. And so Jagger thought, well, she knows what's happening in this world, and he invited me on the seventy five Stones tour, and I had an amazing gig because they paid me to be a consultant to tell him who to talk to in the press. But I also could write about them. There was no such thing that a conflict of interest, you know, So I did both. And being on that kind of tour, being in those kind of hotels with the room service and everything you'd want available to you, and then going with Patti Smith in a van for seventeen hours or whatever it took to get somewhere, I understood this world for women, and I understood what it's like for women that's different than men, because women did not pick up boys on the road the way guys did. Women did not do drugs the same way. I mean, yes they did drugs, but they didn't have a whole chapter about drugs and sex, and another one on sex in my book. But it's like Debbie Harry told me she could not ask her tour manager to go into the audience and pick out the ten cutest boys, like David Lee Roth would have his tour manager go in and pick out the ten cutest girls to meet him, and I use that word advisably meet quotes around that. But having gone on the Zeppelin and the Stones tour, I then got a syndicate, a column, I got a syndicated radio show, I went on cable television, and I don't know, it's just that my reputation for being trustworthy because if something was off the record, it was off the record, and I was not a critic, and people like that, and so then of course I was accused of writing puff pieces. But basically I didn't really care because I was a fan. I was a music fan, and that continues to this day. Talk about CBGB's a little bit. So you saw the Ramunds Patti Smith television talking heads. Did it feel like the music was of a collection or was it more like these are just a bunch of different interesting artists playing in the same place. Yeah, it was a bunch of different interesting artists playing in the same place, and unfortunately they got labeled as all being part of a New York punk scene and they all hated that. Frankly, Ramones didn't mind it so much because they had more of that image or being punks. I thought television was the best band of all of them, and as a result, of course, they were the least commercially successful. Just like you know, Tomderlane thought he was John Caldrane or Pink Floor. I mean, he didn't think he was a punk. Blondie started out as a pop art project. They thought it would be funny to sort of emulate a pop band with a cute girls singer, and that was Chris Stein and Debbie Harry's whole vision for that band. And then they had some hits and then they turned into like a big pop band, but they did some very cool things because Debbie brought fab five Freddie into it and then Raptures. She brought rap sort of to the mainstream a little bit at that point in the seven and these, even though it really wasn't happening in a larger way, I mean cool Hirk started in I don't know what year, it was maybe a little later seventy eight, but in CBGB's Patty was the first woman that like looked like Keith Richards or Bob Dylan, two guys she idolized. But she would punch the air and kind of combine poetry with music, and it was just incredibly liberating and exciting to see a woman do this. And of course the New York Dolls and Mercer Street was even before that. And I thought David Johansson at that time was probably the best rock and roll performer I ever saw, and I still hope that. I think he's much better than Jagger. He was incredibly witty, he was really really funny and smart, and Johnny Thunders was a great sloppy blues rock guitarist, and so CBS was just kind of our home. We went there every single night. Honestly, I think I spent the entire winter of nineteen seventy four there. Every single night we'd stayed till the end of every performance. New York was so different than I mean, it was a dump, but as I've written, it was our dump. And you know, they served hamburgers on paper plates with potato chips. I now cannot believe I ate anything in there. The bathroom downstairs was grotesque. I mean, Helly's dog was at the front desk all the time, slobbery. It was just kind of a crazy place, never to be replicated, never. And the thing is, every city has some place like this. I'm sure, I'm sure, Seattle did London, you know, the cavern in Liverpool whatever. In retrospect, it's taken on this mythic quality, but when you're living it, it doesn't feel like that. It's just someplace you go and you enjoy the music and your friends with all the people. And I would dread Bob growing around by the nape of the neck to take pictures, and then we put them in Rock Scene, and then some people would start showing up, like Paul Simon slumming, or Clive Davis looking to sign someone, or seymour Stein looking to sign someone, and I would always be posing with anybody, and then when the mud Club happened, Bowie would show up there. So it was always the rock scene, frankly was a shameless self promotional vehicle for me, and so they had always Richard would like these very snarky captions, like a rare smiling photo of Lisa with David Bowie, because it'd be like thirty rare smiling photos of me in every issue. We were going to CBGB's every night. When I first heard the Ramones Rick, I couldn't believe their songs were all under three minutes. I thought everybody else proll them some crazy pump I thought sounded like the Beach Boys on speed. We'll be back with more from Lisa Robinson In just a moment, We're back with Rick Rubin and Lisa Robinson, who tells the story of a funny run in with Eminem and his manager Paul Rosenberg backstage at S ANDL. Of all the bands you ever saw, the first time you saw the Ramons having never heard them before, was that the most stunning first impression of any band? Now the New York Dolls, I think was Actually, I mean, you also have to understand anything I would tell you, Like everybody always asked me, Okay, who are the five best female performers you ever saw? And I would start with Bette Midler. Then I'd go to Adele maybe, or Tina Turner or Steven Anything would be an incomplete list, and anything could change on a day to day basis, because I've interviewed hundreds and hundreds of women and probably zens of men, and I can't say that there was one seminal moment, because every time something it turned me on or got me excited, that time was the best time for that thing. You know, It's a series of steps like it took me a long time to get into hip hop, and Jimmy, I having kept pushing and pushing Eminem, You've got to do a story in Vanity Fair on Eminem, and I kept saying, no, I don't know. Slim as Tady seems a little jokey to me. I don't know. I just I like that to drain Tupac better. And I just California. And then finally I saw Eminem perform and it was like he took my breath away. And then, of course it took me two years to get to interview him, and then I did an unbelievable interview with him, three and a half hours, crazy, lucid, brilliant. Anyway, when I saw him again that stage of SNL and my book was almost coming out, there goes Gravity, and Paul said Marshall, Lisa wrote a book and there's a whole chapter about you. And he looked at me and he went, who else are there chapters on? And I said, Rolling Stones, let's Steppelin, John Lennon, Michael Jackson, David And he goes, oh, that's great company. And Paul said, Lisa, tell Marshall the title of the book and I said, there goes Gravity, and for one minute it was like he wasn't sure that that was his line, and then there was recognition that it was from Lose Yourself and he went, oh, thank you. When I went, no, thank you, I mean you saved my ass with that title. I couldn't come up with one, and that was perfect. And then I said, you don't remember talking to me in two thousand and six, do you? You were stoned then, right, and he said probably. And I said I was driven to Detroit because I'd rather be in a car for eleven hours than on a plane for eleven minutes. And I went to his studio in Detroit and I told him, I said, and we did a three and a half hour interview. You don't remember it. I said, you were mad because they put cheese on your hamburger and you didn't want sprite, you wanted mountain dew and blah blah blah with the food order and I remembered all this stuff about it, and he went, wow, you have a good memory. I don't. And you know that was another AHA kind of moment listening to him, same with jay Z. Absolutely blown away by jay Z. And then when I did him for the cover of Vanity Fair. I mean, Moolly spent days together and every single time I saw him perform, I just couldn't take my eyes off of him. And then like I went on one tour with him where Justin Timberlake opened one show and Jay opened another and they alternated. And I can always tell when something really is getting to me because I never go backstage to refill the glass of wine, so I waited it was our bathroom break, and I would do that during Justin Timberlake, never Jay. So you know, there are just people that leave me cold, mostly pop stars, and then there are people that just to this day, when I see Stevie Nixon Lance Light, I cried. Jeremy Mitchell I was always terrified of because I heard she was nuts and I heard she was difficult and hated journalists. And when we did a cover of Vanity Fair, Annie used to do them in panels, like one panel at a time, and one year, I think it was two thousand and one, I was determined to get everyone in the room at the same time, and I worked eight months with the help of Jimmy Ivan who would send some people there. And so that year I got everyone in the room at the same time. And I think that cover was Beyonce Bowie, Jule Beck, Stevie Wonder, Johnny Mitchell, Matt Swell, Wins to Find Annie, jay Z, Missy Elliott, and Chris Cornell another one who's a sad loss. So they were all lined up. But I had never met every other person on that cover I knew, except I've never met Johnnie, and I wanted to go into Annie's studio knowing everyone, or at least not having to say hello to them for the first time. So I told her makeup artist who was a mutual friend. He's also deceased now, Paul Starr, I really want to meet Johnny. Can I go to the Carlisle and just have one drink with her? She was staying at the Carlisle. You could smoke in the lobby of the Carlisle at that time, and Joanie, of course was a chain smoker. Is not anymore, I don't think, But so he said, well, she'll see you for like fifteen minutes. It was like getting an audience, and within the first five minutes. I don't know how I managed to get this in, but I thought this is either gonna be some thing she like, or she'll get up and walk away. And I just said that I thought my Donna ruined the culture. And she got up and she hugged me and we sat there for about four hours, went through two bottles of wine, she smoked god knows how many packs of cigarettes, and that went on until whatever four in the morning. But you know, there's people that still kind of turned me on, and I get interested and excited about I love a lot of the stuff Beyonce is doing. I think she's kind of exceeded. You know. You and I have talked about her in the past, and when she was in Destiny's Chop, she was a pop star and I wasn't that interested in her or them, And then I interviewed her, and then I've been at parties with her, and I've seen sides of her that have absolutely impressed me with her discipline. Like I write in the book that the first time I ever interviewed her, we ordered a pizza and she had one slice. I can't imagine ever having one slice of a pizza. And I would say to her, you're only gonna have one slice, I'm gonna eat the whole rest of it, And she say it's part of my job. And then I was at a party with her once where they brought us a brownie to the table and she cut it into four small pieces, and she had one piece, and I just thought, I cannot believe the discipline of this woman. But then as I got to know her a little bit more, and I saw her a little more with Jay, and she took a lot of vacations and she started living her life more and then also evolving more as an artist. But when I scare her sing love on Top, to me, that's like an R and B Gospel of Motown kind of vibe. And then I've been in parties with her where she can just sing along to any OJ song or any Michael Jackson song. And as Jay said, she's a student of the game. She knows every song has ever been done. So you're asking me, was seeing the Romans like the greatest experience in my life? There have been about fifty two one hundred greatest experiences of my life. Considering all of the artists you've talked to over the years, could you say that there's any commonality between them versus the other people you come in contact with in your life. Well, there's a lot of differences between the male and the female artists. First of all, musicians are always worried they're not going to be able to write the next song or the right album. But the difference with musicians is every single one of them has said the same thing to me in that the songs just get plucked out of the air. We don't know where they come from. I mean everyone from Keith Richards to Lady Gaga, who told me that she was watching the hurt Locker, the movie in Australia, and all of a sudden, Born this Way came to her and she ran out and she wrote it in three minutes. Keith Richards told me he woke up one morning and he had recorded Satisfaction on his tape recorder the night before. I mean, they all say that some people probably labor more than others, but musicians have a lot of things in common. They fight with a record company more than writers fight with publishers. The women have had more problems with male record executives than the men in terms of occasional sexual harassment. Cheryl Kroges told me the other day that she thinks there's a lot she had a lot of sexual harassment when she was touring with Michael Jackson and Frank de Leo, who's since deceased. But in my book, I have a whole chapter on abuse, everything from Fiona Apple and Torreamo's talking about rape to Lady Gaga other women talking about more subtle forms of abuse. Women have the big problem of juggling home versus career, and that ideal with in a chapter called motherhood because I never wanted to have children. But the only woman that I've talked to who said she never wanted children and didn't regret it was Dolly Parton. Stevie Nick said that she kind of regrets never having a child, but she knew she couldn't do it or would have broken a fleet with Mac because Lindsey Buckingham, even after they broke up as a couple, she could never bring boyfriends around Fleetwood Mac, and she could never have a child. Men, now, I suppose are more engaged with their children. You know, the Home Meet Too movement has brought a lot of this to like. But I promised to led Zeppelin in the seventies traveling with their wives at home with their children and their farms in England or Wales. It was a completely different story. But commonality with women is very, very obvious, and that's what I wrote a whole book about it, because all these rich, famous women have the same problems that all women have. If you want a career, it's really hard. And even if you have a lot of help, if you're not with that child, you're worrying what's going on with the child, because the women are the caretakers. If a child falls and a concrete street, he yells for his mother. It's just biological, you know. So Gwen Stefani couldn't keep her marriage going. She had a more successful career than her husband at the time, so that fell apart. Bonnie Ray told me she couldn't stay married because everybody called her husband mister Bonnie Ray. I mean, Realna has always said in length to me in this book, I'm always suspicious of people who want to be with me or want to sleep with me. What are their motives? You know? And I can't just pick up a guy and have a fun night and you know, great ride and he wakes up the next day with a great story and I wake up feeling my ship, you know. Adele told me at the time she was very happily married. Her husband was older than she was. He understood her career, he wasn't threatened by it. And I don't really know the reasons why that wasn't able to last. But it's just tough. It's tough for women musicians. We'll be right back with Lisa Robinson. After this quick break, We're back with the rest of Rick's conversation with Lisa Robinson. Tell the story of seeing the Ramans and getting Sire involved. I don't really know if I got Seymour involved, or the fact that we wrote about them very early on and put pictures of them in Rocksone. But when I saw them, I just was blown away. And so I don't really remember the steps to which Seymour sign them. I don't know that it was that easy for the Ramones to get a record deal. I'm not sure everybody got it. I mean, I know how much they meant to you and mean to you, and I know you think that they were the greatest band the bull time if you had to pick one, but I can't believe you would really do that. Top three, Top three really, Okay, So the Beatles, Remans and who has the clash no, maybe like Simon and Garfunkel. Oh, for God's sakes, really, yeah, I really like the doors too. I like the doors too. I see I didn't like their doors. I just thought the doors were like kind of a college band, you know. I just thought it was a bit much. I just thought, Jim, that was that hull stick, you know, I'm going on. And Glorius Davers, who was the editor of sixteen magazine, had an affair with Jim, and she said he used to call her and say, come over to the Chelsea Hotel. I'm about to kill myself for some crazy thing like that. They're both dead now, so I don't know if this is exactly what happened, but this is how I remember it, so I'll stick to this story. And she said one night, Jim Calder And said I'm having a really bad trip. You have to come over. You have to come over. And she said, oh, Jim, really, And she said, yes, You've got to come over right now. And Gloria was the most glamorous woman. She was a model in the fifties. She went out with Lenny Bruce and she went over to Chelsea. The door to his room is open. She walked in the room. She goes Jim. Jim. She goes in the bathroom. She doesn't see him. She thinks he just left, so she leaves. She goes home. She's home ten minutes. Phone rings, She picks it up. It's Jim on the other line. You didn't look under the bed. That's one Jim Morrison. Sorry, what did you say? The Beatles, the Ramones, Simon and Garfuncle, and the Doors. You've worked with so many more fabulous people than that. I mean, Johnny Cash, Leonard Come, Trent Resner, Adele Eminem jay Z. I mean, I could go on and on and on. Surely you're more sophisticated than both Simon and Garfunnel and the Doors. Really, I don't know. I couldn't pick three top bands. I wouldn't know where to begin. Anyway, anything is incomplete list right, and it always it's always changing. If it would change depending on what I listened to, you know, it changes to me depending on who I'm talking to, depending on the day, depending on my mode, and depending it's almost hourly. I could tell you top ten performances I've seen over forty eight years, which would include Bob Marley at the Roxy. What were you doing in California for the Roxy show with the Stones in nineteen seventy five, and they closed down the balcony for us. So Annie went with her cameras, the whole band went. I went and we I'm also Bob Morley at the Academy Music and I will or I went with Richard and he jumped up standing ovation at the end, and I never saw him that outward about something. He was very Blaise Richard and jaded in a way and sort of calm, but he was so excited he jumped up. But I was shocked, but at any rate, So we were at the Rock Season nineteen seventy five in the summer, must have been July or August. I take the whobod more Lisa, and we laid out these shots of tequila along under the banister of the balcony, and Annie and I must have each had about ten shots of tequila. And I never drank tequila before, and I was sick. It's like mescal, and I mean I was violently ill to the entire next twenty four hours. When I got back to the hotel and Annie lost her cameras. She left them there. She didn't get her cameras back, but I had the tape of the performance, so it was worth it. But that was one of the greatest performances I've ever seen. Now as an interview, I cannot say brow Molly was a great interview because we did a phoner and I could barely understand half of what he said. Talk about the last book a little bit in There goes Gravity. I only had one chapter about a woman, and that was Lady Gerger. For some reason, I had just been interviewing her for Vanity Fair Cover Stories, and I was so taken with her because she was a phenomenon at the time, and yet I just thought she was adorable and grounded. And I met her parents and I had dinner there, and she kept telling me about her parents in their house, and she said, oh, I'll have to take you there sometime. And I kept thinking, though, she'll wait and take Oprah there, you know, we'll never do it. But she came through and we did it. And we also walked around the Lower East Side and anybody that came up to her on the street she signed an autograph and she was just told me the doorway she wasn't just to sit in and take drugs with and she was just incredibly open with me. So in a book that was full of a chapter led Zeppelin, in my five Doors with Them chapter about the Stones, and mostly my nineteen seventy five forty with Them. Michael Jackson, who I knew from when he was eleven years old and so he stopped speaking at the press. But when I met him when he was eleven, he was the most adorable, outgoing, cute child, and I looked so cute. In the picture of me and him in that book, I'm holding my unlock tape recorder up. We're both looking at the camera. He's eleven, I look like fourteen. And in my new book about the Girls, I have a picture of a five year old Janet Jackson with her back to the camera with braids because she didn't want to be photographed. But when I met Michael, he was so adorable that day and talented and running around the house showing me the animals sort of dancing at the pool. And I remember calling Fran and saying, this kid is going to be the greatest live entertainer ever, And she said, how could you possibly know that he's a loved And I said, just trust me. He's going to be amazing. I just know it. And so there was a chapter on Michael Jackson in which I included the questionnaire he filled out when we had a magazine called Rock and Soul, and it was what is your nickname? He felt this out in his own handwriting. I think he was twelve at the time, Amy, And what is your nickname? And he wrote Niger and he crossed that out, and then he wrote the nose, and then I think there's a question what are your interesting? He wrote, children, all kinds, all times. And I have kept that questionnaire in the safety deposit box for years until I finally thought enough, already, I don't want to pay for the safety deposita box as well as the four storage spaces, so I have that hidden in a secure location as well. But then there's a chapter on the whole CBGB's and David Bowie and mcclash and Lou and Chrissy Hynd and Patti Smith, and chapter on John Lennon because I did so many hours of tape with him and Yoko. I mean, the way I got to John, to be honest, was through Yoko. I heard Yoko's music, and unlike everybody else, at that time. I heard the B fifty twos, I heard punk rock, I heard weird shit. But I had also grown up going to the Living Theater and you know La Mama and all that kind of weird performance are. I knew Yoko a little bit, but not much, and I wrote something nice about her in my column at the time in the New York Post. And then she decreed that okay, I could be John. So I went to meet them both do an interview with her about her album in her Bank Street apartment, which was just totally unassuming apartment on like one floor below the main street to just go down a few steps. There was no security there, nothing. This was I when they first moved to New York, before he got into the whole immigration ship. And I sat in the interviewed Yoko for a long time, and then when we were finished, she brought John out, As I wrote in one of the books, like Dessert, So she brought him out, and he was so excited, like he was so thrilled that someone was a paying attention to Yoko and that it was a woman. And then we both agreed that she had been the victim of racist, misogynistic stuff. They know It's interesting because, like with Adell, when I first talked to Adele, she was already huge star. But we were in the car five minutes she driving. Within five minutes, she started talking to me about postpartum depression after the birth of her son. And I know that she had wanted to talk about this, but I also knew that she was holding off talking about it until she talked to a woman, because every interviewer she had done a fire It was with these men and fashion magazines and about clothes. And so that's why when people ask me, the women relate to you differently, Yeah, of course they do, because I've gone through some of the same misogynistic shit at any rate, not racist as in Yoko's instance, but and jealousy and Beatles fans making her this villain and all that nonsense. Anyway, John was just so happy that I was talking to Yoko, understanding Yoko, writing about Yoko, and then he just talked, talked, and we got along so great, and he was so funny and so witty and just so sarcastic and so clever. And then as the years went on and I would interview him more, and I was one of the few that she would let into the house Jako, and when he went back home, as he put it, between seventy five and eighty, I was there. I would interview him. I also interviewed him during his lost weekend, not in California when he was nuts, but when he was living with May Peing over on forty nine Street, when he did Walls and Bridges. In fact, he signed an ascetate to me, which I have somewhere in the midst of my eight thousand vinyl albums, which I gotta sell them to someone. Q Tip came here to look at them, and he said he was sending somebody back the following week to appraise all of them. And I think it's great. He'll find John Lennon signed Assitate because Richard and I don't remember where we put it. That was two and a half years ago on so many and on a mere quest. Love told me, I want to buy your albums. I want to buy them for my storage in Philadelphia, blah blah blah, and I said, okay, amir, come whenever you want. Four years ago it was still waiting anyway, So I'm signed an ascitate to Wilson Bridges and called me the next day after we did the interview, and he said, you know, we were talking about the Beatles convention. He would always call me to go, it's me John Beatles, and I don't you have to say Beatles, even though I know it's a joke. But I don't know anyone else named John who has a Liverpool accent at any rate. He said, remember we were talking about the Beatles Convention. I said, yeah, So you remember you told me you have four Beatles trays and a lunchbox and a thermis And I said yeah. He goes, well, you know I don't have a lunchbox or a thermis or a tray. And I thought, really, okay, I meant I messenger a tray over to him. And then I thought, oh, you idiot, you should have kept the set of four. I still have the three. So I did that chapter on John Lennon because I just I mean, there were a lot of off the record things about John Lennon that I won't talk about because they were off the record. But one thing that I cannot believe happened is when I went to the record plant when they were recording Double Fantasy. He said to me, and that was about three weeks, maybe before he was murdered, and he said, you know, I don't want to be a martyr. I don't want to be Mahatma Gandhi. I don't want to be Martin Luther King. Because I was talking about how he walked around New York and how free he was and he didn't have security. And I said how Bowie and Jagger had both always told me you can walk down the street one way and not get recognized, and you can walk down the street another way and get recognized. And John Savon, I don't give a fuck if I get recognized or now. I like being in New York. I don't care about security. And when I wrote up that interview, I didn't include that quarte in it because I thought, this is looking for trouble and I'll write that in the New York Post and some fucking nut will know that he walks around without security. So you know, that was an off the record thing that I mean. I'm glad I didn't write it, but it was kind of creepy. And then after he died, Yogo invited me over. She said, it's not an interview, I just want to talk to you. It was about a month after he was killed, I think, so I went over there. I didn't have a tape recorder. She was in the bed with the pillows behind her, and she was playing recordings of her new album, Thing was walking on and I said, I don't remember, and she was playing you know, things that she incorporated into the songs, like the fans singing outside the Dakota the night he was murdered. She showed me his sunglasses broken. There was going to be I think, on the cover. And she kept saying, this is not an interview, this is not an interview. And then about three weeks later, I read the exact verbatim stuff in Newsweek by Barbara grass Stark, another journalist, and I thought, did she want me to write about this or was she like audishiming people for who she was going to have this story, have it run in the biggest place. I mean, I would not have blamed her for not wanting it in the New York Post, clearly. But I do remember when I was at Vanity Fair, I took a lot of my Lenen tapes and I print We printed it in Vanity Fair, like the lost John Lennon tapes. And I remember Jan had put out his own lost John Lennon tapes and a book called that, and I remember him coming up to me somewhere and saying the lost Germ Lennon tapes and I went, uh, huh, mine my lost Germ Lennon tapes. But I never had a good relationship with Drawing start. I didn't like the way they treated women, and I didn't like especially that they had a chart of every and I wrote about that in This Girl's book. They had a chart of everyone Journey Mitchell slept with and they never did anything like that. Fanil young about Dylan and also how did he know? And that's fucked up anyway. That last book was called a memoir, but it wasn't really a memoir. I mean, I don't know how I could ever write a memoir would be an encyclopedia. I mean, this book I wrote about women is only forty women. Sort of the best stories that fit in these themes of abuse, fame, motherhood of sex, drugs, age, hair and makeup which is a bad image, which is my favorite chapter because it talks about how MTV changed everything. You know, all of a sudden you were seeing what the music was supposed to sound. Like and for those of us who just grew up with our eyes closed listening to the music imagining what it sounds like, that was not my thing anyway. Cool. Thank you for telling me stories. Well, we have talked for a very long time, and I'm sure this will be wildly edited down, but Rick, you know, between you and me, we could talk for three times if we had enough breath and our bodies could hold up. Thank you, Thank you getting them out of me. I appreciate it. Thanks to Lisa Robinson for chatting with Rick about her incredible career. Be sure to check out her new book, Nobody Ever Asked Me About the Grass. To hear more from Broken Record, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast, where you can find extended cuts of new and old episodes. Broken Record is produced with helpful Lea Rose, Jason Gambrel, Martin Gonzalez, Eric Sandler, and our new intern Jennifer Sanchez. Our executive producer is mil Lovell. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries, and if you like Broken Record, please remember to share, rate, and review our show on your podcast. Our theme musics by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Richmond bass,